Our Scenes are Our Children

I still remember the first scene I ever saw that I actually knew was going on too long. It was Fall of 2004, we were playing a game of "Stand, Sit, Kneel", and after a minute or so of some intermittent laughter, the scene suddenly went decidedly unfunny. This isn’t to say that all the sudden someone was getting raped, or there was talk of killing puppies - it just ceased getting laughs. And it wasn’t that it just became unfunny, it (even worse) became uninteresting, and unwatchable. And gradually the audience began to tune out, and very quickly a feeling of panic swept over all the performers.

Everybody wanted the scene to end, but we also distinctively wanted the scene to have just one more laugh to end on. I was the one in charge of the bell during this little fiasco. Afterwards, I silently cursed myself for letting a scene run WAY too long, and also for not saving my fellow improvisers.

Generally, only very rarely will a scene pop up that is this bad, but boy when they do, they can easily cripple a show, especially if they come near the end. And they don’t always have to be three minute fiascos; I’ve seen thirty second scenes that have already gone on too long (though they often feel much longer).
It’s too easy and by definition wrong, to say that a scene was just doomed to failure from the beginning. (How depressing is it to hear that? That statement says that no matter what you did or how hard you worked, you wouldn’t have succeeded anyway.) As a general rule, a random combination of any number of performers from all across the universe should never be the death knell for a scene. This is because the basic dogma of improvisation is to just let any two people interact and enjoy the sparks that fly from basic human interaction.
It shouldn't be the premise; the previous scene's premise was a Boy Scout leader and two scouts at a strip club. Sure, maybe a premise that is a little too SNL, but certainly no one can say that that scene can't be funny or at least interesting to watch. And any postulating post-show with your fellow improvisers will undoubtedly prove any idea can become a funny scene (or course the difference here is the amount of time you have on stage versus the bar).

Here, though, the real question isn’t why it failed, but more why it failed so hard. And as a result, when and why we edit. As improvisers, we are all taught a basic rule, that all scenes have the potential to be great. If we can just be patient and follow all the improv rules we have learned, every scene can be a winner (hence all the talk of performers and premises). At the same time, we know that not every scene will work; something which we prove all the time in the laboratory of the stage. But just like any great theory, it’s still hard to say that this one is unproven (see the previous bar comment). This firm holding to this very basic rule of improv is what makes us hold on to scenes for dear life. Even good ones. If we take the time to get on stage with each other, we feel the need to explore each scene all the way out, often well past the edit point.

The other problem is part of our basic programming that we get from watching T.V., reading books, etc. We want to logically end our scenes. A big laugh, a logical conclusion to the plot, a change of heart in a character, or at a cliffhanger. Sure this is all well and good, but we operate in a universe where those things are not guaranteed, or even possible sometimes. So instead of holding out to tie up our work perfectly, or hanging on to our scenes like they are the only ones we will ever have, remember your primary obligation: to your fellow performers.

But possibly remember the even more basic tenet of improvisation: nothing is planned or pre-written, so who says you have to keep doing anything if you don’t like it?

A Philosophy of Teaching

It was in "Truth in Comedy" that Close, et al, told everyone that an improviser was actually a number of different roles rolled into one: actor, director, writer, editor, sound man, special effects, props, and scenery (and realistically caterer and producer as well).  It's really no wonder this craft is so difficult to master, and that so many of us become permanently enthralled with it - to improvise is not just make a few laughs, it is to do a near overwhelming amount simultaneously.  But it is not only very difficult to master, it's sometimes very difficult for beginners to do successfully at even a minimal level.

Most improv is taught in a very top-down method.  Typically, throw people into things with a little explanation, and then tweak things as needed to get performers into a desired state.  In fact, I'd wager that every teacher I've had has taken this approach.  It's just easier, since there are so many things that have to be juggled at once, to let the human naturally fill in the gaps of the performance than to force a player to have to think about everything all at once.  I think of this as a holistic approach; even though a smart instructor will know to break down certain skills or simplify scenework to narrow a student's focus, it's still necessary for a pupil to be developing a number of skills concurrently.  I believe the result here is why I am constantly teaching (and learning) active listening as a basic skill.

This is quite different from other arts/crafts/skills; I remember learning to drive and first learning street signs, right-of-way, and blind spots before being allowed behind the wheel of a two-ton steel death machine.  Artists learn composition and point-of-view before painting the Sistine Chapel, woodworkers learn how to cut straight lines before building a house, and you learn to read by first learning sounds - you don't jump from "c-a-t" to "Anna Karenina".  When I was first learning to play an instrument, you start with a few notes, then you play "Mary had a Little Lamb", then scales, then time signatures, then space chords, and eventually you work your way up full orchestral pieces.  I think of this as a reductionist approach - where the focus is on building individual skills before putting them all together.

The reductionist approach is easier for learning complex skills, so why don't we approach teaching improv in that manner?  Quite simply actually: "Mary had a Little Lamb" is fucking boring.  And even more importantly, the basic principles of improv, like "no planning", translate into the uninitiated as "you don't need to practice this, you just get up and do it!"  The seemingly low entry requirements are a welcome encouragement for neophyte players, but also make it difficult to focus the naive to work only on skills for the first few lessons.  Or, is it maybe better to throw new players completely into it right away?  Screw basics, just give them the piano and the sheet music for "Flight of the Bumblebee", and let them figure it out on the fly.  Watching an experienced player rip through something difficult effortlessly might make you think you could, but new performers have to learn the scales first.

Frozen Stakes

Improvisers talk a lot about stakes, which, in my effort to de-mystify a lot of terms that get used, but are not well defined, will be part of this essay's topic. What stakes are is a very ambiguous thing to define, so it's easier to think of them as “what's at stake”, rather than remaining nebulous. In gambling terms for instance, we talk about the stakes being what's at risk; what has been wagered is what you stand to lose or win based on the outcome of whatever event is being bet on. Now when we talk about stakes in improv scenes, so what is your improv director actually looking for? The improv stakes are just the same as in a chance game (when really, isn't improv a chance game anyway – in that we don't know the outcome at least) – what is this character risking in the scene? A character has to have something in danger of being lost, and that thing has to have personal or emotional weight; as in the loss of this thing is of interest, involvement, concern or share to to the person in question.

Okay, easy enough; so we know what stakes are, so it's pretty easy to see why they need to be there. If the two characters in a scene don't have anything at risk (or things at risk they don't care about), then they don't have any investment in the outcome and won't fight to win, and the struggle is where the drama is at. Compare these three scenes:

[A] Ralph has taken Martin's car on a Tuesday night. Martin is okay with that, because he wasn't going anywhere that night, he stays home and watches T.V.

No stakes, nothing at risk, right?

[B] Ralph has taken Martin's car on a Tuesday night. Martin really needed to run some errands that night, but now can't and will have to do them on Wednesday instead. This will cause him to be late for a meeting, which he kind of wanted to go to.

All right, something at stake here, but the problems are relatively easily solved.

[C] Ralph has returned Martin's car on a Friday night completely totaled. To top that off, Martin had a date scheduled that night with Stacy, a girl he really likes, and now he will be late to meet her at the restaurant and his car is destroyed.

Now we've got some stakes – Martin stands to lose the girl of his dreams (I'm editorializing him here a little) because Ralph took the car and wrecked it. Martin stands to lose something that he had at risk (and has lost something else, which may lead to confrontation with Ralph) and it's something he really cares about. Stakes we see, really have one important dimension – importance. Example:

[A] Will loses a plastic sword he used to play Knights and Dragons with. Now with no sword, he plays Cops and Robbers instead.

[B] Sir William loses the Sword of Destiny in a battle, and now cannot defeat the evil dragon.

Option A feels anti-climactic, because there is no consequence to the loss. B feels like the start of a story because there is already a lot at risk.

So stakes are the result of a) someone risking something, and b) the something has to have importance to the character (it should be noted that the stakes don't have to be world-ending, just world-ending for that character). I, for example, am a boring gambler. I don't like the idea of losing money (or at least a lot of it), so when I bet, which is rare to begin with, I don't bet much. The last time I gambled, I put a total of $30 on the line, which is a risk, but doesn't really have a lot of importance to me, and thus would make a very boring scene. Now, had I bet $30,000, then we're getting somewhere. Make that 30 grand the property of a notorious gangster because I was trying to impress a girl, and we're really getting somewhere good. The sub-dimension of stakes, we now see, are consequence. The loss of $30,000 if a I'm a millionaire may have some importance, but if there is no consequence, then the stakes are lost again. The audience needs to feel the risk that a character losing will be important, and have effect to that person. Heightening the stakes, then, are just putting more on the line – the bigger the bet, the bigger the odds; win or lose.

Hulk Versus Superman

I just finished reading the DC versus Marvel trade paperback. I remember catching a few issues way back when it first came out, but I wasn't really in to comics at that time, so it sort of fell by the wayside for me. The premise, for those of you who haven't read it, is that two all powerful beings, one from each universe, decides they will pit the greatest warriors from each universe against each other, to see which universe is superior. Simple, right? I even remember having similar conversations with a friend back in college: who would win in a fight between Hulk and Superman? (Superman, duh. Come on, people.)

If we think about it though, this simple question is essentially the perfect set up for an improv scene. In ten words, we have the whole scene. Who? Two characters, Hulk and Superman. What's going on? They're fighting. When? The present (no time like it). Where? Doesn't really matter.

But notice I didn't ask "why". That's because it really doesn't matter. When we ask questions like this, the why is so unimportant. The comic, for that matter, essentially glosses over the whole topic. There are two supreme beings we don't care one lick about. They were created for this story alone, and will never be discussed once the last page is turned. Their plot is distinctly unimportant, and really only exists to hang the whole thing together. Even the heroes, when summoned for their respective battles, just go along with it.

Remember how I mentioned improv earlier? A scene begins, two actors on stage, and they set to improvising. For our purposes, we don't really care what they're doing, just so long as they're doing something. We also don't care why they're there, which one of them is to blame, or why they're friends (or coworkers, or whatever). What we care about is what's going on, who they are, who they are to each other, and how the whole thing is going to shake out (whether Hulk or Superman will win).

Here's a fun experiment: the next scene you're in either a) start blaming the other person for causing the situation (or just recount how you got there) or b) start asking your other player why he is acting the way that he is.
In the next scene either a) don't worry about why you got there, just accept the fact that its reality or b) treat the other person like this is how they always act (because if they are actually a friend (or coworker, or whatever) this would be how they'd always act).
We don't want to see people argue and bicker, we see enough of that in real life. We go to see performances to see people be honest and deal with each other. Any time we try to "fix" the other person or the situation, we're essentially negotiating the scene with our partner. And time spent negotiating scene points is time wasted.

We don't want to see Superman and the Hulk argue amongst themselves about their predicament, or try arguing with supreme beings as to whether they actually have to do this. We want to see two superheroes go toe-to-toe, and fight each other like they mean it.
Who cares why you're friends or why you're there? You are, so deal with it, and act like this is normal.

The audience wants it.

How To Be Friends and Act Like Idiots - Toolkit

Back in December, I talked about my realisation that characters are interesting when they are being human – namely, that they are flawed, and act on those flaws. The human condition will always be endlessly fascinating and intriguing, and funny as well. My group has been working to try and capture some of the capacity for this kind of play, so I present to you now some exercises that dovetail nicely into “Being Friends and Acting Like Idiots”. As a sidebar for when working on this type of exercise is that everyone should be in the mindset of being affected majorly by everything that other players offer, and also that characters are human and are fallible and do have flaws.

“It's Tuesday” - this exercise is all about overaccepting offers; split the group in half onto opposite sides of the space – a person from line A steps forward and offers any line of dialogue, preferably something fairly mundane, and a person from line B overaccepts that offer. This could be thought of as yes anding in all capital letters. Players should be encouraged to make the overacceptances intensely personal in nature – it is very easily to fall into the trap of accepting an offer in a way that doesn't invest the players on a personal level, or to be dismissive but in a big way. Alternative: That's a great line because; A steps forward and initiates with a minimal line as before, only now B steps forward to the audience and says why this is the best initiation that could ever be given in the history of the world. After a two line exchange, switch sides. After a few goes, repeat with A delivering rich lines.

Character Monologues – player steps forward and delivers a character monologue about a subject, specifically detailing the character's opinion about the subject; good/bad, and most importantly why this subject is that way. Players should not be hesitant about playing characters with ridiculous opinions or ridiculous motivations or reasonings. Stupid or irrational characters make for great theater.

Two person opinion exchanges – forgive the rather clumsy title; as before, A steps forward, only this time, giving an opinion about a subject to B. B can then choose to agree or disagree with the opinion, then both sides provide supporting arguments or additional details for why they feel the way they do. Remember to maintain a balance of agreement and disagreement scenes, and also that both parts have to try an maintain their points-of-view in each scene, and continue to dig deeper into their supporting arguments.

Party Scenes – Four players, and each player silently labels the other three players with how they feel about them: stupid, smelly, and attractive (so one of the those labels to each other player). These four players now treat each by those silent labels, and the scene is that all four characters are at a party. It is important to maintain a level of treatment that allows the scene to proceed (treating someone someone as stupid too strongly, for instance, can alienate the character and grind it to a halt. The location being a party is because there is an obligation to be polite given the social situation – remember that you're not trying to solve the problem of someone being smelly or stupid, you need to find civilized ways to deal with it.

NPC's – one of the key elements of these types of shows is the interplay between the main players, but it is contrasted by the existence of, in role-playing game parlance, a non-player character (NPC). These are characters who are not part of the main group, have distinctly lower or higher status, and are ones who behave more reasonably that a PC. They often have everyday functions in the real world (e.g. cop, lawyer, boss) and act as foils to raise the stakes or frustrate the PC's. Playing with NPC's can be accomplished with the two person opinion exchanges as above, by either a) when a shared opinion has been reached, by acting as the opposing opinion (expressing it in a non-extreme way) or b) with an opposing opinion, but having the “b” player be more rational than his counterpart. As another tangential possibility, having any NPC act as a heavily characterized person (e.g. heavy accent) is usually a surefire way to make someone outrageously more extreme than a PC.

MAAP(ing) – the remaining element is to heighten the language that the characters talk in; this is done by deploying: Memory, Aphorism, Analogy, or Philosophy (MAAP) in the dialogue. Memories are any remembered thing that happened to a character (they usually being with “Remember the time...”). Aphorisms are colloquial sayings, e.g. “A stitch in time saves nine” or “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Analogies compare something to something else, usually using like or as (to quote “The League”: “You're like a gay Iron Man.”), and philosphies display a person's viewpoint on the world (to quote “League” again: “Hey, I can lead a horse to water, but I can't make it not have sex with me.”). It's best to try deploying these one at a time, so have two players step forward, and do a scene where they only have to worry about doing one of the MAAP elements. After, you can have the players use them ad libitum.

Good luck friending!

How To Be Friends and Act Like Idiots

When I first moved to San Diego, I played with the (now sadly defunct) longform group the “Ugly Truth”. At the time, that group was playing around with different forms – some of them very Harold like, others not so much – when we got to talking about some shows we had seen that we had wanted to emulate. Those shows at the time that were mentioned in particular were “Seinfeld”, “Arrested Development”, and “It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia”, though now you could also throw “The League” on that list of shows about groups of friends acting like idiots. Our conceit was that these shows were endlessly funny, and seemed to have natural, organic scenes, with very fleshed out, fully realized characters; we didn't want to do an “improvised Seinfeld” per se, but we did want to figure out how to incorporate that kind of storytelling stylistically, to be able to walk out into a scene and instantly have these kinds of arresting, filled out inter-personal dynamics.

My initial hypothesis about what common traits these shows had was that they were about selfish people. This does, on the surface, appear to be a unifying element to all shows: Gob is typically only interested in pursuing either his own magic or sex related desires, Kevin underhandedly messes with a suspect pre-trial to get a better draft position (in the first episode no less), and Seinfeld et al go to jail because they can't be bothered to help someone being mugged. These shows seem to be riddled with examples of being being completely self-serving to only their own ends. And yet, this explanation didn't feel quite right – my teammate Chris Rubino accurately pointed out that this didn't sufficiently explain these characters completely, or even mostly. These people do act selfishly at times, but to call them blanket “selfish” wasn't precise.

My next theory was that the status differences between all the characters is very narrow (an explanation I love; see my previous essay), and this is true – none of those various characters really has a very high status over anybody else, and even when there are, there are lots of status shifts: George Sr. runs the company, then Michael, then Gob, then back to Michael. All the members of the various groups of the League and the Sunny folks don't have a leg up on each other, ever, really, and they're always joining forces and then dispersing, so the status balance is always dynamic. This does explain a lot of the relationships in all the shows, but it's an incomplete explanation, more functional than philosophical, and that's the point I needed to get to. Perhaps the stakes are the issue; in all those shows, the matters at hand are often trivial or inconsequential (“Seinfeld” is, after all, a “show about nothing”), but this also falls short, as the stakes are high for the characters (i.e. the things going on are important to them), and in “Arrested” can often be quite actually high (“mild treason”, anyone?).

Then, I found the heart of what makes the characters functional in the ways that they are (I should point out this is two years after I originally asked the question, so kudos to me for sticking it out) – these characters are vain. Vanity – plain and simple – the need to feel attractive, talented, smart, loved, respected, feared, is what constantly drives these characters. It's not enough that Dennis Reynolds thinks he's gorgeous and rich, he needs other people to feel those things too; Ruxin will fight tooth and nail to feel superior to his friends, and even Michael Bluth wants his father to give him control of the family business, because he feels he's earned it (a characterization that drives a good chunk of the show). These people are vulnerable, low, petty creatures, that just want to feel like they have a leg up on those around them. The only other archetype is the “idiot” (Kramer, Taco, Charlie, and Tobias-Gob-Buster), a foil that is often not even aware that they are doing strange things – all the better to set off the status grubbing other characters.

This lead me of course, to my final realization about how these characters work: they're human. What James Bond, John McClane, Luke Skywalker, and countless other action heroes have in common is that while they can be physically injured, and potentially emotionally affected, these people don't really have basic desires. Our other characters of interest are far more human: they have weaknesses, bad habits, and foibles. They're irrational and quick to make rash decisions. Sometimes they just want a marble rye or the waitress – these characters are fascinating to watch because they are so unabashedly human, and playing them is as simple as not being perfect; flaws are what make us so damn interesting. Doing a show that plays these kinds of dynamics is as simple as being human, and being affected.

Three years to figure out that good characters are human? Yeah, that was time well spent.

Cause and Affect 3: Oh Geez...

My uncle flew re-fueler planes in Vietnam; just close enough to the action to hear it, but far enough to not really participate in it. The Air Force uses a so called "guard channel" that radio traffic about enemy planes is relayed over. The fighter pilots are a hard bunch - they have the speed and the firepower, so they are in the melee all the time, but again, they are battle-hardened, so they are uniquely unfazed about things that would make most other pilots take pause, at least. Routinely listening to traffic, you could hear various pilots relaying clipped, urgent messages back and forth to each other as they came in contact with bogeys, reacting in ways that seem fairly normal to the rest of us. But among this excited (possibly worried) chatter, the fighter pilots would stick out with simple, terse lines like: "Bogey, 10 O'clock, low. Got him." One particular story is during a refueling flight, my uncle's plane linked up with a fighter element, and the various pilots would go through, reading off their remaining fuel, until it gets to the last plane, who replies in a high-pitched squeal, "I'm almost out of fuel!"

I started watching "Curb Your Enthusiasm" recently, and I was thinking about it in terms of the idea of reaction-based scenework (see my two previous posts, Cause and Affect 1 & 2 in the archives), and Larry David would not, by any means, be considered a "badass". He is only interacting in a very "real" universe: there are no zombies, storm troopers, or supervillains; only the regular kind of everyday people even you could encounter on a regular basis. And in this world, he cannot fulfill the basic criteria for being a badass: 1) having the capability to affect change and 2) being willing to do whatever is necessary to make it happen. Larry David repeatedly shows that he lacks completely the capability to affect change (sure, he can make small gains, but he is so nebbish, tactless, and misanthropic that he routinely fails in relating to others) and is generally more than willing to allow perceived slights against him to go un-remedied and often un-addressed.

So then, why is this character able to maintain a story around himself? The answer is that Larry David is an anti-badass (The complete opposite of a badass. Goodbutt? Nicetush? Greatfanny?) Here's the way it works: Larry doesn't actually cause much change around him, but what he does do is changed by much of what goes on around him. Small stimuli from others around him, cause him to change greatly. He gets very bent out of shape, deeply affected, and dramatically changed in mental and emotional ways by every single one of those stimuli. Remember how we can tell if someone is a badass (or make someone a badass) by creating change to their affects? Batman starts fighting 20 thugs, and we know whether or not he is a badass by whether or not he beats them, and how easily. If he doesn't break a sweat, he is more badass, if he barely crawls away, he seems like less of a badass. If he is defeated, he's not a badass any longer. In effect:

[BF] = [HE] - [EOH]

Where:

BF = Badass Factor (how badass a character seems)

HE = Hero effect (what and magnitude of changes precipitated by hero

EOH = Effect on Hero (what changes the Other precipitates on hero)

Now, in Larry David's case, he effects so little change and is so greatly affected by everyone around him that his BF is effectively negative, which makes everyone else a badass. Remember that there has to be a response to stimuli in order to register change - you can't force the Other to change for you, but you can choose to be changed by stimuli, and because Larry is so changed everytime - greatly frustrated, embarrased, anxious, and angered by everything that goes on around him, that he makes everyone else badass.

Greatbehind?

Field Guide to the North American Improv Scene

My father and his two brothers grew up in east Texas, and from what I can tell, the vast majority of their formative education appears to have been built around naturalism. It's not nearly enough for them to be outdoorsmen – they want to be able to identify literally everything in the natural world. Typical conversations with them go something like this:

Me: Oh, that's a cool [tree, bird, animal, fish].

My Dad or either Uncle: That's called a [name of tree, bird, animal, fish, as appropriate].

Me: Cool.

They seem to have a near encyclopedic knowledge of the various flora and fauna (which may be more a product of growing up on a farm, pre-internet, than anything) but these facts allow them to draw parallels about the world, to understand it beyond merely wandering through it. By that same token, I'm the one my father calls when he wants to know “what else [actor/actress's name] has been in”. This kind of fundamental information becomes critical in truly understanding our worlds, so here is a review of the four basic scenes (I would like to specifically thank iO West's Brian O'Connell who taught me this list).

Straight/Absurd: The most commonly encountered scene. Person A is wacky and strange; he has strange points of view, is irrational and expresses those elements. Person B is a normal guy – he's us, the audience – reacting to the craziness. This basic scene is one of the most commonly exploited for laughs; provided you set up the A causes B frustration (a hammer/anvil situation) then you've got comedy. “Ghostbusters” is a classic example, where depending on the scene, different people play the part of straight or absurd (which is a key element of this dynamic: it's all relative). Peter and Egon sell Ray's family home, and they're absurd and he's straight. They visit the new headquarters and critique it as Ray slides down the pole; now he's absurd and they're straight. Janine asks Egon what his hobbies are and he replies “I collect spores, mold, and fungus”, and you get the idea.

Character: This is the second most common, and is in essence just an extension of the previous scene type. In this one, two characters have similar (often identical) viewpoints. In this one, the points of view often have to be far more exceptional, because now the burden of the “straight man” has passed to the actual audience, who has to recognize the ridiculousness. It's important to note that in a character scene, A and B need not have peculiar characterizations, it's more about how they think. Also, if a third player enters and presents a different viewpoint, you're back to a Straight/Absurd.

Alternate Reality: In this very rarely encountered scene, the players are normal, but the world has gone absurd. Whatever universe these characters inhabit, it has different rules than our own. iO West's Lusty Horde revels in this kind of scenework, where ice bases, dragons, mole men, and other classic B movie fare are considered normal. The fun comes in watching how life works in this other realm. By this same token, Improvised Shakespeare and Improvised Musical pieces could also be considered this scene type, since each of those shows present worlds with different rules than our own.

Roommate: You don't actually have to be roommates in this scene, but this dynamic is one that is set in our own reality, and has normal characters. A and B will often have very similar statuses, and this scene can also have elements of any of the other scene types, but the emphasis is on highlighting reality – absurdism is kept to a minimum. Shootin' the Shit with EJ is great example, but so is Shotgun!, Dinner for Six, and Hold 'em.

Those are your four basic scene types; they can intermingle and hybridize, but you'll find that when you're in a scene, if you can identify the particular species, you can figure out how to make it thrive.

The Abyss of Status

As a second entry into my series of Things That I Have Learned Doing Improv That Were Ill Understood And Yet Still Taught To Me, this week we will be discussing status. Status is the dynamic between two people as expressed in how they either command or acquiesce to each other. Improv teachers say that well defined, big status offers are interesting and powerful to watch. A teacher and a student traditionally have a fairly large status chasm between them, because the teacher is in charge, and the student(s) have to follow the teacher's instructions. (This is, as is turns out, quite necessary, as anyone who has ever tried to control a large group of underage children and also teach them something). The teacher and the principal also have a fairly large status chasm between them, as the principal is the teacher's boss (and can also fire the teacher). When discussing two characters, we usually say that one character is “high status” and the other is “low status”, though bare in mind that these are only relative terms.

A high status character is usually more still (little head movement, gesturing, definitely no fidgeting or nervous twitches), speaks and moves with brevity and purpose, is comfortable, and makes themselves seem bigger or taller.

A low status character is usually more fidgety, nervous, rambles, tries to keep distance from others, and tries to make themselves seem smaller.

Ultimately, status is a relative measurement of how more or less in control, and confident a character is (but always compared to a second party). We typically associate high status with police, judges, bosses, soldiers, while low status are usually employees, students, or children. The examplar exercise for this is the card game – affix a playing card to each player's forehead so that they do not know what they have, and everyone treats everyone else based on what they know about other people, with Ace being lowest and King being highest. At the end, have everyone get in a line of increasing status, and then take their card down and see how well they did. The concept of establishing status is very Johnstonian (and as a result the people I see teach it the most are either Johnstonians, TheaterSporters, or ComedySporters) and is often one of the first concepts taught to new improvisers. Establish the status, establish the scene.

There is nothing inherently wrong in pursuing strong status at the start of a scene – finding out who the boss is and who the employee is tells us a lot about the relationship, dynamic, and setting of the scene with very little effort. However, the way the concept is taught is often to make big status offers (“I'm the King, you're the peasant.”) which, while very edifying, make scene management very difficult. One of the most common questions I hear from improvisers is how to make a scene last longer – and often the answer is one of status. A scene between a king and a peasant has a very large abyss of status – the king is very high, he is, after all, ordained by God to be the supreme ruler of the kingdom, whereas the peasant is, quite literally, a nobody (no offense to any feudal era peasants who may be somehow reading this – now back to the field!). As you stare into an abyss of status this deep, know that it stares back into you.

What you can do to make your scenes last longer is to narrow the abyss of status. The slimmer it is, the longer, richer, and more interesting your scenes become. The first strategy is to make offers of slim status difference between you and your scene partner. The vast majority of truly amazing scenework I've seen has been between two equals (for example, friends) – you may not feel like the scene is going anywhere, but it is – it's just not going as fast as would with the king and the peasant, a dynamic that has a lot of power, but can't necessarily continue forever, and often will burn out much sooner. The other tactic is what often termed a status shift or switch, but is often just a narrowing of the status abyss. The boss and employee are talking, and the boss admits he's broken up because his wife is sleeping around – now the boss is closer to the same level as the employee, and they can communicate.

This all really boils down to the capacity to be changed, that is, your character's capacity to be changed by what's going on – static environments are boring, dynamic environments are exciting. That's why your big status offer stalemates the scene after 60 seconds – a high status boss who won't be changed preserves the status abyss, and it swallows you whole. But show me the king who is conflicted about being supreme ruler and confides in a lowly peasant or two guys sitting around drinking beers commiserating about women mistreating them, and you'll see a chasm that can be crossed, and it will seem all the more interesting for it.

Defining You and Me (AKA Us)

“The relationship is the most important thing in every scene you will do.”

As I discussed in my last post, there is a danger in attempting to apply hard rules like “You must know each other for X amount of time” and “It is only sufficient to name the relationship” to found dynamics in scenes, but how can we teach these concepts? Here are three exercises I created that I've used with my group that illustrate the concepts and give players practice with stepping away from those previously named crutches.

Relation Dash – Take two players, and give them a relationship; for our example, we'll take the relation of roommates. The players are going to do two scenes – the first is these two characters meeting for the first time, in our example, maybe it's move-in day at the dorm. The point is, we are going to specifically outline that these two people do not know each other and see the dynamic that develops (maybe it's your classic party animal/studious roommate dynamic, or maybe it's a freshman and a junior who transferred in from another school). Next, we're going take the same two players, and have them play the same characters and relationship, but with a certain amount of time passed – in this example a year might suffice, and we can take them on move-out day. The exercise has two goals – one, to mandate two people meeting each other for the first time so that players can see what that kind of dynamic feels like; defensive, nervous, eager to please, etc. You don't shy away from that, you embrace it, play it honestly, and keep accepting the reality. The second goal is to see how a dynamic changes over time (rising hate, perhaps, to a loud, disrespectful roommate or a comfort to someone you got to know, for example) and to see what the difference between a new and an established relationship is.

Click, click, mom – I've adapted this one from a Bill Arnett exercise; two players, and give one person a slip of paper with a relationship written on it (e.g. Mom/Child, Boss/Employee). Have the two players start a scene and after 30-45 seconds or so, have the player read the slip of paper and drop that relationship into the scene. Again, we're looking at two different things; the first is that what the relationship is doesn't really matter (although I should point out that it is hard to maintain some dynamics, say a resentful one, when you discover you're the other character's mother – coach the players to maintain their original point-of-view in the face of such adversity) there are an infinite number of variations on the same named relationship, because (and this is the second point) dynamic (which is to say point-of-view, attitude, etc.) is independent of relationship. You might be surprised at the kinds of dynamics that can emerge, and seem completely organic in relationships you would never expect to support such a dynamic. You can, additionally, coach players to ask themselves “If this is true, why is it true?”

Relationship Drills – Two players; assign them a single relationship (e.g. Teacher/Parent), and instruct them to do four different scenes which will all have the same relationship. Each scene should be two minutes or so – long enough to establish the dynamic. The characters can change, as can the setting, but the important part to coach is that we don't want to see the same dynamic played out four times; in our example, we don't want to see concerned teacher/apathetic parent four times. Encourage the players to test the boundaries of the relationship to see what kinds of dynamics can emerge; we did a really great one where a single parent asked the teacher out on a lunch date to hit on him. The goal of the exercise is to get the players to not go for the most obvious dynamic, because other possibilities do exist, and can all be equally entertaining. Basically, not every older/younger sibling scene has to be an authoritarian dynamic.

These exercises have worked well for me so far – feel free to use them at will, develop them, and provide me with any feedback on them. The most important thing is to continue to foster a philosophy in your group that emphasizes an open mind, and honest dynamics. Happy relationship hunting.

It's not you, it's not even me. It's more "us".

There are new people in two of my improv groups, so it's got me thinking about basics again. There is so much “basic” stuff that we want to get across to new improvisers so that they'll have a good foundation, and while at the same time we like blank slates to draw on so we don't have to fight against any preconceived notions and habits (good or bad); it is however, certainly an easier climb when they already know some of the “stuff”. I was talking with one of the new peeps who was telling me that she had never done improv previously, but was really enjoying learning all the keystone elements, yes, anding, listening, and building the relationship. It was this last one that really stuck out to me, mostly because it was probably two years into my improv training before I heard of this concept, yet I have heard probably every teacher and coach I've had since then try to pound that concept home. It's a good idea, don't get me wrong, but it's also one of the worst understood basic concepts in all of improv, and if there is but one thing I could do to right any listing on the part of a new improviser, it would be on this one.

I say it is poorly understood with the full knowledge that I didn't understand it for quite some time. If you were to believe most improv teachers and coaches, “finding the relationship” is as simple as just naming the relationship between two people. In other words, just look across at your scene partner(s) and just name a relationship. In a shitty scene? Apparently all you have to do is say “Gosh, I don't know dad/mom/sis/bro/boss/co-worker/spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend/friend” and your scene has just been saved. Tied into this poorly understood concept is that idea that every relationship has to have been previously established for X amount of time (the length of time appearing to vary depending on what books your teacher has read or who taught them). The problem with this is that if just naming a relationship was all that was needed to rescue a flailing scene, why doesn't everyone do such a simple thing? (And more importantly – how could a scene ever fail with such a simple lifesaver?) The answer is that just naming the relationship means absolutely nothing. Not a single frickin' thing. I've been in a number of classes where this exchange took place:

Teacher: Pause. What's the relationship here? Continue.

Player A: [Pausing a moment] I'm tired of this, mom!

Rest of class: [Laughter]

The reason they laugh is because there has been such an obvious correction at the prodding of the teacher, but really, we all know deep down that just naming the relationship is worthless. The relationship I have with my mother is unique (because I'm a special boy) and is completely different from the relationship you have with your mother. Even the relationship I had with a girlfriend is unique from the relationship you would have with the exact same girl, despite the fact that in either case we would still refer to her as The Girlfriend. What the teacher is looking for, but often can't articulate is that we were looking for how you relate to this person. Do you care for this person? Put up with their bullshit, regardless of how strange it is? Treat them like shit? There's a game I've played before where you get four people, and each person is tasked with silently choosing another person that they will always treat as smart, funny, or beautiful. That's what's interesting. Any teacher's misguided prods are often just trying to get you to treat your scene partner like a real person, or as Gellman would succinctly say: “do you like or not like this person?”, which is the most basic level for relating to another person, but serves as a nice jumping off point for the infinite levels of subtle ways we treat everyone around us. Asaf Ronen uses a good vocabulary for this by calling the relationship the logistical circumstance, and the emotional one a dynamic – a term that I like a lot.

The second problem is in the “you must know this person for X amount of time” corollary to the Relationship Rule. I want you to right now think of any movie, T.V. Show, or play where there was not a major relationship that started with the two characters not knowing each other. Did you come up with even one? (Following this rule would mean we could never do scenes of job interviews or even worse, first dates – a scene whose humor lives on the awkwardness of meeting someone for the first time. Part of how I can prove this one as being misleading is that there is no established minimum length – I've heard everything from 3 months to 3 years.) In everyday life we regularly encounter people we have never previously met, and have absolutely no previously established relationship, and it would serve well to remember the Arnett Axiom: if you can say it in real life, you can say it in a scene. This relationship corollary likely spawned itself from the reverse logic we have for looking at scenes (as Napier described in his book, only looking for the problems in bad scenes, and not looking at the successes in good scenes). It's true that doing scenes with characters who are just meeting for the first time is difficult, but not impossible. The same with the first half of this conundrum is that what's important isn't that you get to put a name on it as soon as possible, it's that you treat the other character like a real person – listen and react to them, form opinions about them, like them or hate them. These were guidelines that were created because they do make scenework a lot easier, especially in the beginning; the problem is that somewhere along the way they became gospel, and often get taught in concept as such, because people didn't think to analyze and digest what was being taught.

This concept is unfortunately rarely analyzed, so we get a lot scenes like:

Player A: Mom, I had a hard time at school today.

Player B: That's okay, son. School will get better.

Rest of class: [Quietly checking their cell phones]

Which is not necessarily a bad scene, and following the “name the relationship” rule is technically perfect. It is however, a tad boring. Nobody cares if you're parent/child or boss/employee or lonely housewife/pool boy; we care that you understand interpersonal relationships well enough to make those exchanges more than just a name or a time limit.

Improvised X

I took in a workshop a couple of weeks ago on improvised story-telling, which got me immediately intrigued, because it's the one type of improv that I've done very little of. The improvised movie workshop I took focused partly on “linear, improvised story-telling”, but was light on stringent “this is how you tell improvised stories” info. Improv (longform especially) is largely the way it is by the sheer nature of improvising with a bunch of people: the strange, disjointed sequence of scenes tumbled together (like we see in a montage, Harold, etc.) wasn't done because we are as an artistic collective consciousness challenging artists who are interested taking the juxtapositional approach to thematic presentation. We don't want to be weird, elusive and challenging showmen, it's just that improvised story-telling is hard. Keeping a story on track, and having it make sense and be logical is difficult when you have a bunch of players all pulling it in different directions.

What I've noticed though, is that the improvised stories that really seem to work well are ones where there is a mutually agreed upon theme or genre being improvised. This is commonly known as an improvised X, where x equals the genre being done up, be it “Star Trek”, “Zombies”, “Shakespeare”, or whatever. These are the ones that appear to work the best, because there is mutually agreed upon framework that makes the whole process easier, and because everyone is essentially using the same palette. You know walking into an improvised X show what types of stories, characters, and motifs are likely to be seen. When we learned the improvised movie, one of the first things we learned was genre recognition so that we could rapidly identify the genre we were working in. Even the guy teaching our story-telling class has been having success with his show, which he describes as being the in style of Alfred Hitchcock/Twilight Zone. The shows I've seen where the improvised story doesn't work are ones where there is no agreed upon palette, and as a result the audience gets a strange hodgepodge of stories, none of which seem to jive, and then there's a clumsy rushing together of all the plot (a shoehorning, if you will) at the end, seemingly just so the players can say “See? We did it! It was all the same story all along!”.

You could make the argument that this is the same reason why just basic scenework doesn't seem to work. I'm a big advocate of specifics and details giving scenework it's definition and easy-to-follow-itude. Or rather, scenes that are strange and non-definitive are hard to follow. At the same time though, I also promote the idea of “following your obvious”; an obvious being a piece of information that can easily be deduced from previous information. What the obvious is can differ from person to person, based roughly on how his or her brain works. For example, a couple of years ago I was hanging with a friend of mine and his brother, and we were all taking about this story my friend was trying to write. Based on the simple idea he had, I proposed a spy twist and his brother wanted a vampire edge. Neither of us was wrong, but the difference is in what our go-to's or obviouses were. I knew spy stories and his brother knew vampires, so that was where we felt the most comfortable. (Possibly an extension of write what you know?)

Thought of in this framework then, where two people are in a scene together building the scene from the ground up, providing information, the scene converging on being defined (essentially becoming “this scene is about X”) can be thought of as a coalescing obvious. Or: what I think of as obvious based on the known information is now the same as what you think is obvious. We now know we are in the scene where X happens. When the obviouses have not coalesced (which is to say one or more players is confused about the current scene facts) is when moves are made which don't seem to make sense. Looked at from the opposite end, bad scenes arise from two players who have not agreed upon what they are doing. (If my friend's brother and I were doing a scene and were both being either obstinate or non-specific, the bad scene would be because I think we're in a spy scene and he thinks we're in a vampire scene. Possibly very interesting provided we are providing definition like crazy, but a bit complex and confusing to nail down in three minutes.)

The only real problem is everyone has a different obvious, and you need to find a common ground of interest for everyone to do an improvised X. If you're going to be pursuing the same story for 30 minutes to an hour, you want all your players to be invested in the genre. My group toyed with a number of concepts last year, and we never could find a common ground among six people. “What about improvised 'Lost'?” “I've never seen it, but I'll give a shot”. I appreciate the flexibility, but unfortunately, not good enough. If you're going to be picking apart a genre well enough to put it back together on the fly in new ways, everyone has to love and know the style.

No conscientious objectors, only invested and involved people, playing to the obvious.