‘Is this even comedy?’ The Elysian Theater pushes the limits of live performance

It’s a Friday night in April, and the crowd at the Elysian Theater is belligerent. “I think we’re just really like, ‘Can we see something happen onstage?’ as a dare to ourselves,” says Anna Seregina, a comedian and writer who co-created the show with longtime collaborator Kyle Mizono. “We take it really seriously,” says Kate Banford, the Elysian’s executive and producing artistic director, who books the programming based primarily on proposals from performers. “We have a really good, clear structure around it, so that it elevates trying stuff out and allows people to really mess around and have fun with an audience that is there to see something good, but open to seeing something fall flat on its ass.” “She’s very encouraging of using the space to see very ambitious things that might work and might flop,” writer and comedian Seregina says of Banford. When the Lyric Hyperion’s manager left suddenly in the spring of 2018, Plapinger and several other friends and collaborators — including Palamides, Kimberly Stuckwisch and Ian Blair, all of whom helped develop “Incubator” — decided to form a nonprofit to run the theater and attached cafe.