Garage Stories
An amazing thing happened at last week's Saturday evening show. The guys were playing a game that involved an audience member. The audience member give a little information about themselves, then the improvisors enact a day-in-their-life while the volunteer sits at the wing of the stage and a) rings a bell when the performers do something likely to happen or b) honks a horn when they do something not likely to happen in their lives. It's not high art, this game, but it somehow yields some of the best scenes in the Saturday shows.
The amazing thing happened in this game with a middle-aged audience member who turned out to be an environmental engineer, "Fred." The scene was funny, the guys were exploiting the fact that Fred had come with a woman he assured them was "just a friend." The scene goes:
Marie, I'm not looking for anything other than a friend right now! (bing)
Marie, I'm not at all interested in you sexually! (bing)
Marie, you're the closest totally platonic friend I have! (bing)
As the scene goes on, it becomes clear that Fred is ringing a positive on nearly everything. Finally the improvisor performing Fred, who is comfortable being political, says... well, it went like this:
No Marie, I have to go to work now! (bing)
I have to go save the environment! (bing)
Because those damn Republicans have passed another bill damaging the environ-- (HONK)
Fred honks the liberal schtick. Holy shit. Fred the volunteer is a Republican. This is a total shock to the audience because, hell, the guy's an environmental engineer, and after all this is a theatre with an "-re", the normal audience loves Bush-bashing of any sort. I froze in my seat, totally expecting the entire house to boo Fred the audience volunteer off the stage. But the amazing thing of the night was that they didn't boo. They didn't even react with a "Oh no he didn't" collective jeer. In fact, the audience erupted with the kind of laughter only reserved for inebriated late-night audiences. The performers on stage froze like me, only they had giant grins on their faces like kids enjoying the fact they'd gotten caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Why did this typically liberal Inman Park audience love Fred the Conservative? I think they were too wrapped up in the story, that's all. In improv games, I'm told, the audience has an expectation that the scene needs to fulfill, and each offer made by the performer is executed by the volunteer ringing or honking. In this case, it didn't matter what the content of the execution was. In fact, what made it a show-stopper was the complete about-face reversal in expectation. You could tell by the faces on the performers that it was a magic moment. Fred's a conservative! Holy shit!
True to the game, the next offer went: "Let's go beat up Al Gore!"
Today I stayed late at the theatre to entertain this 5 year-old kid who's the son of one of the improvisors here. His mom (who also works at the theatre in design) was in a production meeting and his dad was coming soon to pick him up. I imagine the order from his mother was something like, "Go play with the intern." So the kid spent 30 minutes showing me all sorts of skateboarding tricks on this pint-sized Incredible Hulk board, but I was more amazed at the imagination this kid had. At one point he had me "videotape" his tricks, so I pretended to hold this big heavy camera over my shoulder and focus the lens on his board. He started calling me "cameraboy" and for ten minutes, he would always point out when I wasn't filming him anymore. In fact, he insisted that I bring my invisible camera with me whenever we went somewhere.
I could give a lot of other details, but the fact is that little kids have such more vibrant minds than we do. As adults I think our streams of thought start to flow in predictable ruts, river beds dug by ourselves or others. (Nowhere is this more clear than university classes, in which I seem to be writing the same kind of papers over and over again with the same predictable argument style and conclusion). Kids though seem to have thought processes that flood the landscape. Uncontrolled and undefined they are, but the scope and power of them is sometimes breathtaking.
If there was only some way to retain or revive the force of imagination from the younger unformed mind, life might be a little less predictable. Keith Johnstone is an old improv fella, and in his book Impro, leant to me by Tim at DG, he says that he always uses an exercise on his students that guarantees they'll perceive the world like a kid, if only temporarily. He has the students walk around a room or local spot, and point to ten different object. For every objects, they have to look at it and speak the name of a totally different object at random. So I might point at a window and say "clock" then point at a ceiling fan and say "strawberry." Johnstone claims that every time he does it, he's left feeling like colors are more vibrant, light is sharper, and the ordinary surroundings look like new again.
Time for bed and back-pains.
An amazing thing happened at last week's Saturday evening show. The guys were playing a game that involved an audience member. The audience member give a little information about themselves, then the improvisors enact a day-in-their-life while the volunteer sits at the wing of the stage and a) rings a bell when the performers do something likely to happen or b) honks a horn when they do something not likely to happen in their lives. It's not high art, this game, but it somehow yields some of the best scenes in the Saturday shows.
The amazing thing happened in this game with a middle-aged audience member who turned out to be an environmental engineer, "Fred." The scene was funny, the guys were exploiting the fact that Fred had come with a woman he assured them was "just a friend." The scene goes:
Marie, I'm not looking for anything other than a friend right now! (bing)
Marie, I'm not at all interested in you sexually! (bing)
Marie, you're the closest totally platonic friend I have! (bing)
As the scene goes on, it becomes clear that Fred is ringing a positive on nearly everything. Finally the improvisor performing Fred, who is comfortable being political, says... well, it went like this:
No Marie, I have to go to work now! (bing)
I have to go save the environment! (bing)
Because those damn Republicans have passed another bill damaging the environ-- (HONK)
Fred honks the liberal schtick. Holy shit. Fred the volunteer is a Republican. This is a total shock to the audience because, hell, the guy's an environmental engineer, and after all this is a theatre with an "-re", the normal audience loves Bush-bashing of any sort. I froze in my seat, totally expecting the entire house to boo Fred the audience volunteer off the stage. But the amazing thing of the night was that they didn't boo. They didn't even react with a "Oh no he didn't" collective jeer. In fact, the audience erupted with the kind of laughter only reserved for inebriated late-night audiences. The performers on stage froze like me, only they had giant grins on their faces like kids enjoying the fact they'd gotten caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Why did this typically liberal Inman Park audience love Fred the Conservative? I think they were too wrapped up in the story, that's all. In improv games, I'm told, the audience has an expectation that the scene needs to fulfill, and each offer made by the performer is executed by the volunteer ringing or honking. In this case, it didn't matter what the content of the execution was. In fact, what made it a show-stopper was the complete about-face reversal in expectation. You could tell by the faces on the performers that it was a magic moment. Fred's a conservative! Holy shit!
True to the game, the next offer went: "Let's go beat up Al Gore!"
Today I stayed late at the theatre to entertain this 5 year-old kid who's the son of one of the improvisors here. His mom (who also works at the theatre in design) was in a production meeting and his dad was coming soon to pick him up. I imagine the order from his mother was something like, "Go play with the intern." So the kid spent 30 minutes showing me all sorts of skateboarding tricks on this pint-sized Incredible Hulk board, but I was more amazed at the imagination this kid had. At one point he had me "videotape" his tricks, so I pretended to hold this big heavy camera over my shoulder and focus the lens on his board. He started calling me "cameraboy" and for ten minutes, he would always point out when I wasn't filming him anymore. In fact, he insisted that I bring my invisible camera with me whenever we went somewhere.
I could give a lot of other details, but the fact is that little kids have such more vibrant minds than we do. As adults I think our streams of thought start to flow in predictable ruts, river beds dug by ourselves or others. (Nowhere is this more clear than university classes, in which I seem to be writing the same kind of papers over and over again with the same predictable argument style and conclusion). Kids though seem to have thought processes that flood the landscape. Uncontrolled and undefined they are, but the scope and power of them is sometimes breathtaking.
If there was only some way to retain or revive the force of imagination from the younger unformed mind, life might be a little less predictable. Keith Johnstone is an old improv fella, and in his book Impro, leant to me by Tim at DG, he says that he always uses an exercise on his students that guarantees they'll perceive the world like a kid, if only temporarily. He has the students walk around a room or local spot, and point to ten different object. For every objects, they have to look at it and speak the name of a totally different object at random. So I might point at a window and say "clock" then point at a ceiling fan and say "strawberry." Johnstone claims that every time he does it, he's left feeling like colors are more vibrant, light is sharper, and the ordinary surroundings look like new again.
Time for bed and back-pains.
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