With a dash of insan­ity, a smidge of ridicu­lous­ness, and a lot of Wel­ling­to­ni­an wit, Base­Jump Improv’s new show The Blender is a wild ride for your Sunday even­ing.

We don’t tend to see Sundays as a ‘going to theatre day’ but with a show run­ning at roughly forty-five minutes long, this piece is eas­ily man­age­able between wal­low­ing in sad­ness, recov­er­ing from a hangover (as I was) or whatever else you do on a Sunday even­ing.

The Blender cast (last night it was Lesa McLeod-Whit­ing, Duncan Ballinger, Tris­tram Dom­ic­an, Tony Yuile, Tim Croft, Jonothan Mandeno and Jam­ie Hoare) takes true stor­ies by not­able Wel­ling­to­ni­ans and impro­vises pieces from them.

Our storyteller of the even­ing was Kate Spen­cer, known in Wel­ling­ton for her poetry. She told us three unique stor­ies – about mas­turb­a­tion poetry, diarrhea in China, and get­ting robbed when trav­el­ling – and then the excel­lent team of impro­visers cre­ated utter man­i­cism around them. While the con­tent was slightly blu­er than I anti­cip­ated for a Sunday even­ing, it was a fun ride and not at all what I was expect­ing.

Want to know how the artist inside you is con­nec­ted to one of the stor­ies above? Well, you’ll just have to see the show.

(Obvi­ously it’s improv, so that exact top­ic is nev­er going to come up again, but that’s why you need to be there in per­son to wit­ness it.)

One won­ders if a slight chance to the show’s format – per­haps short­en­ing the stor­ies told and length­en­ing the impro­vising from them – would add more of a sense of pace to the over­all piece, but oth­er­wise, The Blender is a damn fun show and very much worth com­ing out for on a wet Sunday night.

It’s per­formed at the Scruffy Bunny Improv Theatre, a great new improv ven­ue in Wel­ling­ton that lies with­in the Read­ing Cour­tenay com­plex. Though it may not be quite what you’re expect­ing of a theatre, the place has a wide range of improv acts, and the tick­et prices aren’t ridicu­lously steep either.

Hit up the Base­Jump web­site for more details about their shows and classes.