Mr. Self Destruct

Yesterday began with about half of us in class, so we began with freeze tag.  This sequence of freeze tag felt good as a unit (even though it only involved about half of us).  Poor Scott made the mistake of embracing me in a scene -- never do that immediately after I've ridden my bike to class.

Once the whole gang had arrived, we did a mock audition.  (Because you have to audition after Level Two to be allowed to complete the program.)  This was a mid term of sorts.  If you remember that scene from Rocky IV where Ivan Drago declares to Rocky: "I must break you," you have an idea of what Gellman was out to accomplish with this exercise.  Everybody was against the back wall, and we did three people scenes after getting a suggestion from the "audience." The characters were supposed to be somewhat close to who we are in real life.

Then, it was time to be broken.  Of the ten people in our group, he said that two of us would have made it through.  Spoiler alert: yours truly ain't one of 'em.  And then, things got personal.  "Personal" as in personal critiques of what we're doing wrong. Questions about what we were thinking on stage. And tips to improve what we're doing.  (I think at that point it was pretty much a given that we would have a better turn out than usual for our post class drinking session.)  A global suggestion was that we were taking far too long to get going.  In these scenes, we need to check-in and get the first line out within three seconds.  Tops.  Another global suggestion/admonishment was that these scenes are about character.  Character comes first and scenic content is a second.  (Perhaps a distant second.)  The goal of these scenes is to have the actors perform their characters with an emotion while interacting with their environment.  Easier said than done.  You've taught all these great things over the course of months or years, and it's confounding how it all can evaporate during that three minute scene.  You (or I, more accurately) find yourself making the same mistakes. Again and again and again.  Son-bitch.

Another mistake: letting the first line define the entirety of the scene.  (This is useful corollary to the beginner's mistake with object work -- talking about the object or the action involved with the object.)  Yet another error that found its way into more than one of our scenes was turning the three person scene into a two against one.  This is bad.  Very bad.  Well, it's very bad for the two people who gang up on the one.  The one, according to Sensai Gellman, will almost always come off looking better than the two.  In fact, the one will have a much better chance of making it through because the auditors will conclude, "fuck, she deserves it after putting up with those assholes."

Yeah, I was involved in one of those 2 on 1 scenes as part of the 2.  In the personal critiques afterwards, I was once again told -- wait for it -- TOO ANGRY.  I was genuinely surprised, but it's again something to work and to try to banish.  Gellman then asked me several questions about the character I was playing on stage.  What did he want? What did he desire?  I had no answers, which was reminiscent of trying to write a character based loosely on me in a writing class.  I had the same critiques: this character's wants and desires were not well defined.  Well, yeah, because I'm apathetic.  And angry, evidently.  (We grow 'em dispassionate and irritable in the wilds of southwestern Michigan.)  So, that's a challenge and some homework worth doing with respect to improv and writing: stop doing the same shit.

But enough about me.  As a unit we were also faulted for "yes anding" a single topic or just "yessing" a single topic.  Example: grandma died.  And then an entire scene about the single subject of grandma's demise.  Throw another log on the fire and take it in another direction: "Cool.  She was an ornery old bitch who never let me eat ice cream.  And now we get to sell her house and pocket the money. I'm spending Christmas in La Paz with a gaggle of whores!  Thanks, grams."

Going further on emotions, we all too often have the urge to treat a scene partner the same way that we would treat a real person who is emotional:  we try to console or de-fuse the trauma.  But we get a better scene when we throw gas on the fire instead of putting it out.

Another fundamental thing that we were drilled on was connecting on stage without constant eye contact.  In several of our scenes, whatever object work we were doing would either get ignored entirely or get turned into a mindless and repetitive motion. (Think Daniel-san doing "wax on" when a table or something else is being scrubbed or wiped off.)

Man, that class was a punch in the gut.  As I understand it, he is trying to get us out of the trap of thinking too much on stage and trying to be funny.  We just need to let it go and start moving, talking and reacting without all the pre-planning, processing, and stammering.  Just start delivering lines and moving around and figure out what you were doing after you did it.  I've been trying to get myslef to do that in scenes for a while, but it just seems to fall apart in practice.

So, back to my anger issues and the above paragraph.  The final scene of class was a four person scene: mother (Elizabeth) and her three kids (Dan, Megan, and I). After some side-coaching, Gellman got one of us playing the kids to assume a place in the birth order.  It was Dan as the youngest (and he's a real life youngest child).  And his lines were delivered after the mother and his sister.  So, after he did his bit it was my turn to go.  Given my crow's feet and ever-increasing light black hairs, I took the mantle of oldest child (even though I, too, am the youngest in real life).  I just channeled my oldest sister and some of the tirades she used to have when we were all growing up and having an argument as an entire family.  It was anger, sure, but it was also just delivered freely without trying to be witty or clever and the words just came out without searching for them beforehand. Despite this outburst of anger, Sensai told me it was a solid contribution.  According to him the difference was that the emotion was honest and the character had an opinion, something to say, instead of just spouting off out of intellectual laziness.

* * * * * 

I finally went out and saw professionals imrpovising this past week.  I had fallen into a lull of not going to shows after the past several weeks.  What got me off my ass and out of the house on a weeknight? One of my Second City instructors, Kate Duffy, is leaving flyover country for Los Angeles.  Well, Kate was performing with her close friend, and improv giant, Susan Messing at the Annoyance on Wednesday. It was a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone: see Kate before she left and finally see Susan Messing improvise.  

The fuss and hype are entirely deserved.  This show was awesome.  You can tell that they are great friends and that they love being on stage together.  As entertaining as the show was, it was also kind of intimidating for a novice improviser.  You find yourself thinking, in between bursts of laughter, "damn, how do they that.  I have so much to learn."  Personally, I was tickled pink that they used the audience suggestion "Jimmy Hoffa" for the show.  What ensued were scenes with mob wives, cellmates in prison having altercations over chess pieces, a mob wife cheating on her husband, a psychologist taking advantage of her patient and insisting on payment afterwards, a pervy dude named Glenn using fisting as a pick-up line, Turkish prison guards who are huge fans of the NHL, two early teen-age boys calling each other "abortion face" and trying to explain sex with a dinner date metaphor.   The whole experience was a reminder of just how fun improv can be and is.  A reminder worth keeping in mind after a harsh review, a bad class, or a bad performance.  

I Get So Emotional

About a week ago, I did a make-up class on Wednesday night.  I couldn't make my usual Saturday slot on account of a baby shower.  A baby shower for my baby. [Pause for appropriate emotional responses from all of you wonderful readers.]

All of the actors in class were strangers, even if a few had vaguely familiar faces.  I didn't bother to learn any of their names.  I guess that makes me an aloof prick, but nobody asked me my name either.  So, there.

Back to my notes and observations from class.  We concentrated on emotional reactions in our scenes.  The sort of emotional reactions that somebody has when they've been holding onto something personal about somebody and have avoided saying it for too long.  You know these sort statements: I love you. You're selfish. This isn't working.  I hate your meatloaf recipe.  That sweater is actually pretty ugly.  You ruined oral sex for me.  Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  The emotional response is a good piece of advice.  Too often we make the mistake of being too polite in our scene work, probably because it's closer to the pussy-footing we do in our everyday conversations.  And, perhaps, the tendency to mimic the insipid interactions we have every day is a misguided attempt to make our work seem more realistic.

We were also encouraged to make physical or emotional movements before we speak to get ourselves out of our heads on stage.  The added bonus of making an emotional or physical movement before uttering a word is that your scene partner gets something to react to -- it puts less pressure on them to create something out of thin air.

To help with the night's emphasis on reactions, we played an immensely fun game called "Sentences."  We each wrote a personal sentence on a scrap of paper and tossed them on top of a table.  Then, you and your scene partner take five scraps of paper and put them in our back pockets.  (Except for a woman who wore a dress that had no pockets.  She held the papers in her hand.)  The papers were there to be used when we were at a loss for a reaction to what our partner was saying.  Gellman told us that the game is played poorly when the sentences are used as an initiation or in a manner equivalent to mad libs.  A highlight was a scene involving Bosnian janitors (man and woman) who were having a contentious conversation that delved into unrequited love.

The main thing we took away from this exercise is that if you get emotional on stage, then you can't fuck it up.  You just gotta go for it.  That being said, anger is the emotion that is used as a default because it's the easiest one to reach for. I'm guilty of this.

The challenge is to reach for other emotions, to go elsewhere on the palette.      

We then tried to put our knowledge to use in some improv games that we learned and payed numerous times in Levels A through E: 4 square and scene tag.  The basic principles that we worked on was to make physical choices, to react, to play with emotion, and to listen.

I had fun playing with this new group, but I missed my Saturday posse.

Head Games (It's You and Me, Baby)

It was one of those days.  One of those days where you're thinking about other things when you should be thinking about you're doing.  So, my scenework was basically for shit today.  Well, it happens.

We began by listing some current events topics at the beginning of class.  Topics such as the teachers' strike here in Chicago, the nutcase-dipshit who made the anti-Islam movie that has pissed off the nutcase-dipshit faction of the Islamic world, the brouhaha over the princess's boobs (is that France's revenge for Waterloo?), and Romney's "Obama supports the Islamic radicals" quip.  The point of this exercise was to get us thinking about how our improvised characters might mention these events during a scene to add depth to our characters and the scenes themselves.  I like that idea because it takes the action on stage out of a vacuum.

We spent a good chunk of our time on theoretical stuff.  Part of that discussion was the notion that being trained to create shows that are sold to an audience somehow compromises the content or the integrity of the show. Gellman was adamant that being able to learn this craft to communicate and connect with a broad audience is more sophisticated than just doing it for the amusement of your friends and their friends.  He uses IO as an example.  He says that when you go to a show at IO, chances are the audience consists of other improv students or other improvisers you've seen around town.  (True enough, I guess.)  His point was that communicating with a broader audience is more difficult, and it is not necessarily dumbing down your material.  If you just make other people in your improv group laugh, and nobody ever pays to see you perform that material, then your just having a circle jerk.

In our scenework, we spent an extensive amount of time on montages -- which will be a huge focus of our audition to be allowed to complete the conservatory.  As a preface to that work, Gellman shared a piece of advice that stuck with me: as an actor, your line is not over until your scene partner reacts/responds to your line.

In montages, the idea is to come out, take a few seconds with an action on stage, and check in with your partners before delivering lines.  Leading off with a line without seeing what's happening, who's on stage with you, and what they are doing can lead to some very bad beginnings to your scene.  For example, you say "Dad, I'm not going to college" but you're onstage with two female actors.  Or you start working with a wrench and say something about the car you're working on when the people behind you are bowling.  This goes against what many people are taught in their beginning classes -- to just say something as you are walking out.  Also, we were bluntly told that montages do not have call backs (or reincorporation) of previous scenes or characters.

We began class on hour early this week, which was kind of cool because we had our usual room for an hour after class ended.  We used that time to jam and practice our montages.

Damn, is that all I have to say about this week?  Fuck, I need to take better notes.

I Am A Man Who Will Fight For Your Honor

Back at it.

Once again, we got into things with some freeze tag. But before we began, Gellman shared a story about a classic Laurel & Hardy scene where they have to deliver a piano to a house in the Hollywood Hills and they have to go up 250 steps from Sunset Blvd. to get to the house.  His lesson from that story was that adding the stairs to that scene was the source of the comedy, and we need to add stairs (in a metaphorical sense) to our scenes to create comedy.

After our freeze tag warm-up, we had a review of last week's ground rules for dialogue and Gellman's personal rules for his class.  He expanded on one of the reasons for his no gender-bending rule: in some improv circles men play women because there are no women in the troupe, and there are often no women in the troupe because of the bullshit notion that "women aren't funny." That shit don't fly in Gellman's class.  And rightfully so.  During this part of class, he also shared a vitally important life lesson: "Junkies can't be trusted, especially when they are speedballing."

One of the drills that we did, which we also did last week, was sixty second relationship scenes.  Two people are on the stage, and the audience gives them a setting for their scene.  What the actors have to do during that scene is to stick to the dialogue guidelines (yes, and; statements; and stay in the present) and establish a relationship between their two characters.  It sounds easier than you'd think.  You can't just be obvious about the relationship (Hello, mom, I am your son, and I am going to come out as gay in this scene...).  It actually gets easier if you just look at your scene partner and react honestly to his or her cues, statements, and body language.

Some highlights of this exercise were Kris and [fuckican'trememberwhowasinthescenewithher] as sisters at a campground.  Sister A accused sister B of hating her soul because it was so beautiful and that's why people like her.  Another highlight was Dan and Kristen.  Dan was hitting on Kristin after she had told him not to do it.  He thought that restriction only applied for the previous shift as opposed to a blanket prohibition.  It was then revealed that she was particularly opposed to his advances because they are co-workers -- and cousins.

Gellman's tip during this exercise was that the scene works better when the characters are fighting for something or someone -- such as a couple fighting to keep their relationship going (even if they want different things out of the relationship, they still want to be together).  This idea of a clear exposition in the scene at the beginning is also usual for sketches because if a scene isn't working, a good place to start in trying to fix it is to go back to the beginning --the first sixty seconds -- and see if the characters relationships and objectives (what they are fighting for) are well defined.

Our next exercise was a wrinkle on the sixty second drill.  We each had to write down a line that we said to somebody during the previous week or that somebody said to us.  The line had to be person A saying something personal about themselves or the recipient of the line; it could not be about some third person.  So, we got on stage with our scene partner and the audience gave us a relationship and a setting.  Whoever went first said their line as the first line of the sixty-second scene.  During that sixty seconds, a scenario had to develop.  For the next scene, you and your scene partner have the same relationship, but you're given a new location, and it was the other person's turn to deliver their line first.

This was quite fun. My personal favorite was Mario and Siera as husband and wife.  In scene one, they were in the yard of their home in Boise, ID.  Mario's first line was "you're a prick." (Something a husband usually says to his wife.) In sixty seconds, they had the beginnings of a marital misunderstanding that was nuanced by a desire to make things work.  In the second scene, they were on a balcony at a resort in Puerto Vallarta. Siera began with "you really are a selfish person."  This couple had this funny scene where they both found common ground in that they are both selfish and put themselves before their spouse.  But hey, it's just peachy because even though I put myself first, honey, you're number two above all others.

The idea of using a line as the spark for a scene is a good one.  Gellman told us that one of his friends would keep a list of "overheards" that he'd use to begin scenes.  I'm going to steal that idea.

Knockin' On Mine

Last Saturday was the first day of Conservatory Two with Michael Gellman.  

When you mention to Second City veterans that you are taking a class with “Gellman,” they give you a knowing look.  The sort of look that suggest: “he’s a hard ass, fasten your seatbelt.”  Well, he started us off with a game of freeze tag.  I felt rusty.  As a group, we must have looked rusty, because Gellman asked us if we had “last fucking improvved six fucking months ago.”  And, so, it begins. 

Our freeze tag had more than one moment of awkward-man on woman action.  So much so that Gellman admonished the menfolk to not be afraid of women. He called us nerds.  He accused us of jerking off in our basements to Spy vs. Spy from Mad Magazine.  (What? I need to re-visit that because I never got a boner from Spy vs. Spy.) He also told us that not every scene needs to end with "fucking or sucking. I know that's what Tim O'Malley taught you, but ...."  

Gellman then asked us about interactions that we had with actual people in the past week. Many of these involved alcohol, including my story.  Oh well, we’re drunken clichés.

After that, we were drilled on why we are here.  We’re here to hone our skills to see if we have the chops to be actors for the Second City.  The purpose of the Conservatory’s first two levels is to distill what we’ve learnt in Levels A through E and to see if we’ve retained those lessons.  The acid test to see if retained these lessons is the audition at the end of Conservatory 2. 

To that end, we were reminded of dialogue guidelines in improv: (1) make statements; (2) yes, and; (3) stay in the fucking present.  And, incidentally, in a Second City scene, the audience should see a change in the character. 

We were also given some guidelines for the coming weeks.  (1) No gender-bending (i.e. men playing women and vice versa).  The reason is that the audience cannot suspend its disbelief at the gender-bend.  (2) Keep your bodily fluids inside you.  Not sure what that means. I’ll take it under advisement. (3) No sounds effects.  That one, even can I understand.

At that point, we given a history of improv.  Sorry, my notes for this segment of class are incoherent, but it boils down to this: our tradition began with kids saying “fuck you” to the grown ups. 

Before we got back into scene work, we were given some pointers.  Anger.  It ends a scene with argument or confrontation.  Fearful is better than angry.  We need to find out what’s underlying the anger, deal with it, and make a better scene as a result.

Fighting.  You have to build up to fight to get the audience on your side: you get pushed three times before you’ve had enough.  If you get pushed three times, then the audience thinks that it’s justifiable for you to snap.

Action.  Don’t stop the action on stage.  Your mind works better when you’re moving, and action is like putting another log on the fire – which is another way of saying “yes, and” to the scene. 

Well, off to have some real life experiences that do not involve alcohol.