One Night in Bangkok....

Last day of Conservatory 1.  What a great class.

Our warm-up exercise was the word association game that we did in our first class.  (Look through previous posts if you don't believe me.)  We begin with "you" and eventually a word gets said after "you," and the group votes on these words by repeating them or stating words that agree with the word said immediately before. Eventually, a narrative arises from these words.  In our first attempt yesterday, it took us a while, but a story emerged where a guy went on a vacation to Hawaii and was attacked by a shark at a beach.  He was taken to the hospital, a limb was amputated, and he eventually had sex with a nurse.  (It's undetermined whether the nurse was male or female.) We got some suggestions and did it again. The second time, we had a murder, a burial in a shallow grave, a manhunt, a chase, and then a trial.  (Knowing our group, it's somewhat surprising that prison sex wasn't introduced to the equation, but perhaps if had had more time....)

Tim then took suggestions from us for four categories: social/political issues, book or fictional works that have influenced us, things that we have done for the first time in the last several years, and locations (the more detailed the better).  These categories were used as jumping off points for black outs and sketch ideas that consumed most of the rest of our class time.

We began by being divided in groups to work on three black outs.  I was grouped with two very funny and talented friends: Scott and Kristin.  Writing in a group is usually a source of frustration for me, but working with these two this was a very energetic, fun, and smooth process.  We targeted a news issue (gas prices), a social issue (corporate citizenship and so-called right to lifers), and a place (the Air & Water Show -- we could hear the planes during class).  Dr. Evil made an appearance in our gas prices blackout, Kristin had a PTSD flip-out induced by the airborne war machines at the Air & Water Show, and Scott and got to play rabid corporate right-to-lifers.  (Note to self: you are too angry; it scares people.) We received some classic advice from Tim after our corporation abortion blackout: kill the bad people because audiences want justice.

Siera, Mario, and Christine had a very funny blackout regarding Chik-Fil-A.  Siera and Christine were two lesbian lovers having a kiss in outside a Chik-Fil-A.  Mario was a conservative evangelical who was at Chik-Fil-A to show his support for its social stand and the company's free speech rights.  Despite his foaming hatred of "gays" he gets turned on by the sight of two women getting it on.  All we need is love, right?

Our sketch work had us shuffled into new groups with the goal of choosing a place off our list of suggestions and focussing on character, action, and support.  Ryan, Christine, Casey, and I were working in a slaughterhouse in Chicago during the 1920s.  This involved several accents.  (We were mostly immigrants.)

Scott, VP, and Kristin had a funny scene involving a roommate (Kristin) coming to sleep in the same room as her roommate (VP) and her friend/stud-muffin Scott.  She eventually climbs into bed with them because the floor is too uncomfortable.  And things get very uncomfortable.

The last group was Mario, Dan, and Siera.  The setting: Bangkok.  The premise: Mario was an effeminate Thai man.  Dan was trying to get his lesbian sister (Siera) this girly boy as a mail order husband. But actually, Dan and Mario had hooked up the night before.  Mario's antics were super funny in this scene.

Tim's insights after these scenes was that trying to be funny in a scene can break down the support between the actors which then short circuits the scene's development.   We just have to trust that the funny will happen because our scene partners are talented and funny people instead of forcing the funniness.  A counterexample to that advice is that even with silly characters the scene can progress and  develop when the actors are playing their characters with emotional truth.

We ended class as we usually do with montage work, but we had a twist: we used the suggestions from earlier in class.  We had Bill Clinton at a roller park, Romney and Ryan hanging out at a hipster bar in Logan Square, a women's studies class, and wild west saloon whose proprietor is allergic to cats.

We had a great time this term, and I cannot wait for next term.

Tada!

Move, move, move

Yesterday we focussed on movement and action.  Before we got to that, however, we had an extended warm-up exercise.  We played the game "I know people who have...."  The premise behind the game is this:
One person is in the middle, and everybody else in the class is seated around the middle person.
The person in the middle says something about him- or herself, but phrases that statement, "I know people who have...."
Anybody seated who has also had that experience has to get up and take a new seat and the person in the middle can snatch a seat.  The person left standing is in the middle.

Confused?  Here's an example:

A is in the middle and B, C, D, and E are seated.

A says, "I know people who have masturbated during their lifetime."  Obviously, that statement is true of everybody in the group, so everybody scurries for a seat. B is the person left standing.

B then says, "I know people who were born in Michigan." B was born in Michigan, and so was C.  So, C has to get up, B takes C's seat and C is in the middle.

C then says, "I know people who have had a jelly donut and chili dog with Mel Gibson and Paul Ryan.  C is the only person in the group who has done this, so he remains standing and gets a round of applause from the group.  (And, unfortunately, this factoid can't be shared with the public at large because what is said in the circle of truth stays in the circle of truth.)

So, we played this game for a good while, which was pretty cool from a class bonding perspective.

We then did montages.  The goal was to practice juggling our variation of characters and not getting into a rut performing the same type of character.  A highlight of this exercise was Mario as a teenager talking to one of his friends.  Mario's mom had found his stash of pot and thought that he was suicidal, so his friend suggested killing Mario's mom.  (As you do.)  The murderous friend got tagged out for a new friend who was talking to Mario about how his mom was overreacting to think that just because she caught him masturbating, that he wasted to kill himself.  The solution? Well, go into your mom's bed and whack off. (Duh.)  That friend was tagged out for Mario's new friend: Geez, just because your mom caught you trying to hang yourself, she thinks you're suicidal.  Mario's classic response: I know, was just doing that for a better orgasm.  (Scene.)

Our work with action consisted of raising the action in the scene and going from space to space on the stage.  The action is supposed to pull the actors from part of the stage to another (or even off stage).  This makes sense.  Action keeps the actors moving around the stage and the audience has something to look at.  A scene with two people planted in the center of the stage talking for two minutes gets a little old and stale.  In the sketch world, scenes like this are criticized as "talking heads."  It's very easy to get trapped into writing a talking heads scene, and perhaps it's also easy to get bogged down with a talking heads improv scene when the actors are trying to focus on emotion of character traits too much.  (In my experience (albeit limited), the main culprit in getting stuck in the talking heads muck is focussing too much on plot.)

All in all, it was a great class, even though it was far from being our funniest class.  It's hard to believe that next week is the last of our eight weeks of tutelage with Tim.

The Ecstasy of Defeat

Birthday Face made its debut last night.  We part of the Sketch CAGEMATCH! at Stage 773.  Seven teams performing sketch comedy to win a coveted three week run in October.

The rules: each team had ten minutes to do their thing.  After each team went, the audience members had to text their vote for their favorite team, and the team with the most votes wins.  These competitions are won and lost by getting your friends to show up and vote.  Spoiler alert: we lost.

Despite the defeat, this was a good experience.  We tried out three new sketches.  We were able to get all three completed in less then ten minutes (about ten seconds shy of ten minutes).  And we were in a room of people who mostly didn't know us, and we got laughs.

We also got exposed to six other groups to see what other people are doing.  The quality of the competition varied.  Some pieces were too talky.  Others were too heavy with their exposition.  Some sketches took too long to get to the point.  On the plus side, we also saw some very tight and funny stuff.

I thought we had a nice blend of material.  We began with a zombie attack, then we had a heartbreaking unrequited love between a nerd and the robot sex doll he made, and we ended with an orgasm.

So, no free October run for us.  Guess we'd better get to work on something new.

Emotional Rescue

Yesterday in Conservatory, we worked with emotions.  We did a whopping amount of work with emotion.

Tim coached us to be emotionally honest.  In fact, he's offered that advice several times during this course.  (Perhaps it's important.)  One of his insights was that truth, honesty, and realism make for good theatre.  In doing our scene work yesterday, he encouraged us to play characters close to who we are in real life.  However, this doesn't necessarily mean that we react to situations as we would in real life.  For example, an audience connects with people standing up for themselves. And standing up for oneself may not seem like "yes, and..." but it still affirms your scene partner's choice when you move the scene forward.

We spent a considerable amount of time coming up with a list of words to describe a spectrum of emotions.   We covered the following basic fields: Love, Anger, Fear (both normal and abnormal), Happiness, and Sadness.  No, I'm not listing the words here. Use the aforementioned word, grab a thesaurus, and make your own damned list.

In working with the emotions, our goal is to physicalize these emotions without saying the word.  Saying the word dispels its power. Tim's goal for us is to get us to be emotionally mobile as actors, truthful with our emotions, and able to change emotions with the scene. Most of the trick in accomplishing this goal is figuring out what your scene partner wants.  That being said, we were warned about hidden objectives in a scene because they can throw things off kilter if and when they aren't picked up by our scene partners.

As usual, we did an extensive amount of three person scenes.  We also did some five person scenes.

In the three person scenes, we had pretty funny one where VP and Christine were sisters who pushed Scott (Christine's husband) to the breaking point.  The poor guy's epic Labor Day weekend was ruined, but he got to have his barbecue during the five person scenes.  He played a roided-out suburban dad who intimidated his daughter's new boyfriend by lifting a huge barbecue grill -- while it was cooking steaks.

Jesus Christ, is that all I have from yesterday?  Making that list of words took up a lot of time.