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Sean Tevis and Paul Rudd in 1987

In high school I participated in Forensics, a form of competition acting. We’d perform at tournaments throughout the year and there was even a post season where the better teams competed against one another. I was Improvisional Duet Acting (I.D.A.) State Champion with my partner, Paul Rudd. Paul had a fantastic sense of comedic timing and a talent for improv. He went on to a successful career [IMDB link] on stage, screen, and film. It’s kind of neat to see someone you know in a movie, although it tends to destroy any suspension of disbelief. I usually find myself trying to figure out how tall other actors are since I know how tall Paul is.

This video comes from our 2nd to last time performing together - at Olathe North High School in March, 1987. A friend videotaped us as part of a school news story he was producing about Forensics. It’s the only video ever shot of us performing that I can recall. The VHS tape I had is 18 years old and required multiple DV transfers to get it all to play before it broke apart. There are a few areas where the image dissolves entirely or the footage jumps a second or two.

Total Running Time: 12:02 [159 MB QuickTime movie]

ABOUT I.D.A.
The way I.D.A. works is that you draw a random topic out of a hat or bowl. It’s usually something like “At the Park with a Monkey” or “Saving the Day”, but since the topics are created by the high school staff hosting the tournament they can be varied, weird, and unpredictable. You are then given 30 minutes to develop a 6-8 minute long skit or performance centered around the topic you have drawn. At the end of that 30 minutes you walk into a room and perform it. At the minimum, there is always one judge in the room who ranks you compared to your competition and a timekeeper who flashes countdown cards letting you know how much time has elapsed. In a final round of a tournament, there are three judges and almost always a large, eager audience of other performers who may or may not have made it to the final rounds - called “breaking” in Forensics parlance.

NOT REALLY A TYPICAL PERFORMANCE
In our Senior year, Paul and I started getting over-confident and a little burnt-out. We’d done I.D.A. together so much that we’d draw our topic and then do anything other than plan what we were going to do. We’d talk to friends, get something to eat, play hacky-sack, whatever. Then, with about five minutes before we had to perform we’d hurriedly sketch out a few ideas and swagger in to see if we could pull this off with little or no planning. In retrospect, I think that was the only way to keep inducing the performance high that comes from beating the “scare factor” that you might choke and perform miserably. By the end, we were ignoring the rules almost completely about not using props or leaving the 10’ x 7’ stage area and ignoring time limit requirements. It was about the entertainment, not the medals.

PERFORMANCE NOTES
01:30 Paul fell of the table and landed on his head really hard. I remember having a fleeting worry that he was really knocked out.
01:50 This tournament gave you three topics that you had to combine into one performance. We had “Jack from the Beanstalk”, “In the Morgue”, and “Freddy Cruggar” which we think was a misspelling of “Freddy Kreuger” from A Nightmare on Elm Street, a very popular movie at the time.
02:40 One of the judges had brought their small child who was quietly drawing in a coloring book. Paul walked into the audience and started coloring with him. He drew an airplane which he shows off to the audience.
03:40 I have no idea who the girl in the desk is. I typically kept the “plot” going and played straight man while Paul played the comic. I figured he had gone off to do something, so I grabbed the girl. This is against the rules, by the way.
03:50 Jack Klugman was an actor who played a forensic autopsy doctor in a TV series called “Quincy, M.D.” It was a lot like today’s “C.S.I.”. He also had a big nose.
06:10 Paul is talking to the event director who’s job it is to create the topics.
07:00 Pac Man was a popular Atari video game.
08:15 The official timekeeper was signaling that we were out of time. I just waved back to let her know that we were going to ignore those rules.
09:03 Paul decides to use the world map on the wall. The “Excuse me, Sharla” refers to fellow Shawnee Mission West student Sharla Gattshall.
09:38 I just kind of gave up trying to rein in Paul and started tapping my foot and biding my time until he was done. Paul was digging through a bag of candy someone had given him.
10:14 The person who recommends that we “kill Xavier” is fellow Shawnee Mission West student John Sprengelmeyer. He and his I.D.A. partner Andrew Turner had told Paul earlier in the day about how they ended one of their performances by killing a character named Xavier. I had no idea what he was doing.
10:25 Our volunteer is Andrew Turner. The guillotine is a yellow chicken-shaped cookie. I did the “Let’s hear it for our contestant!” to get Andy off the stage.
10:55 Paul spit out the candy part of his lollipop. I think he really did choke on it a bit.
11:10 I’m working hard to bring this to a close. A good denouement technique is to come up with a moral of the story you’ve just told.
12:02 They judges immediately lean together to try to figure out what to do. We blew the time limit by four minutes and broke pretty much every rule in the book. We were told later by the event director that ours was the best performance, but the docked points made us come out with 5th place for the day.

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