Sketches in motion Revving and shifting gears with the Escapists BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Accelerate By the Escapists | A Company of Girls, 10 Mayo Street, Portland | Sept 1 + 2 | www.theescapists.net | 207.615.4021

The Escapists could have called their new improv and sketch comedy show Transsubstantiate. One of their recurrent tricks is to shake out their kinks, join hands, and then, seized with the power, collectively take on the form and spirit of some memorable cultural throwback. In this show, actually called Accelerate, the common theme they channel is the game show of old. "ESCAPIST POWERS ACTIVATE FORM OF . . . WHEEL!" they chant, and in a flash they’ve morphed into the starring gadget from Wheel of Fortune or The Price is Right, complete with those little tabs (formed of Escapist hands in the praying position) that blip as they pass the pointer. A volunteer from the audience spins away, and the whole shape and form of the show hangs in the balance of where that wheel stops.

This is the second full-length offering from the Escapists, the high-energy, five-person brigade that last brought us Keep Moving. You’ll recognize most of them from other Portland stages. Brainy and gamine, Ariel Francoeur was most recently seen in The Miser, and directed Lysistrata at USM this past spring. Longtime improv fiend Chris Fitze, who does a mean straight man, also designs sound for Portland Stage, and both the aggressive Brian Giles and the sinewy comic id that is Sheila Jackson have appeared at the Comedy Connection. Amiable emcee R.J. McComish has directed for Wide Open Mind and the Portland Studio Stage; and the writer behind the Escapists’ sketches is Jason Wilkins, who was also behind Naked in Portland (and who is an infrequent contributor to the Phoenix).

Like Keep Moving, Accelerate puts super powers in the hands of the audience; an Escapist show is essentially a Choose-Your-Own-Comedy performance. You are thus forewarned: The show that this reviewer saw was not same entity you will see. Even the scripted Wilkins stuff functions on a repertory basis, and when your own audience volunteer spins the wheel, she sets the evening’s comedic fate.

On Friday night, it was our good fortune that our audience member spun to the sketch called "Kick-Ass Librarian." The skit features Francoeur in the title role, an über-competent hottie with hidden Keats tattoos, who manages to take on Dan Brown, the PATRIOT Act, and the lyrics to "Louis, Louis" without ever cracking her mellifluous phone-voice. Wilkins’s writing here is a good example of one of the Escapists’ hallmarks, brazen cultural literacy, which is in slightly less evidence in this latest show. They do this particularly pertinent, allusive type of funny exceptionally well when they do it at all, and I for one hanker for a little more.

In another of Wilkins’s more successful sketches, "Baggage Claim," the Escapists reprise their trick of actualizing one of our more egregious pop-psych metaphors. Francoeur and Fitze play a couple in the early stages of dating when who should pop up but Jackson, Fitze’s ex, mime-lugging some seriously heavy shit. Yes, it is Fitze’s "baggage," and yes, Francoeur has some, too, delivered by a muscle-shirted Giles. There’s some acute writing in the enumeration of the baggage items, and this skit also treats us to some gorgeously wanton behavior on the part of Jackson, who takes a shine to Giles.

Then: "ESCAPIST POWERS ACTIVATE FORM OF . . . TANK OF IMPROV!" And another volunteer dons apron and goggles and is sent into this "tank," where slips of paper bearing names of improv exercises blow about like legal tender, and she must collect five. On Friday, she set in motion the fun, tri-headed "Oracle," which you might have spotted prognosticating its way through the Old Port last month. There’s also a manic game called "Survivor," in which the four players in a scene are voted off, one by one; Friday’s winner was Francoeur as a surprisingly lucid and entertaining monkey that births loaves of bread.

With a name like Accelerate, as you can imagine, the Escapists strive to up the pace as the show progresses and in time we come to the Lightning Round, during which five audience-selected sketches are to be performed in 10 minutes. The gimmick makes sense for the going game-show motif, but as comedy goes, these five skits (well, four, since one ended up being "Free Candy for the Audience") feel a little, well, hasty — focused on speed rather than content.

The Escapists are at their best not when they race for the sake of racing and momentum, but when they suddenly up and slip into a new mode, an unexpected form. They show that they understand this in the exquisitely different Bonus Round, when Fitze assigns each of the other four an audience-generated emotion (we got "sad," "insecure," "aroused," and "desperate") and conducts them in a wordless symphony of sounds. In other hands, that could just be a mess, and it’s to the Escapists’ great credit that their shape-shift into orchestra is not just funny, but even fascinatingly lovely.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com