Doug Peruski says one of the things that he will miss about The Square Peg Players is its popular Improv Night.

Improv Night, he explains, is the troupe's weekly feature that has proven to be one of its most popular events. "It's just what it sounds like. An improve. It's classic improve, really – we ask audience members to call out ideas, the actors select a few, and improvise off of that." He says that he and the other actors usually try to connect ideas that seem to bear no resemblance to each other. That, he says, is when the really creative part of the process takes place.

But the days of Improv Night at the Square Peg Players are numbered. Doug Peruski announced he is taking the troupe to New York sometime next year. They'll be putting their renovated barn on the real estate market and pulling up stakes.

The atmosphere at the big yellow barn that has housed the Square Peg stage and administrative offices has been unmistakably nostalgic since Peruski announced his plans in early 2014. In a Sunday newspaper feature, a Duluth Register reporter went so far as to call it the end of an era. In that article, reporter Timothy Slater asked Peruski what the wildest thing ever to happen at an Improv Night was.

According to Slater's article: "Peruski stopped and gave the question a moment's thought. ‘I'd have to say,' he said, ‘it was the time a guy called out, ‘Put me on the stage!' I don't know who he was. But we said sure, why not? It's the spirit of improve, right? So the guy jumps on the stage, someone else calls out ‘You're a camp counselor who is secretly the Lone Ranger!' and we all took it from there.'" The man who came on the stage, according to Doug Peruski, surprised them all with his inventiveness.

"But the strangest thing of all," Peruski told Slater, "is that when it was over, he was done. I thought he'd tell us he wanted to join the Squares – I know I was thinking that might be a good idea. But we never saw him again. And so we had to ask: Who was that masked man?"