'And Then What Happens?' (The Final Performance)

The audience cheered, the audience laughed, the audience gasped and tutted in all the right places. The audience egged the performers on and applauded explosively when they delivered.

In short, the night was a success.

The six die-hard storytellers from  five-week seminar, “The Art of Comedic Storytelling,” presented their real-life tales on stage Sunday night to a live audience.

They were the last performers standing after five of their classmates had dropped out. Their dedication, seeing the seminar through to the end, showed.

“I have got to say,” said Marc Unger, who taught the class with Rain Pryor, “I don't know if this is a testament to Rain's and my abilities as teachers, or just the fact that when push comes to shove, and we put human beings on a stage, and we put an audience in front of them, and you say, 'entertain us,' people just rise to the occasion.”

Vera Gabriel rose to the occasion, as the first amateur performer to take the stage. She also twirled and bounded while she was demonstrating the habits of bed bugs, the subject of her story. She itched and squished and stomped and ultimately did a victory dance, when her story concluded with the death of her unwelcome pests.

Her parting line to the audience was fitting.

“Good night, and don't let the bed bugs bite!” she said.

Zack Green, Bryant McCray, Kat Soul, Noah Halle and Danielle Baird were just as enthusiastically received. The energy ran so high that Pryor did victory dances herself between performances, gushing, “I'm so proud!”

Pryor opened the night with an excerpt from her solo show called “Fried Chicken and Latkes,” followed by Unger with a piece from his show called “Drinking Up the Pieces.” Both teachers commented, between performers, how much each student had grown as an entertainer.

They plan to teach the course again this fall.

“When you're in front of an audience, it just creates an electricity," Unger said. "And that's what you saw tonight. You saw everybody electrified, by what was happening, by the experience—the communal experience.”

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