u/Afalstein

I'm a member of a rural community theater group. We're light on resources but we can usually dependably pull in enough actors for a musical and a dinner murder mystery, yearly. We used to do a Shakespeare play in the summer but we don't have a director for that anymore.

One of the members has at different times talked about how he'd like to do an improv group, but he's pretty sure we don't have the talent in the area to sustain one. I'd like to do a variation of this and try getting people together over the summer (when most of us don't have much else going on) at a local park or something to try practicing improv, with perhaps the endgoal of getting a dedicated group together that could perform in local bars.

Here's the thing. I've never done anything like this before. I have no formal dramatic training at all, I'm an English teacher who's done purely amateur work with this organization. One of our regulars used to do competitive improv, but I'm not sure how she'd feel taking the lead on it. And in any case, it's unlikely our organization will actually go for it unless I can put forward a coherent strategy--while the board says they want new ideas to boost membership, in practice they're more hesitant about adopting said ideas.

So if we were to put together a group that got together weekly to try out various improv scenarios and bounced off each other, what are some important things we'd need to consider?

Sort of an odd question here but suppose you had unlimited funding and the goodwill of nations. What's an opportunity here on earth to turn ecological dead zones into a thriving environment? Something like the Millenium Forest on St. Helena or other cases of people rebuilding island ecosystems.

I generally don't like teaching Shakespeare's famous love story / tragedy, but the local theater is putting on a production they invited schools to, so I selected it this year. We've been reading it and students have really been getting into it, which is unusual for them. We're up at the end portion, where Juliet fakes her death and Romeo purchases the poison.

Then, just yesterday, news comes out--a student, not at our school, but the neighboring one--has been found dead. They'd just broken up with their partner and circumstances of their death are such that people have assumed it's a suicide, though so far as I know there's no proof of it.

How should I handle this?