Free Verse
A Comedy and Poetry Mashup Show
Celebrate National Poetry Month in April with Free Verse, the poetry-and-improv-comedy show from Madison-based improv team Big Honey. The show will feature three world-class Madison-area poets reading their work to inspire Big Honey's bighearted, sweet-and-sticky comedy, culminating in the writers and performers improvising poems together, inspired by audience suggestions!
Great poetry and improv share the same creative backbones: Transcendent surprise! Intense focus! Playful joy! They cut reality with a sharp blade one minute and melt you into bliss the next. Combining them shows that poetry is not esoteric and unknowable; what is profound can also be fun! Part epiphany, part ephemera, improv and poetry weave unexpected connections to unveil revelation and truth. Watch these two art forms brawl and bloom together.
The April 22nd Free Verse features these lyrical geniuses:
Matthew Guenette, author of Doomscroll, Vasectomania, and American Busboy, is a poet-teacher whose work has been described as "vividly rendered,” "gorgeously expansive, and “a gift.”
Chessy Normile is poet-in-residence at Ripon College and author of Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, which The New York Times named in its list of Best Poetry of 2020, saying its mix of “gorgeous strangeness” and “near-silliness” will “trick you into feeling more than you were quite prepared to feel.”
Richard Vargas is a California native and longtime Wisconsinite whose latest book, The Screw City Poems, takes inspiration from his current home, Rockford, IL. Reviewing that work, poet Dan Denton called Richard “a modern day lion of the literary underground, and one of the best working class poets to ever hold a college degree.”
This show is geared for adult ears, though we won’t purposefully be vulgar.
Forward Club (917 E Mifflin St, enter at Gate 5 of Breese Stevens Field)
Show at 7:00pm, doors at 6:45pm
Pay-what-you-can, donations encouraged
Big Honey is:
Casem AbuLughod (Forward Theater, Children's Theater of Madison)
Megan Baker Detloff (The PIT NYC, Annoyance NYC)
Michael Hartwell (Baltimore Improv Group, PBS)
Kelly Maxwell (Mercury Players Theatre)
Tara Ptasnik (Broom Street Theatre, Lucid Dreaming Sketch Comedy)
Ben Rush (Amalgam Improv)
Zoe Schirmer (iO Chicago, Comedy Clubhouse Chicago)
Ben Seidensticker (Lucid Dreaming Sketch Comedy creative director)