In the last installment of the blog (that honestly was published two weeks ago, but could have easily have been a year ago), I talked about the resistance of improv to criticism - which in this case isn't the gripes about improv culture, but is the aesthetic artistic analysis and evaluation of the value of a piece of improvised theater.
One of the things to get out of the way at the top is that any criticism of improv must endeavor to divorce itself, as much as possible, from personal judgements about the producers of the improvisation. A significant pillar of the practice of Neo-futurism, which, like improv, traffics exceedingly close to the reality of the performer(s) lived experience, and receiving feedback on a piece that is incredibly personal can feel like receiving feedback on the person themselves. This is not the aim of criticism, and shouldn't be, perhaps outside of the acknowledgment, for example, of the influence of H.P. Lovecraft's xenophobia and racism and the types of stories he wrote and how he wrote them. In general though, I'd argue most of the themes that we tackle in improv don't require us to know a lot about the lived experience of the performers to understand what they're doing on stage, at least not the way we are typically teaching and directing it. And at the very least, the immediacy of improv precludes a broader understanding of context, in that we're already coexisting in this context.
We should instead focus on trying to evaluate the relative merits of a piece of work as compared to other improv shows. Since that article, I've been trying to find examples of criticism to see where we're at, before figuring out where we're going. More specifically: what do we as creators of improvisation and, ideally, consumers of improvisation need to know in order to "appropriately" dissect improv in order to judge it?
Improv is unique in that, unlike most of other art forms, has very few enthusiasts or buffs that aren't also performers. (That this is likely due to most improv theater's business models being built primarily around making significantly more money off a student than an audience member is a discussion for another time.) We don't have fans in the same way that sports, film, music, or even furniture has fans: interested followers who partake in discussion and consumption but not deed.
And those contributions aren't insignificant, for while we might listen to Martin Scorsese's opinion of filmmaking, the academic critiques about what makes film "good" really fall to an adjacent class of user; to do something different runs a heavy risk of an incestuous ouroboros of self-indulgence (which, one could argue, improv already has). If you want to do improv for other improvisers, be prepared for a different kind of feedback and support than if you try to get the general public interested. A non-improviser likely wants some different experiences from a performance than an improviser does. Conversely, an improviser not only wants different things, but is also like to ignore some things simply because of how we're trained. We already know roughly how the process is, so we don't or can't "see" the things that might be glaring to other people.
If we consider the question of critique as "what is the most significant thing about this work" (which is, as it turns out, what the average audience is also interested in) through the lens that understands that the work is fleeting and discretely temporary, then the question becomes "what is the most significant thing about the kinds of work this group can produce". This makes our job easier, in a sense. We can look at individual shows or scenes not as the end-all-be-all, but as evidence towards what can be produced.
Since we largely sell a "process", visible in real time, to an audience, we really can only talk about that process primarily, and the ultimate product secondarily. I don't remove the final product from the equation entirely, because if we look back retroactively on shows, all we can truly remember is what we saw and heard (and felt) and that becomes the product. And, consequently, if we look at a tape of a great show, we're seeing that product of what we saw on stage: words, emotion, scenes, we can no longer view the process. The sudden schism between process and product may be why improv shows lack entertainment value (often) when viewed on tape. Those two diametric elements are now divorced, and in doing so, the product now lacks immediacy, presence, and risk.
As I've been wrestling with the nature of critical improv theory recently, I've been working from the angle of what are the limitations - knowing the boundaries and the conformational hindrances are how we can hopefully begin to describe just what the hell it is we're doing all the time.
Friday, May 22, 2020
Friday, May 1, 2020
This Is Not A Review of the Hit Netflix Special "Middleditch and Schwartz"
"I'm excited that so many people are being introduced to Longform Improv thanks to a Netflix special," says my friend Elaine on Facebook. She's talking about "Middleditch and Schwartz" (which for brevity's sake I'll abbreviate M&S), a series of three comedy "specials" that the streaming platform has administered to us, here in the absolute depths of the monotony that has become the current coronavirus pandemic. I only put 'special' in quotations, because for those of us in the longform improv world, a duo doing a one hour set isn't in itself truly special; for many improv theaters across the US, that's a pretty standard weekly occurrence, perhaps outside of the set length. Indeed, the general consensus of my improv friends on social media (~75% of the people whose posts I regularly see) is that there is rising hope that once we can do shows again that audiences will come flocking out to see what the apparently underground local scene is like, a regular regret among local community leaders. (Indeed: in 2018 my parents came to Chicago for the weekend, and we went to see the Second City MainStage show the Friday they got in. When they told their AirBnB host, he, a lifelong Chicago resident in the Lakeview neighborhood, asked 'What's that? Is that new?', of a venerable 50+ year pillar of the Chicago and national comedy scene occupying four floors of an entire city block in Oldtown.)
I have doubts that people will come out, not the least of which is that M&S looks a lot less like the kinds of improv shows that improvisers hold up as paragons of virtue, in the way that some people talk about Cook County Social Club or Parallelogramophonograph or Beer Shark Mice are revered, and a lot more like two already modestly famous actors doing a pretty funny show. I guess if you're already famous (or improv famous), it might make more opportunities for you to hock your show at various festivals and theaters (or possibly Netflix).
This isn't truly a review of M&S - I'll only say that it is very funny, is definitely improv, but isn't an example of what I would show students of what kind of show they should aspire to; for example, at least a few times every show there is an onstage negotiation about who is present, what their names are, and what is happening. Those things come up in typical shows, but it happens often enough here that it feels less like an honest "oops" and more like careless, thoughtless play. Most of the show is really just watching two men goof around with each other playfully, which may or may not be your kind of improv. End of "review".
More than anything though, we don't get to review or think critically about an improv show, and certainly not write about it. There are precious few reviews of improv shows, and the problem is a product of the lack of critical theory we have in popular culture for discussing improv in a critical light.
1. At a Q&A following a screening of "Rio Bravo" (1959, dir. Howard Hawks) in the halcyon days of this past February, Michael Phillips said that the basis of critical thought boils down to three questions:
In improvised theater, for better or worse, most shows would probably answer 'be funny', 'sometimes', and 'depends on how funny it was and how often you're coming to shows'. I've been in a few shows where we tried really had to "tell a coherent story" or "leave no loose threads" and those felt like quantum leaps from the other 90% of shows we did where we didn't even know who the cast was going to be until five minutes before showtime, and the stage plan was "let's do X form" (abandoned three minutes into the set because someone forgot or didn't know what the form was). My point here is not to spend an article knocking how casually we treat improv and how 90% of improv shows are 'meh' to 'nah' (see previous posts and also every improviser's social media ever), but to remind us that if we're going to think critically about shows, there's dearly little purchase to make a case on other than "yeah, funny".
2. Tied into #1 above, improv as a culture has a problem when it comes to what we care about and what we value. If you were to go through classes and read books and try to remove yourself from the macro culture, you'd probably believe that improv is all about mastering the craft, treating your fellows like 'artists, poets, and geniuses', forging interpersonal connections, getting out of your head, facing your fear, and aspiring to art over being funny. If you've done improv for some time, you know that's partially true, but it's mostly false. Being successful in improv is about being funny. Full stop, period, end of sentence. I've sat in auditions where whether someone was good at improv could be a tiebreaker, but at the end of the day, we cast the funniest people, end of story. Even Mick Napier of the Annoyance, the self-proclaimed watcher "of more improv auditions than anyone, ever" has said on multiple occasions that the people who get cast are the funniest. Improv values being funny as absolute currency, good anywhere, and to a lesser degree fame (see any festival ever) and to a lesser degree still whether or not the practitioner owns/operates an improv theater or festival. And that's it. Funny, Fame, Fiefdom. Again, not a gripe about the system that we all occupy and cannot change, but it's difficult for us to square up a craft that believes whole-heartedly one thing on paper, but rewards something completely different in practice. (For evidence, read every improv book ever, which probably has a chapter titled "Don't worry about being funny".)
3. The other glaring problem is one of repeatability; I can review M&S (I won't, but I could. Someone else already has so read them) because it exists in a state that can be reviewed identically by anyone with a Netflix account. Same goes for "Trust Us, This is All Made Up" (The TJ and Dave DVD) or Asssscat (for the record, I looked up how many S's are in it), episodes of "Whose Line is it Anyway?", and a small handful of tapes or uploads of teams (for my money, the tapes of Trophy Wife and 3033 are the gold standard). But for a lot of improv shows, they exist in that moment, and that moment alone (and outside of a few notable exceptions above, no regular audience member is going to watch a single-camera 25 minute video of an improv team playing on a Wednesday night) and then they're gone forever. Being critical of an improv team would require watching several shows to get a feel for the "average" output of the team, and while we as practitioners might, a "reviewer" probably won't. And your average audience member is probably only coming to see a show once, maybe twice a year? Have a bummer, and you've probably lost them forever.
4. The logical extension of the above is "which show(s)" are they going to watch? In my other theater life, I'm constantly writing press releases, begging press (and honestly anyone - are you a member of chamber of commerce? I'll comp you) to come give our production some ink. When they come, they come on opening weekend. This makes sense; if we're only running for three weeks, we'll get a few inches of copy for our second and third weeks, but what do we do for an improv show? I've had a few shows that ran regularly, but most of them have "open-ended" runs with an inconsistent schedule. If I get some press, how the hell are they going to write about a show they watched that will be next Thursday, the following Friday at 11, and the last Sunday at 7pm, and will run at least through the end of the month, but we're still waiting to hear from the theater manager if we'll get any spots in the following two months? And are reviewers supposed to come on opening night of a team? Most teams last a handful of months, are vague reconfigurations of other teams, have inconsistent casts ("hey ya'll I'm going to miss tonight because I have another show at Z theater, break all the legs!"), and are part of "three great teams for you tonight" so which version of your show are they supposed to review? If I was an improv reviewer, I'd wait until a team had been around for 6 months before I even considered coming to see them, or they had a definite end to the run.
5. And what do we want to critique? We don't have sets, costumes, props. usually no music, little lighting design, and our forms are often incomprehensible to an average audience or are simplified versions of extant genres or contexts ("Come see our Improvised Beach Movie show!"). So when a critic does commit some type to an improv show, they often rely on just describing the performer's appearance, which feels at least a little weird and mostly un-necessary. They way we teach improv is probably about 70% writing, 25% acting, and 5% directing, so just what in the hell should we be talking about once we get past "it was funny"? Well, we obviously still have to explain what improv is, so that's good for about a paragraph or two. Maybe worth devoting a paragraph to whether or not it is "silly", "serious", and/or "playful", and maybe another to whether or not the players have chemistry together, but if you're an improviser, you're probably nodding your head and thinking "that's what improv is". We wouldn't expect a critical analysis of "regular" theater to say:
6. Last one, promise. There are no independent reviewers of improv who are also knowledgable students. If you live in a city that has a lot of improv, like NY, LA, Chicago, maybe Austin(?), you might be fortunate enough to have a critic that frequents comedy shows, but (at least here in Chicago) mostly when I see columns dedicated to a non-theater, non-standup performance, it's usually the scripted SC MainStage or ETC shows. In most environments, theatrical critics won't spend their time on an improv show unless it has Fame or a significant word-of-mouth behind it, not when traditional theater is much more "accessible" and is always clamoring for reviewers (and, see all the above, is easier to discuss and dissect than an improv show because of the nature of how theater has organized itself). And then, your theater reviewer probably hasn't done improv, so they probably don't know what they're looking for. Among improvisers, you're either actively doing it or have left it to move into other industries (either your "regular" job or to deal "real acting/writing/directing"). If you've left it, you either left on good terms with improv, or bad terms, and if the latter, you probably never want to see improv as long as you live. If you left on good terms or are still actively doing it, you can't talk about improv critically from inside it. Write a bad line (or hell, even a mediocre) line about a production, and that person/group/theater may never work with you again, and if you don't believe me, just know that all improvisers hold grudges, and their memories are long. Every community has people that are persona non grata to someone, and if they make decisions, they are gone. And obviously, you can't review your own shows - and if you're playing six times a week, you probably don't have time watch anything else anyway (seriously, just try to invite an improviser to an improv show).
Add all those problems, and you have an enterprise that resists review and critique, even from an artistic level. I hope that one day in the future we'll have enough language, distance, substance, and clarity to analyze it as an art form that seems to see itself either above or incapable of criticism. Maybe some hard critique will help in pushing it into the next wave. In the meantime, may I recommend the Netflix comedy special "Middleditch and Schwartz"? It's very funny, and the best example of what improv looks like right now.
I have doubts that people will come out, not the least of which is that M&S looks a lot less like the kinds of improv shows that improvisers hold up as paragons of virtue, in the way that some people talk about Cook County Social Club or Parallelogramophonograph or Beer Shark Mice are revered, and a lot more like two already modestly famous actors doing a pretty funny show. I guess if you're already famous (or improv famous), it might make more opportunities for you to hock your show at various festivals and theaters (or possibly Netflix).
This isn't truly a review of M&S - I'll only say that it is very funny, is definitely improv, but isn't an example of what I would show students of what kind of show they should aspire to; for example, at least a few times every show there is an onstage negotiation about who is present, what their names are, and what is happening. Those things come up in typical shows, but it happens often enough here that it feels less like an honest "oops" and more like careless, thoughtless play. Most of the show is really just watching two men goof around with each other playfully, which may or may not be your kind of improv. End of "review".
More than anything though, we don't get to review or think critically about an improv show, and certainly not write about it. There are precious few reviews of improv shows, and the problem is a product of the lack of critical theory we have in popular culture for discussing improv in a critical light.
1. At a Q&A following a screening of "Rio Bravo" (1959, dir. Howard Hawks) in the halcyon days of this past February, Michael Phillips said that the basis of critical thought boils down to three questions:
- What was the creator trying to say?
- Did they say it?
- Was it worth saying?
In improvised theater, for better or worse, most shows would probably answer 'be funny', 'sometimes', and 'depends on how funny it was and how often you're coming to shows'. I've been in a few shows where we tried really had to "tell a coherent story" or "leave no loose threads" and those felt like quantum leaps from the other 90% of shows we did where we didn't even know who the cast was going to be until five minutes before showtime, and the stage plan was "let's do X form" (abandoned three minutes into the set because someone forgot or didn't know what the form was). My point here is not to spend an article knocking how casually we treat improv and how 90% of improv shows are 'meh' to 'nah' (see previous posts and also every improviser's social media ever), but to remind us that if we're going to think critically about shows, there's dearly little purchase to make a case on other than "yeah, funny".
2. Tied into #1 above, improv as a culture has a problem when it comes to what we care about and what we value. If you were to go through classes and read books and try to remove yourself from the macro culture, you'd probably believe that improv is all about mastering the craft, treating your fellows like 'artists, poets, and geniuses', forging interpersonal connections, getting out of your head, facing your fear, and aspiring to art over being funny. If you've done improv for some time, you know that's partially true, but it's mostly false. Being successful in improv is about being funny. Full stop, period, end of sentence. I've sat in auditions where whether someone was good at improv could be a tiebreaker, but at the end of the day, we cast the funniest people, end of story. Even Mick Napier of the Annoyance, the self-proclaimed watcher "of more improv auditions than anyone, ever" has said on multiple occasions that the people who get cast are the funniest. Improv values being funny as absolute currency, good anywhere, and to a lesser degree fame (see any festival ever) and to a lesser degree still whether or not the practitioner owns/operates an improv theater or festival. And that's it. Funny, Fame, Fiefdom. Again, not a gripe about the system that we all occupy and cannot change, but it's difficult for us to square up a craft that believes whole-heartedly one thing on paper, but rewards something completely different in practice. (For evidence, read every improv book ever, which probably has a chapter titled "Don't worry about being funny".)
3. The other glaring problem is one of repeatability; I can review M&S (I won't, but I could. Someone else already has so read them) because it exists in a state that can be reviewed identically by anyone with a Netflix account. Same goes for "Trust Us, This is All Made Up" (The TJ and Dave DVD) or Asssscat (for the record, I looked up how many S's are in it), episodes of "Whose Line is it Anyway?", and a small handful of tapes or uploads of teams (for my money, the tapes of Trophy Wife and 3033 are the gold standard). But for a lot of improv shows, they exist in that moment, and that moment alone (and outside of a few notable exceptions above, no regular audience member is going to watch a single-camera 25 minute video of an improv team playing on a Wednesday night) and then they're gone forever. Being critical of an improv team would require watching several shows to get a feel for the "average" output of the team, and while we as practitioners might, a "reviewer" probably won't. And your average audience member is probably only coming to see a show once, maybe twice a year? Have a bummer, and you've probably lost them forever.
4. The logical extension of the above is "which show(s)" are they going to watch? In my other theater life, I'm constantly writing press releases, begging press (and honestly anyone - are you a member of chamber of commerce? I'll comp you) to come give our production some ink. When they come, they come on opening weekend. This makes sense; if we're only running for three weeks, we'll get a few inches of copy for our second and third weeks, but what do we do for an improv show? I've had a few shows that ran regularly, but most of them have "open-ended" runs with an inconsistent schedule. If I get some press, how the hell are they going to write about a show they watched that will be next Thursday, the following Friday at 11, and the last Sunday at 7pm, and will run at least through the end of the month, but we're still waiting to hear from the theater manager if we'll get any spots in the following two months? And are reviewers supposed to come on opening night of a team? Most teams last a handful of months, are vague reconfigurations of other teams, have inconsistent casts ("hey ya'll I'm going to miss tonight because I have another show at Z theater, break all the legs!"), and are part of "three great teams for you tonight" so which version of your show are they supposed to review? If I was an improv reviewer, I'd wait until a team had been around for 6 months before I even considered coming to see them, or they had a definite end to the run.
5. And what do we want to critique? We don't have sets, costumes, props. usually no music, little lighting design, and our forms are often incomprehensible to an average audience or are simplified versions of extant genres or contexts ("Come see our Improvised Beach Movie show!"). So when a critic does commit some type to an improv show, they often rely on just describing the performer's appearance, which feels at least a little weird and mostly un-necessary. They way we teach improv is probably about 70% writing, 25% acting, and 5% directing, so just what in the hell should we be talking about once we get past "it was funny"? Well, we obviously still have to explain what improv is, so that's good for about a paragraph or two. Maybe worth devoting a paragraph to whether or not it is "silly", "serious", and/or "playful", and maybe another to whether or not the players have chemistry together, but if you're an improviser, you're probably nodding your head and thinking "that's what improv is". We wouldn't expect a critical analysis of "regular" theater to say:
The play featured complete sentences, scenes where the plot advanced, actions, emotions, and during one particularly pivotal moment, themes and subtext. The actors even memorized their lines!That's what I expect already, and critical theory needs to be rooted in "how is this different" from other examples, and "is it worth watching". The bottom line is, we're just not good at using words to analyze just what we're doing.
6. Last one, promise. There are no independent reviewers of improv who are also knowledgable students. If you live in a city that has a lot of improv, like NY, LA, Chicago, maybe Austin(?), you might be fortunate enough to have a critic that frequents comedy shows, but (at least here in Chicago) mostly when I see columns dedicated to a non-theater, non-standup performance, it's usually the scripted SC MainStage or ETC shows. In most environments, theatrical critics won't spend their time on an improv show unless it has Fame or a significant word-of-mouth behind it, not when traditional theater is much more "accessible" and is always clamoring for reviewers (and, see all the above, is easier to discuss and dissect than an improv show because of the nature of how theater has organized itself). And then, your theater reviewer probably hasn't done improv, so they probably don't know what they're looking for. Among improvisers, you're either actively doing it or have left it to move into other industries (either your "regular" job or to deal "real acting/writing/directing"). If you've left it, you either left on good terms with improv, or bad terms, and if the latter, you probably never want to see improv as long as you live. If you left on good terms or are still actively doing it, you can't talk about improv critically from inside it. Write a bad line (or hell, even a mediocre) line about a production, and that person/group/theater may never work with you again, and if you don't believe me, just know that all improvisers hold grudges, and their memories are long. Every community has people that are persona non grata to someone, and if they make decisions, they are gone. And obviously, you can't review your own shows - and if you're playing six times a week, you probably don't have time watch anything else anyway (seriously, just try to invite an improviser to an improv show).
Add all those problems, and you have an enterprise that resists review and critique, even from an artistic level. I hope that one day in the future we'll have enough language, distance, substance, and clarity to analyze it as an art form that seems to see itself either above or incapable of criticism. Maybe some hard critique will help in pushing it into the next wave. In the meantime, may I recommend the Netflix comedy special "Middleditch and Schwartz"? It's very funny, and the best example of what improv looks like right now.
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