The Second City 'Reality Detox' review: confessions meet comedy

Truth is stranger than fiction. At Reality Detox: The Improv Experience, it’s also the punchline. An ex’s mother who won’t stop texting videos. A coworker with a dumpster-diving habit nobody saw coming. A family secret about two adopted siblings who still don’t know—and that’s just the audience. None of it is scripted, and all of it becomes fuel for the cast’s improv toolbox.

If improv comedy is Chicago’s religion, then The Second City is its megachurch. The result is a breakneck 90 minutes presented by the Windy City’s most stellar comedic talent.

Your secrets, their material

“You’ll never see this show again!” promises Reality Detox’s six-person ensemble, as they scrawl audience suggestions onto a large sheet of paper taped up onstage to refer to throughout the performance. (Past performances’ sheets of paper adorn the walls of the e.t.c. Stage, as proof.)

The improvisation, incorporating the contributed source material, takes place through short warm-up games and a long-form scene in the show’s second half, intercut with sketches and improvised tunes, accompanied by the show’s effervescent music director, John Love.

Opening night songs included a sexy ballad imploring a new partner not to bed down together because they have different sleep schedules (why complicate matters?), and a celebration of men singing falsetto that had almost every male-presenting audience member breaking out their own high notes to theater-wide enthusiasm and encouragement.

An illustration featuring fangs, a microphone, and city skyline in red, yellow, and blue.

Improv comedy is both an art and a calculation, and Reality Detox‘s ensemble is fluent in both. The long-form scene that anchors the show is the most ambitious swing of the night, weaving three storylines together across the full cast. When it lands, it lands hard: an amorous wannabe mother-in-law, and a woman begging her white boyfriend not to bring up Friends in front of her family (a setup that pays off once you realize who he’s about to meet). When it doesn’t, it leans on easier material, like a riff on multisyllabic product names at Trader Joe’s.

But the misses are brief, and the cast doesn’t let them linger: Max Thomas, doing double duty as the mother-in-law and a Living Single-loving dad in the same scene, and Annie Sullivan as a bawdy, cigarette-smoking matriarch, kept the momentum going.

No two nights at Reality Detox are the same, but on this one, there were plenty of reasons to call it a hilarious night out.