Before every Vertigo-go show, Lucia Pachynski-Hoopes ’27 and her fellow improv comedians gather to warm up with a few rapid three-line scenes and start shouting. Then they sprint, chanting through the halls and into the performance space.
“Sprinting through the halls of Swarthmore makes me very self-conscious,” Lucia said. “But doing it with a group, as you’re chanting, it lets down your walls. It gets you ready to be so ridiculous.”
It is immediately obvious to any audience that Lucia is a natural-born performer. Getting to that point, though, took a detour and a bit of self-discovery. She went to a performing arts high school where mornings were for academics and afternoons were for theater. She loved performing, but being graded on her art, day after day, gradually wore her down. “The way I view acting and theater, it should just be something that brings you joy. It’s your creative expression. So when you have to write essays about it,” she said, “something about that kind of took the joy out of it for me.”
So she came to Swarthmore wanting the opposite. “I was like, I’m not doing theater.” The vow lasted about as long as most New Year’s resolutions. “After the first year, I was like, ‘Oh my God, I really miss it,’” she acknowledged. The next year she jumped straight into Acting II and soon realized she “couldn’t just not do theater.” Now, Lucia is a double major in theater and psychology.
Even after she returned to theater, Lucia still found herself looking for a space where she could rediscover the joy of performing again. She eventually found it in improv, though she nearly missed it entirely. As a first-year, she discovered that Vertigo-go’s auditions overlapped with a pirate session for her math class. “I didn’t know that the pirate sessions were optional,” she said. So she skipped auditions for math, and only realized afterward that she could have gone. “I don’t know what I was doing,” she said. Sophomore year, she was determined: “I’m going, no matter what.”
Now as a member of the group, she practices with them twice a week, two hours of improv games at a time.
“Improv is just adult pretend play,” she said. “I was such a big pretend-play child. It’s so fun to pretend to be someone you’re not, and it allows me to forget, just for a moment, about anything that is weighing me down in the real world. And [it’s just fun] to make people laugh, especially at a time they’re not expecting it.”
That freedom to be silly is part of the appeal. “Theater sometimes is pretentious,” she explained. “You don’t get silly and ridiculous like that.”
Silliness has its risks, of course, and not every scene lands. “There’s never a performance where there isn’t a scene that falls flat,” Lucia admitted. The trick, she has learned, is knowing when to stop. Performers can get so attached to an idea that they keep pushing it, “but you start to hear the audience laugh less and less.”
Her rule of thumb: “The funniest things are just really quick and short.” Her other trick is generosity. “You have to be willing to give the other person space,” she said. “Your scene partner’s success is your success, too.”
Lucia approaches improv as a whole with openness. For all the pretend play, she isn’t hiding behind a character. “My body’s the vessel for the scene,” she said. “I am very much just Lucia, but with all my walls down, so I can accept whatever prompt my scene partners give me.”
This mindset has followed her offstage. In unfamiliar rooms, she reaches for comedy “to soften the blow of being uncomfortable.” When people laugh and loosen up, so does she. “I like to think I’m funny, overall, as a person in my life,” she said. Halfway through interviewing her, I was already inclined to agree.
Her scripted roles ask for the opposite, and they have taken her somewhere much darker. In the Theater department’s production of “The Threepenny Opera,” Lucia played Jenny, an older sex worker in Brecht’s imagined seedy London who struggles with addiction and still craves the affection of Macheath, the man who used her solely for financing. Lucia had never played anyone like her.
“She has so many outbursts. There is not a lot of emotional regulation,” she said. “Publicly, I, as Lucia, present fairly reserved, even if internally my mind is screaming. I struggled at first to really embody that character of being irrational and impulsive.”
To close that gap, she works alone on how a character thinks, moves, and speaks, then tries to inhabit them before curtain. The goal, she said, is that “it doesn’t feel like I’m acting. It feels like I’ve become the character, and Lucia is not here right now.”
Even so, the two forms are closer than they seem. Improv, Lucia noted, often gets its laughs by touching uncomfortable subjects like sex, politics, and religion, and from the shock of hearing them raised by people you wouldn’t expect. Jenny unsettles audiences in a similar way. Her situation is hard to watch, and, as Lucia put it, “it makes [the audience] question and look at their own lives and positionality.” One form asks Lucia to show up as herself, the other to disappear into someone else. Either way, the walls come down.
Her final year has offered plenty of chances to test both approaches. This semester, Lucia is acting in Senior Company and directing a scene from Suzie Miller’s “Inter Alia” for Directing I. She describes Senior Company as the “culmination of everything that we’ve learned here.” Together, the company puts on a production shaped by student directors, actors, and dramaturgs rather than a single vision. “We’re all trying to add a little bit of ourselves into it.”
“Inter Alia” is more personal. Lucia saw it in London while studying abroad, and though she usually prefers on-camera acting to plays, this one stopped her in her tracks. The lead never leaves the stage, so water breaks are written into the script. “You forget where you are,” she said. “I know I’m not going to be able to recreate what I saw, but I hope people get a little bit of a glimpse into it. I just hope I can do it a little bit of justice.”
After graduation, she plans to move to Los Angeles and spend about three years acting, taking classes, and looking for an agent. Until then, she hopes to pitch improv to those who may not yet be sold on the art form: “You’re not going to have to sit still the whole time. You can be loud, you can laugh, you can throw out suggestions,” she said. “It’s poking fun at life. People take life too seriously.”
