Talk to the hand

Harry Dinger has lost control of his show.

A bouffant-coiffed blonde in tight leopard-print pants has leapt out of the studio audience and stalked onstage, interrupting Dinger’s televised interview with Asian salon owner Sue Lee.

“Your shop does cheap acrylic nails that cause fungus!” the blonde accuses in a heated Southern accent, pointing a manicured finger at Lee. “You want fungus, you go to her!” she tells the audience.

Though Lee has only been in America a short while, she immediately utters the requisite talk-show reply in her broken English: “Whatever. Talk to hand.”

Dinger, rallied by the potential for higher ratings and the lure of an impending catfight, assumes his talk-show host authority and offers the blonde a seat on The Harry Dinger Show.

She informs him that her name is Lottie Aerosol and that, although she is also a salon owner, unlike Lee, she is a woman of high moral character. “For example,” she offers, “I would never sleep with a man outside of marriage. Of course, I have been married seven times.”

When Dinger breaks for questions from the audience, a slick-haired, gold-chained mobster grabs the microphone. “Yeah, excuse me Miss … uh … Aerosol. Weren’t we married for a while in the late ‘70s?”

Aerosol scrutinizes him carefully before her eyes widen in recognition. “I believe we were, honey! How have you been?”

The man runs onstage to hug her, once again thwarting Dinger’s agenda.

“You know,” Lottie drawls after looking him over, “because we have been married before, I think we could do the nasty and I would be OK with that.”

The reunited couple eyes each other lasciviously, but before the audience can yell “Slut!” the CIA arrives.

Welcome to the unpredictable world of Talk Show, Sacramento’s newest improvisational theater experience. The collective brainchild of local actors Michael Yager and Michele Silas, the production stages a fictional taping of The Harry Dinger Show (hosted by Yager as Dinger) in which the audience decides the theme and the 18-member cast runs with it.

The idea may seem redundant at first glance, given the glut of talk-show info-tainment readily available on television, but let’s pause to consider the concept: First, take your average 60-minute talk-show parade of human melodrama, minor-league shoving matches and bad hairdos. Now jack it up a few notches on the extreme-o-meter, since live theater is not beholden to censors or sponsors. Second, add the idea that all the participants are actors—which means spectators are free to laugh at their antics without lapsing into guilt about their personal plights or sociopolitical analysis of “what’s wrong with America these days.” Third, because it’s participatory theater, anyone in attendance can stand up and tell the people onstage exactly what their problem is.

So what conclusions can be drawn? Yes, Talk Show is an improv comedy spoof. Yes, it’s a critical comment on today’s exploitive media trends, and yes, hell yes, it’s an unprecedented opportunity for catharsis.

Some late night adventurers may recall Talk Show‘s prototype, Talk Show Theater, which ran for a scant four weeks at Actor’s Theater last May. “By the last week of that run, we were selling out. We blew the roof off that place,” Silas recalls. “People wanted it back right away.”

Never ones to deny Sacramentans a venue in which they can comfortably yell “Kick his ass, sea bass!” at live performers, Yager and Silas hastily set about reincarnating their wacky yet vulgar creation. This time around, they enlisted the aid of veteran theater producer David Czarnecki of D&D Productions. “Immediately when I heard their pitch, I knew that it was incredibly wrong … and should be done,” Czarnecki said.

While Talk Show has retained the same irreverent vision and some of the same cast members as its predecessor, the new production is less a temporary performance piece than a potential institution in Sacramento’s nightlife. Talk Show happens once a week—a late-night Saturday performance at Studio Theater. Seats are filled on a “first banging on the door, first inside” basis. There is no ticket price—at the end of a show, the audience pays whatever they think the experience was worth. And there is no closing date. As long as Sacramentans queue up on Saturdays, the show will go on.

“It’s not even democratic. It’s almost anarchy,” Czarnecki asserts. “Eighty-five people can get in. We’re not telling people how much to pay for it. The attitude is, ‘If you don’t get it, leave.’ Talk Show is not a show, it’s a place.”

Silas adds, “You want to go to a movie? Well, that’s something to watch. This is something to do. It’s an alternative to bowling. It’s a rave for people who can’t dance.”

“It’s a bar for people who don’t drink,” Yager jumps in. “It’s sex for people who don’t have genitalia!”

There is a pause as Silas and Czarnecki consider whether associating the show’s audience with eunuchs is an intelligent marketing strategy. After a beat, Silas summarizes the point: “This is a scene. Even if I came here last night, it’s not going to be the same tonight.”

For two people who spend an extraordinary amount of energy replicating a talk-show environment, Yager and Silas are surprisingly vehement in their dislike of said genre. Both insist they watch—"for research purposes only.”

“I have to watch them in five minute intervals, to be honest. I can’t watch it,” Silas admits.

Paradoxically, it is this shared distaste for TV’s commercial-driven misery pageants that fuels their passion for creating Talk Show. Harry Dinger was born out of Yager’s frustration with today’s talk hosts. “I wanted to make a mockery of these idiots,” he says. “They are using disadvantaged people for their own pocketbooks and ratings. These hosts have a 12 1/2-minute attention span and then it’s a commercial break. That doesn’t cut it for me. I’m sick and tired of seeing hosts act in such pious ways, like they’ve made a difference in people’s lives in 60 minutes and tomorrow they’re on to something else. I’m saying, ‘Let’s skewer these bastards and see what they’re really worth!’ “

“A majority of hosts are more exploitive than helpful,” Silas adds. “They say they want to reveal who we really are, but they contort it for ratings. We at Talk Show sniff that out like dogs, and we’re annoyed. So we want to exploit that.”

Czarnecki agrees. “My first tag line for the show was, ‘This is why the Taliban hate us!’ We have so much time on our hands and the mass media is willing to exploit the horrible conditions of people’s lives, sandwiched between commercials, and that’s just wrong.”

“And the only person who doesn’t know that it’s wrong through our whole show is Harry Dinger!” Yager exclaims.

Though the creative heads of Talk Show will not admit to indulging in talk-show culture, they do recreate it—sometimes so accurately that it’s hard to separate the imitation from life. “I struggle with where to go with Talk Show because the shows on TV are so outrageous,” Yager admits.

This is where the audience input is crucial. “The audience gives us the ‘Why?’ of the show. They give us everything. If it’s rude, if it’s crude, if it’s nasty—you asked for it,” Silas enthuses. “We are really more than willing to give it to you.”

“And we can accomplish everything the TV shows do, guilt-free because it’s all fake,” says Czarnecki. “Talk Show: cheap, stupid people exploited live onstage!”

“With a fresh minty taste!" Silas promises.