Last night I accompanied the graduation shows for Asaf’s solo improv class and Shana’s scene study class. It was fun, though playing two shows in a row is a really good way to highlight the limitations of my sonic palette. I’m not a one-trick pony, exactly, but I’m in the single digits. 

However: there were times last night when I was approaching the musical improv much more like I approach it onstage; that is, there were a few moments when I just let my fingers fall where they might and then worked with whatever came out. 

When I first started accompanying improv, I thought that being a better musician would allow me to come up with more different ideas and more accurately execute the ideas I did come up with, and both of those are true. But that’s also the musical-improv equivalent of standing offstage thinking, “In the next scene, I will be a pirate who threatens a young girl with ravishment and then repents my evil ways.” Entertaining? Quite possibly. Improv? Not so much. 

The idea of practicing diligently every day just so I can nail “Hot in Herre” when pimped to it (as opposed to fumbling around and mangling it, as I did last night) fills me with ennui. Traditionally, the ideal improv accompanist is someone who is not only technically gifted but who also has a huge catalogue of songs at the ready AND has an improviser’s sensitivity to what’s happening onstage. Good luck with that. Dave Asher in Chicago fits this description, which is why he’s one of the few improvisers at iO who actually gets paid. (Locally, our best and brightest is Michael Brockman, for whose presence Girls Girls Girls is forever in my debt.)  

I would love to play as well as Brockman, but I’m not remotely interested in listening to and learning the week’s 20 most popular downloads just in case someone mentions them onstage. (Not that he does that; he doesn’t have to. But I would actually have to sit down and learn those songs in order to play them.) 

There’s a double standard, which is completely understandable but insidious nonetheless: improvisers who would cover their faces in shame if someone started doing Shakespeare monologues or Austin Powers impersonations in a scene are still thrilled when recognizable pop music makes its appearance. And I get that, I really do. I just don’t have the skill set and don’t want it, at least not to do that.

What I am interested in, and which I got a small taste of last night, is actual musical improvisation: really being in the moment and responding to whatever just happened. This is difficult with scoring, which can’t turn on a dime the way a scene can — or, rather, it can, but it loses its emotional impact when it does so — and it’s even more difficult for me, given my limitations as a musician. But I feel like there’s a lot of interesting possibility there.

Improv’s relationship to music is between twenty and fifty years out of date. On the one hand, you have the traditional piano accompaniment, which is an enjoyable theatrical convention — but that’s all it is. Solo piano music hasn’t been popular for many decades now, so while it’s music, it’s not the music that most people listen to. 

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the integration of recorded, multiinstrumental music into shows, as intros, outros, and for specific prearranged sections. I saw a great show called Indra’s Net in Chicago where the format was the leadup to and aftermath of an event that affected the whole community. (In the show I saw, it was food poisoning at a barbecue.) The leadup and aftermath were straight improv scenes, but the event itself was staged as a comic ballet to recorded music. 

But recorded music can’t be changed by what’s happening onstage. At the same time, improvising music with multiple musicians is incredibly difficult, and there’s the additional problem of volume. 

There’s a huge unexplored expanse of territory between music and improv, and anyone who starts wandering around in it now may well be considered a pioneer ten years hence. Sara Farr has been doing really interesting soundtracking for Get Up using prerecorded music and sounds, in which the improvisational element lies not only in what choices she makes from a huge library of material but also in the performers’ relationship to the music. (For example, at the top of the show Shana and Shannon ask the audience to pick a random number and Sara plays the corresponding file, which then inspires the audience suggestion.)

My personal bet is that the sound improviser of the future will be someone adept on both kinds of keyboard, blending prerecorded samples and files with spontaneous musical creation as seems appropriate. And what seems appropriate to some people will probably err more and more toward continual soundtracking. The fact is that we’re getting to the point where an improv scene is one of the few places where music isn’t playing constantly. 

And now that I think about it, maybe I’m missing the point entirely. Maybe instead of figuring out ways to shoehorn music into some of the few remaining silent spaces in the world, I should be more concerned with keeping them that way.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

We are now at the point where the vast majority of our class time is spent running Harolds, which is pretty much the only way to get better at them. I’m still irritated by how my classmates find it almost impossible to actually stay still and listen when Bill is talking, but I’m also delighted and humbled by how much good work is being created, and seeing my friends bring it onstage makes me less cranky about what they’re doing offstage and more committed to raising my own game and serving the show. While we are perhaps not so impressive when compared with even the worst Harold I’ve seen on the iO stage, we are very impressive compared with the thirteen strangers (some of whom had never done improv before) who met for the first time three and a half weeks ago. At the end of class today, John Plough, the six-eight theater grad student from Massachusetts, said he missed the group huddle that we used to do, so we circled up and threw our hands in the middle and it was sweet in every sense of the word.

I forgot to recount one of The Reckoning’s anecdotes from their preshow Q&A: When they were someplace with a view of the Chicago skyline, like at the top of a building or driving down the highway, TJ Jagodowski (who was maybe their coach at this time?) would encompass the city with a sweeping gesture and say, “Look at her. Look at her. You serve this city.” It was fancier than that, particularly in Holly Laurent’s recreation, but you get the idea. I find this both very funny and very moving. It’s not a joke, really, it’s a truth expressed in humorous terms. Expressing the truth in humorous terms seems like an idea with legs; somebody ought to figure out a way to do it onstage.

So that was a digression, but not really, because one of the subtle shifts I’m experiencing is from worrying about what I’m doing to worrying about what the scene is doing. It’s not like I suddenly have Zen mind and can see the Harold in four dimensions, but my instincts about what is necessary or appropriate are getting better. I am less concerned with my own brilliance and more concerned with what works — which means embracing whatever anyone else does, even if the look-at-me factor is off the charts (it takes one to know one).

Of course, it’s really fucking dangerous to announce something like that in public, since now anyone who wants to can bust me for hotdogging, but I’m not really interested in being in a group with people whose main motivation is catching other people out.

In college a bunch of us once attempted some elaborate operation on the dance floor — please, don’t ask — and it went horribly wrong. During the post-mortem I went down a list of who had failed to do what, which was capped by my friend David’s comment, “John was there assigning blame.” Unfortunately, a completely accurate description of my approach to problem-solving, but I’m finally realizing the truth of what Shad (I think) said: If I’m complaining about that guy on my team who keeps doing those things, it means I’m not honoring and celebrating that person’s offers . . . which is not only what I’m supposed to be doing but also the only part of the equation that I have any control over.

Or, in the words of Susan Messing: If you’re not having fun, you’re the asshole.

This morning we worked on second beats. This afternoon we ran through openings again and then ran a couple of Harolds.

Incredibly frustrating, but this is how we get better. At least today I managed to remember all three first beats AND where we were in the piece, skills that have eluded me in the past. It makes no sense to insist on learning scenework perfectly before attempting to learn the Harold, but that’s what I want to do, because trying to stay on track while simultaneously running scenes that don’t suck feels like spinning plates on poles at this point.

Bill keeps describing the elements of the Harold in cinematic terms, which is starting to make sense. The opening is like the credit sequence, which sets tone, theme, and possibly genre; the scenes are (of course) scenes; and the games between the beats are the equivalent of car chases or dance numbers; nonscenic group activities (that in the case of the Harold include all the players).

The game Cocktail Party is analagous to the Harold: The conversations start out as totally separate but by the end of it pieces of the other conversations leak into one another.

There’s a spectrum of potential second beats, ranging from the most closely connected to the first beat (e.g., a scene with the same two characters that is a direct continuation of the first beat) to the most tangential (e.g., a scene inspired by an incidental word or phrase in the first beat). To go too far in either direction is a trap.

Bill: “Inspiration trumps obligation.” In other words, do what feels right, not what you think you’re supposed to be doing according to the unwritten rules of the Harold.

An awkward or weird first beat is often the source of some of the show’s best material, which in retrospect makes the improvisers look like they planned it that way. The difference between the Harold and a montage is that in a Harold you have to do something with that scene, which is difficult but which also opens up the possibility of a show in which nothing is wasted. As Buckman says, use the whole buffalo.

It took me this long to realize that one of the guys in Cook County Social Club was also in the the D.C.-based trio Biscuitville, who were one of the high points of the DSI Festival. They were so tight and so attuned to each other that I remember being astounded that they didn’t live in the same city anymore; I guess Chicago is where Mark Raterman was commuting from.

We had our first class with Bill Arnett today, and for the first time I felt a serious disconnect between what I’m doing here and what my classmates are doing here. Or, to parse it more finely, how we choose to do it.

I’m pretty single-minded about pursuing improv while I’m here, for reasons already discussed: it’ll be a while before I’m exposed to this much improv or can immerse myself in it completely again, and I’m starting twenty years later than almost everyone else here. These facts sharpen my sense of this as a limited-time offer, and I’ve made a conscious decision to prioritize my improv experience over everything else, including my overall Chicago experience.

My classmates are young and full of piss and vinegar and hormones, and I don’t begrudge them wanting to go out and get drunk and screw each other and enjoy a great city, particularly if they’ve never been in one before. But in class today, they would not shut up when Bill was talking, and for some reason this was really chapping my ass. Granted: he explains things in a sometimes elliptical way, and repeats himself, and has a really interesting verbal tic of holding focus not with the elongated “uuuuuuhh” that most people use but rather with a long repeated staccato “uh uh uh uh uh uh uh” that’s very easy to make fun of. Regardless, he’s forgotten more about improv than I know and I’ve laid down an enormous splodge of wonga to hear what he has to say, and when he can’t get the attention of my classmates because they’re busy doing bits about what just happened, it irks me. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive today. I notice in my last entry that I shushed people at the show last night; I did it in class today too. I’m not really mad at anybody, since when I was their age I was a more arrogant prick than any of them could ever hope to match, but the closer we get to the end, the more I’m going to want to squeeze every moment for its maximum return.

Today we reviewed Levels 1, 2, and 3 and then worked on openings. Level 4 is basically The Harold, and Bill admitted that a lot of what we’lll work on this week will appear to contradict principles we’ve already learned, because we’re now leaving the theoretical for the practical. This is what I think my classmates are missing: regardless of how they feel about Bill’s teaching style, he’s got a ton more experience than we do, and the more work we get done in class, the greater chance we have to benefit from that. Duh. I personally like his teaching style, because he’s clearly jazzed about this stuff, but I’d be listening, or at least quiet, even if I didn’t.

Okay, enough about how much more mature I am than everyone else. Here are a few highlights from today’s class, of interest solely to people who give a tinker’s damn about the Harold:

• It’s not that there are good choices and bad choices. It’s that every choice comes with consequences.
• First beats need to be clean so that the players in the second beat are on the same page about what they’re dealing with.
• The majority of what we do onstage isn’t funny. So it doesn’t make sense to spend all our time focusing on trying to be funny. (What he did not say, but which I intuit from this and other comments, is that if you take care with the nonfunny parts the funny will take care of itself, but not the other way around.)
• “An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.”
• The Harold is difficult because it has the potential to be amazing and transcendent. (When I wrote this down, it made sense in context, but now I’m not sure if he meant that it’s more difficult to do it really well or that merely doing it competently is more disappointing than in other forms. I’ll try to remember to ask him tomorrow.)
• The opening needs to be true to the suggestion; the show needs to be true to the opening.

I need to let go of my irritation at my comrades now, because we’re doing twenty minutes at a local bar tonight. I’m going to strongly suggest that we just run a montage instead of burdening ourselves with a structure, but I will bend to the group mind. Because that’s what we do.