October 23, 2007
this just in
Tim Orr sent me a nice note correcting my post about 3 for All’s “two bad shows” warmup, which suffers from the minor inaccuracy that it’s not actually 3 for All that does that. It’s Tim and Stephen’s when they’re doing their “Dirk & Blaine” scripted show, which is obviously a whole different animal. As Tim says in his comment below, “Improv is much too harsh a mistress to tolerate that kind of pre-show hubris.” Well, I didn’t think it was hubris when I thought they did it; I was just pretty sure I couldn’t get away with it..
So the bad news is that I got my information wrong and spilled it all over the internets. The good news is that I now officially agree with 3 for All about everything. They’re so relieved.
Please tell everyone you know that 3 for All are not hubristic bastards but rather humble servants of their art whose worst sin is hiring piano players who only hear every third word you say.
October 15, 2007
a plaintive cry
My friend Kat’s reaction to a review of The Darjeeling Express that slams it as a rich-white-person’s wish-fulfillment jerkoff: “Dang. Can’t I just watch the pretty colors go by, does that have to mean I’m going to third base with the Machine?”
the ground rises to meet you
Last Friday I went to see Katherine Catmull in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days at Hyde Park, as part of my ongoing attempt to see more theater. I took a certain perverse pleasure in buying a theater ticket when my finances are so marginal; it felt like an oath of loyalty to art. (As far as I know, art doesn’t care either way, but it’s more for my benefit.)
Though sleep-deprived and hungry, I was glad I went. I’d never seen it, and I’m not likely to get another chance soon, let alone starring someone as good as Catmull. She did not disappoint.
If you’re not familiar with the play, the first act is essentially a monologue (with a few contributions from a barely-articulate partially-visible husband) by a middle-aged woman buried to the waist in a mound of earth. The second act is another monologue by the same character, this time buried up to her neck.
Obviously, this is a challenge for both actor and audience to maintain connection throughout the play. But even in my drowsy state, I was engaged and, eventually, moved. Which surprised me.
I knew the premise of the play, so I thought I knew the play. But it’s a play, not an essay or a novel, and so reading it, or reading about it, is no substittute for seeing it performed. What struck me was how strong my physical and emotional reaction when the second-act curtain rose on Winnie buried up to the neck. I knew that was what I was going to see, but I immdiately felt constriction, and panic, and hopelessness, and it just got more emotionally wrenching from that point on. The second act introduces a wider range of emotions, too, but the groundwork (sorry) was laid as soon as we saw her buried up to her neck. Or, more accurately, the groundwork was laid throughout the first act and was then present by implied comparison throughout the second. Put it this way: I didn’t expect to have a strong emotional reaction to the play, and despite my physical condition (and the audible conversations emanating from the tech booth), I did.
It makes me think of Kareem’s point below that memorable situations make memorable characters, because Happy Days is almost like a challenge Beckett set himself: make the audience care about a character who can’t move and to whom nothing happens while she’s onstage. Which he (and Katherine Catmull) did, to me, anyway.
And it’s also a great reminder about how powerful stage pictures can be. Obviously, this one took on additional weight as the single biggest visual change over the course of an entire play, but it was telling nonetheless. In Jennifer’s improv dance class on Sunday, she talked about how you can drastically affect the stage picture and the relationship between players by changing what dancers call your level. Probably not to the extent that a change in the entire environment does, but still.
Actually, now that I think about this, Bryan Roberts figured this out a long time ago. Saturday I made a joke about him starting scenes standing on a chair, but now I see the big-picture brilliance behind this move. Forgive me, Bryan. I just didn’t get it.
October 14, 2007
the pros from dover
I want to write about 3 for All before they recede too far into the coastal mists of memory. Last weekend they came to play and teach workshops, and since I was their local pickup musician and sat in on the classes, I more or less spent the weekend with them. It was an inspiring and illuminating experience. Also fun.
The gents in 3 for All are gents, of the old school. They wear sharp vintage clothing and silk ties onstage, and are never less than impeccably dressed offstage. They are unfailingly gracious to every single person they meet, and if you so much as fetch them a glass of water you will be thanked sincerely and repeatedly. They know exactly what they’re doing and what they need to do it, but they’re never overbearing or demanding. (Every request, no matter how reasonable, is accompanied by a joke about what divas they are.) In short, they’re pros, and for someone like me with no background in theater, watching pros work is a bracing experience.
I took Stephen Kearin’s spacework class at Out of Bounds in 2006, and it was the first time I had ever thought about improv as a form of theater. What was nominally a class about creating an environment onstage and letting that inform your character turned out to be a secular sermon about what it means to be a theater artist. It was thrilling, and daunting: I was forced to look at this as something more than diversion, and I left with the understanding that performing improv entails a commitment to something far larger than myself, or my team, or my community. Dave Razowsky makes the same point, that this is a tradition reaching back thousands of years to Ancient Greece.
(Liz Allen: “This is not a lark, people.”)
One way of thinking about 3 for All — onstage and off — is that they’re very presentational. Their shows are very carefully staged, right down to the entrances. (I was urged not to go directly to the keyboard but to arrive downstage and acknowledge the audience before crossing to my post. How many improv groups do you think give a tinker’s damn about how their accompanist gets to the piano?) Obviously, the improv itself isn’t planned, but anyone who saw either show last weekend knows how fully they made use of what was a pretty minimalist stage and lighting setup. I particularly liked the white spot far upstage, which was noted during rehearsal and then used very effectively throughout both shows.
In art as in life: someone remarked that watching Stephen gesture while he talks is itself a theatrical experience, and while I’m sure they would scoff at the idea, it’s hard to spend any time with 3 for All and not be struck by how elegant they are all the time. Not fussy, not pretentious, just elegant, in the sense that everything is accomplished skillfully with no wasted motion. Like a tea ceremony, only much more entertaining.
There’s an improv spectrum, and at one end is longform narrative, in which the goal is to approximate as closely as possible another art form. (Edit: Shannon points out that telling a story is not inherently borrowing from another form, and I see his point, but most narrative improv I’ve seen — including Get Up — borrows explicitly from other mediums.) The challenge in this form comes from the creation of expectations. If you get up onstage and say, “We’re going to do some improv,” very few people are going to be able to tell you that you did it wrong. But if you say, “We’re going to improvise a movie,” you’ve set up a very specific set of parameters, because everyone in the audience has seen a movie and has opinions on what makes one good. Basically, you don’t have a lot of leeway; you either hit your marks or you don’t, and pretty much anyone can tell the difference. But when you do, and do it well, it’s extremely gratifying to the audience.
At the other end of this particular spectrum would be improv that could not exist in any other form. Hard to describe, but you know it when you see it. It wouldn’t work as a play, it doesn’t look like a movie, it doesn’t sound like a book: it’s improv and nothing but. Easy to aspire to — no rules! — but also easy to drop the ball entirely, without the discipline of the narrative touchstone. And harder, I think, to create a work of art — though when you do, it’s more mind-blowing, because nobody knew what to expect, so whatever emerges is by definition more surprising. (The Harold is self-evidently a way to organize this kind of improv in a way that makes it more likely to achieve a coherent work of art.)
It’s obvious which end of the spectrum 3 for All occupy, but when I first met them more than a year ago, I hadn’t figured out where along the spectrum I fell. Since then I’ve pretty much planted my flag at the far distant end of the spectrum, the improv-qua-improv camp.
So watching them and learning from them this time around was doubly enlightening, because even as I was taking in all they had to show and tell me, I was also able to put it in context and distinguish what seems to be true of improv in general from what is true for narrative longform specifically.
(Ironically, seeing them again also confirmed my instincts about what kind of improv I want to do. I’m fortunate in that I routinely get to see really good longform narrative, but really, if I can watch 3 for All tear it up and still not feel even the slightest urge to do narrrative, that’s a pretty good sign that I’m on the right path.)
Unsurprisingly, 3 for All promoted the same broad principles that my teachers in Chicago did: connect with your fellow players, yes-and the hell out of everything, and when you’re stuck, come back to what’s right in front of you. No surprises there.
I think improv is an ineffable experience that can never be accurately described, and that therefore all improv instruction falls into the category of the finger pointing at the moon. I’ve been studying this long enough now that I’m rarely surprised by new information in classes. What happens instead is that the same principles are expressed differently by different people, even as I’m getting more experience in what they’re talking about. So the same instruction that makes no sense the first three times I heard it suddenly produces a blinding insight the fourth time I hear it, because I’m not the same improviser (or person) that I was when I heard it the first three times.
So the things that jumped out at me this time were the references to serving the piece. As in, ask not what the show can do for you; ask what you can do for the show. Readers of this blog are by now heartily sick of my dragging religion into everything, but I merely point out that this principle is at the root of every spiritual path I know of: figure out how you can best contribute to the greater good and then commit yourself to tht contribution, no matter how slight it seems.
Because it was still seared into my brain from last year, I had forgotten almost none of what Steve Kearin had to say about spacework — including his hilarious impression of his chain-smoking mother calling his parochial school to give Sister Mary Benedict a piece of her mind — but again, context changes everything. I have accepted that spacework is important because my teachers told me it was, but having now spent some time onstage, I realize (a) how difficult and baffling spacework is to me, and (b) how badly I need it.
Every improviser has his or her own path to follow, and for the foreseeable future mine is to fully inhabit my body instead of just using it as a mobile podium for my head to talk from.
To that end, I have internalized Kearin and Seth Weitberg from Chicago as my two little spacework angels, excitedly urging me to take the time to feel what I’m doing and pay attention to it, and by doing so discover more about what’s going on in the scene. It was Kearin who first told me this, but it was in Seth’s class that I first experienced it: I was playing the bad boy sitting next to the good girl during a test, and I pulled out a cigarette and started to smoke. I had to exhale, and at that moment I realized that I could either blow smoke in her face or away from her, and whichever one I did would tell me something about how I felt about her. (I blew it in the other direction, and for the rest of the scene I knew I liked her.)
I went to the ColdTowne jam after the show on Saturday, which was pretty much the polar opposite of 3 for All, with the exception that they were both great fun.
Well, fun for me: a friend of mine was irritated and frustrated by the silliness and lack of attention to how the games should be played. (Read: people were drunk.) And I saw her point. As anyone who’s ever played a board game with me can testify, I can be a bigger stickler (read: dickhead) about following the rules than anybody.
But in this case it didn’t bother me. Partly because I don’t really care about games even when they’re done well, but partly because to me the jam was more about community bonding than technical excellence. If every show at ColdTowne was like that, I’d be out of there like a kerosened cat. But ColdTowne and the people who play at their theater really want to be good, and work very hard at it. It’s just that they also sometimes just let anarchy take over — in a designated time slot — to see what will happen.
Was it great improv? Not really. Was it entertaining? Sometimes. But did things happen that surprised and delighted me because there was no way to predict them? Yes. And that’s what I want from improv.
Tim Orr said that he and Stephen have a signal they pass between them before a show. It comes from an interview he saw with Bruce Springsteen after he’d come off the Born in the USA tour, meaning that he had just played 500 shows in two and a half years, or some equally absurd number. The interviewer asked Springsteen how many of those had been bad shows, and Bruce raised his hand curved into a zero. As Tim tells it, Springsteen’s attitude was that people had paid too much money to see him turn in a bad show. (Of course, when you play for three and a half hours a night, you have a lot of room to turn around a bad show . . . but you also have to play for three and a half hours a night.)
Before their shows, Tim says that he and Stephen flash each other a “two” signal, representing the two really bad shows they’ve had, in an implicit promise that the number will not change before the night is over.
And here is where I respectfully part company with 3 for All.
I am deeply grateful to them for embodying a noble approach to this work. I aspire to their sense of mission, their attention to detail, their dedication to the idea that every show matters. And I’m personally both fond of them and indebted to them.
But I don’t aspire to a record of only two bad shows, because if my main priority is avoiding bad shows I’ll be playing scared, and will never take the risks that might result in a great show. Here at this end of the spectrum, the possibility of a bad show and the possibility of a great show rise and fall in direct proportion to one another. I’m willing to risk one for the chance at the other.