What’s my line?

OFF BOOK That’s not a script Bakkedahl and Karie, from left, are reading.

Photograph: Francine Daveta

Finally, someone has found a way to bridge the gap between New York’s comedy and Broadway scenes that doesn’t involve writing campy lyrics to Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes. The monthly show Gravid Water—the next installment is Thursday 20 at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre—pairs serious actors with improvisational comedians to perform scenes from straight plays. Here’s the catch: The actor memorizes his or her lines and sticks to book, while the comedian has never seen or read the play.

“A lot of modern acting theory is improvisational, because real human interaction is too nuanced to plan out in advance,” says creator Stephen Ruddy, who conceived the show in 2004 after noticing similarities between his studies at the UCBT and at the Atlantic Theater Company. “I thought, If you put these two things together, there’d be a lot less conflict than one would guess.”

The result is hilarious—and not due to audience schadenfreude from watching performers stumble and fail. Instead, you get the joyous laughter that comes from discovery. In a scene from After Ashley by Gina Gionfriddo, actor Kate Hess mentioned the art she’d brought home. Improviser Anthony King responded by labeling Hess’s character a kindergarten teacher and the art nonsensical finger-painting by her students. Unbeknownst to him, her next line of dialogue was, “I’m a terrible artist,” which led to a huge laugh when King said, “Wait—those pictures are yours?!?” Suddenly, the mother in this scene was struggling with more than just her marriage.

“Even if the improvisers are familiar with the play, it doesn’t matter,” explains Ruddy. “It so quickly becomes a different scene.”

By virtue of its location, Gravid Water—which Ruddy named after a phrase he liked in a Flann O’Brien book—first took root in the comedy community. In the past three years, the show has slowly grown in notoriety; now it regularly sells out and features the city’s top improv talents, including Dan Bakkedahl, Christina Gausas, Michael Delaney and Tara Copeland.

Recently, though, the little-show-that-could has also garnered attention from the Great White Way. Through word of mouth, Ruddy started receiving calls and e-mails from noteworthy Broadway stars—excluding this month’s performance, he’s moved the show to Mondays to accommodate their schedules.

“I don’t want the actors to just be straight men,” Ruddy says of the project’s appeal to scripted performers. “The hope is that the show will inject some of the immediacy of improv into their performances.”

The November installment featured Sarah Saltzberg and Jared Gertner (both in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), Joel Karie (The Lion King) and Tony Award nominee Jonathan Kaplan (Falsettos). Superstar Marc Kudisch (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Assassins. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) is slated to appear in January.

As in a certain classic commercial, the performers get peanut butter in each other’s chocolate and vice versa, exploring ground they never could have in pieces strictly scripted or made up. The more unpredictable the marriage, the funnier. During a scene from William Inge’s The Mall, Peter Gwinn, as the improviser, mimed fiddling with something on the wall. Then he turned to Ruddy, the actor, and asked, “Can I trade you a new dollar for this old one? The jukebox won’t take it.” Accustomed to working with props, Ruddy pulled out his wallet and handed Gwinn a real bill. Unnable to suppress a smile, Gwinn exchanged the buck for his imaginary one, saying, “Okay! And here’s yours!”

Gravid Water takes place Thu 20.