Susan Messing will always remember the opening night of her weekly show Messing With a Friend: that same evening Jack Farrell, a student in an improv class she taught, almost died from a ruptured aorta. As her student was rushed to the hospital, she took to the stage for her two-person, anything-goes improv show. “That’s how the real show opened up that night,” Messing says. “That’s how I remember when we started doing the show, because he almost died.”
Messing, a staple of the Chicago improv community, came up with the idea of a weekly two-person event in 2006, when she decided to cut back from 11 performances a week to just one. “I got married and had a baby and thought, ‘If at most you could do one show a week, what would you want to do?’ ” Messing says. “I would want to work with people I had never gotten an opportunity to work with or I miss desperately.”
The situation is indicative of what may have kept the show alive for so long: Messing lives and breathes what she does and enjoys doing it. She’ll run a bit into the ground if it delights her enough, and she says she’ll keep performing Messing With a Friend until she gets yanked off the stage.
Thu 8/11, 10:30 PM Annoyance Theatre 851 W. Belmont 773-697-9693theannoyance.com $20
