Don’t stop Very smart moves from the Escapists BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Keep Moving Presented by the Escapists — Brian Giles, Sheila Jackson, Chris Fitze, Ariel Francoeur, director R.J. McComish, and writer Jason Wilkins — at 10 Mayo Street, April 15 and 16. Call (207) 615-4021 or go to www.theescapists.net

Neither bird nor plane, nor garbed in bodysuits, the band of superheroic comics called the Escapists are nevertheless in motion and flying high, and they are well-equipped to rescue you from what ails you. From the moment they seize the floor of 10 Mayo Street — to the long-lost strains of "Holding out for a Hero" — the Escapists prevail mightily in temporarily saving us from, among other things, the ordinary drudgery of mud-time, tax season, and ho-hum scripted theater tropes. Their show is called Keep Moving, and it does.

The Escapists — a troupe of veteran theater and comedy folk that includes Chris Fitze, Ariel Francoeur, Brian Giles, R.J. McComish, and Sheila Jackson, with sketch writing by Jason Naked-in-Portland Wilkins — are an exceptionally smart, energetic, and well-appointed young gang of comics. All five have the complicated combination of reflexes and smarts required to keep unscripted comedy in motion. Their mission: to take the storytelling capacity of theater and make it into something rambunctious, irreverent, and unpredictable. They seek, as they put it, to "amuse and bemuse" you.

They’ll also use you. Well, don’t get too excited: Not you, exactly, but rather your thoughtful suggestions for fleshing out their improvised debauchery. About half of the hour-long show consists of open-ended improv exercises with the blanks filled in by you — a panel of unspecified experts are assembled for a Q&A; the Reverend Giles is sent out of the room and returns to perform a sermon whose words he must figure out from the miming of his choir. In the style of SNL, the other half is scripted sketch comedy, and there’s even a lip-synched musical number. (It’s not some dumb-ass SNL boy band, either, but I won’t give it away, except to say that it involves the magnificent Ms. Jackson stripping out of her baggy improv-wear to strut the floor in a little black dress, and that she is fan-fucking-tastic.)

Introduced to us by comic enabler (and director) McComish, the performers of these diversions are distinguished by particular strengths and styles, and in the convergence of them comes a gratifyingly complete team. Giles’s range moves him far and wide, from an explosive preaching Reverend to the white Portland homeboy Mr. Stone D to a subdued expert on (in last weekend’s show) Wisconsin cheese. Fitze often takes on the role of the straight man, the hapless tourist, the big dumb husband, and measures them out with great grinning inanity. Just as versatile as Giles, Francoeur also provides some fine serifs to the show. She’s positively gamine in the coy nuances of her expressions, little wry, wordless asides to the audience that step the humor up another notch. And Jackson absolutely radiates — she’s a sassy, supple, and unaffected force, and a veritable comedy Buddha in the effortlessness of her good humor. Mix these personas and their quick wits and you get a show of irreproachable texture and pace.

To keep moving is indeed the name of the game when it comes to good sketch and improv comedy, and by that I don’t mean just a lot of overwrought jumping around, like what happens when a loser SNL skit degenerates. The Escapists have great sinews for movement and timing, but more importantly, they keep things moving in the more difficult comic departments — verbal timing, and thinking not just fast, but well. Never did I sense the halt of good ideas behind the motion on stage — even when it came time for a Kung-Fu take on an underwater scene, or to explain the holes in Swiss cheese — and for a show that’s half unscripted, that’s saying a mouthful.

On the sketch end of things, the Escapists are topical and on top of things culturally. One skit has two (white) Bowdoin professors (Francoeur and Fitze) attempt to rid their black daughter (Jackson) of her too-unmulticultural (i.e., "white") ways, which include listening to Rufus Wainwright. Another, about a guy who admires the work of an accomplished pan-handler, turns first into a workshop on Method bumming, then a treatise on the innermost capitalist ploys of maintaining bourgeois urban complacency.

That’s certainly not to give the impression that Keep Moving’s humor is overwhelmingly socio-political — what’s sketch comedy without a little sex? But even the sexual is smart in the hands of the Escapists. Watch for their super, reversed send-up of a Viagra commercial — advertising "Gynomite," which "redirects blood flow from his nether regions to his brain" — led with sublime coyness by Francoeur.

It goes without saying that watching witless sketch comedy is one of the worst ways to spend a Saturday night, so I want to be perfectly clear about my endorsement of these intrepid comics: "Smart" is the operative word in lauding the Escapists’ success. They’re quick-thinking, culturally literate, and devilishly shrewd. Never do they stall their comic momentum by settling too long or too vacuously among the lower comedic denominators — beneath the "blue line" of scatology and fornication, below which lesser comics descend for cheap laughs — even when it’s what we think we want.

"Ooh, I do like that sex thing," squeals Jackson, after we’ve suggested both sex and cat neutering as topics for her panel of experts. "But I’m gonna go with cheese."

Go they most certainly do, and do they ever go. Escapists, please don’t stop.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com