The Harold

This week's post is in response to the Matt Krell from Alabama (I think. That's where he was the last time I checked, about two years ago, so I guess he's still there. Holla back Krell.) Matt wants to know just what is the Harold, and while I could link to it and save myself the time, this gives me chance to prep my notes in advance of teaching it to my group out here in the SD.

The Harold is the de facto longform; longform being the kind of improv that lasts longer than 3 minutes, and usually involves weaving multiple scenes together into a single, contiguous piece, but can also just be improvising a single scene for long periods of time without gimmicks – just straight-up long distance running of scenework. (A more in depth of longform would be an essay in and of itself. Stay tuned.) The Harold was originally developed by Del Close in the sixties while he was with The Committee in San Francisco. The piece was actually visualized as what it was going to do well before anyone figured out how to do it. (The name was attached to it this point, and was apparently a point of contention for Close; selected by the theater's pianist as reference to a Beatles' quote. Close considered renaming it later but decided not to to avoid confusion.) The Harold was envisioned as a platform for improvising scenes, games, songs, etc. as a full on non-stop performance piece, with the various parts seamlessly working together “like the members of a jazz band.” Essentially, everything is tied around some central theme, and everyone just riffs on that – a means of exploring and elevating common eccentricities and finding that they are grandiose and connected to epic ideas.

The Harold toiled like this for quite a while, as Close did know what it should be, he just didn't know how to make the whole thing work. The breakthrough was while watching a shortform game called “Time Dash” that involved a scene jumping forward and backward in time to see how relationships changed. The design of the Harold then became built around the idea of starting several scenes and then jumping around so that concepts from the other scenes could play into each other – essentially starting with disparate story lines and then watching them slowly weave together until they were all talking about the same thing. The formal Harold has three beats, and each beat has three scenes (for a total of 9 scenes throughout the entire piece). The first scenes in each beat are connected, as are the second scenes, etc. Each beat is separated by a “group game”, which is just an everybody out on stage and let's goof around a bit so that we can kind of reset for the next beat kind of thing. Cap it with an opening and a conclusion, and the end result is, in order:

OPENING/SCENES 1A, 2A, 3A/GAME/SCENES 1B, 2B, 3B/GAME/SCENES 1C, 2C, 3C/ENDING

(Apologies for the lack of graphic representation; I couldn't even find a good one through Google, but there are bound to be some good ones out there.) Often times, the third beat (“C” in my display) will be a merging of all the scenes, but not necessarily. The important thing here is that the Harold is meant to be a platform for the exploration of ideas because it's repetitive nature encourages exploring similar ideas rather than spiraling away. You can think of this as a road map – and one that you will be infinitely grateful for when you realize you go for thirty minutes without stopping. The Harold is significant in my mind for a few reasons: a) nearly every improviser on the planet has started doing longform with the Harold and b) understand the Harold, and most of the next level of difficulty of forms comes easy, because they are all built on the Harold's blueprint. But one of the greatest things about the Harold is that it really is actually simple once you've done a few of them, which means it's quite open to improvise on the structure of the Harold itself. So, fellow Harolders – happy hunting in the great exploratory world of the Harold.

Further reading: definitely "Truth in Comedy", or just Google "Harold". Got improv questions? Leave them in the comments section below or email stagemonkeyssandiego@gmail.com.