The End of the World Show: Inception

View fullsize

End of the World Logo (by Mike Rubino)

I've been hard at work: at my job, the Pittsburgh Comedy Festival, and the four weeks I have been living and breathing The End of the World Show.

I thought I would write a series about my experience putting the show together -- as a journal for me and for anyone interested in the lessons I learned.

This maiden post is about where the show came from. I mentioned this briefly in the NakYouOut interview, but it one of the first questions people ask me. 

I had been toying with a big, theatrical improv production for many years. Scotch 'n' Soda did a few mainstage improvised productions in the years before I arrived (and one while I was at CMU) -- and that idea was always appealing to me. What if we did an improv show with a theater production schedule? Rehearse for a few weeks with a dedicated cast, put up a run of shows (build an audience, get some buzz in the press), and then all move on with our lives?

I've also been wanting to do an envelope show. I knew the concept but the term I got from Asaf Ronen's book Directing Improv. He describes an envelope show as one in which the improv -- in this case, short form games -- are motivated by a frame story, an envelope. I loved the idea of building up characters in rehearsal then playing them over the course of 4 weeks. Those characters could grow and arc over the course of the show, and we could really take the audience somewhere even as we play games. And further, that the games themselves would be affected by the envelope. They would not have that "here's what we're doing can I get a location?" feel because the actors (in the plot) are not improvisers. They're just people trying to save the planet. 

View fullsize

A painting that's been in my bedroom since I was a child

The final motivation was of course that I believe all improv is about people. I want to see true human relationships on stage. So I devised a scenario in which this was of the utmost importance -- in which humanity itself was at stake. My lifelong attraction to space (see photo) naturally drew me to the alien dystopia but it was just a convenient narrative to put on top of these themes.

Stay tuned! In the rest of the series, we will be looking at workshopping the form, the rehearsal process, collaborations, tech, press and more!

You also have 2 more weeks to see the finished product!

Play on the edge of failue

Well the once a week blogging plan fell off the rails for a while. I'm going to try to get back in the game. 

Me and 20 of my closest friends are heading to the Motor City in early August for the Detroit Improv Festival. I'm performing with Iguanatron and I'm really excited to take the duo to our first festival!

Greg and I have really been experimenting with the show a lot lately (under the tutelage of Sam Turich). When I started performing with Greg, it was like no improv I had ever done before. I couldn't stop to think, I had to just move, be in the moment, support, edit.

As we continued to grow and teach and coach and play together on a lot of other teams, this became less of a unique experience. The show was still fun, but it was not the boundary-pushing experience it once was. This is when Sam started working with us. Sam showed us how two guys who've performed at least every other week together for 6 years can surprise each other again. And more importantly, that we have to. We were getting comfortable, and comfortable is no way to play. 

I'm really excited about Detroit. It's an audience that won't love us just for being Brian and Greg. And we are working hard to make sure that we are on that edge where we really push each other.

*Credit to Ric Walker for the phrase "play on the edge of failure" 

How to teach improv?

In the past few years I have found myself stumbling into a fair amount of teaching -- at the Steel City Improv Theater and more recently at Carnegie Mellon -- and I've never been taught how to teach. I've never read literature or student-taught or studied different learning styles (which grinds the gears of the real teachers in my family).

With both software (how to write good software) and improv (how to do fun meaningful scenes more often), I find a similar problem: the masters just have a lot of experience. There are different schools of thought and most of it has nothing to do with learning rules and following them. It's a lot of context-sensitive applications of that experience. 

So how do you teach something that comes down to experience? There have been many discussions at the theater about this. While there are definite subtleties, I believe the philosophies break into two fundamental camps:

• Start with the basics: yes and, physical/object work, who/what/where, pattern/game. These are the lingua franca of improvisation that allow you to talk about early scenes. The theory is that learning the basics allow you to understand what you are doing when you transcend the rules. But: is it possible to lose the forest for the trees?
  
  
• Start the way you want to play. If you believe in true emotional connections, comfort and honesty, start there. If you believe in pattern and game, start there. The theory is that by doing good work students will discern the "rules" for themselves -- or their own rules -- and learn to follow their fun. Mick Napier was an early pioneer of this idea, and it has been wholly embraced by folks like Chris Trew of The New Movement (where they don't teach suggestions!). But: is it possible to feel overwhelmed and lost when you start at the end?

I don't believe there is one correct answer. I have been shifting more toward the latter approach but I find a lot of value in the former when coaching and with some groups of students.  

If anyone knows more than I do about teaching, or just has experiences to share -- I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

An open letter about suggestions

I believe improvisers should give suggestions only as a last resort.

In the Death Show, Greg gets a volunteer from the audience to give us his or her wallet or purse and we rifle through it for our suggestion. Twice, that person has said to me after the show, "I don't know if anyone else enjoyed it, but I thought the show was hilarious!"

That person felt as though the entire show revolved around them. And the chances that they come back to the theater (and tell their friends to come) multiply.

I am not the biggest fan of suggestions in the first place, but if we are going to get them, please let them come from real audience members. Preferably someone who's there for the first time. It seems often when someone asks for a suggestion -- before they've even finished asking -- someone I know in the crowd shouts something clever or interesting or funny. Just like on stage, we can't handle the silence.

But this takes away one of the most valuable experiences for those people coming to the show. That experience of watching their suggestion turn into 20 minutes of theater.

This is on all of us. I've seen performers at UCB ask for a suggestion from someone who's never seen the show before. Maybe we could do more of that (esp on weekends). But I do think when we're in the crowd, we could sit on our hands, so to speak. If an awkward pause has gone by, sure, support! Throw something out! But first give those paying customers a chance to be a part of the show.

Accessibility

I talk a lot about accessibility.​

I am currently in Singapore​​ and finding myself talking about accessibility with my good friend Yu Hsien. He does some (amazing) set design here. But he struggles with the perception of theater here. What is popular is not good and what is good is not popular. 

View fullsize

​Irony City and Hustlebot 11.15.07

The improv scene in the states is not all that bad, but I find that argument at the heart of why a lot of people dislike short form or narrative improv or any number of other forms. When Irony City first started performing, we did a lot of shows with a group in town called Hustlebot who did solely Harold. I would watch their sets and marvel at the simplicity and beauty of their games, the technical brilliance of their second and third beats. Then I'd hear people say, "Yeah those guys were ok but I enjoyed your games much more."

We were not better improvisers. But I think we did work that was more accessible to someone who's never seen improv. They could look at it and say, "Yeah, I know what's going on here." And that person is still a large percentage of the Pittsburgh audience.

​When performing to non-improvisers, we have two options:

1. Educate them to appreciate technically beautiful improvisation
2. Be cognizant of the accessibility of our work

​They are not mutually exclusive, especially since option 1 is a long-term option. Shows like Totally Free Mondays at the SCIT are in the option 1 camp. This is a free show where Harold has been performed every week for years. That gets students, friends, family, and the general public to learn the conventions of improvisation (edits, tags, pacing, etc.). FWIW Hustlebot was doing this too. My friends coming to see us did not  go regularly.

And while I love short form, ​you do not have to do short form to make something accessible. Give the audience some ground to stand on, something that they recognize from non-improvised work. Some shows follow a familiar format: LuPones improvises a musical or Midseason Replacement makes up a sitcom; others stick to a well-known genre: Crime Scene Improvisation. Even just telling a story with a beginning, middle and end, where the protagonist grows and changes will make the show more accessible to an audience used to written work.

​Not that any of that is easy, but I think it's important for a community working in Pittsburgh where the average audience member has seen little to no improv. 

Forming a new team

I remember Irony City's last round of (formal) auditions. We had forty+ people show up and cast two. That's a lot of talent we turned away!

And I mean it when I say talent. There were a ton of good people that just don't fit in our team. We wanted people who both complimented and accentuated the personality of our group, players who would make us better by being in the group.

Now that the Pittsburgh community is exploding it is much easier to form a team. You can just ask a few people whose name you know to play with you at cage match. But is that the best way?

I don't think so. There are many successful models for teams, but as I've been chatting with folks here, it seems often times they are formed haphazardly.

Here's how I would go about forming an indie team:

• Who do you absolutely love to play with? You get excited to do scenes with them. Here's your chance to do a lot more!
• Who do you admire most as a player? You love their style and want to know more about how they tick. Remember, you'll watch a lot of each other's work, get notes together, and hang out.
• Who plays the way you like to play? If you're a patient player, it might be good to have another patient player or two on your team. Especially early in your career.
• Who balances the group out? Who does a really good job at what you're weak at. Maybe you need a good straight man, or someone with a solid emotional core, a player who aggressively edits, etc.

Now look at your list. If, in your opinion, you are the weakest player on that team, it's probably the best team for you to be on!

How I think about short form

I really enjoyed performing short form for many years, and I still love watching it when it is compelling. I would say the same about long form -- anything can be done well or poorly and anything can be performed for entertainment, art, comedy or theater.

So how do I think about short form? Not much differently than long form actually. Many people do look at it differently. Because the games change every 5 minutes, they think, "We better have scenes that get there faster and get more laughs per minute." In truth, many long forms (aka Harold) typically have scenes shorter than 5 minutes. And in long form we encourage players to know their want / what their scene is about within the first few lines. So how much faster could you get to the point? Further, the audience typically does not know or care to know the difference. So why should we treat them so differently? As long as our scenework is compelling, they won’t care how we get from point A to B.

What practical affect does that have on my approach? I look at short form games/constraints as an opportunity to push my in a way I wouldn’t normally play. I mean that both in a larger sense (my work during some period) and a narrow one (this specific scene).

Let’s say I’m working with a group that tends to be very talky. We might think of some games or workshop some games to address this. For example, we might play Film Dub/Dub Scene*. Often when I see this game, there are a lot of jokes at the expense of the mechanism: a long line of gibberish turned into a short line of dialog or vice-versa, someone going against the intention of the player, etc. For this team, I would focus it differently. I’d think of it as an opportunity to focus on one thing at a time. If I’m acting in the scene I would think entirely on that: acting. How can I use blocking to help tell a story. Use my movement to create physical space where there is emotional distance. Listen to the dialog and punctuate beats with changes in movement. Initiate movement or space work as gifts to my dubber. And the same goes for dialog. I can just focus on dialog -- on creating natural lines that are begged for by what it happening on stage.

This to me is a fun way to play. And I kind of fun I don’t get to have a lot on stage in long form.

*a game in which 2-3 players do a scene in gibberish and 2-3 players stand off stage “dubbing” the dialog.

Acting while improvising

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to host Amie Roe and Kristen Schier when they were visiting Pittsburgh to perform and give a couple killer workshops (not to mention stop by Talking Shop!).

I always jump at the opportunity to stay with and host improvisers because of all the great conversations that emerge. I talked to them about a lot of topics (not all improv, I am not a monster), but I did get into a great conversation with Kristen about using more of my acting chops in my improv work.​

I had worked with some improvisers this past winter on exploring this space. For me, it was more about getting back in touch with my acting work. Some were more experienced actors and some were new to acting, so we did basic text-to-stage concepts. I was excited to play with how to improvise some of the homework an actor does. ​

Kristen, I was surprised and delighted to learn, says you don't. It's not about improvising the homework. Being able to in an instant or while a scene is progressing understand each tactic and how it will affect your reading and could affect your scene partner. Where acting has really helped her is her ability to understand her instrument.​

As an actor, her instrument is her body and her voice. Improvisers are so quick to jump to dialog and not truly understand how to emote with our full bodies. How to release emotion on vowels and with our breath, how to use our full instrument to communicate. So when we make a choice or are given a gift we are used to using our entire instrument to embody it -- that is the gift acting brings.

​I am not yet sure where to take this, but I am excited about having some direction there.

And But Because

When teaching the early days of "yes, and," I focus on the word "and." Word choice is often demonstrative, and our intentions are revealed when we choose different words. If you really listen to yourself and the sentence you are creating, the words you say after "and" will likely be different than the words you will say after "but" or "because." Sometimes I describe what those other words tend to signify, descriptions I got from a book somewhere sometime.

Recently, one of my students asked me to break that down for them, so Iooked for that reference everywhere. I even asked some other SCIT teachers. No sign of it.​

So I figured I'd recreate it from my memory and my own experience and put it up here for reference. As a bonus, if anyone knows where this is from, please let me know!

• "Yes, and" says I agree with what you're saying and am going to build on it
• "Yes because" and "Yes so" say I heard what you said but I want to follow the plot of the story rather than the emotional truth of what's happening between us right now.
• "Yes, but" says I heard what you said but I think my idea is better. Or I heard but I don't feel comfortable with where this is going

Of course, over time we focus less on words and more on agreeing to the emotional truth, the game, the offer being made. But I think this distinction is interesting early on.​

Amie and Kristen on Talking Shop in April!

View fullsize

Photo credit Erin Pitts

In just two short weeks, I will be back on the mic and interviewing New York and Philly natives Amie Roe and Kristen Schier!

I am so excited to talk shop with these incredibly talented improvisers. I first saw them in Jan 2011 when Irony City coordinated a trip they took to Pittsburgh for a performance and workshop. I also made a point to see them at the Del Close Marathon last year and they were easily one of the best shows at the festival.

But don't take my word for it. The Amie and Kristen Show has won 16 awards at festivals throughout the US and Canada, and they were voted Best Improv Group by their peers Philadelphia's 2011 Witout Awards.

​Mark your calendar now for Saturday, April 20 11pm at the Steel City Improv Theater.