Last December, when Alon Margalit called Jonathan Pitts, the cofounder and executive producer of the Chicago Improv Festival, he casually mentioned that earlier that day a suicide bomber had killed 15 passengers on a public bus in Haifa. The day before, said Margalit, who’s a member of a Tel Aviv improv ensemble called Lo Roim M’Meter, two bombers had killed ten people in a Jerusalem pedestrian mall.
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“He told me that they often deal with terrorism in their shows,” Pitts says. “They improvise around it and play with it and make fun of it. I thought, that’s really important for us to see. Since September 11 we’re still dealing with this new, horrible reality. Terrorism is a part of our world now, but we’re still not sure how to cope with it.”
“It’s my dream,” he says, “to have an improv jam that uses people from Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Israel, and, of course, Chicago. I think that would really be something special, a true sign of unity. I’m not saying that improv can save the world. But to get all these different cultures coming together, for no other reason than a love of improv, well, that says a lot about our common humanity.”
