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by LAURA TABOR
Lifestyles Reporter
Jordan L. Westra, senior theatre education major, has never been to Maine.
“I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Maine on Google Earth,” Westra said. “I also read the L.L. Bean catalog every time it comes out.”
While Westra has not been to Maine, his advocacy for the state began when he and his friend Tom G. Valentine, an Appalachian State University graduate, formed their sketch comedy group, “The State of Maine.”
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Valentine
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It all started over coffee in 2008.
“We
ended up throwing that name out, and ended up basing the show off that
name,” Westra said. “We built an educational form of entertainment
about the lovely state of Maine.”
Shawn S. Stoner, who graduated from Appalachian in December, occasionally joins the two of them in practice.
“A third person adds a fun element of ‘ganging up,’ and he’s really great at it,” Westra said.
Westra
wanted to start a group like this for over a year, and sought the help
of Gordon Hensley, an assistant professor in the Theatre and Dance
department.
“He
challenged me to look at this as marketing a product rather than being
so content oriented,” Westra said. “That was hard, because I
immediately jump to what we’re gonna do on stage.”
After a
month and a half of work, the group has started a YouTube channel for
films of their sketches and performs at Crossroads Cafe in Plemmons
Student Union.
“The
first joke we came up with was that we have a lot of people in our
group, and that consistently we are the only two that show up,”
Valentine said. “Then we have to apologize and fake our way through the
show.”
While Westra is a part of NoUn, the campus Improv troupe, “The State of Maine” is subtly different.
“Sketch
comedy is planned and scripted, with predetermined outcomes and
characters,” Valentine said. “For us, there can be improvisation on the
way to those outcomes and within those characters. We’re sort of
‘plan-prov.’”
Along the way, the audience is provided with many facts about the state, most of them made up spontaneously to create comedy.
“We
encourage people to catch on to our misinformation and throw it back at
us,” Westra said. “We’ll just take it and keep on talking.”
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