Orlando Weekly Review of CraigsLUST

May 10, 2014 By Seth Kubersky In my personal experience, Craigslist is a great place to sell an old sofa, an unreliable place to purchase an iPhone, and a terrifying place to look for a job. Craigslist is also a dangerous place to look for love, according to countless tabloid news reports. But in the mind of Ryan Price, creator of last year’s impressive improvised 39 Steps and producer-director of this year’s CraigsLUST: A Sexploration, the infamous website is a perfect place to find fodder for laughs about love — or at least its physical expression. CraigsLUST consists of a compilation of time-tested improvisation comedy exercises, with each game given a sexual spin. For the opening bit, each of the six performers composed a “Missed Connections” post based on an audience suggestion and actual postings from Craigslist. Later, the crowd supplied nouns and adjectives for a naughty round of personal ad Mad-Libs, followed by an extended three-part improvistation inspired by a guest speaker’s autobiographical monologue about their sexual history. After some snappy speed-dating satire and an orgasmic sound-and-motion improv, the show closes with a round of “stalker endowments,” a sadistic twist on “guess the secret phrase” introduced with a burst of “Every Breath You Take.” CraigsLUST‘s success depends on the improv talents of the cast, which was batting about .500 at the press preview. Christian Cheker, Nadia Garzon and especially Sheli Nathan-Miller create side-splitting quickie characters and help keep the laughs flowing when their compatriots languish. Even so, some segments proved painfully overlong, leaving me to empathize with the actress who cried, “I want to get out of this place,” shortly before deus ex machina cops arrived to put the final skit out of its misery. Crazy Craigslist postings could provide rich material for a show, but co-writers Price and Katie Thayer unfortunately abandon that conceit after a few segments, leaving us with an unevenly funny four-letter SAK Comedy Lab show sans scum box.