As the world has retreated to its own various holes and out of public spaces due to the potentially significant (and catastrophic) coronavirus (Covid-19), we've necessitated that only jobs and enterprises deemed "essential" have been permitted to continue operations. The list of such essential activities seems to swing fairly wildly from 'no duh' (healthcare, public transportation, grocery) to 'huh?" (WWE, dry-cleaning (no knocks on dry cleaners, but I can't imagine there is much of a need for many suits or ballgowns right now)), but it does seem that the line is holding that most live entertainment - here namely improv - is finding itself to be "un-essential" against in the light of potential morbidity and mortality. Not that I could really imagine what improv would look like at present, were it to continue; a team of eight 24-year olds wearing masks and pretending to drive or conduct job interviews while 50+ patrons (half of which are the prior/next team(s)) sipping BYOB IPA's laugh behind the footlights just feels surreal.
As a result, it seems that this might be one of the longest stretches for most improvisers to go without doing improv. Sure, there are some Zoom jams, some online classes that may fill the gaps - but based on my own experience, and what I've heard from others, these will always be stop-gaps to satisfying the itch, and we're all counting down the days until we can do our Crazy 8's and Harolds in spaces with other warm bodies, preferably a nice hot crowd. For me, I realized last week that this is now the longest gap I've had from doing improv since 2005: the summer and fall immediately after I graduated college and before I moved back to Hattiesburg. And if the lockdown goes as long as the estimates are looking (based on a number of sources, some official and and some not, I'd wager there won't really be an "improv show" until August, and it'll probably be weird), this might be the longest I've gone without really doing improv since I started doing it in 2003.
I'm not sure if everyone else is taking the opportunity to evaluate or reflect on what improv "is" and what their place is in it. Over the last ~17 years, it has been a hobby, avocation, occupation, tool, social outlet, frustration, and aspiration. Through it, I've made some of the best friends that I've ever had; ones that let me crash on their couch, ones that I only see three times at year at festivals, and ones that I've seen get married and start lives with each other. It has also been a crucible through which I have seen some of the worst in people, and discovered which ones are irresponsible, immoral, unethical, and unprofessional, and under what circumstances they are willing to sacrifice their principles for the thing they "love" in favor of a spell of slow doom giving in to their basest instincts. At the risk of this sounding too dramatic ("The worst is not, So long as we can say, 'This is the worst'), I've also known the quietly diligent, the easily talented, people who have no friends but colleagues, and people who've only come to the table for a snack, not the whole feast.
It's gotten me thinking a lot about "improvisers" as a class, and the various ways in which we've categorized ourselves in relation to each other: owners, for instance, those who have legal and administrative custody and stewardship of the business. (It dawned on me that some improv theater owners never seem to start an improv theater with the intention of presenting an improved product, service, or manner of business - only the desire for them to be the ones providing it.) But improv theater owners are not monoliths, because improv theaters are not typical business ventures. The theater does not have many "employees" in the traditional sense, and instead the line is very blurry between an employee (someone who is paid to perform work) and a customer (someone who is paying for work to be performed).
Instead, improvisers often straddle (and co-occupy) many lanes during their "career" from an audience member watching a show, to a student paying for classes/workshops, to a performer not being paid for providing work that people have paid for, to (preciously rarely) a performer being paid for work that people have paid for, to being paid to be a teacher. Even the traditional "staff" at a theater are a mix of people doing work for intern credit, being paid hourly, drawing a traditional salary (oftentimes supplemented by additional pay for teaching and coaching), or merely volunteering their time (as happens regularly during festivals).
As a result, the improvisers at theaters get (justifiably) cranky at theater management who make decisions or rules; it's because everyone lives in a soupy middle zone of employee and customer (an employstomer, if you will). None of them are shareholders (people who hold legal and financial stake in an enterprise) in an official sense, but don't we all feel a rush of joy when a new theater opens or an extant one moves into a new space and an equal crushing blow when one closes or a team is cut? Every employstomer is responsible for simultaneously supporting and being supported by a business they have zero say in.
A lot of writing and thought has been given over the last five years or so to what a community is, and how to cultivate and foster its growth. Of course, communities are interesting in that they can (and often do) span multiple theaters, and really more cleanly defined by who isn't in them. Communities are groups of people with a common geographical, cultural, or value set, so to say the Chicago Improv Community is an amazingly amorphous description to define a group of people who've never been in the same room together - I know there's probably a thousand improvisers here I've never met and never will meet, and somehow they and I currently have enough in common to have the same general needs and goals.
To underline though: not all owners are bad. People don't become inherently bad because they sign a lease or have to make decisions. Not all decisions work for all people all the time, and leadership is about making tough decisions sometimes. True leaders are those that are there for the high times as well as the low; who have values and are willing to risk things for their values. Anything else is a term paper. Leadership in improv must come with the understanding that your customer, employee, and colleague are often the same fucking person. To be in our global improv community necessitates understanding the strange interconnectedness we all apparently have.
I don't know what improv will look like when it comes back. A friend asked me today: 'what's the first meal you're going to have when the quarantine is over?", and I stumbled at the simplicity of the question. It's folly to assume that the current state of affairs will have a clean stop and one day we'll all restart our Level 1's and Main Stage shows. The question 'when will be your first improv show back' is multiple parts: 1) when will we have a full rehearsal again, 2) when is the first show we can sell tickets to, 3) when is the first show that'll be packed, and 4) when will it be "business as usual", as well as another dozen subquestions that'll each have to be answered one step at a time, and the change will be so gradual that we probably won't notice right away that we got back to normal.
Maybe a better question is, what will our relationship(s) with improv look like when things get "back to normal". Will there be the same glut of shows, will we be so casual with our practice (and I mean practice here more in the sense that a doctor or lawyers have a practice), and will we still tolerate and endorse the same shallow negligence as before?
Do we miss improv now?
Will we remember that we missed it when it's back?
