Purple Crayon

The Purple Crayon of Yale, or the Purple Crayon, is an improvisational theater group at Yale University in New Haven, CT, United States. The group specializes in longform improv, such as the Harold. The Purple Crayon is Yale's second-oldest improv group, after the Ex!t Players, and the oldest collegiate longform group in the country.

The Purple Crayon was founded in 1985 by Eric Berg, class of 1987, and a bunch of theater friends. Berg had taken a semester off during his sophomore year to study improv at ImprovOlympic in Chicago, Illinois, where he learned the Harold, a long-form improv format developed by Del Close and Charna Halpern. The group named itself after the popular children's book Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, whose protagonist, Harold, uses a purple crayon to draw his imagination into reality.

The group performs several shows each year on campus, appears at various comedy festivals, performs at (usually local) events and locations, and tours each spring and fall. Performances mostly consist of one or two 25-minute Harold sets, though the group often experiments with various styles and forms.

Among the improvisation, theater, and comedy festivals in which The Purple Crayon has appeared are the National College Comedy Festival at Skidmore College, on and off since its inception in 1990 by 30 Rock producer David Miner; the Bellwether Improv Festival at Ohio State University; Brown University's College Hill Longform Improv Festival; the Slate Comedy Festival at The George Washington University; the Out of the Loop Festival at the WaterTower Theatre in Texas; and the annual Del Close Marathon run by the UCB Theatre in New York City.

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