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.

LIFTERS Is Out There Now in the Ezone

After having no success finding an agent willing to represent a novel about a female detective working in early Twentieth Century Seattle, I decided to step into the brave new world of e-publishing.  Luckily for me my wife Rita is on friendly terms with html and its kin.  I probably would have permanently fused my wiring if I had tried to format the book myself.  So we punched the button; LIFTERS in now out there in the ezone.  I learned the book was the 125,799th e-publication as of last Friday.  Well that's heartening news.  I feel like the salmon smolt who's decided to leave his little pool in the creek and point his nose towards the river.

We'll do a little e-marketing, as we're all encouraged to do.  I'm not sure how many of the people linked to me by two or three degrees of separation read novels on devices.  I find myself looking forward with anticipation to feedback.  I'll relish the good, try to deal with the bad, and wince at the indifferent.  So go ahead, risk $1.99 and let me know what you think.

Writing a Play, Hearing It Read by Real Actors

Three months ago it never would have occurred to me to try writing a play.  But in the voice class I took at Freehold Theater in the fall the teacher told us about the theater's annual Incubator series.  "Go ahead," she said, "try something."  I had written a short short story I called "Offramp."  The story is basically a sales pitch being made by a guy who approaches panhandlers and demands forty percent of their take in exchange for marketing support and not having them beaten up.

It dawned on me I could work up what happens to the panhandler and to the enforcer who comes to work him over after the initial pitch is declined.  I spent a week or so writing a script, checking the internet to see how to format a play, and sent it in. 

What do you know, "Offramp" was accepted, one of fourteen works to be presented at the end of March.  I found a  director who liked the script, who in turn had auditions and selected five actors and a stage manager.  Last week we all sat around my living room and did the first read-through.  It's hard to describe the experience of hearing a scene you imagined and wrote down the words for being brought to life by experienced actors. 

I learned something worth pondering in the discussion after the read-through.  Jesse, the director, encouraged the actors to talk about what was going on behind the lines, what they felt about the characters they were portraying.  One said the play was about mercy.  Another said it was about fatality.
Jesse asked me what I thought the themes were.  I was reluctant to say much because I didn't want to constrain the actors' creativity. 

But I realized I didn't actually have much to say.  I did not write the play with a theme or big idea in mind.  I imagined some people in a particular situation and wrote down what I imagined they'd say.  A very bottom-up process.  I listened to the actors' ideas, and realized they had a grasp of the whole more complete than mine.  The creator of the trees may not be able to see the forest.  I can't wait to see how they develop these characters in rehearsal.

The Novel and Its Cover

I have been working with an artist in Portland on a cover for LIFTERS.  I was surprised at how blank my mind went when I tried to think about covers.  I could remember only a few from recently read novels.  Some are photos, some are drawings ranging from semi-realistic to abstract.  I would be interested in talking with a publisher about "what sells" if you're lucky enough to have a copy of your book facing forward on the shelf.

Apart from graphics, the question is how closely the images reflect the events of the novel.  I decided I wanted fashionable gloves, which are the key item stolen by the lifters from department stores, and an image suggesting mountaineering, another major theme.  The artist found a good image, a silhouette of a climber in a vaguely threatening posture, an ice pick overhead ready to be swung down into the ice or into someone's head.  I added a third thematic element, a poker hand.  Several of the covers I looked at picked up two thematic elements from the novel; I've gone for three.  Is the cover too busy?  Does anyone look at it that closely?  I'll wait for feedback.