August 14, 2007
walk this way
As I emerge blinking from the haze of the intensive into the sunlight of my previous life (migas! driving! walking around the house naked!) a few strands are starting to emerge as the likeliest longterm candidates for What I Learned on My Summer Vacation. In no particular order:
- It’s all in your group mind. Liz Allen’s work with our class convinced me that this is the alpha and omega of improv, or at least of the kind of improv I want to do. It’s not that I don’t care about technical mastery or solid scenework or brilliant thematic unity. I want all of those things. But mostly I want deep emotional engagement and astonishing logic-defying leaps, and I think the quickest way to get them is to assemble a group of people committed to affirming what happens no matter what happens. It wasn’t just Liz. Shad Kunkle told us to love each other and said, “If you’re having a problem with that guy on your team, you’re not honoring and celebrating his ideas.” Pat O’Brien said that giving your teammates negative notes does more harm than good. “If he’s played a little old lady the last three times he’s come out, let him keep playing her another thousand times if he wants to.” In other words: Say yes, say yes, say yes. And.
- Adverbial trumps verbal. A scene is never about the words. It’s about the emotional relationship between the characters, and therefore about how they do what they do. Physicality, as an expression of character and emotion, is far more important than any line of dialogue.
- You have everything you need at the top of the scene. You walk onstage with physicality and emotional outlook, and within a few lines you have what the scene is about. If the scene stalls, don’t panic and add extra information (as I did in my one scene in our graduation show). Go back to the top of the scene. It’s all there. Buckman said this scores of times; I’m finally starting to get it.
My goal for the next year or so is to hit the Harold over and over and over again, because the only way I’m going to learn this stuff is to do it repeatedly. It’s a failing of mine that I want to learn things in order, piece by piece, instead of all together at once, and I’ll have to let go of that, but I can narrow my focus so that I’m not spraying my energy out in too many different directions. By my birthday in February I want to be playing with a group that has at least some of the same priorities. There, I said it.
August 12, 2007
coming down
Yesterday I brought my Chicago adventure to an appropriate end by missing my flight and almost missing the Girls Girls Girls show I was guesting in. Appropriate because it seems like in a lot of ways this trip has been about stripping down to the essentials and realizing that even when I’m in an uncomfortable situation (unsure lodging, lost debit card, missed plane, lack of talent) I’m okay. There was a moment in the airport where I actually started feeling guilty about how calm I was and started to panic almost out of a sense of obligation to anyone else who might be freaking out (e.g., GGG), but luckily I realized how silly that was and stopped.
The show itself was, to use Jon Bownds’ new favorite t-shirt phrase, meh. Or, more accurately, the show itself was fine but I didn’t really pull my weight. This is only slightly disappointing to me; I knew better than to think that I was going to burst onto the stage at the Hideout and wow everyone with my new improv superpowers. It doesn’t work like that for me anyway, and exhaustion combined with a format that is almost completely different from what I’ve been working on argued against a triumph. So the bad news is that I haven’t turned into an improviser who can step into any show and kick ass. The good news is that this doesn’t bother me. I would have liked to be the poster boy for iO, with which I now feel a strong bond, but that’s not my job.
My graduation performance with my class was naturally far less accomplished than the GGG show, but it was also more emotional, since it represented the culmination of our time together. I wasn’t thrilled with my scenework, but I was proud of us for supporting each other fully and doing what we set out to do. A number of people commented on how great our group mind was, which I attribute almost entirely to Liz Allen. It’s starting to become clear to me how deeply she affected my relationship to improv. I’m now convinced that group mind is everything — “If you’re not connected to the ensemble, you’re not an improviser” — and that’s going to be my priority in any group I play with. Because I’ve seen it work.
August 9, 2007
the tornado
We put the finishing touches (by necessity) on our new form today. It felt pretty good. It would be even better if we had another week, but so would lots of things. We haven’t named it yet. It comes from a suggestion for a place that could fit on the stage. Ten of us create the environment for that place while two play a scene. From that point on, all transitions are organic, taking something from one scene and morphing it into something else, which in turn informs the next scene, usually through a noise we’re making or the physical position of our bodies. This continues on for twenty minutes until we get the five-minute warning, at which point we know it’s time to get to the last scene, which takes place in the same place as the first scene with the same characters. We get there via the tornado, which is Pat’s name for a transition that incorporates elements from throughout the piece. He calls it the tornado after The Wizard of Oz; the flood in O Brother, Where Art Thou? performs the same function.
It’s getting sweeter, though whether we’ll pull it off tomorrow night is anyone’s guess. It does play to our strengths, which are group work and support. I had a weird moment today when I came out and started what I thought was a transition and which nobody followed, which meant that I was slithering around a dancing couple for a while for no apparent reason, but what the hell. What I found weirder was that nobody mentioned it in the notes, which made me nervous, as though it were so obviously terrible that no one wanted to mention it. In general I’ve started feeling pretty invisible during both the notes and in the name-one-thing-you-liked wrapup at the end of the day, but I choose to believe that this means I’m succeeding in my goal of offering excellent support.
I’m going to the theater now, lest I get to the Reckoning show too late to get in. That really would make me sad.
the runout
Because I am tired, and because I have been engaged in intense activity for five days a week for the past month, and because that activity will soon come to an end, and because I haven’t been home in a long time, and because a machine ate my ATM card and I don’t know what I’m going to do for money until Monday or for that matter for the rest of my life, I’m very emotional tonight. So that when I got to the theater hoping to see Carl & the Passions and Johnny Roast Beef for the last time only to find out that I was too late to get in to the sold-out show (because I had gone home to take a nap, because I was tired — are you seeing how this feeds on itself?), I almost burst into tears. If there’s one phrase designed to evoke every fear and failure in my life, it’s “too late.” (And yet I’m late all the time. What fucked-up message am I sending myself?)
Instead I went upstairs and saw Roadster (Harold team) and Felt (puppet improv), which cheered me up somewhat, especially since I found my friend Jessica there, who had also gotten to the theater too late, and for the same reason. Afterwards we went next door to the Salt & Pepper and had coffee and mozzarella sticks and talked about writing and improv and waited for the downstairs show to get out so we could go see Dave Pasquesi and Tracy Letts.
Once in, there was a lot of time to kill, which I spent by communing with people in other classes. My friend Zoe sat up at the bar with me and we talked about writing and improv and waited for the show to start. (I would like Zoe and Jessica even if they weren’t both drop-dead gorgeous, but as it happens, they are. It’s nobody’s fault.)
The Pasquesi/Letts show was wonderful, probably the best thing I’ve seen since I got here . . . including the TJ and Dave show, which those who know their work say was only so-so by their standards. I thought it was great, and it was, but tonight I saw exactly the same format on a whole new level. It was even a similar storyline, which really brought out how much deeper this one went. In both shows, a sympathetic character is trying to make a connection with a woman, but whereas TJ’s character two weeks ago was sweet and goofy, Dave’s character tonight was a little darker and more complicated — to the extent that even though at the end of the piece he had quit his timesuck of a day job and scored a date with the girl, it was unclear how optimistic we should be about his prospects.
After it was over I turned to Zoe and said, “Everything Dave said in that piece perfectly expressed my philosophy of life.” “Me too,” she said. She has a boyfriend.
Whenever I’ve seen Jonathan Richman play, at the end of the show I felt like I wanted to invite everyone there home to my house to hang out and listen to records. I felt the same way at the end of the show tonight, partly because the show itself was so fraught with unexpressed emotion and partly because I had such a strong connection to so many of the people in the room. As the end nears I can feel people drawing more closely to one another, because even if they say they’re going to keep in touch, most of them won’t. (The blackout tonight was Dave’s character saying goodbye to his now-former workmate, who said “See you around,” to which Dave replied “Nah.”)
So one way I can make the most of my last day in class is to get a fulll night’s sleep. I leave you now.
August 8, 2007
the enemy within
I’m exhausted, cranky, sore, tense, and almost broke. I started out class today with a couple of strong scenes and let them go to my head and spent the rest of the day noticing too late that I wasn’t on the same page as everyone else. For the most part I’m comfortable enough with the rest of my class that even when I screw up I’m not embarrassed, but today I embarrassed myself.
So tomorrow is our last day, and no matter how it goes I want to play well and serve the larger purpose. I correctly predicted that running any kind of form with 12 people is a clusterfuck, so really in a lot of cases I feel like the best thing to do is stay offstage. Today Pat kept telling us to incorporate two-person scenes and we kept winding up with four or five people onstage when a scene started. Part of this is the nature of our transitions, which typically come from an organic group game in which there’s a mob of people doing the same thing. There’s only one person (besides me) I’d categorize as a stage hog, but for some reason it’s easier for us to respect a two-person scene coming off the back wall than one that starts as the result of an organic opening.
Part of my frustration is that this week represents an attempt to cram two levels’ worth of instruction into four days. Level 5 is an exploration of other forms; Level 5B is dedicated to creating your own. In the normal curriculum, each takes place over the course of eight weekly two-hour classes. We’re trying to accomplish both things in four days. I will eventually benefit from this when I start trying to experiment with these forms back in Austin, but as far as I’m concerned it would have made just as much sense to work on Harolds for the last two weeks and have everyone do that instead trying to come up with something that’s never been done and then do it well. To make matters worse, some of the other classes apparently beat us to the punch on claiming some of the forms, so The Living Room, for example, is effectively off limits. Or, rather, Pat doesn’t want to do anything too close to it.
Another part of my frustration is that I sense I’ve improved as an improviser since getting up here and I’d like to be testing that instead of trying to master a new form. I am frankly nervous about the Girls show on Saturday, not because I think anything terrible will happen but because I’ve been onstage a lot less this week than I was last week. Normally I don’t like rehearsing (anything) right before playing, but on Saturday this may turn out to be a good thing. Buckman reminded me to let go, and he’s right. And I will. Once I’m there.
And I know that another element of my frustration is that when I’m down all my worst habits arise, and they are of course the habits that infuriate me the most in other people. Most of my tongue-biting moments this month have occurred when someone isn’t paying attention to what other people are doing and seems to be more intent on doing his thing . . . which is exactly what I was doing today.
I tell myself that I don’t have any resistance to laying back and listening and supporting and saying yes, but what I really mean is that I have a lot less resistance than I would have earlier in my life. Which is great, but that doesn’t mean that my worst tendencies — arrogance, pettiness, viciousness, being judgmental — have gone away. They’re always there, waiting for me to get tired or frustrated enough that they seem comforting and familiar. Just like my alcoholism, now that I think about it. So while I’m happy at the progress I’ve made, telling myself that I’ve somehow transcended my worst aspects is practically an open invitation for them to prove me wrong.
The good news is that I know how to deal with this, and that I caught it before the last day. Tomorrow and Friday, I will listen and say yes until it hurts and then I’ll do it some more, and it’ll work. And then on Saturday I’ll let go and forget the rules and that’ll work too.
If you’re not having fun onstage, you’re the asshole.
the forms
The Reckoning did a Bat and then a Living Room tonight. It was fun to watch because we had done a Living Room today in class as part of our prepping for creating our own format for Friday’s show. This last week of the intensive is kind of silly, in that it incorporates the material from not one but two eight-week sessions. During the first, classes investigate new forms; during the second, they create their own. We’re doing all of that in four days. Yesterday we did an Armando and Detours; today we did Courtesy Sleeve and the Living Room and started work on J.T.S. Brown. Descriptions of these follow, which should run off everyone except for the geekiest of geeks:
The Armando
This is familiar to anyone who’s seen Stool Pigeon at ColdTowne. A monologist takes a suggestion and then opens the show with a monologue, reappearing every several scenes to either continue the first monologue or start new ones. Ideally the monologues and scenes will comment on each other and eventually intertwine to create a coherent show. Shad said that the scenes essentially try to disprove whatever conclusions the monologist comes to. Pat O’Brien says that in an Armando, the monologist is God and can edit, freeze or alter scenes with impunity. I had never seen this done until this Monday, when the American Idol guy inserted himself into some scenes, much to the chagrin of the snobby improv students in the audience. Still, some of it worked pretty well, and it would be fun to play with that.
Detours
This is the one that gave us the most trouble, possibly because none of us had ever seen it performed. (I think this is true of improv in general: it’s a hell of a lot easier to learn it after you’ve seen enough to get a feel for it. Explaining it sight unseen is a mug’s game.) One scene is played. It’s then played again as close to verbatim as possible by two new players. Then variations on the scene begin, including changes in emotional pitch, physical staging, characters, and content. Any part of the scene can be used to create a new scene, and new material can be added onto the existing scene. I will withhold judgment on it until I see it done well.
Courtesy Sleeve
This was actually the name of a group that Pat was in that specialized in this form, which he says he hated at first. CS begins with the suggestion of a room, which the improvisers proceed to fill by taking the form of various objects, each of which is making some kind of noise. The players trade places and take on each other’s appearance and sound several times before “zooming in” on one of the objects, meaning that everyone takes on that object’s characteristics and possibly alters them into something else before returning to the room again. This happens a few more times, and then the first scene is created organically from one of the group transformations. One or more players takes something from the group game — a posture, a noise, a movement — and creates a character from it to initiate a scene. There are no hard edits; every scene emerges from the organic game previous to it and becomes the game following.
Courtesy Sleeve is sort of the anti-Harold: instead of doing all the hard headwork of looking for themes and figuring out which characters go where, you just surrender to the group game and let that create your characters for you as needed. Callbacks aren’t necessary, but Pat says they show up a lot more than you’d expect, given the random means of generating scenes.
The Living Room
What it sounds like, more or less. The improvisers sit around and talk as themselves until one or more are prompted to do a series of scenes based on the conversation. Very fun and very easy for me to do, but not so much for people who don’t like playing themselves onstage.
I have more to write, but it’s two-twenty. Good night.
August 7, 2007
armando agonistes
Today class was frustrating (or, more accurately, the class was frustrated) and tonight the monologist for my last iO Armando was terrible, a second-place winner on American Idol who couldn’t tell a story to save his life. And yet I’m in a good mood. Because I realized that even though we got crossways with the new formats Pat is trying to teach us, we didn’t take it out on each other and in fact still like playing with each other. And because the cast of the Armando (which included my teachers Bill and Pat, Miles Stroth, Joe Bill, Bob Kulhan, Pat Mason, Brett Lyons, and Amber Ruffin) turned it into a giant yes-and to the monologist and definitively proved once again the mind-blowing alchemical power of improv.
And because afterward people stood around and ate pizza and chatted in a way that seemed to indicate they were happy to be there. Little clots of improv students clustered around Bill and Pat, but other than that the feeling is pretty democratic. I was reaching for another piece of pizza when a gnawed-on crust rocketed past me into the box. I looked up to see Joe Bill, who doesn’t know me from Adam, making a highly suspicious who-me face.
There is an actual feeling of camaraderie here that extends beyond Charna’s introductory speech. I have plenty of reservations about how iO is run, but the fact is that people keep coming back to play because they love it, and that fact is communicated in the best shows. I have been told this since I started doing improv, but it’s more obvious to me than ever: the best shows are those that are fueled by confidence and joy.
The format that stymied us was Detours, in which a scene is played and then played again as precisely as possible before being repeatedly altered, edited, and otherwise played with. There were plenty of good scenes, but the main points eluded us. I think it’s hard for Pat to try to teach us a difficult format while avoiding the terms “right” and “wrong,” and it’s hard for us to learn it as well. But I understand why he does that, and I appreciate his commitment to the idea that there are no mistakes, only undiscovered patterns. I have to sleep now.
August 6, 2007
miles to go
I’ve been here a month, and the trajectory was predictable: for the first two weeks, it seemed like it would last forever, but the last two weeks have whipped by and it’s hard to keep my head here and not be thinking about what I’ll do when I get back to Austin. As in, make a living again now that I don’t get to go to improv day camp four days a week.
Tonight I saw Mr. Fahrenheit, Stottlemeyer, Darryl, Deep Schwa, Teresa & Jason, Ghettoblaster, 3033, and a special late show that turned out to be Miles Stroth and two of the guys from 3033. I had gone out to get a horrible burrito so missed all but the last of the Stroth show, but it was funny that he played exactly like he did in the workshop on Friday.
Oh, yeah: I took workshops on Friday from Miles Stroth and Beer Shark Mice. Stroth, whom Del allegedly plucked from a shadowy existence in the demimonde, has a reputation as a hardass, but really he just gets to the point and doesn’t spend any time contriving nice things to say about your scene. I didn’t have any problem with that. He is also the type of improv teacher whose gold standard is what he would have done in the same scene. I don’t have much problem with that, either, but it always seems a little funny to me, since it’s based on the (false, I think) premise that there’s one way to play this scene and your teacher happens to know what it is.
Nevertheless, I learned a lot. Miles directly contradicted Shad’s call to come out with the same energy as your scene partner and instead urged that you take on a very different emotional state. I think both can work and neither is a rule that needs to be followed all the time.
Miles also claimed that 80 percent of the scenes you play will be straight-absurd scenes, that is, scenes in which one person is normal and the other person is not. (The other 20 percent can be divided into character-based scenes, which can be played realistically, and completely absurd scenes, like, um, attacking Martian vampires. I almost never intentionally initiate the latter.)
His advice at the top of the scene is to wait for the scene initiator to provide enough information for you to know whether you’re straight or absurd. If you’re wrong — about anything — you’re absurd. So the line “You seem angry, Doctor” (which someone used as an initiation) tells you all you need to know: the speaker is the straight man, and the partner has been endowed as the absurd angry doctor.
Being the absurd partner doesn’t mean you have to overplay or invent unrealistic scenarios. It just means that you keep heightening the game, in this case getting angrier as the angry doctor.
My first reaction was that this seemed like a wildly oversimplistic way to play scenes, and it probably is. But it’s amazing how much easier it makes playing a scene that someone else initiates. You just wait for enough information and then go with whatever it tells you. (Which is what you should do anyway, but this simplifies the process even further.)
Beer Shark Mice’s workshop was slightly less useful, for a number of reasons. First off, because BSM includes famous people (including Neil Flynn and David Koechner), the theater was packed. For another, what was billed as a workshop on physical comedy turned out to be a tutorial on BSM’s own format, which relies heavily on tag-outs and flashbacks, which is another way of saying it’s ideal for the short attention spans of Angelenos. Given that I have no plans to pursue this format in the immediate future, the workshop was of limited interest, if entertaining. David Koechner in particular was very funny and hollered a lot. “Attack that scene! Attack it!”
Their show was entertaining but slight. I think it comes from the format. If you can’t really develop a scene for more than a few minutes without someone tagging you out, there’s a limit to how real you can play it, and Liz Allen’s sine wave comes into play. (For those of you just joining us, Liz postulates that the greater the emotional depth you play, the bigger the laughs you get . . . so if you’re constantly trying to be funny, you’re not generating any emotional depth.)
Last night I saw the iO musical team the Deltones. Girls Girls Girls has nothing to worry about. I also saw a very rough show from Bullet Lounge, whom I had previously thought invincible. A sobering but encouraging reminder that anybody can have a bad night, and eventually will. Then I saw Jen Cargill’s team Sandbox Democracy win the Cage Match finals and walk away with the prize of a slot in the regular rotation. I continue to be slightly boggled at how teams are chosen and scheduled, but since it’s not my problem unless I decide to move here, I’m not going to worry about it.
Tomorrow we start Level 5 with Pat O’Brien. This week I will be trying very hard to wring the maximum return from this experience, because who knows when I’m going to get to do this again? (Well, actually, I’ll get to do it during workshops at Out of Bounds, that’s when.) At any rate, I have to get my game on for the GGG show next week. Once more into the breach.
August 2, 2007
arnettscape
Today was our last class with Bill. In the morning we warmed up and then did mini-Harolds only through the second game. We took Bill out for lunch and then ran Harolds all afternoon. This is so much fun now, not because we’re always good but because we’re all enough on the same page, more or less, that we can all agree on what happened afterward and how we could have improved it. We have yet to run one that just craters into everyone saying, “What the hell happened?” Bill also asked us to start examining the ways in which the structure of the Harold (or lack thereof) could be directly related to the suggestion, and started throwing us suggestions like “deja vu,” “time machine,” and “bulletin board.” In each of these, we incorporated the suggestion into the structure in various ways that you can probably figure out, but it was less that any of them were great than that everyone was coming up with great ideas and we were all on board.
Last night I saw Virgin Daiquiri, an all-female supergroup with Dina Facklis, Holly Laurent, the two women from Johnny Roast Beef, and another woman; Johnny Roast Beef; and Carl and the Passions (starring, in my mind anyway, Jenny Hagel). All three were great, but one thing I’ve started realizing from talking to other people is how useless it is to try to describe what happened in an improv show. It’s bad enough when recounting a movie, but this is more like recounting a dream: you literally cannot convey what it was like, and it almost always sounds lame or tedious in the retelling.
The late show was Deathstorm, which was a long two-man scene with Pat O’Brien and Brad Morris, and then Weaselicious, which was those two plus Bob Kulhan, Joe Bill, and another guy I haven’t seen yet. Arnett later explained to us that Weaselicious is an intentional attempt to break the rules of improv, which I sort of intuited while watching the show. Put it this way: In the hands of worse improvisers, it would have been intolerable. (It was in fact intolerable to my friend Sue, who’s the only other forty-something in the intensive.) But I found myself laughing really hard in spite of myself, even while thinking that beginning improvisers should not be permitted to see this show, lest they attempt to recreate it. It was instructive in that it seemed like the reasons it worked when it should have stunk was the quality of the acting and the commitment of the players.
People are going out and doing interesting things: going to the Art Institute, seeing the Tracy Letts production at Steppenwolf or the mainstage show at Second City, watching a Cubs game, playing in the improv free-for-all down the street at the Playhouse. And yet I find myself back here almost every night I go out, in some cases seeing the same players over and over again. I sort of assigned myself the role of improv warrior monk when I got here, and I’m glad I did, but as my time to leave draws near I’m really starting to more acutely notice all the things I’m not doing more of.
August 1, 2007
the reel’s on the bus
Yesterday and today the Clark 22 bus was late and slow. Today was particularly egregious; it was packed armpit to elbow and at every stop the accumulated backlog of waiting riders took forever to get on. I heard the driver say that three buses ahead of him were down, which seemed statistically unlikely but which explained the travel conditions. I was getting pretty frustrated with the whole thing and was seriously considering bailing and splurging on a cab when we came to a stop and a lot of people got off. One of them was a guy carrying a cooler and a rod and reel. For some reason, knowing that my bus had been carrying a fisherman this whole time calmed me down considerably.