An Improvised Life (18 page)

I don’t know what each of them has experienced in the last few days. It’s different for each person. Often we hear from people who seemed to have been hiding for the weekend, who seemed to unfold not at all, people we felt we haven’t touched, and we’ll get a letter saying their lives have been changed dramatically. For each it’s a kind of re-finding of something lost, or perhaps a letting go of something that was holding them back, and I guess that can only come from having been in a place where such self-exploration has been allowed and encouraged.

I’m at a point in my own growth where I can say that I don’t really care if the workshops work or not, or even if I ever do another. And I think that this letting go on my part—not needing the workshops to be “good,” not needing or seeking approval, not needing to find my own identity or validation through them—this can only be good for me and for the workshop participants as well. If I could not let go of my own needs, a tension would be created inside me that would infect everything about the weekends. Whether visible or not, it would be felt. But that seems not to be the case. I don’t pick up from people that they’ve
experienced anything but freedom and joy. That’s what their question alludes to, so now it’s their
duty
, each of them, to insist that this place of openness and connection stay alive within them, and then, to the best of their ability, help create a similar place for everyone they encounter.

We’re all sensitive to energies. Mostly we ignore these subtle feelings, push them into the background. But we come home after work and we can sense if a loved one is in a bad mood, or has had a hard day. They can be in the next room, we still sense it. We walk into a meeting that doesn’t have a good feeling or a good atmosphere and if we have any degree of consciousness we say, “Uh-oh, bad stuff going on here,” and we shut down, or try to remove ourselves from the negativity. But what we forget is that the minute we walk into an environment we become part of it. If it’s negative, we become a part of that negativity. The most creative way of dealing with it is to recognize it and then commit ourselves to changing it. It can be done. It takes energy and imagination, but it can be done.

Once or twice in a workshop someone has yelled out, “This is turning into a lot of psychodrama!” The first time I heard this I was completely thrown. I didn’t know how to respond. After a couple of hours of doing the exercises, everyone knows I have no interest in having anyone learn how to audition, or be better actors. Frankly, I don’t give a damn if anyone in the group ever performs again. Acting is nothing more than a metaphor for life, and a pretty transparent one at that. Theater is supposed to be an art form,
but most of the time it’s just life up there. In the first part of a theatrical event, the playwright shows us the rules he believes life is governed by, and then he goes about attempting to prove his theories, and he does it simply by showing us human behavior. It’s rarely much of an abstraction. Trying to analyze a piece apart from human psychology is nuts. This is why I get tongue-tied when I’m accused of conducting psychodrama workshops.

The second time someone yelled, “This is psychodrama!” another voice yelled back, “
Everything
is psychodrama!” And I realized this was the answer I was groping for. In the workshops, working on one’s psychological issues happens almost by accident. It’s usually a by-product of having fun, but the thumb-print of our unconscious is always present, as it was for me in the early days of Second City when I thought I was playing this great variety of characters, each one a million miles away from me and my psychology. I wanted nothing more than to hide behind my characters, but they were all me. When I sense someone is avoiding something in a scene, when I push people into examining what’s going on, when I prod the person into looking for whatever is stopping the flow, they are never asked to examine their past, their painful childhoods, their blocks, their fears. They are asked to be very much in the present, and to open up their feelings to the character they’re working on.

If I at any point I were to inflict a specific character on someone, or a specific way of viewing that character, it would be a manipulation, and I never do that. The view of
the character being played is in every instance the performer’s own view. And in any case, as the person yelled out, “It’s all psychodrama!” If you’re not living your life with that in mind, you’re coasting through. Trying to sneak by. But as they say, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” If you want to sail through this existence having fun devoid of consequence, go watch TV. Your life will catch up with you sooner or later, whether you like it or not. People come to the workshops to grow, no matter what else they think they come for.

I talked earlier about the dream work I did with Anita Hall. One of the techniques she uses is to ask you to describe to her a dreamed object as if she were a Martian and had never seen or heard of the object before.

For example, if I dreamt about a refrigerator and it seemed to have some significance in the dream, Anita would say “How would you describe a refrigerator to a Martian?” and I would say to her, “A refrigerator is an electrically powered object that exists in most people’s homes that’s used to keep food cool and fresh. There’s usually a fairly strong emotional attachment to this object since it protects one of our primary nourishment sources.”

This technique allows us to discover unconscious connections to ordinary things that we might otherwise just blindly pass. It became so fertile for me that I started doing it just for fun, so now I often have conversations with a Martian visitor. One day he asked me what I did for a living. I thought about it for a while and finally said:

So when things get tense, when I start taking my work a bit too seriously, I remind myself that I’m only pretending to be a human being. I am happy to say that I don’t take it all that seriously any longer, which doesn’t seem to have affected my work too adversely.

It the final analysis, it’s all improvisation. We’re all tap dancing on a rubber raft. We like to think otherwise, so we plan our lives, we plot, we figure, we find careers that will guarantee us an early retirement, we look for relationships that are permanent, we fill out forms, we do scientific experiments, we write rules—all in an attempt to solidify, concretize, and control this universe of ours that refuses to be
pigeon-holed, to be understood, pinned down, categorized, or even named. This magical wild horse of a universe that gallops by us and through us and around us, and every once in a while allows us to grab on to its mane for a moment or two and join in its dance, but won’t be tamed, conquered, or figured out. We keep finding the smallest possible particle only to discover six months later there is a smaller one. We find suns and planets and star systems that continually defy all logic. We ask doctors for the scientific unalterable facts about our condition and when pressed to the wall they tell us they don’t know the answer, they can only approximate. Psychiatrists tell us after five years, “I never promised you a rose garden.” We try endlessly to make sense of the whole thing. We write down rules and regulations that are supposed to work under all conditions, it never happens. It’s not possible for it to happen. You know you’ve found a real expert on television when they
can’t
give you a definitive answer. Real experts know something about the variables, the intangibles. We are at our best, I think, when we start to let it all go. When we begin to trust the fact that millions of years of evolution have created this organism, through a lot of trial and error, and it’s come up with some pretty good answers. It’s all the nagging, the complaining, the plotting, the fears, the endless need to keep the universe in all its majestic chaos at bay—that with a little more thought and effort we can figure it all out, control it all, the universe, our destiny. This is what kills us, robs us of our spontaneity, our ability to
improvise
, which, as Webster’s
says, is
to create something on the spur of the moment with whatever material is at hand
.

That’s what we’re all doing, all the time, whether we know it or not. Whether we like it or not. Creating something on the spur of the moment with the materials at hand. We might just as well let the rest of it go, join the party, and dance our hearts out.

INDEX

Academy Award winner, criticism of an

Academy of Music

Academy, the, critique of

Acting, as a metaphor for life

Acting classes

sense of competition in

taken by Alan Arkin

teaching, issue with

Acting profession

dream-analysis conversation involving the

power of the, sense of the

Actor’s disease

Actors’ Equity

Addiction

to acting

to film

Anarchy and chaos, difference between

Arkin, Adam (son)

Arkin, Alan

as an acting addict

acting classes taken by

adolescent years of

attending musical performance at Carnegie Hall

in Austin, Texas

in Broadway productions

career dip of

in Chicago, with Second City

childhood of

college years of

conducting improvisational workshops

connecting to emotions

on the craft of acting

depression felt by

directing and performing in one-act plays

as a director of off-Broadway plays

on directors

and dream analysis

early decision to go into acting

on embracing the beginner’s mind

in Europe

on failure

on fans and fandom

fears and inadequacies faced by

as film director

as film junkie