A Consensual Christmas* NIGHT 2

Consensual Improv’s holiday tradition returns December 11 & 12 at 8:00 PM with a blizzard of comedy merriment: brand-new original sketches, holiday-themed improv, digital shorts, and more Dolph Lundgren than makes sense and is in good taste. 

Kick off your holiday season with a Roaring Fork Valley tradition. 

*Not just “Christmas.” In fact, we should be clear that when we say “Christmas,” we do so with a kind of exhausted cultural shorthand that barely begins to capture the bewildering, overlapping constellation of winter holidays, rituals, and vaguely pagan carry-overs humanity has clung to in order to make the bleak midwinter tolerable. We absolutely, unequivocally, include Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, Solstice celebrations both secular and mystical, Festivus (for the rest of us), Saturnalia (in case you’re still Roman), and whatever half-remembered family traditions involve lutefisk, fruitcake, or interpretive dance around a pine-scented candle. To be perfectly honest, we are not particularly invested in theological squabbles so much as in phonetic pleasure and shared reverence. Because the truth is this: beneath the lights and the consumerist hysteria and the hand-me-down rituals, there is one thing, one transcendent, almost sacred figure, that unites us. Dolph Lundgren. Human traditions wax and wane. Tomorrow there will be new gods, and our gods will be forgotten, washed away in the sands of time like Ozymandias. And yet, improbably, Dolph remains: our one Swedish lord and savior, standing tall in a filmography that resists both taste and temporality. Theologians may quarrel, cultures may clash, but none can erase the enduring, granite-chiseled truth of Storm Catcher (1999) or the utterly confounding but undeniably real Puncture Wounds (2014), a film in which Dolph portrays an Aryan Brotherhood enforcer and which grossed a staggering (if cosmically modest) $167,832 domestically. Art and divinity cannot be measured in capital, and we invite all to join us in our winter worship of Sweden’s third most famous actor, behind all of the Skarsgårds and also probably Ingrid Bergman.