An Improvised Life (15 page)

In this exercise I occasionally just watch the patterns of movement unfolding in front of me, and marvel at the cohesiveness and beauty achieved, without the groups having had one minute of rehearsal. When I check the faces of those watching, they’re the faces of kids at Christmas, or on the Fourth of July, marveling at what is in front of them. Two or three, sometimes four conversations are going on at the same time, the entire stage is being used, with movement everywhere, and we can follow every bit of
it. We in the audience are able to have intimate relationships with a half-dozen characters simultaneously without becoming confused.

It’s the difference that I see between chaos and anarchy. Chaos is beautiful. It’s the way nature works, endlessly flowing, changing, all the parts bursting with their own richness, their own individuality, and yet constantly in touch with everything else that’s taking place around it. Anarchy is every man for himself, when the individual is not only at the center of the universe but is the
only
center of the universe. The difference between chaos and anarchy is evident immediately.

When there is, within the individual, a consciousness of the group, we are watching fractals at work—actors who have taken on, individually, and in reduced size, the characteristics of the larger experience. It’s no longer theater but nature, and it’s right here that I often marvel at the shallowness of so much of our theater and films. How little is demanded of us. It’s as if most directors and writers are sitting next to us, pushing, pulling, turning our heads, focusing our eyes and demanding what we are to see. “Here, here, look over here!” they call out. “Listen to this! Pay attention to this line, this piece of movement!”

With this exercise all of that changes for me, and I think for most of the others watching, and what is before our eyes is a rich, complex, layered event populated with people mostly without theatrical training who have known each other for about four hours. Watching this exercise changes
my sense of how much can be taken in and assimilated by an audience that is not being berated by anyone’s unspoken diatribe on “
what’s important here
.” I can only attribute this clarity and richness to the unconscious attention that the actors are paying to each other, and to where they are in the playing area—the sense that they are complete individuals and at the same time parts of a whole. If I am watching this exercise and I see that the movement is getting messy, if there’s a traffic jam, I know it’s because someone has come in with a character that doesn’t work. The actor doesn’t have a specific action or intention. At this point I’ll stop the scene, spend some time with the actor, figure out where his intention was off, and we go back to where we were. And then the scene almost invariably self-corrects, and we’re watching fractals at work again. After this extraordinary display of cohesion and freedom, we start tightening the reins. The next big chunk of time gets devoted to twocharacter scenes with very specific built-in intentions.

I have what I consider to be two main functions during the workshop. The first is to be supportive and not judgmental. To allow people to play. To fail. It’s improvisation. It’s going to fail sometimes.

My second function is to help people get out of their heads. Their clever place. I can see it when it’s happening. The truth of the matter is, everyone can. When it’s pointed out to the actors, they know it. And so do their scene-partners. And so do the people who are watching. It’s usually experienced by the scene-partners as their own sense of
awkwardness or failure, a general discomfort. Those of us who are watching the scene settle into an analytical objectivity, our sense of engagement diminishes, and we, like the person onstage, retreat into our heads.

I also sense it in myself kinetically. My body moves back into my chair. My sense of involvement diminishes. When actors are fully present my whole body moves forward toward the players and the scene.
Something is happening
. When I feel that actors have started “playwriting,” working in their heads and not with the people in front of them, I stop and I say gently, hopefully without judgment, “Let’s back up.” I ask them to tell me about the character and what they are looking for. As they start to describe the character and tell me the thing they are trying to accomplish, they almost invariably relax and start to move effortlessly into the emotional state that they have avoided during the scene. In explaining their intention to me, they drop the performance and make real contact. And as I feel their emotional connection with their character start to take hold, I gently stop them and I tell them to stay emotionally exactly in that place, and we start the scene again. Almost invariably the scene is deeper, more spontaneous, and more connected. I’ve tried to figure out the psychology of this process, but it’s remained mysterious. It seems that as someone is trying to explain the emotional state of the character, it allows room for that state to present itself. Often when people begin a scene, in order to “communicate” they try to rev up the emotions and start selling something they
don’t yet own, which I think just crystallizes and deadens them, and makes the performance intellectual and selfinvolved. In explaining it to me, in order to make me understand, they are forced to relate to me, and this seems to give the emotional state a place to freely flow, unimpeded from the unconscious. Whatever the inner mechanism is, it works. It makes the scene come alive for the actors, for their partners, and for the audience.

The improv workshops are themselves improvisations. The nature of the group, its specific identity, its personality, its special abilities and resistances will often necessitate new ways of working. Very often a new exercise comes out of a workshop, sometimes a whole new series of exercises. I never plan for this to happen, it just does.

I did a workshop a year ago in Toronto mostly with alumni of the Second City troupe who lived there. It was an unusually bright and cohesive group of people and we had a three-day session, which for some reason turns out to be the optimum length of time for a workshop. By the third day a deep and comfortable bond had developed between all of us, and in one of the breaks a younger actor came over and asked if we could talk for a few minutes. I said of course, and he told me that he had great trouble being positive onstage. He could play anything negative, but it didn’t seem possible for him to portray anything joyous. He asked me if I had any advice, and I immediately had a thought. “Can we talk about this in the group? Would you be comfortable with that?” He said sure, so we went back
and I said, “Sean has trouble being positive onstage. Let’s create a situation where he’s
got
to be positive.” I told Sean to leave the room for a minute. When he’d gone I said, “Let’s throw a surprise birthday party for him. When he comes back in the room, shower him with gifts and praise and we’ll see what happens.”

I found Sean, told him to come into the room, and the entire group, all twenty of them, jumped into immediate action. They sang “Happy Birthday,” they showered him with gifts, they plied him with his favorite food, they sang his praises and within a few minutes Sean had no choice but to lighten up. Within another few minutes he was beaming, and the mission that the rest of the group had taken on, the action that they’d chosen, was working like a charm. The joy was infectious. It ran through all of us, and Sean had an experience onstage he’d never had before in his life.

Everyone sat back down, but they were all fired up. “Does anyone else want to try something?” I asked. Greg, another young man in the group, raised his hand. “I have trouble taking charge onstage,” he said. “I can’t take on any authority. I’d like to work on that.” “Let’s do it,” I said. “We’re in Detroit, you’re the foreman in an automobile plant.”

With no discussion, no time for thought or preparation, there was an assembly line in front of me. There were five guys working on the line and a chorus of people acting as cars in front of them. It was like magic. The guys on the line were all goofing off and it was up to Greg to whip the operation into shape. Within minutes he was running the plant,
barking orders, pushing people around, telling everyone what to do; it was again an experience he’d never had before.

Other hands went up. A young woman said she’d wanted to be a ballerina. She’d had an accident and could no longer dance; it was a part of her life she felt she’d never resolved. We jumped into action. We took her backstage to her dressing room, immediately after her debut as prima ballerina at the Met. We surrounded her with reporters, with fans, her family, the other dancers, all praising her to the skies and she basked in glory.

The afternoon went on like that, and I spent most of it crying tears of joy at the extraordinary degree of love and cooperation that everyone showered on each other. It was a glorious day.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I live in New Mexico and was asked recently if I would work with some of the Native American youth, out of the Pueblos, a lot of whom are floundering and lost. For reasons I’ve never understood I’ve had a feeling of connection with this culture my whole life, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with them and perhaps get closer to them. My wife Suzanne and I agreed to do a oneday workshop at The Institute for American Indian Arts, a local school that’s geared to meet the needs of the Native American population of the state.

Normally I plan my workshops for two or three days, with two seeming to be the minimal time that anything transformative can take place, but they wanted to do it quickly and I agreed to one day. I didn’t know what could be accomplished in that short a time, but I thought we’d give it a try.

Suzanne and I showed up at nine; people started drifting in about nine-thirty. And we learned our first lesson about
the culture: Punctuality is not a trait that belongs to these people who are, I suppose, still governed to some extent by the time sense of their ancestors, the sun being the gauge of where one should be and when.

Around ten A.M. things started to come together. As our session began there was an easy compliance with the exercises, but no real sense of abandon or exploration. Not much joy. I felt more like an employer than a workshop leader. I kept augmenting the exercises, trying to loosen things up—nothing worked. At the end of each exercise I asked if there were any questions, any comments. None came.

By twelve-thirty only one scene had emerged with any element of personal investment. It was a simple transaction scene. I use this exercise to introduce the idea of tasks and objectives. The setting given to the actors was a pawnshop. The young man who was assigned to come into the shop came in with a necklace to pawn. He made it clear, not by anything particular that he said, but by the gentle, loving way he handled the necklace, that the object had been in his family for generations, that he cared for it deeply, and that he was having trouble parting with it. The pawnshop owner was a tall beautiful Inuit woman who decided to play the role as someone who was generous and loving. It became clear as the scene went on that although she had feelings for the young man’s situation, the necklace was not an object she could use. She told him finally that she could give him enough money to scrape by for a while, and offered
him the promise that she would keep the necklace hidden away for a longer period than usual in order to prevent anyone from buying it.

The scene was very subtle, filled with real feeling for the necklace, and a lot of pain. No other scene had much of anything personal in it. When we broke for lunch I asked that each participant come back with something that moved them, something they felt particularly happy about, or sad, or angry. Something that made them laugh or cry. Anything they felt strongly enough about that could be the basis for a scene.

When we returned I asked the group what they’d come up with. No show of hands. Does anyone have anything they want to turn into a scene? Something that moves them? Nothing. Finally a woman who was one of the instructors in the college said, “I have something that I’d like to work on, something that I feel passionate about.” “What is it?” I asked. “Runaway children,” she said. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s turn those feelings into a scene.”

She decided she’d like to do something about a runaway son returning home. A young man raised his hand. “I’ll be the son,” he said. Brad was his name, a broad-shouldered student at the school with long black hair and glasses. “What made you come home?” I asked. He had no immediate answer so we decided that a good element for the scene would be to have two social workers bringing him home to find out the lay of the land between the boy and his mother. Two students volunteered to be the social workers. I told
them to stay in the scene until it became clear that what was taking place at home seemed safe. They nodded, left the stage area, and without any preparation the scene began.

The social workers knocked on the door, the mother let them in, and there was her son whom she hadn’t seen in six months. The social workers explained to the mother where the son had been found, and that he expressed some desire to return home. The reunion was tense and uncomfortable; the two students playing the social workers watched the interaction like hawks, waiting to see what happened between the mother and her son, which would clarify what their function in the scene would be. Brad was sullen and monosyllabic, refusing to give anything but the most minimal responses to his mother and the social workers, but it became clear after a while that he wanted to stay home, and they left. The mother wanted to know if he would go back to school, he said he would try it out. She also said that her boyfriend had gone away and that the two of them would be a family again. Brad remained sullen and uncommunicative and deeply unhappy.

After about ten minutes I ended the scene. This is one of my roles in the workshops. When I feel that the energy has played out of an event, or if it comes to a natural conclusion, I cut it. I feel it’s important for the actors to stay engaged in the moment rather than worrying about where a scene is headed. I can tell when actors are “playwriting” or shaping something, rather than connecting, and when they begin doing that it takes the fire and immediacy out
of the work—for the actors, for their partners, and also for anyone watching.