Improv and hypnotism unexpectedly good co-stars

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This article was published 23/11/2024 (676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ten years ago, out of the blue, Colin Mochrie received a message from a hypnotist, teasing out whether the improv star could be persuaded to try something crazy with him onstage.

In a cold email, Asad Mecci proposed performing a live combination of his and Mochrie’s professions, both of which rely heavily on the power of suggestion and trust.

“I expected no response,” Mecci says.

“I never saw the email,” Mochrie admits bluntly. “My agent keeps everything from me.”

But there was something about Mecci’s marriage proposal that Mochrie’s manager Jeff Andrews figured was worth an “I do,” as well as a “Yes, and…”

“So we go meet him at a coffee place, and Asad started talking about the show, and that’s the last thing I remember,” Mochrie says, feigning amnesia.

But the idea — creating an improv troupe from scratch by leveraging Mecci’s hypnotic skills — was exactly the type of out-of-the-box concept the Gemini-winning actor and comic needed after 22 years on the road with his Whose Line Is It Anyway? co-star Brad Sherwood.

“I’m always trying to be the most out of my comfort zone as I can be, because I find that’s when I have the most fun, and usually, that’s when my best improv comes out. Whether it’s just panic or going into survival mode, I love being back on my heels and figuring out, ‘How are we going to get through this?’” Mochrie says.

“Working with people I’ve not only never worked with before, but never met before, and they’re hypnotized? I thought, ‘Let’s give this a try.’”

In 2016, the duo set a date at Toronto’s Second City, and since then, Mecci and Mochrie have performed Hyprov in 150 cities across North America.

The duo appears at Winnipeg’s Burton Cummings Theatre on Sunday.

“Every night that I go backstage, I go, ‘It’s not going to work tonight,’ and every night, it does,” says the Mochrie, who started improvising while in theatre school in Vancouver in the 1980s, participating in the city’s nascent Theatre Sports league.

Nowadays, high schools have improv teams.

“That was all me, I’m responsible for that,” Mochrie deadpans.

But what about junior varsity hypnosis squadrons?

“That’s next,” says Mecci.

While Mochrie credits his admiration for zany onstage character work to comedians Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams, Mecci’s love of mentalism can be attributed to a quirky dentist.

“When I was in my first year of university, a good friend went to Hawaii over spring break and was sunburned very badly,” says the Sudbury, Ont.-raised Mecci.

“He was travelling with his father, and his father’s friend was a dentist who used hypnosis in his practice for painless dentistry. He ended up hypnotizing my friend, giving him the suggestion that he was no longer itchy or irritated.”

For Mecci, hypnotism scratched an itch. After self-teaching, he performed on the university circuit, later studying through the National Guild of Hypnotists, through which he met his mentor, the Canadian mentalist Mike Mandel.

As his career progressed, Mecci, like Mochrie, was looking to challenge himself through non-traditional collaboration. Both performers learned a fair deal about their own mediums by watching the other work.

“Asad does an incredibly amount of work during the show because he of course hypnotizes everybody, but then he’s giving scenarios, checking in on people the entire time to make sure they’re still in a trance and not coming out,” says Mochrie, who says his partner has a calming influence.

“Once, he fell off the stage — it was no big deal. Everything that comes his way, he deals with using this demeanour, keeping the audience focused.”

Mecci says his stage partner is naturally more introverted than he appears onstage

“He still has tons of zingers but he’s not the same person. Onstage, he’s able to shift states and become this wild, crazy, energetic, high-energy individual who takes control of the stage and pulls everybody with him for a wild ride,” he says.

Most of what people think they know about hypnotism comes from television, but the practice doesn’t just mean clucking like a chicken or falling asleep on command, Mochrie says.

“All (hypnosis) does is make you get out of your own way. It stops you from stopping yourself.”

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com