University alumnus Aaron Bliden has had a busy few weeks. Take his Monday, for example.
At 8:30 a.m., Bliden woke up at his friend’s house after a long night of working on a show for Washington’s Pointless Theatre Company, in which he is singing and performing. (He’s also the music director.) At 10 a.m., he was back home for a Skype meeting to check in on a workshop he and his friend wrote for another Washington theater company. After a flurry of errands and a lunch break, Bliden was off to an executive board meeting for Pointless Theatre Company, followed by another meeting for the workshopping show — then, finally, sleep. Maybe.
“I don’t want to think about it,” he said.
Though a crazy schedule is nothing new for Bliden — it comes with the territory for a Washington actor — he has had an unusually packed few weeks. As a cast member in The Second City’s new collaborative Washington sketch show with the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies, Bliden had two weeks of rehearsal before his first show on Tuesday.
When he got his casting email from the famed Chicago comedy group, he said he had to re-read it several times to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.
“It was pretty unreal to me,” he said. “Of course, that’s a dream. Ever since I knew what sketch comedy was, I knew what Second City was.”
Spoiler Alert marks the first time in a while that Bliden has been onstage. He has been playing multiple offstage roles recently, including writing and composing a show for Pointless Theatre Company, The Super Spectacular Dada Adventures of Hugo Ball, and has worked with several university alumni in the process.
“It’s all come back to the University of Maryland people — theater, in improv, in the comedy theme,” Bliden said.
At this university, he was a member of campus improv group Erasable Inc. He said he credits the group with molding his perceptions of comedy.
Senior marketing major and current Erasable Inc. member Jay Kasten said he is not at all surprised about Bliden’s good fortune and thinks his experience in Erasable Inc. probably helped him get cast in Spoiler Alert.
“It’s a huge opportunity for him,” Kasten said. “It’s primarily a sketch show, so it’s all scripted and planned, but they said one of the reasons they really liked him was because he had such an improv background.”
Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies is billed as “the most gleeful anti-holiday celebration of doom ever,” according to a release. In a series of sketches, the show tackles the idea of fate with a comic twist. Many sketches from The Second City’s recent show, South Side of Heaven, were adapted for the company’s collaboration with Woolly Mammoth.
Bliden said the combination of sketches and music stays true to The Second City’s style. But Spoiler Alert uniquely functions more like a play than some other Second City material in that it has a unifying theme between the different acts, something that, according to Bliden, is similar to 1990s sketch comedy.
“I haven’t seen a show with as much conceptual through-line as this show has,” Bliden said.
Bliden said he doesn’t accept Spoiler Alert‘s belief in fate. Whatever happens in the future, he isn’t worried.
“People think the world is going to blow up in flames, and I agree with that in sort of a general way,” Bliden said. “In other ways, I just don’t care if it’s going to go up in flames, because I’m enjoying myself.”
Spoiler Alert: Everybody Dies opened Tuesday at the Woolly Mammoth in Washington and runs through Jan. 8. Go to www.woollymammoth.net for more information.
diversions@umdbk.com
