Dirty Laundry: Calgary's Improvised Soap Opera

Somewhere in the middle of Saskatchewan, author Edna Whiteberg is choking Trina Zeezie. She demands to know why Zeezie, a miniskirt–wearing kleptomaniac, stole her bathmat. Zeezie distracts her by shaking the bathmat clutched in her hands, which unleashes a shower of pet fur. Whiteberg’s grip loosens in the flurry of fur. The audience erupts in laughter.

This ridiculous scene is from Dirty Laundry, the live, improvised soap opera staged Monday nights at Lunchbox Theatre. Whiteberg and Zeezie (played by actors Karen Johnson-Diamond and Tammy Roberts, respectively) are characters in the soap’s 10th season. Each week, the two actors, along with eight others, give or take a guest star, spend two hours onstage making up plot twists as they go.

“It’s live and dangerous — a one-shot deal with no pre-planning,” says Johnson-Diamond, who co-founded Dirty Laundry with fellow actor Elinor Holt in 1999. The two are alumni of Edmonton’s live improvised soap opera Die-Nasty, which was created in 1991.

When they relocated to Calgary in the 1990s, Holt and Johnson-Diamond were craving a similar outlet for improvisation and used the Die-Nasty template to create Dirty Laundry. Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre Company is famous for Theatresports, a rapid-fire competition-based improv game format, but Dirty Laundry favours long-form improv and keeps the storyline going for an entire season. Each week’s performance picks up where a cliffhanger left off the Monday before. It takes 25 episodes before the story comes to its dramatic and unscripted conclusion.

In its 10 seasons, Dirty Laundry has been set in hospitals, on space ships, in a 1960s advertising agency and even in an evangelical television station. This year, the soap taps into the hilarious and highly competitive world of reality television with its Amazing Race parody, The Amazing Rinse: Clean Across Canada. Each week, 10 characters travel across the country vying for $10 million. The actors don’t know which city the evening’s performance will take place in or whether his or her character will live through the episode.

In the melodramatic tradition of soap operas, a single show can swing from romance to murder in minutes, based on the whim of the actors. Keeping the storyline in check is director Aaron Coates, who is responsible for weaving each episode’s dozen or so invented vignettes into a cohesive storyline. He sets up each scene with voice-over narration that he writes as the evening progresses. Once the actors get their cue from Coates (for example: “In a hotel room, Edna Whiteberg has her hands clasped around Trina Zeezie’s throat”), they have only seconds to react. Audience voting is also incorporated into the show and can alter the storyline. “Whatever happens, happens,” says Johnson-Diamond. “Either the person dies, or the improv changes the direction.”

Apparently, she had fully intended to have her character kill off Zeezie before a last-minute change of heart stopped her.

Episodes are performed most Mondays at 7:30 p.m. at Lunchbox Theatre (160, 115 9 Ave. S.E.). Tickets are $12 at the door. 403-701-1284, dirtylaundrycalgary.com