Improv Crazies to Maul Moguls of Orange County : Comedy: A troupe making its debut with two shows Saturday targets local wheeler-dealers. It’s the brainchild of a one-time member of the fabled Groundlings group of Los Angeles.

HUNTINGTON BEACH —  Picture this: Donald L. Bren, Henry T. Segerstrom, William Lyon, J.M. Peters and other assorted Orange County real estate moguls get together behind closed doors for a secret . . . game of Monopoly!

Crazy? That’s the point. The local landed gentry are just one target of the satirical jabs of the Orange County Crazies, a new improvisational comedy troupe that makes its debut with two shows Saturday at the Santa Ana Civic Center Annex.

The group is the brainchild of Cherie Kerr, an improv veteran who was a founding member of the Groundlings, the Los Angeles group that serves as a model for the Crazies. Orange County people and places provide the grist for Kerr and her troops, who take swipes at everything from swank restaurants and Caltrans workers to the Rev. Robert H. Schuller.

“I’ve long had a dream to bring a Saturday Night Live/Groundlings/Second City kind of thing to Orange County,” Kerr said. She finally held auditions in September, selecting 15 Crazies from among 35 hopefuls. The troupe has settled at 13 performers, plus a technical crew of six.

Kerr, 46, who is executive producer and artistic director, has high hopes for the project: She has lined up shows each Saturday through May 26, sometimes two nightly, at venues including the Gem Theatre in Garden Grove and the Fine Arts Recital Hall at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

That’s not all. By the time that run ends, Kerr said, she wants the Crazies to have a place of their own, with a theater of about 250 seats and space for an improvisation school. Kerr said she already has real estate brokers scouting possible locations, particularly abandoned industrial sites that can be converted.

Besides housing the Crazies, the facility would provide a venue for other types of “alternative” entertainment, Kerr said.

That may sound like a pipe dream, but Kerr--who runs her own public relations agency in Huntington Beach--is a serious businesswoman who thinks that the Crazies can take off.

“We have a nice machine behind us to make this a real professional effort,” she said.

Her biggest goal, Kerr said, is to provide a showcase for county talent, which she believes is neglected by scouts from over the county line. “To me, that would be the ultimate reward,” she said, “if someone made the big time because of what they did here. I think that could happen with some of the people in this group.”

Kerr’s enthusiasm for the project seems to have rubbed off. “There’s a drive and charisma about the group,” said LizAnne of the charter Crazies. “I’m looking for this to turn into a real success.”

LizAnne, who goes by that single name, is one of the more experienced members of the ensemble. With just a few high school plays under her belt, she met Kerr 11 years ago when she was a student at Golden West College.

“I had never heard of improv before,” said LizAnne, 30, who became hooked after studying with Kerr.

She took part in some early efforts at establishing the Crazies and taught in Kerr’s Execuprov program, a sideline in which she teaches comedy improvisation techniques to corporate types looking to enhance their public- speaking abilities and image.

Working full time as the manager of a fast-food restaurant, LizAnne has also found time to do some stand-up comedy and radio commercials. Now, she will appear in several guises in “This Is Orange County,” the first Crazies show, including Babs Marblehead, a contestant in a Miss Orange County contest and a fast-rising corporate executive in “Yuppie Girl Rap.”

Improv, LizAnne said, can be frightening, but is ultimately a satisfying outlet for her comic energies: “You don’t work from a script. You don’t know what the heck you’re going to do. That’s what makes improv such an exciting type of performing. . . . It’s also very dangerous. It might not work.”

There are about 20 skits in “This is Orange County.” Kerr came up with the initial ideas, then group members fleshed them out in rehearsals. About two-thirds of the material is set, Kerr said, with the remainder improvised according to audience suggestions. In one example, a parody of the game show “Jeopardy” called “Yuppardy,” the audience suggests the trivia categories.

A new Crazies show will debut every few months, Kerr said.

Successful improvisation depends on trust and teamwork, something group member Kimberley Adams, 27, said the Crazies have managed to build. “We communicate really well,” Adams said.

When things are working, she added, “it’s just like floating on water.”

“It’s much like jazz,” said Bruce Brown, 33, a musician who, as lounge singer Frankie Capistrano, contributes an original tune--in his best Sinatra imitation--that includes lots of county locales. “I like the daredevil aspect of the whole thing.”

“I think everybody really does trust everybody else,” said group member Sean Kerr, 23. “It makes you feel really comfortable on stage.”

Kerr has had a lifelong exposure to improv. Cherie Kerr’s son, he remembers sitting in on Groundlings shows as a 6-year-old, watching Mom along with such group members as Laraine Newman (later of “Saturday Night Live”), Paul Reubens (now Pee-wee Herman) and Cassandra Peterson (who made her mark as Elvira, Mistress of the Dark).

Cherie Kerr daughter of show-biz parents--Mom was a singer and dancer, Dad a jazz bassist--came to comedy after the breakup of her first marriage. She began taking improvisation courses with Gary Austin, becoming part of a group that evolved into the Groundlings.

She left the group after a few years to try her hand at TV writing, later concentrating on her public relations career. But she kept in touch with her fellow Groundlings, taking part in a reunion show and later heading the troupe’s alumni group.

Kerr has also kept her hand in improv by teaching privately and at community colleges and by heading her Execuprov workshops.

But starting the Crazies has been her dream for years. At auditions she found that “some of the talent was very raw, . . . but they were funny,” she said.

The project, she added, has “far exceeded what I thought it would be at this stage of the game.”

She anticipates that there may be objections to some of the material. One skit, for instance, takes the Carl’s Jr. concept of hiring the elderly and disabled and transplants it into a skit set in a pricey county restaurant (as selected by the audience). The help, including a blind busboy, bumbles through the scene to the consternation of a couple trying to have a romantic evening.

The point, Kerr said, is not to laugh at the disabled but to create an absurd situation.

Kerr also said she is not worried about the consequences of tweaking some of the county’s high-profile government, business and religious figures. “I’m sure some people are going to want to run us out of town,” she said.

But Orange County, she said, is just too up-tight: “We need to loosen this town up.”

The Orange County Crazies will perform Saturday and Jan. 27 at 7:30 and 10 p.m. at Santa Ana Civic Center Annex, 20 Civic Center Plaza. The early show Saturday is sold out. Tickets: $10. Information: (714) 840-1406.