The Thinking Man’s Improv

On Monday, I went and saw my friend Biddle’s show, The Monday Show, which is a long-form improv show that uses the art form to explore a themes, such as “Sex and Love,” “Beginnings,” etc. The show I saw was “War and Politics,” and it really blew me away. The performers were by and large willing to go to places—heavy and serious places—that I have rarely seen with improv shows and they went there comfortably, taking their time to establish the scene and bring the audience with them. The few times I’ve seen anything comparable in terms of dramatic improv, the performers went through the dramatic scenes seeming uncomfortable, almost apologetic for taking the show there, as if they weren’t sure it was okay to use improv for anything other than silliness and ephemera. It was really something to see a show try for something more, and frequently hit their mark dead on.

Afterward, Biddle and I had a long conversation about improv and theatre, in general and in Chicago. This is a function of their training. Improvisers are taught either short-form improv, which most commonly takes the form of sketch comedy, or long-form, which in Chicago, takes the form of the Harold, which is long in theory, but is actually composed of numerous sketches. And at the larger houses in Chicago, while it’s taught that people can do dramatic improv, by and large people not bringing in big laughs are ignored or dropped. As a result, the schools encourage improv that is jokey, and consequently devoid of real emotion; be they pleasant emotions or hurtful ones, everything felt or expressed in the shows is always done so with minimal after effect, and the improviser’s body language makes it clear that they aren’t really serious.

One of the trends I’ve noticed among the improvisers I’ve met in Chicago (and some actors, although I’ve met few actors who aren’t also improvisers here) is that there’s a quality to many of them that red-flags them almost immediately in conversation. I used to think of it as always being on, which is to say always trying to be the center of attention, but it’s different than that. I came to realize, in talking with Biddle, that it has more to do with always being in sketch-comedy world, where nothing you do has consequences. Emotion isn’t something expressed, except on the most shallow of levels, covered with the glossy veneer of a joke. In talking with them, they’ll happily say seriously insulting things to you and then act like you should learn to take a joke. I have a hard time imagining any of them expressing an actual emotion like love or anger or what have you without covering it up as a joke. Many of them say things like, “I’m not really an actor; I’m an improviser.” Which is crap. I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, in fact. Improv is acting, though it be a form without a script, and requiring a different set of skills than “standard” acting. That they seemingly teach otherwise in the big Chicago schools, and that they will take anyone, even people without any real training in acting or theatre, through advanced courses, makes me think these places are just huge money factories, to be avoided by all.

And it makes me happy and sad all at once that shows like The Monday Show are out there. Happy because they are so damn intelligent and it’s good to see people using such a versatile art for good ends. Sad because they are so often ignored. So go see it. It’s a great show and only runs for two more weeks. I’ll be there for both of them.

And now it’s time for Slide…

I promised it for many entries, and just when you’ve begun to think I wasn’t going to make good on the promise, Slide.

Tantalus is already well at work on our next show, Slide, which is described by the producer as a “philosophical groove musical” based on Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. That’s really all I can say about it at this point, because we’re only a week or two into the process and we don’t have a script yet. What we have is a concept, which strays from The Jungle in terms of location and time period for the purpose of universality and metaphor, and a few songs and the beginnings of a script. The producer, my friend Ed, described it to someone as being an airplane on the tarmac about to takeoff. Personally, I think it’s more like a group of people in a room with a diagram of the basic principles of aerodynamics. Maybe we’ve begun to build a wing or two, but we won’t be testing them for at least another week.

This project is in the interesting position, one I’m not envious of, of coming on the heels of a show that was very powerful and exceeded anyone’s expectations in terms of success. It’s a little like being the guy who had to follow the Beatles the first time they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. There are now vast expectations of what our company can do, and it will be a difficult task to live up to them. Being the first show to try to keep alive what we’ve begun is an awkward position to be in.

That said, I think it can live up to those expectations. The people working on the show are all very talented in their ways, and come to meetings with suggestions and arguments. Which is good, because, as Ed also said, anything good is worth fighting about. There are a couple of things that I worry about in it. Keeping continuity in it, and avoiding lots of random elements thrown in just because they seem neat is one of them. Which is more or less why I took the role of the script editor (a.k.a. the Narrative Nazi)—to make sure those many random elements (such as a society that created an industry just to randomly destroy objects for no reason) don’t get out of control in the show. Which means I’m a bit of a hard ass a lot of the time, and that’s okay by me. The Jungle is meaty enough without lots of excess additives and filler (that’s a little meat-packing joke).