Got your back! Got your back!” a troupe of improv actors chant to each other as they prepare to hit the stage in Mike Birbiglia’s incisive showbiz comedy Don’t Think Twice. Birbiglia, a veteran comedy writer and performer who made his screen directing debut with the stellar rom-com Sleepwalk With Me (2012), frames his second feature as a love letter to the art of improv and its attendant values of trust, openness, and spontaneity. But Don’t Think Twice also exposes the backstage politics of improv and finds beneath the players’ camaraderie an undercurrent of jealousy, rivalry, and professional despair. It has more laughs than any big-studio comedy I’ve seen this year, but it’s dead serious about the difficulty of creating something collectively in a world where everyone’s chasing the spotlight.
For most of these characters, Weekend Live is the holy grail—every week they gather around the TV to smoke pot and watch the show, dreaming of the day when they’ll make the big time. (Birbiglia meticulously re-creates SNL‘s hot-night-out credit sequence, with its blaring saxophone and cast members doing comic takes as their names are announced.) Miles, who blew an audition for the show a decade earlier and has since watched one former student leapfrog over him into the cast, can barely contain his bitterness. Calling it “the only live sporting event of comedy,” he interrogates the old cliche that the show isn’t as good as it used to be: “It’s the great paradox of Weekend Live—was it good ever, or did we just think that because we were 12?” Their disdain notwithstanding, almost all of them pressure Jack to get them on the show, and as the group’s last performances near, his growing status spoils the creative rapport they’ve enjoyed for so long.
Directed by Mike Birbiglia Producer Ira Glass takes questions at every Saturday screening Music Box 3733 N. Southport 773-871-6604musicboxtheatre.com $11
