Investments and Easy Riders

Around this time last year, my old improv team, the Stage Monkeys San Diego (SMSD), celebrated our 5 year anniversary. It was an amazing milestone for a team that started doing longform in San Diego when no one else was doing it, and when most people didn't even have faith that it could be done. Now this team isn't celebrating a six year anniversary this year, because about eight months ago it died out. This doesn't come as a true surprise – most improv teams don't last more than a few months, so a team that runs for 5 years is really like 50 in improv years.

Why do improv teams die out? Well there are obvious reasons: people get too busy, lose interest, better teams take all the slots, or the work becoming sloppy or careless are the commonly espoused reasons. But these aren't causes of teams falling apart, they're the symptoms. The center of the circle that connects all of those things is commitment. Commitment is the currency that all teams spend, and when the bank account runs low, that's when teams dissipate.

Where does the commitment come from? It's a product of each team member – the member's make periodic deposits into the group's commitment bank account and these deposits must be made routinely. An account cannot survive on debits alone. Okay so great, teams need commitment from team members, which is great, but surely we've all been part of teams where everyone says how committed they are to a group or a project or a team, and those teams are usually the first ones to expire. True deposits are made from sacrifice, and all teams periodically require it.

This isn't virgin or animal sacrifice, it's a sacrifice of time. We don't often think of time as something that we spend in this way but it is, and time is the one thing we can never get back. You can only spend it once, and on only one thing at a time. What we choose to spend our time is a critical consideration and one that shouldn't be taken lightly, ever. (This coincidentally, is a good life lesson as well as a good improv lesson). No doubt you've had some people on your teams that seem un-committed; they show up for practices (usually) and shows (usually), but they seem generally absent from the team (symptoms may include: being on phone constantly, leaving early, showing up late, etc.). In game theory, these people are referred to as “free riders” or, to use the movie title, “easy riders”. All teams can suffer a certain percentage of these people will with no serious ill will and no fatal effects. But every easy rider needs someone else to make sacrifices on their behalf, because they are not making deposits and are enjoying the withdrawals.

Every successful team will be made of people making equivalent sacrifices for each other. You'll often hear these people refer to their teammates as “brothers”, “sisters”, or “families”. Everyone on the team is making periodic deposits into the team's account – making those sacrifices of time for the sake of the group. In an ideal world, everyone is making equivalent deposits, just since it is the duty of every person to make it happen; “many hands make light work”. Jane Jacobs' “The Life and Death of Great American Cities” essentially summarizes that neighborhoods (read: improv teams) fail because the people who populate them fail to actually “live” in them. Neighborhoods populated only by people “just passing through” are ones that are destined to perish. Successful teams (really successful ones) have everyone fully dedicating their time to each other continuously (making many deposits gives you more money to spend).

Some teams and their members refer to things like “team bonding time”, which for all intents and purposes is equivalent to the phrase “quality time”. This is a clichéd idiom with a basic underlying premise – that it is possible to “plan instances of extraordinary candor, plot episodes of exquisite tenderness, engineer intimacy in an appointed hour” [1]. Despite a lot of training, workshops, books, and blogs (like this one!) all dedicated to the principles of improvisation – namely that it requires patience, finesse, and being present – we are continually intoxicated by the promise “capturing lightning in a bottle”. More specifically, we assume that capturing said lighting means that we can force a storm to come rather than understanding that sometimes we will catch lighting, but mostly we only catch sparks that we will have to grow into lightning. In general though, there is no substitute for physical presence. All the promises, practices, and “group hangs” make no difference when members are unwilling or unable to dedicated (read: sacrifice) time to each other. Time is, and always will be the most valuable asset we can ever have and give to each other.

[1]http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/frank-bruni-the-myth-of-quality-time.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&src=me&WT.nav=MostEmailed&_r=0

A Writer's World

In An Evening with Kevin Smith, Smith said something along the lines of “the writer creates his ideal world when he writes.” For him then, he said that apparently in his ideal world, people have endless conversations about pop culture and relationships. By that same token, in Tarantino’s world, violent criminals wax philosophic and then maim each other, and in Scorsese’s criminals try desperately to keep a clear conscience in the face of doing bad things for family. Pretty cool actually. The writer allows us a brief peek into not how he sees the world, but how he wishes the world could be.

I’ve read and heard a number of times, from countless sources, that the improviser is more than just an actor in a play. The improviser is the actor, director, editor, stuntman, costume designer, set designer, and writer all in one, doing every conceivable action simultaneously. Well, if we’re technically writing our play, in the moment, then by extension of the previous corollary, then we are also showing the audience our ideal world (albeit a mutually agreed upon and group derived ideal world). This is one of the things that propels improv from just jokey stuff into a much more meaningful experience. Or as Jason Chin once said, “You have to have an opinion about what you’re talking about.” It’s not enough to merely explore mousetraps (very basic scenes; I mean, how many scenes can we have about mousetraps?) we need to explore what mousetraps are symbolic of (I don’t know, stifled domestic life?) but also to have an opinion about it. The audience doesn’t necessarily have to agree with it, but that’s okay, because stuff that you’re opinionated and passionate about makes for great improv.

Now, what I’ve said is no big revelation. I haven’t exposed any great mysteries about improv, or art, or life (not the least of which because I don’t presuppose to have any). But here’s what is important; the first rule of writing is “write what you know”, so the improv corollary is “improvise what you know”. It’s not really a big surprise that most improv pieces revolve around relationships and superheroes; look who is improvising them. When I was playing with my college group, we invented and modified a number of games to make them more superhero-esque. Why? Because were a bunch of comic book nerds. That’s what interested us. My San Diego group, the Ugly Truth, struggled for a little bit when we tried to experiment with more slow, dramatic improvised scene work. Obviously, things weren’t going well because we weren’t improvising what we liked. Show me an improv group that is struggling with a new form or technique, and I’ll guarantee that they’re doing something they don’t enjoy.

Without a doubt, I’m a big advocate of fun first when it comes to improv. A group that is enjoying what they’re doing will be immensely more watchable than a team that is doing something meaningful and hating every minute of it. Or rather, we’re not all Scorsese or Tarantino, some of us are just Smith. Find, as a group, what you enjoy, are passionate about, and interested in, and the rest will follow suit.