Seattle Dinner Theater

Sex-crimes cop by day, improv artist by night

Last month, late on a Friday night, Kyle Kizzier appeared on stage in the University District, where, at the audience's suggestion, he pretended to be a penguin mascot, telling a story about a dirty lampshade.

That same night he became a unicorn with golden hoofs. And he spun a tale, a la Dr. Seuss, about a tree and a "Squiggly-smoosh."

Kizzier is one of the Seattle's best improv performers, a man willing to take the wildest proffer and roll with it.

"For a couple of hours a night, I'm able to get up on a stage and jump around like an 8-year-old," Kizzier says. "Improv for me is almost like therapy. It's physical. It's immediate. And when it's done, it's done. It's a way to clear your head."

For Kizzier, that's important. Earlier the same day, before going on stage, he went to work at the Seattle Police Department's headquarters on Fifth Avenue, where he reviewed a report of a child being assaulted and spoke with a woman who said she had been raped.

Kizzier works as a detective in the Sexual Assault & Child Abuse Unit, one of the department's most demanding.

His twin pursuits — sex-crimes detective, improv funnyman — sound like the kind of mashup only an improv audience could come up with.

Only in his case, it's real.

Short prompts, long answers