An Improvised Life (14 page)

Back to the second exercise. We’re going to turn ourselves into a machine. The first person performs a motion that suggests a piece of a machine. It can be real, imaginary, anything. When the second person has a way of fitting into the motion, a way of adding to the machine, he joins the first. And so on, until six or seven people in the group are one machine.

What invariably happens the first time through this exercise is that no one touches anyone else. It’s understandable; they’re strangers. They don’t know each other. After the group has become a machine I ask them to do the exercise again, this time making sure that each person is in some way touching another part of this human machine. The difference is dramatic. The event becomes infinitely more interesting and compelling, and afterward we spend some time discussing why. People grope toward articulating a reason but can rarely state what it is.

I have seen this exercise hundreds of times and I think, first of all, there is no machine in history where the parts
don’t touch. But this is obvious. The subtle aspect of it, the one that’s crucial for our purposes, is that the minute the moving parts of the machine touch each other something dynamic takes place. Our attention to what they’re doing becomes more acute, and it’s more interesting for the participants as well. Why? I think it’s because when the parts are touching,
something can happen
. There is a world of possibility now open that was not present before, when there was no touching. I think this translates to any form of “touch.” As machines, in this exercise, physical contact is the only kind of touching possible; machines don’t make emotional connection. But there are myriad ways for people to “touch” each other, and I find that just introducing this thought to the group brings that awareness to the mix. We don’t have to work on it. No touchy-feely exercises. Just talking about this opens the group to the necessity of really relating to each other, genuinely touching each other, making sure that they see, feel, and affect each other as the workshop goes on.

Once, as I sat watching twenty adults turn themselves into bits and pieces of machines, making strange noises and moving with grotesque, awkward mechanical gestures—all of them lawyers, teachers, psychologists, and actors—I pictured the group at a party, an evening get-together, with all the attendant random events and desultory conversations that go on during these evenings. And I imagined one person jumping up and saying, “Hey, everyone, let’s play a game! Let’s all turn ourselves into machines! We’ll break up
into groups and become machines.” The likely result of that announcement would be that everyone at the party would exchange alarmed looks, smile politely, and go back to their cocktails.

What’s the difference? I wondered.

I came to the conclusion that the difference is that in the workshop, although nothing is stated, each person senses that there’s a reason for the exercise—there is
meaning
behind it, an intention—and that meaning and intention will be revealed. But what if there was no meaning behind the exercise? What if I had designed it just to kill time, or I came up with it on the spur of the moment because I was ill-prepared? What if I was just bored?

Still, in the minds of participants, simply trusting the fact that there must be a meaning behind the exercise allows them to jump into it fully, and invest it with their own meaning. And it turns out that
that
jumping in,
that
decision and personal investment of
their
meaning is what actually
gives
the event meaning. Who cares whether it’s my meaning or theirs? In fact, who gets to decide what the meaning of something actually is?

I am pretty sure that meaning changes from individual to individual. Take an activity like sweeping a floor or cleaning a kitchen. When you think of those activities you probably think of them as acts of drudgery. No chance of doing something creative with jobs like that. Now picture Charlie Chaplin cleaning a kitchen or sweeping a floor. The possibilities become endless. “Well of course that’s different,”
you answer. “He’s a genius.” Yes, he is a genius, but what are the contributing factors to his engagement in these activities that turn them into genius?

His decision to turn them into creative activities.

His insistence that there was something creative to be mined, even in the most common activity.

The amount of time he’d spend discovering their creative potential.

He could find it anywhere, and so can we. Perhaps not with all the brilliance and grace that were his particular gifts, but we can do it too.

For me, it all comes down to intention.

For the third exercise we again break up into three groups, and again people enter into the playing area one at a time. In this exercise the participants are asked to be part of a moving tableau. They can speak now, but only to communicate with the others in the playing area, not to us in the audience. It’s as if they’re now extras in a movie, setting the scene, creating an atmosphere, but not calling a lot of attention to themselves. I suggest a place that conjures up a specific mood, a specific tone—for example, an urban park on a warm spring day. One by one each actor has to fill in the scene. We want to see a variety of activities, and we want to see the space in the playing area used creatively, and we want to maintain the feeling of the place and the day. It requires not only that the players be aware of their own activity and their own life in the playing area but also that they fit it into a whole and make sure they are adding
to the event. As with all the exercises, if someone is doing something that gums up the works we go back, fix it, and continue. How does someone gum up the works? By having an activity that is random and can’t be pinned down—they’re wandering all over the stage doing a half-dozen different things, which keeps the next person from finding a clear space or activity in the playing area. They can gum it up by being redundant and doing the same thing the last person did, or by ignoring the tone of the piece and looking for laughs.

The actors are occasionally thrown by this emphasis on group awareness. My experience over the years has led me to believe that most actors don’t read the scripts that are assigned to them. Often, in auditions, they’re not even given anything to look at but their own parts, which encourages this myopia. In a well-written piece every part has a function, every character is necessary to the whole. Sometimes the function of the character is obvious, sometimes it has to be searched for, sometimes it just adds to the tone and mood. An actor’s exploration becomes much easier if he examines the material from the viewpoint of discovering his function in the piece.

For the fourth exercise we break up mostly into groups of three. This is the only exercise of the weekend in which I ask people to jump right in without a plan. This exercise requires no thinking beforehand. No characters, no set up. It only requires immediacy—the actors solving the problem directly in front of them.

The groups of three are given specific tasks to accomplish: putting up a tent, taking a boa constrictor out of a packing crate and placing it in a glass tank, bringing a piano through a doorway and into a room, hanging a huge picture. All are activities that require shared physical activity, spontaneous planning, and a lot of consensus. It’s not about making an interesting scene, it’s about accomplishing the physical task. Again, this exercise will fail if people try to be funny or inventive, or embellish. It becomes magical when we see people, still for the most part strangers, struggling to find common ground with imaginary objects and having complicated decisions to make. With this exercise we start to see interesting scenes formed before our eyes, without any attempt to be dramatic or interesting.

T. S. Eliot said that all drama is about man’s fall from grace and his redemption. I believe that in its most archetypical form this sweeping concept becomes simply addressing a problem and finding a solution. In this exercise we now see the very beginnings of this idea at play.

It’s too soon for people to feel as if they’re making statements, but in a small way the sense of drama and event has now been subtly added to the mix. A problem needs to be solved. Sometimes we get people who become anxious about not having a character, not having a fix on the dramatic event of the “scene,” not having a strong point of view, and they start to bring a manufactured conflict into play. They decide that they’re going to be argumentative or petulant or bossy, and you can smell that it’s coming
out of some fear that “
nothing is happening. We’re not getting laughs
.” It invariably ruins the scene. This is not to say that legitimate conflicts won’t arise, but these will be the result of ironing out and sharing the specifics of the imaginary objects and the difficulties of the task at hand. Sometimes the conflict will arise out of seeing who has a more realistic handle on what’s happening. These are exciting scenes to watch.

Looking for conflict onstage is always an easy way to manufacture a false sense of comfort for a performer. It can get you some easy laughs, and it can give the audience a vague sense that
something is going to happen
, so actors often like to come into a scene belligerently. My understanding is that Elia Kazan instructed his actors to “look for the fight.” I hope this wasn’t true. In the first place, I think most people are not looking for fights. I think most people go out of their way to avoid fights. And secondly, it’s not an actor’s job to go around looking for fights (unless he’s specifically playing a belligerent character, or a psychopath). It’s an actor’s job to explore all the aspects of his character, as outlined and hinted at by the author. Finding the fight might be one aspect, or not. It depends on the play and the author’s sensibilities. In the early days of Second City we fell victim to that hostility in scene after scene to such an extent that one day during a rehearsal Paul Sills bellowed out, “I’m sick of this damned hostility! For the next two weeks I don’t want to see anything but agreement onstage!” Shocked, we tried to comply, gingerly at first, and then after a couple of days of
testing the water we found that there was gold in the instruction. We found there was no way in the world to avoid conflict in a scene where two people had different agendas, or even when two people had the same agenda but different vantage points. And what happened was that in watching people attempt to get along, everything became subtler. We’d have to watch the scenes more carefully and pay attention to the nuances. We’d see all the same tensions displayed, but now instead of yelling and rolling eyes and tapping feet we’d see subtle body language and hear difficult and strained pauses, because the truth of the matter is that in all human dealings, no matter how positive, there are tensions. The scenes got so much better, and the word about this new way of working got out so quickly that there are now whole schools of improvisation that insist that you’re not allowed to say “no” on the stage! This, of course, is another form of insanity, because if theater is about human relationships, which is
all
it is, then you have to include “no” in there too. But let’s throw in a couple of “yes’s” every once in a while, for variety.

Before the fifth exercise I talk about the two tools that participants will be using for the rest of the workshop. These tools are the basis of every good performance they have ever seen or ever will see, and even more importantly, in my opinion, they inform a successful life as well, but we don’t talk about that.

The first tool is
intention
, and once understood, the deal is that you never enter the playing area without your character
having an intention, a specific job to do, a function to perform. This accomplishes several things. First, it makes it impossible to have stage fright or to be self-conscious. There isn’t time. You have something to accomplish. Second, it allows you to be alive without self-judgment. You now have something to do that relates to other people, and making clever jokes or trying to be “interesting” will get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish.

The second tool works in conjunction with the first. The intention you pick should make you feel something. It should give you an
emotional context
, which then becomes the second tool. This emotional context will give you a felt connection to the character you are playing, so that when you go into the scene you won’t be entering with an intellectual idea but with the sense of a character. These two tools, used with intuition, are the matrix from which everything you do in the playing area comes alive. It takes time and patience to learn how to sense these two tools at work with each other, how to play with them, and even when you do they won’t work all the time, but then that’s the problem with creative work. Once we think we have a handle on something, we change, and the change requires a new way of examining the problem.

The sixth exercise goes back to a more intense version of the tableau, and for the first time the two tools,
intention
and the connecting
feeling state
it puts you in, become something to work with. In this exercise we will have six, sometimes eight people working in a scene. They have graduated
from being extras in a movie to being supporting players, which means that there can be several conversations going on at the same time, but with no one trying to dominate the scene or take over. (That’s the stars’ job, and the stars aren’t here.) Our settings are, for example, a unisex beauty salon on a busy afternoon, or the kitchen of an expensive restaurant at dinnertime, or the emergency room of a hospital on New Year’s Eve—places where a lot of different activities can occur simultaneously and yet still have a common thread. Again, people enter the playing area in the order I’ve given them, not jumping into the mix until they have something specific to contribute that will not obscure someone else’s activity. And it’s with this exercise that miracles sometimes occur. If the group is sensitive, and people have their antennae out, these scenes can go on for twenty minutes, often with an extraordinary sense of place and tone, and spontaneously contain complex patterns of movement, levels of motion and flow, that if one had directed them would have taken days of meticulous blocking rehearsals in order to reach.