An Improv Game: Arms

I spent Sunday with seven other people in an improv class with Matt Smith.

Improv was the part of my first acting class I liked the least.  I knew it was necessary if we were going to turn Mr. Stick-Up-The-Ass into Mr. Mellow Quick-Wits.  But I didn’t like it.

But this class was much fun as Jesse, the director of my play, had promised.  And at the end of the day I felt the stick, if not fully extracted, had at least been loosened a little.  Let me share one of the activities we did.

Call it Arms.  You stand in front of your group with your hands clasped behind your back.  Your partner stands behind you and sticks his arm through yours, so at a glance it looks like his arms are yours.

Ready?  Someone throws out a topic.  For me it was bees.  So you start riffing on your topic.  But you have to build on whatever gesture the arms are making.  Normally you speak a thought and reinforce your thought with your gestures.  Now the gesture leads, and you have to follow with a line of thinking.

So the arms made an expansive open-handed gesture—I described the search over hill and dale for colorful flowers.  A finger pointed—the bees zero in on a target.  The hands go into my pockets (slightly risky gesture)—hey, we weren’t really that interested in bees anyway.

One thing to keep in mind: the gesturer has to hold a gesture long enough for the speaker to work out something to do with it. 

This stuff can be fun.  You just have to find the right people to do it with.  Do people still play parlor games, the way they did fifty, sixty years ago?  Some of my friends would get a kick out of these improv games.  Others might say, “Roger, I can see those acting classes you’re taking must get kinda weird.”

Meeting My First Reader

A few friends have read LIFTERS and told me how much they liked it.  But they’re friends, and strongly biased in my favor.  Today I talked with a woman who is a student at the Lifetime Learning Center, where I’m the director.  I don’t know her beyond the casual chatting I do with the three hundred or so students who take classes with us.  But she had overheard me telling someone about the novel, and asked where to find it.

She came to me bubbling with enthusiasm.  What a sweetheart!  She’d recently had the experience of reading an e-novel published by a local author someone had recommended to her, and had been disappointed.  “Probably never would have found a publisher,” was her judgment.  But my book was great, she said.  She loved the writing.  I hear that praise with caution; it’s possible to write fluently but not have much of a story to tell.  She asked me about the research.  “You can tell you did your homework,” she said.

That led to a conversation I’ve had before in book discussion groups.  Is a novelist who brings historical events into his story required to be accurate?  Those discussions sometimes become a debate between what I call the historians and the storytellers.  The historians argue that you can create dialogues that no one could have recorded, but you shouldn’t alter what is known as historical fact.  The storytellers say the novelist can do what she wants as long as she holds the reader’s interest and faith in the world she is creating.

I could go either way on that.  I find myself intrigued by the motives of certain historical figures, and enjoy speculating about them in what I write.  An example is the wrestler Dr. Roller in my story.  There is no documentation that will get to the root of his ambivalent behavior.  You can read the newspaper accounts, and you’ll be left, as I was, free to speculate.

But newspaper accounts of life in Seattle during the first decade of the twentieth century were the starting point for my story, and I came down on the side of the historians.  Nothing that I knew had actually happened was altered in my slice of early Seattle life.

First Audition

Saturday evening I stood outside Studio B at Theater Puget Sound, the room where I’d taken my beginning acting class a year ago.  Two other people sat outside the room focusing on scripts.  At eight sharp the stage manager stepped out and invited me into the room.

I was introduced to the four auditors.  How did I feel at that moment?  A brief flash to many years ago, walking into a room of professors for my Ph.D. orals.  But different.  Graduate school is about writing and taking written exams.  Though you may have done mock orals (I hadn’t), you really aren’t trained for oral performance.  For an acting audition that’s exactly what you’ve prepared for.

So I was anxious, but nothing like that afternoon in Wheeler Hall.  I felt I was well rehearsed as far as remembering the lines of the two monologues I had prepared.  I had a bit of fear I would blank out, but some confidence that once I got the first line out the rest would flow without having to think it.  And that’s how it worked out.

How did I do?  Okay, I’d say.  The lines did flow.  How good was my acting expressiveness?  I’d say about 80% of the expressiveness I achieved when rehearsing the day before on my I-phone video.  For my first monologue, Duke Senior’s address to his group of followers in the woods, I scanned across the auditors, but didn’t focus on them.  I’d read an article on auditioning that said don’t speak to your auditor, which forces him to act back to you. 

But when I was done, they asked me to do the monologue again, this time addressing them as the Duke’s group.  So I did.

I didn’t get a part in the play (a Jacobean revenge tragedy).  So Roger, compare the rejection experiences of submitting a pitch to an agent for a novel and auditioning for a part in a play.
In the audition, you know you had someone’s full attention, not the equivalent of an eighteen-year-old intern’s eight-second scan of your pitch letter.  The audition response came the next day.  The auditor’s invitation to audition again for his next project may be the standard courtesy everyone gets, but it at least gives you the opportunity to think you were more or less one of the finalists for a part.  I spent a day experiencing disappointment, but also a sense that I’d broken the ice and would be able to do this again.  Hey, who gets a part on their first audition?

So practice, practice, practice.

Offramp the Play Actually Happens

A year ago I attended a play at Freehold’s Black Box Theater in Seattle called Web, a dark reimagining of the Charlotte’s Web children’s story.

The play stimulated my curiosity about acting.  Freehold offers acting classes. I took some of those classes.  In February our instructor challenged her class to propose a performance for what Freehold calls its annual Incubator Series.  Two of the students in the class submitted an idea for performing a scene from an established play, one proposed a performance by his improv group, and I submitted a hastily written play.

Offramp, a play, about a panhandler at a freeway exit who is approached by an organization demanding a cut of his take, was accepted.  With the help of a Freehold mentor, I found a director, a stage manager and five actors.  Through the month of March I watched the words I’d written become a performance as director and actors sweated through the rehearsal process.  The director was a little leery of having the author on-site—he’d done this once before with an author who kept rewriting lines through the rehearsals. I promised to be a passive observer eager to learn about how a director works with actors, and that’s what I was.

The two performances took place this weekend.  I can’t say too much yet about the experience of watching my play because I’m still absorbing its impact.  Today I’d just say this:  If a year and a month ago someone had suggested as we left the theater that I would write a play that would be performed in that same Black Box theater, with one of the leading actors in Web having a role in my play, I’d have said they shouldn’t be smoking whatever it was they were.

Life lesson:  sometimes the stream of causes and effects in our lives carries us beyond what even a vivid imagination could foresee.  Case in point for me:  Offramp.