Drink the Electric Kool-Aid Part II

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.