It's almost uncanny how little X-Files Improv has to do with either The X-Files or improv. Presumably, paranormal activity is to blame. Dean Haglund played Ringo Langly (one of the three Lone Gunmen) in the hit sci-fi series for nine seasons, and has now devised a likable comedy show in which he claims to improvise a new Mulder and Scully adventure at each performance. In fact, the audience does most of the work for him. The show is not so much a sci-fi story as a series of familiar improv set-pieces in which the laughs derive from members of the public behaving daftly on stage.
It's a formulaic entertainment, then - but the formula is a trusty one. The show's five sections each involve a basic improv game. In the opening scene, a punter makes sound effects orally to match Haglund's actions. Later, when Haglund plays a government scientist at a press conference, a woman from the crowd stands behind him and provides his flapping arms. The activities are irresistibly ridiculous, and leave ample space for the volunteers' eccentricities to reveal themselves. Witness one recruit deployed to read out nonsense dialogue that the audience has written on scraps of paper, but who gets hung up on re-establishing whether he is playing Mulder, Scully or Langly.
Haglund is the boisterous ringmaster whose job is ostensibly to string the punters' contributions together into some supernatural tale. But he barely bothers - which is a shame. I would have liked to see him marshal the improvised material with more discipline, and use it more creatively to build a show around. But here, audience tomfoolery is the show, and Haglund little more than its giggling attendant. I giggled, too, even while painfully aware that the laughs supplied by audience participation are not exactly an unexplained phenomenon.
