February 23, 2006

Joshua Heuertz: A theater man for all seasons

By Cindy Blankenship
For the Tidings

Joshua Heuertz is sort of a theatrical jack-of-all-trades, a producer/playwright/tech person/performer/poet, but he doesn’t have to think twice about his niche: Improvisational theater.

After performing with the Second Saturday Players for about four years, Heuertz founded an Ashland improv group that came out of Green Room Theatre Productions. Based in Illinois, the Green Room Theatre produces original scripts for causes such as overcoming breast cancer, teaches improv classes and produces improv.

The Second Saturday Players perform in a format called Theatre Sports, a style of competition featuring two teams, with winners decided by audience participation.

Heuertz brought the Players into this competitive arena, registering the group to compete against the Bay Area Theatre Sports.

Heuertz is at no loss for words in describing with passion the joys and life lessons of improvisational theater.

"It’s crazy. It’s extremely unpredictable — a high-risk art. I don’t have time to make myself look good … it gets me out of my head pushes me into this zone … improv is an extreme art.

"Improv has really taught me to let go of control. It teaches you enthusiasm and the value of enthusiasm that can be brought to all aspects of my life. Negativity is a waste of time … When in doubt — be enthusiastic!

“Before improv I never really realized how much worry and fear kept me from committing. Our culture has a lot of mechanisms to control, to be ‘safer’ but the more you can commit and let of out the fear, and just let go and be spontaneous that’s where the good stuff happens."

Heuertz is also grateful to the art for teaching a higher form of listening, one that is necessary to be any good at improv, which Heuertz is (he’s won several competitions at the state level).

"You have to really listen to the person on stage with you. You don’t have time to analyze. It feels very intuitive in a way. I didn’t realize you could listen this way; it’s a very sublime communication.

"Above all the other arts, improv has changed me as a person. It’s great fun!" he concludes.

Heuertz says he couldn’t ask for a better day job. Always a stage tech, he’s working his wizardry for a second season with OSF in stage operations and as lighting technician. This year he’ll be working the Elizabethan Stage, and until it opens this summer, the Angus Bowmer and New Theatre.

Some of this other theatrical accomplishments include writing two two-act plays and several one-act plays and working in various theaters in various capacities, from the Ginger Rogers Craterian before it was remodeled to more recently at the Oregon Stage Works with Terry Baum in "How Green was my Ballot," as technical director.

Primarily self-taught, he took drama classes at Crater High (graduate ’93) where he performed and wrote scripts as a member of the Planned Parenthood Teen theatre.

"Theater made everything easy to deal with. After graduating high school, I pretty much went into a theater house and never came out."

Theater also reignited his passion for writing poetry. He says participating for about 10 months in the poetry slams hosted monthly by Mobius put new energy into his poetry.

"Poetry slams put the spectacle back into poetry. Poetry is historically spoken so it’s neat to have a format like this. You can send poems off to be published, but with an audience, there’s more energy, and you know what’s hitting and what’s not."

Like improv theater sports, poetry slams involve competing and with the three judges chosen randomly from the audience, he says, "the only choice you have is to do what you like not what you think the judges will like."

The term "poetry slam" is a metaphor for the basketball, slam dunk, "shooting your long shot from the three point line. It was invented in a bar by a guy who wanted to put the fun back into poetry," explains Heuertz.

"The points are not the point. Poetry slams are presented with the idea we’re here to express ourselves, have a good time and to share."

For more information, contact Joshua Heuertz at 261-8386 or visit www.greenroomtheater.org.