The Purple Crayon of Yale, or the Purple Crayon, is an improvisational theater group at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. The group specializes in longform improv, such as the Harold. The Purple Crayon is Yale's second-oldest improv group, after the Ex!t Players, and the oldest collegiate longform group in the country.[1][2] The Purple Crayon currently consists of fifteen members, and is directed by Mia Cortés Castro '26 and Amit Kamma '26.
The Purple Crayon was founded in 1985 by Eric Berg, class of 1987, and a bunch of theater friends, among them Ian Jacobs '87, and Adam Gross ‘88. Berg had taken a semester off during his sophomore year to act in a play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Illinois, where he also studied improv. There, he learned the Harold, a long-form improv format developed by Del Close and Charna Halpern. The group named itself after the popular children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, whose protagonist, Harold, uses a purple crayon to draw his imagination into reality. The original Purple Crayon had 13 founding members: Eric Berg, ‘87 Frances Barney, ‘89 David Baron, ‘87 Frank DeSantis, ‘88 Tom Dowe, ‘87 Leslie Goldman, ‘88 Adam Gross, ‘88 Liz Hutchinson, ‘88 Ian Jacobs, ‘87 Phil LaMarr, ‘88 Carla Power, ‘88 John Sylvain, 87 Bliss Tobin, ‘86. [3]
The group's current members are: Vivek Shah '25, Abigail Sylvor Greenberg '25, Noam Scully '25, Anand Srinivasan '25, Amara Neal '26, Prentiss Patrick-Carter '26, Amit Kamma '26, Mia Cortés Castro '26, Eddie Proffitt '26, Sui Yu '27, Miles Kirkpatrick '27, Campbell Lazar '27, Avery Misner '27, Aaron Parr '28, and Alice Kasdan '28.
Performances
The group performs several shows each year on campus, appears at various comedy festivals, performs at (usually local) events and locations, and tours each spring and fall. Performances mostly consist of one or two 25-minute Harold sets, though the group often experiments with various styles and forms.
In 2010 and 2011, the Crayon advanced to the finals of the East Coast Regionals of the College Improv Tournament, a national competition hosted by the Chicago Improv Festival, losing to Seriously Bent, Suffolk University's improv troupe, and the Otter Nonsense Players, Middlebury College's improv troupe.[4]
Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script.
Improvisation, often shortened to improv, is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. The origin of the word itself is in the Latin "improvisus", which literally means unforeseen. Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of improvisation can apply to many different faculties across all artistic, scientific, physical, cognitive, academic, and non-academic disciplines; see Applied improvisation.
The Upright Citizens Brigade (UCB) is an improvisational and sketch comedy group that emerged from Chicago's ImprovOlympic in 1990. The original incarnation of the group consisted of Amy Poehler, Matthew Walsh, Matt Besser, Ian Roberts, Adam McKay, Rick Roman, Horatio Sanz and Drew Franklin. Other early members included Neil Flynn, Armando Diaz, Ali Farahnakian and Rich Fulcher.
Second Nature is a long-form improvisational theatre troupe based in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California.
Matthew Gregory Besser is an American actor, comedian, director, producer, writer, and one of the four founding members of the Upright Citizens Brigade sketch comedy troupe, who had their own show on Comedy Central from 1998 to 2000. He hosts the improvisation-based podcast Improv4humans, previously on the Earwolf network, but now solely operated by himself and Brett Morris.
Charna Halpern is an American comedian who is co-founder of the ImprovOlympic, now known as iO. Upon iO's founding, in 1983, with partner Del Close, she began teaching Harold to many students in the Chicago theater community. Many prominent comedians performed at iO, from Neil Flynn to Jack McBrayer. Also appearing were up and coming comedic minds such as Craig Cackowski.
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The Immediate Gratification Players (IGP) are a collegiate improvisational comedy troupe based out of Harvard College. They specialize in long form, free-form improvisation and are recognized as one of the top college troupes in the nation.
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