Ask Shelly Hoffman what her favorite part of performing is and she’ll tell you it’s making people laugh.
She says this is also the most difficult part of putting on a show, but humor comes easily to the cheerful co-founder of Adrian & Enid Inc., a comedic theatrical troupe based in Flint.
The U-M-Flint alumna not only performs with her troupe year-round, but also works full time as a major gift officer at her alma mater, where she cultivates prospects capable of making large gifts to the University. Much of her work involves socializing, which Hoffman says is “absolutely wonderful for me, because I’m a very social person. We take donors and prospects to football games, invite them to campus for dinner and a show or a tour of a facility.” She balances her time between the University and the comedy troupe by putting on about a dozen shows annually, sometimes even taking her vacation days from work to do so.
“I had interest in the theater as a kid, with a vision of going to drama school in London, but it never happened. When I was working as a secretary for U-M Flint in the ’90s, I decided to audition at the local community theater with a friend and ended up in ‘Father of the Bride,'” Hoffman says.
She met her husband, Brian Haggard, while performing in “Fiddler on the Roof” at the same theater, and together they veered off into local troupes and eventually formed one of their own based on their hilarious alter egos: an eccentric couple named Adrian & Enid Wappkapplitt.
“All of our humor is self-effacing, or we poke fun at the other characters,” Hoffman says. “We make a point of never getting laughs from insulting our audience members.”
Adrian & Enid, as Hoffman and Haggard are known in the theatre world, perform for business events, community groups and various organizations. When necessary, additional actors also are brought in to enhance the performance. One memorable show Hoffman recalls took place at a bowling alley in South Bend, Ind., coincidentally the farthest venue to which the troupe has traveled. The company was hired by an accounting firm to entertain at a “Roaring ’20s”-themed party, in which the actors dressed up and acted like gangsters.
“We have one sort of stock murder mystery we do that’s the ‘Wappkapplitt Family Reunion,'” Hoffman says. “We make up name tags for all of the participants and give them to them when they arrive. Of course, they’re not their names; they’re funny names that we’ve made up.
“Everyone who’s there becomes part of our family, and we greet them as if we’ve known them forever. I just have a lot of fun with this one. And, the more diverse the audience, the more fun they have with it.”
Generally, the troupe focuses on these types of murder mysteries, in which a synopsis and characters are prepared beforehand, but the actors arrive at events as if they are guests, intermingling with other guests and improvising most of their performance.
Because of these conditions, Hoffman and her troupe don’t really have to worry about line memorization and stage fright. “Usually the only thing I get nervous about a little bit beforehand is if we have the right address and if the actors will all show up,” Hoffman says.
“I like to think my husband and I are pretty funny. We performed a weekend murder mystery at an inn once, and the next day we were sitting having breakfast with one of the guests and she said she couldn’t figure out why her face hurt so much that morning, until she realized it was from laughing so hard the night before.”
Feedback like this is what motivates Hoffman, who says that their characters always are very broad, with an emphasis on humor and making people laugh.
“You know, the old toilet paper on the shoe trick” she says, “It always gets a cheap laugh.”
