Making their audience laugh, cheer and laugh some more, Running With Scissors presented their Wild West improv show on Friday. The theatre sold 108 tickets to the event.

“Everyone on the team worked really hard to put this together. It was so much fun to see everyone laughing and smiling at the end,” senior Kaelin Kerpash said. “My favorite part of the show had to be when my friend [junior] Chris [Reed] said, ‘Do you have hemorrhoids?’”

During the show, performers were organized into four groups that took turns playing improv games. The group for each game was randomly selected by audience members drawing their names from a hat. These games forced the performers to adapt to audience input and each other.

“[My favorite part of improv] is getting to laugh with people and getting to mix it up during practices [by] doing different games with different people, getting different reactions. There’s so much you don’t get to see during the show that happens behind the scenes,” Kerpash said.

The theatre puts on three improv shows — scheduled annually for December, March and May. For this show, performers auditioned in the second week of school and have rehearsed twice a week since.

“The captains spend months figuring out what improvisers work best in teams together, and then teaching them the games that we play in the show, so that they’re prepared if their name is chosen to play a specific game. We also have to look at a variety of games — scene games, gimmick games, things like that,” theatre teacher Amie Gossett said.

In the week before the show, Running With Scissors worked on advertising, preparing scenes for the show format and other details such as lighting and sound.

“For this whole week, you have to have improv practice every day, for an hour and a half, to do the exact same games over and over again until we get good,” senior Sam Huber said. “Improv in a group setting is hard because yes, you can come up with something completely random and just go with it, [but] you have to categorize that randomness into a theme or into whatever everyone else is doing.”

Huber believes that teamwork was key to the improv team’s success.

“You have to rely on others so heavily. In improv, especially if there are parts where you will not have a joke but the other person will, just go with the flow because if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can be pretty lost on stage. So, really trust your teammates, and trust the process,” Huber said.