I've finished reading Wolfe's “The
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, and I've made a few more
observations. While we're on the subject, you recall in Part I that
I could only guess that maybe Del Close and Kesey may have knew each
other, as they were both interested in drugs for enlightenment and
living in the same area at the same time, well, I've found the proof.
Near the end of the book, a reporter goes to an Acid Test and sees
Close and Severn Darden at the event (doing what else, but
improvising some scenes right in the middle of the party), of course
at the time Kesey was hiding out in Mexico, so no direct line just
yet. But what I was struck with was Kesey's final lesson to the
Merry Pranksters (and all drug users really), that doing all these
psychotropics was cool and all in that it gave man a way to really
dive into himself, but in the end, we had to figure out a way to get
there without the drugs.
The Acid Tests really were this, an
attempt to reproduce the introspection you get from LSD without
having to take it (except for one party where someone actually did
spike the punch with acid, but then again, they weren't call the
Pranksters for nothing). They would play the weird music, do light
shows, the whole shebang, trying to mimic the experience. I have to
think Del probably made the same connection – while the kind of
crazy, off the wall spiritual experience you got while doing LSD was
awesome, you couldn't really do scenes or relate to any audience
while you're on it, so the next obvious step was trying to bottle
that lightning in a way that you could use it on stage. A lot of the
early Close Harold openings were based around this concept (including
the “3 Rituals” and the “Invocation” - still used today), and
Close even said that he loved it more when audiences gave the most
mundane suggestions, because that really gave them the opportunity to
wow them by elevating something bland into something extraordinary,
or even God-like. The Beatniks (who preceded the Hippies in drug use
by a decade) discovered this too. The Beat culture was addicted to
Benzedrine and Dexedrine (amphetamines for those of you following at
home) instead of LSD and DMT, and they were doing it for different
purposes (artistic productivity, including writing for the Beats,
while the Hippies used it for spiritual exploration), but they
reached the same conclusion. Eventually, you have to figure out a
way to capture that without taking pharma. (This is compounded by
the fact that it requires increased doses for amphetamine, some
individuals pushing as high as several hundred milligrams and
eventually toxifying themselves to hospitalization or worse. Ah, the
pursuit of artistic endeavor.)
I taught a Harold workshop recently to
a group that is relatively inexperienced in longform (though they
have been experimenting with a very Commedia del Arte approach to it
in the last couple of months, and that's pretty cool). The director
asked me to teach some longform, and said I could teach whatever I
wanted, and after a great deal of internal debate I settled on the
Harold for its simplicity of structure, it's influence on other, more
complicated forms, and also because every other longform player I
know of started on the Harold, so it seems a good place to start.
The biggest lesson I learned teaching this two and half hour crash
course, is that you can teach the structure relatively easy, but
that's only really half of what the Harold (and by extension,
Longform) is about. The other half has to do with that paragraph
right up there (go ahead and read it again, I'll wait). The other
half is largely what I think Close contributed to improv – it's the
attitude: everything from the “Theater of the Heart” all the way
up to artistic integrity (e.g. play to the top of your character's
intelligence/integrity). And it's this way of thinking that would
explain why exactly it is that when my first group back in college
tried Harold's (twice) that we failed miserably. We were missing
that piece of the puzzle that makes longform different from
shortform, and what makes longform more than just “longer scenes”
but transforms it into something mind-blowing. In a post crash
course sit down with the group I taught, one of the players said she
didn't like the Harold because it seemed too chaotic; which she was
right about, but the Harold I can teach in two hours, sure. What I
can't teach in two hours is the mindset of how a longform improviser
approaches a piece. This is one of the reasons why the big three
cities holds a tight hold on “good” longform – they have the
right mindset. Running all the way from Kesey to Close and up to
every improviser performing longform today (or at least the ones who
can trace their improv lineage back to the original drug users) runs
a line that has to do with artistic integrity, discovery, and group
mind. This is what makes a longform improviser – not the form he
does.
On a personal note, my group is
chomping at the bit for some longform, but I don't want to drop that
on them until they've attached themselves into that lineage. Once
they have, the Harold will be easier than breathing.
