By Lucas Castillo ‘25
RAMSEY, NJ – On Friday, February 7th at 7:00 pm, our IRONMAN Improv Troop hosted its very first ever teacher feature show, including many teachers, tech members, coaches, and administrators known throughout our school. Here are just a few notable highlights from this night of amazing performances and excellent comedy from both students and faculty alike.
Our show opened with a few short-form improv skits, exclusively acted out by our Ironmen:
One of the first skits was a game in which one person acts out a scenario based on a word provided by the audience; then, four other people each come unto the stage one at a time and change the scenario. Then, as one person leaves, the scenario goes back to the previous scenario performed by the same people. The scenario below depicts Martin Hubany creating a revolutionary 3D world map with his mind, to everyone’s amazement.
The next skit had two students translating two other students as they speak in gibberish and act out a scene inspired by the audience. This particular scene was said to depict two people trying to sell Ostrich feathers on EBay for a Bitcoin.
The next student skit had three Ironmen challenged to walk through a scene where each could only give one word, three word, and five word responses respectively. They were playing professional bungee jumpers in this scene, and the picture depicts them denying responsibility after accidentally cutting someone else’s line.
This skit was more long-form then the previous few, as the troop members walk through a variety of interconnected scenes derived from a collection of words that were inspired by a single word suggested by the audience. In the climatic scene depicted below, Dr. Scientists (Jack Schreiber) is making a deal with two “lizards” on the ground after his machine that ended all diseases and doomed the entire lizard race.
This next skit, the first of which to feature a few of the Don Bosco Prep faculty, namely our Principal Mr. Wojcik, Coach Frank, and our Assistant Principal for Students Mr. Moore, was a game in which the three play a three headed specialist that can only say one word with each “head”. The three played a snickerdoodle specialist, at the behest of the audience, and talked about how to cook a snickerdoodle and described their beef with chocolate chip cookies.
In the next one, six faculty members were tasked with playing six different fictional characters that are attending the student’s (James Colman’s) party. Once he guessed each person, they were allowed to leave. Mr. Cahill was given Scooby Doo, Mr. Wojcik was given Doby, Mr. Austria was given Winnie the Pooh, Mr. Dwyer was given Donald Duck, Tim, one of our resident pre-novices, was given Big Foot, and Mr. Ortiz was, unfortunately, given Tinker Bell.
In another skit, Fr. Abe and Mr. Tranate played alligator farmers trying to do something about their sick alligator Betsy. The twist, however, was that every time they made a statement, Ms. Walters, our Improv Director, would call out “switch” to change their statement and turn the scenario around.
In this skit, the faculty were acting out a snapshots of a vacation that they and the student describing the pictures (Gianzack Chariell) had gone on. Ms. Walters had asked the audience to shut their eyes for 5 seconds as the six of them rearranged each other based on what scene the picture was supposed to depict. This particular scene was supposed to be the moments before their plane crashed.
The last skit was a rotating skit in which all of the faculty and students went around in a circle and tapped each other to act out a different scene each time. This one was Mr. Dwyer and Tim acting as two old ladies in a cut throat race for apple sauce.
In the same skit, Coach Frank killed the audience and his fellow members after scolding Martin Hubany about his awful parallel parking.
My words can only do so much to capture the hysterical, innovative, and frankly quite impressive work on display by our students and teachers. I would highly recommend showing up to one of these next shows, if not just to watch our talented Ironmen in their element, but also to support Ms. Walters and all of the hard work and effort that she and all of the other students, tech members, and staff put into these shows.