This week, my one team Player Piano was coached by Megan Neuringer of DeCoster. One of the things she was really pushing was to stop getting in our heads about the rules of improv and to just react naturally and with emotions. Once we started doing that, we started actually having a lot of fun, our scenes got funnier and we were able to naturally heighten. This Harold wasn’t perfect, but we all felt a lot more free and third beat connections seemed to flow easier and without us having to fully think about them. Made me think of Will’s post here. I don’t know about the other guys, but I certainly didn’t start scenes with the thought that I would make connections, and the connections just organically came.

This was also the first Harold I’ve done since the end of 401 and working on notes has paid off. In both group games, I held back and then was able to make some tagouts and do some fun work on the backline. I was also less screamy, and in my scenes with Will tried to initiate with different emotions so that I wouldn’t automatically go to anger. I think that in my other scenes with Joel where I was arguing with him, I had a legitimate reason to be angry, but I never let that anger carry over into violence, so that felt good (though in one of the scenes in our exercises, I let loose with insane anger and was so consumed by it that I was able to say some funny and weird things “Blood is the unluckiest fluid!”)

Another thing Megan was pushing us to do was to only deal with the information given to us at the top of the scene. Instead of inventing things that we had to bring in after the first couple lines, the idea was to keep it simple and to never deviate from that originary idea. You do less work and end up having a lot more fun. We’re trying to combine that with some advice we got from Gavin Spieller in a workshop we had where the idea is to agree to the very first thing and to never deviate from that thing so that we’re all sure we’re playing the same game and not simply different games that all revolve around the same idea.

So, all these things combined made Harold #23 probably the most fun Harold I’ve participated in. I wasn’t searching desperately for ideas and second beats weren’t a problem – or at least I wasn’t bereft of ideas for second beats.

This was performed on Friday, March 26th and we used scene painting for the opening. The suggestion was arthritis, and the scenes were a graveyard with nice grave for celebrities and a pit for common people, an old person’s house where everything is protected, and a pharmacy where everything is arranged idiosyncratically.

1st beats: Joel and I were digging the grave of Corey Haim. At first I played this scene super-what-one-would-expect-from-trying-to-do-improv. Megan sidecoached us to just have a natural reaction. And the scene got a ton funnier from there. Joel wanted to piss on the grave because Haim was a shitty actor, and even though I agreed, I didn’t want him to because I thought you should still respect a human death. The second scene was Cory and Aaron as a husband and pregnant wife. Cory didn’t want there to be any negative stimuli, so he wouldn’t allow Aaron to watch the Spike channel. Eventually, Cory was talking directly into Aaron’s womb to the fetus. Scene three was Will and me, and Will was sorting something. I came out already with an emotion so that I wasn’t naked and picked sadness because I don’t play that a lot. I sorted too, and eventually Will discussed how he was sorting candy by a certain system. I just kept crying more and more, and eventually said “I don’t like how you sort candy.” Edit.

Group Game 1: Cory is mad at Will for rearraging his Netflix queue. Joel and I tag them out, and are Netflix employees confused as to why Cory’s queue is fucked up. Cory and Will tag us back out and are arguing about the queue again. The Megan sidecoaches us again and says that I started a pattern of tagouts, I better keep it going, even if I don’t have anything. It was a great note, and Joel and I tagged back in, and found a joke pretty quickly. Not a great joke, as it hinged upon the queue being filled with porno, but a joke all the same.

2nd beats: I had an idea for an analogous scene, but it was too real to follow that first beat about Cory Haim and kind of fell flat. This is of course my big weakness. Every once and a while, I’ll seize upon a good second beat, but a lot of the time it’s not really analogous or it doesn’t play the game right. This was about me trying to stop Joel from spraypainting on a church because he didn’t like that they got away with so much molesting. I agreed, but didn’t think one should deface a church. It had the moments in there, but not the game really. The second scene was Aaron as a surgeon and Cory as a nurse helping on an operation. Cory kept second-guessing Aaron and then would talk to the anesthetized patient like he did to the fetus in the 1st beat. The third scene was me frightened of Will’s toy trains because they reminded me of the Holocaust. It got kind of complicated when it didn’t need to be, but it was more successful as a second beat than my scene with Joel.

Group Game 2: Aaron, Cory, Joel are in an old age home. Joel thinks he’s dying because he swallowed gum. I was on the backline and because Megan was coaching us and DeCoster always does fun and weird cartoony stuff, I had the idea to stand behind Joel and in a menacing voice say, “Specter of Death!” This continued when Will came into see if the others wanted to play canasta or something, and the Specter of Fun was behind him. Then when Cory and Will were ignoring Joel, the Specter of Jerks was behind them.

3rd beats: Joel wants to brand Angelina Jolie’s baby with a cattle brand. (I only thought of this today, but it would have been smart for me to talk to the baby like Cory talked to the fetus/patient, but I am dumb and missed that opportunity. Cory called me out to do a scene about being scared by an actual train, and Will and Joel were sorting Netflix movies and were intentionally putting them out of order, so I said, “Specter of Jerks!” behind them. There was one more scene with Aaron and Cory that was funny, but I forget what it was.

All in all, way more fun and way easier to play than any other. Think this was a good breakthrough practice.

In 401, you get personal notes form the teacher about what to work on, and my notes have been 1) to not be so loud all the time and 2) to play slower. Kevin told me that I’m a very supportive player, but I often rush and don’t let games moves hit, and not just that, but I don’t let the scene naturally unfold and force game moves instead of recognizing them when they come along. That last one wasn’t his exact note, but I extrapolated a bit from what he said.

So in those Harolds, I definitely tried to say less, play more emotionally and not rush out for every group game immediately, but to sit back and wait to see what’s needed. This paid off in a number of scenes. In one group game, C was cutting into a cake, and everyone else was out with him, which gave me the opportunity to scream on the backline as someone in the cake. And because I wasn’t just saying anything to fill up the space, I was able to sweep everyone away then, and be the guy in the cake earlier, looking into an oven saying, “I don’t see anything in here but a big cakepan filled with batter.”

All of this also paid off in a non-Harold scene from the last class, where I played an angry character, but a simmering anger that never boiled over. The scene was fun and interesting and it freed me up to think quickly and say funny things because I wasn’t 1) looking to say funny things and 2) wasn’t panicking because of the silence.

Harold number 21 also had a good first beat with a solid game and my character had a real point of view. In the opening (scene painting) there was a waiting room with machines and posters and people giving themselves examinations, so I had the idea to initiate as a doctor who is packing up his practice because he feels he’s been replaced by machines. My scene partner is telling me that there still needs to be someone to interpret the results, but I refuse to believe him. However, I completely dropped this game in the second and third beats, which is a big thing I have a problem with. I get game and understand it, but I have problems with following through with it in second and third beats.

In the class show, Harold number 22, performed on Sunday, February 28th, I showed both sides of my playing ability. On one hand, I was very reserved. In my beat, I went out with A and B, and we were in a videogame world, where A initiated with, “I don’t feel in control of my life.” Great idea. I was kind of sidelined in the conversation, and was just standing there though, until someone on the backline as a kid playing the videogame said that his character was frozen. So I decided to freeze for the rest of the scene. I felt fucking awful about doing this, but I wanted to “yes” my teammate. So I took Kevin’s note to it’s ultimate extreme, neither talking nor moving for an entire scene while I stood mid-stage.

The second beat, I still felt like shit because of my earlier choice, so I held back, which I was glad of because  A and B came out again in the video game world and mentioned that my character had gotten hurt, so I decided to come out as a small Mario character, all scrunched down. A then gave me a mushroom, and I grew. As the scene progressed, I once again got hit, and fell and then got back up as small Mario. When questioned by B about why I keep getting hurt, I was able to hit the game and scream, “I’m not in control of anything!” It felt good, and was only possible because I waited instead of brashly running out. I did scream though.

I was mostly not doing things in this Harold though out of fear. My first couple bits in the scene painting didn’t get a lot of laughs and it spooked me a bit because I usually add funny stuff in Player Piano scene paintings. Then in the first scene, I had an idea, but was scared to do it, and it was totally the right move, and I kicked myself afterward. It’s that fucking fear. I’ve been playing way more fearlessly lately, but it still creeps up and makes you doubt your ideas. This Harold though was rough because I was playing scared and in addition, a lot of my ideas got stepped on, which was kind of comical in a way. Still, it’s my fault for not being confident with my ideas in the first place.

The challenge Kevin had given me was to not play angry characters in these. Now, the thing is, I don’t usually play only one kind of emotion or one kind of character. In the Player Piano show last night, I played worried/sad and happy/frustrated in two separate scenes. In most practices, I can play a (relatively truncated for my skill level) range of emotions/characters/opinions, but in class I seem to be falling into angry characters. I’ve been thinking why this is so, and I think that because Harolds are so difficult, I default to a safe acting mode – angry is a super-easy emotion to play for me – or perhaps even externalize some of my frustration and fear as an actor and channel that into my character. It’s tough to really play fun scenes and find the joy though when the character is needlessly angry.

I also got a note today that I tend to talk too much in scenes. This all connects together with everything I’ve been working on. Something Terry has been pushing us to do is to confront what we fear in scenes and to do that thing we fear. I think I’m afraid of silence because I think the audience takes silence for “The improvisers don’t know what to do.” As well, I fill up scenes with words instead of emotions, even though in the end, what people connect with is emotions. My desire to write in scenes, say, to do funny one-liners like my friends, gets in the way of my ability to emote and to heighten those emotions. In my Armando Diaz class on Sunday, I did a scene where I didn’t even talk. My scene partner and I were stretching, and he was saying how the run we’re about to go on was just casual, that just because my ex-wife was now dating him and that he got the promotion at work, and I lost my job doesn’t mean that the race meant anything, etc. The first time we did the scene, I talked. Just tersely and succinctly, but I was replying with what I thought would be funny lines. And the class laughed. But the second time, Armando pushed me to heighten my movements, so instead of verbally replying, I just stretched more and more violently, and the class responded much more than the first time.

While I’m looking at what I do wrong, I often get fixated on the wrong game. Today, in a truncated Harold (I don’t really count them if we don’t get to at least the 2^nd group game), I took something form the opening about putting a flag on a woman to let her know you want to date her. And that’s what I focused on to the detriment of the scene, even though what was funny was my scene partner’s reaction to that. Brian – as a woman – agreed to the date, but thought I was supposed to be more romantic. What I should have done was increasingly unromantic things. The flag thing was a nice subgame, but the real meat of the scene was Brian’s reaction, and I should have been pushing for greater and greater reactions by doing more and more unromantic things. But I couldn’t recognize that because I wasn’t focused on the emotions of the scene, but just playing the jokes.

Anyway, Harold  #17 was performed on Thursday, January 28^th and Harold #18 was performed on Saturday January 30^th. I don’t think I want to write about the whole thing because they were both for class, one in class and the second the mid-way class show, and the difficulties of doing them in class make them not fun to examine as full pieces. They’re often thematically disconnected and generally third-beat connections are kind of strained. Partly, I think, this comes from lack of chemistry. Partly it comes from the difficulties of the Harold, and partly, it comes from people in class being from different backgrounds. Some are writers, some actors, some comedians, some just regular people, and while everyone can be funny, something like the pattern game, which we did in #17 and #18, is really difficult if the people aren’t used to joking around. People just toss out words randomly, they don’t play with ideas and riff on them, unusual things get glossed over, energies aren’t matched and heightened, and people really get in their heads instead of having honest reactions. I often don’t get interesting games out of class pattern games. Player Piano has been warming up with pattern games lately, and I would love to do some of the ideas we come up with because everyone in the group is funny, and the pattern game is basically just what funny people do when they’re just hanging out: throw ideas out there and play around with those ideas, combining them in weird and fun ways.

Anyway, in #17, my first beat was done with C, and taken right from the pattern game. We both had the same idea, as we found out later, but C said his first, and he initiated with something about how my dog was judging him. Of course I played the scene from an – not angry as Kevin would later tell me, but an –  in-your-face point-of-view and while I yes-anded that my dog was judging him, I didn’t really just sit back and facilitate the real interaction in the scene, which was K, as my dog, judging C. While K needed to heighten more, I needed to either take a back seat or set up his heightening. Instead, I filled up silences and acted brash. As Kevin later commented, I didn’t even really need to be there. Part of my fear though is that I am not pulling my weight in scenes, not saying enough funny lines, not hitting game moves that really push the scene along. So I talk indiscriminately, throwing everything at the wall, hoping something sticks, like a Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker film. Or that David Cross joke. Maybe 99/100 women don’t respond to the garbageman’s catcalls, but maybe that one woman likes to fuck on a pile of garbage.

The 2^nd beat – which I’ve been screwing up lately – was at a zoo. I initiated that the baboon’s plans for world peace were laughable. I made C the zookeeper, and I worked there feeding the monkeys. This misses the game, which wasn’t about smart animals, but judgmental animals. That emotion, the emotion K played in the first beat – stern judging – was what the game was. Brian’s reaction to my flag planting was the game, not the flag planting. 3^rd beat was just C picking up on something from the first two beats. I would keep justifying the judging dog and the smart baboon by talking about how evolutionarily close they were to us, and the 3^rd beat was just about cavemen first entering into a symbiotic relationship with their “wolf-slaves”.

For Harold #18, the class show, Kevin pulls me aside beforehand and tells me that no matter what, I can’t play an angry or aggressive character, even if the scene calls for it, and even if I ruin the scene. In the Armando class, we were working on just using an emotion to guide our character, so I walked out incredibly happy and took something from the opening “someone who has no internal monologue” and started babbling about loving everything. Kevin later remarked how it would have been better to just narrate what I was doing. That makes more sense. Instead the emotion – unbridled happiness – and the game mixed together, and we quickly shifted into the game that I love everything and that Ariel, my scene-partner, is fed up with my cheerfulness. I think I managed to play my happiness with a bit of sadness underneath, my smile becoming a sad rictus as Ariel began to say more and more hurtful things, and we justified our characters’ actions as well. However, we were not that funny. A few laughs here and there.

The second beat, I wanted to affect Ariel more, so we were back at the house, and one of the troubled kids I had taken in – Ariel mentioned that in the first beat – had set her bed on fire. Ariel kind of reacts, and justifies staying with me by saying she’s Catholic and can’t get divorced. The funniest part was when a girl in the class did a walk-on to sell me Girl Scout cookies. I said, “Sure, I’ll take them all!” and she said, “Great,” and ran off. I yell, “Wait! Where are you going?” Big laugh. Ariel’s emotions and my emotions never really heightened though. The first scene of the 3^rd beat combined my game with their game (we were always scene 2), so I didn’t go out for a 3^rd beat because Ariel was what was needed. The less said about the group games and such in these the better.

Anyway, these were all great notes and good object lessons in the last few weeks, so I will work on them.

I’m not that far into the book only having gotten it today, but in the beginning he is talking about a person with a secret life that he acts out on the internet, say a mild-mannered guy who plays out rape fantasies online and the difference between that person and a warlike general who goes home and meditates and is generally in private a peaceful person. If the first person were to discard his public identity and act out his fantasies in real life, we would say that he was just letting his true self out, but in the latter case, the general would actually have to shift his public subjectivity. Zizek uses Lacanian imagery to discuss this, but the point being that in one case, there is an imaginary public persona that covers up the real private persona, and in the other case there is a real public persona over an imaginary private one.

Improv though cannot abide by the idea of real selves and imaginary selves. To do improv is to be vulnerable and as close to the surface as possible, to, in a sense, merge the real and imagined into one character that doesn’t have time to create a false self. In fact, lying or holding things back or mendacity of any stripe really destroys an improv scene. The improv self is the dialectical synthesis, perhaps, of the inner and outer. It is a self who cannot lie because to lie is to betray the fundamental criteria that allows an improv scene to exist, a liar’s paradox of sorts – if I lie, this scene ceases to exist and therefore this self ceases to exist. Not a paradox so much as an act of uncreation or disassembling.

Anyway, my 16th Harold was performed on Monday, January 18th with my one team A Dangerous Woman. This Harold was perhaps the most thematically coherent and satisfying one we’ve done, but was also perhaps the most unfunny one as well. Part of it was that we had been doing organic openings for 40 minutes before launching into it and were mentally exhausted, and as well, we were doing grounding exercises earlier, trying not to be funny, so that spirit may have carried over.

We were not really catching anything fun in the organic openings we were trying and finally were able to do one really, really long opening that had some interesting stuff in it. Terry has really been pushing us to not settle for boring ideas and to really hone our instincts to recognize weird and interesting ideas and to attack and selfishly drain those ideas for everything they’re worth. It’s difficult but rewarding, though we’re struggling pretty hard with doing that.

1st beats: After that terribly long opening, C and L are in a rowboat looking for land. This came from the opening (I forget the suggestion) where Cory stepped out and was looking through a spyglass at land, and we were all then trying to get on land. They yes-and for a bit until C and L settle on a somewhat complicated game where L wants C to kill L so that L can die without angering god with suicide, but C doesn’t want to offend god by murdering someone. Then K and I do a scene where my leg is in a bear trap and I tell K to let me die, that I want to become one with nature. There was a weird part in the opening where I was yelling at Cory for a minute straight that everything ends, that death comes for everything and we return to the earth and the stars. Our scene was kind of weird and sometimes funny. All the scenes were sometimes funny. A and R then did a scene where A was a doctor and R wanted A to tell her that she was pretty even though A was gay. It was the most game-oriented scene of the Harold, and I don’t know. While I thought scene one and two were kind of failures, I liked them more than the straightforwardness of A and R’s scene.

Group game 1: In the opening, there were some great parts where we were introducing ourselves genially as parts of the body and then eventually were singing, “I am your heart”. I step out and shake C’s hand and say, “How’s it going? I’m your gallbladder!” I kind of expected other people to step out and do the same thing, but C was thrown at first and didn’t really know how to react. A eventually came out as his esophagus. I was removed from C because I was infected, and C took that to mean I was trying to kill him. We kind of moved around that, but no one else came out to help and the scene never really went anywhere.

2nd beats: C and L are now trapped in a basement by someone, I think this was also in the opening. Same game as the first beat, but in this one, L wants sexual pleasure, so he says C can rape him while he’s “asleep”. Same god stuff. In my and K’s second beat, I was now trapped under a beam in a collapsed house, and K – my son – wants to free me, but I want to die and become part of the house so I can literally shelter my family. I had given some justification, but we never explored why I really wanted that. A and L came in with the jaws of life, but never freed me and we never really explored what my character was like when not trapped by things. A and R did a scene similar to beat one.

Group game 2: A wanted to introduce his family to his new lover the floor, but didn’t get that out in his initiation, and we moved on so instead, he introduced us to C, who was a Native American, and then the game of the scene was us trying not to offend C. I kept apologizing for things like The Trail of Tears. The whole thing was not great.

Terry ended us after that.

For example, we’re taught game at UCB, where “game” can have many definitions, but in general is the overriding concept for a scene, the concept that drives the action. Game can be generated out of the scene or out of the characters behaviour, the former tending towards more jokey scenes, the latter tending towards scenes that focus on relationships between characters. Games-of-scenes contain within them though the sub-category of game-as-character-behaviour though. Last night, the second part of the macroscene had an overarching game that dealt with parent/child relations. The characters began in a town where everything was played through this dynamic, and it was, frankly, incredible to watch. While the game began out of the characters’ behaviour, it became the premise of the entire town and therefore the game-of-the-scene.

So, we’re taught game and to think about game especially in the context of the Harold. Find the unusual thing in the scene, blow it up and explore it. Textbook scene mechanics. We’re even taught that game is the fun thing in a scene. However, there is a disconnect between “unusual thing” and “fun thing” that our coach Terry really helped dissolve in the last week. We’ve been doing an exercise out of practice where we get a suggestion and write initiations and responses and then come up with a game based on those first two lines. Most games can be boiled down to something easy. The cliched tropes are “bad doctor” or “klutzy mother” or something like that. MAD TV type shit. We’re taught to hone in on the unusual thing, but not hone in on what’s actually fun about the unusual thing. In this exercise, Terry was challenging us to not just name the game, but name it as something fun that you’d actually want to play.

This may seem like a “Well, duh” moment, but when one is in a scene and so intent on finding the unusual thing and working with it, and when one is in a Harold and finishes a scene and has mere moments to think of a second or third beat, you tend to just take a generic idea out of the first scene.  Partly because of time constraints, partly because it’s easy, partly because of the entire culture of cliched comedy that we exist within that makes these tropes easy to latch onto. “I can play a bad doctor”. Easiness though leads to joylessness. What makes most scenes not work is that they are joyless. The people in them aren’t having fun; they aren’t playing with the idea, they are just embodying a standard cultural comedy trope. When an actor takes a generic game instead of really honing in on what’s fun, she gives up her free will and merely becomes a stand-in barking out a pre-programmed script. Where is the joy in that?

Now in 401 at UCB, I sit on the cusp of the dividing line between doing pre-programmed bullshit and being a truly creative improvisor. I think, at least from my own internal experience, that the glee of just having a scene continue from this pre-programmed script might overshadow or obscure the sense of discovery in scenes, such that, if I really want to become a better improvisor, I have to get used to scenes just existing and knowing that no matter what happens, we can always do something, i.e., the people I’m working with now are all super-smart and we’re not going to get stuck, so give up that fear and really let go. Once that knowledge is grounded, once you know that a scene will always go on and you won’t just be standing, mouth-open, blankly staring at a crowd, then people can truly explore what’s fun about a scene. But if one gets addicted to that glee, the glee of working off a trope, then it’s just automatic, and who gives a shit. Might as well do sketch if that’s what gets you off.

The newest question I’ve been working with as well is how to manufacture a brain state where I’m talkative and making connections. I’m not sure what to call the brain state, perhaps “abuzz”, but I most often am put into it at Harold night, that is, by watching other people perform Harolds. It’s like my brain almost sympathetically arranges itself along with the performers. All I know is that it is “abuzz” after I leave there, and I feel ready to do really great creative work. Today I am trying an experiment. Before practice, I am going to listen to complicated minimalist music that has a lot of moving parts and see if that works.

Anyway, Harold #15 was performed in practice with my team A Dangerous Woman on Monday, January 11th. The suggestion was “steam ironing”, and we did an ok organic opening that wasn’t very dynamic. There were some ideas in there.

1st beats: I walk out with R and initiate a scene based on a very languid punching match from the opening. After a bit, a part of my brain realizes we need a justification, so I say that we’re trying out S&M for the first time. In my mind S&M is an unusual thing because I don’t ever really witness it nor have ever investigated it in my life, but really, “unusual thing” means “unusual for all humans, not just the actor”. While we heightened to the point where I asked R to slit my throat, all we really did was play some pre-programmed idea. Because we were so involved in that, we both missed something truly interesting. At one point, R hits me hard enough to draw blood, and I said, “I like blood because it reminds me of menstrual blood which reminds me of your vagina.” People laugh, and we take it as a throwaway line in the larger game of “Intertwining death and sex”. But that was the real line of interest! A and C then come out and C initiates with laughter and pointing, also from the opening. This scene was confused because C said A had a stain on his shirt, and C thought it was funny that A would be humiliated at an office meeting. Both of them were playing kind of coy and not really saying what was on their mind, which led to a kind of stilted scene. Then L and K came out; L was a cool conductor on a train trying to show K the ropes and to get K to abandon his buttoned-down ways. There’s a game there, but L and K got stalled on the whistle and pulling a lever to make the train go.

Group Game 1: We are tailgating a Jets game, and A doesn’t know much about sports. We think that’s ok, but he still insists on saying nonsensical things about sports. Generic all around. However, K is kind of hanging back, and C eventually asks A who his friend is. A says, “My autistic friend.” Some of us here that, some of us hear “artistic”, and K holds up a painting he made. There’s the real moment of discovery! But it was too late.

2nd beats: R and I sneak into a mausoleum to fuck a corpse. Remember, I think the game is “Intertwining death and sex” or more specifically “Death/sex gets us closer to life.” Again, generic. The one funny moment of discovery though is when I lubed up the corpse’s asshole with vaseline. L walks in as a guard or undertaker. Edit. C and A are eating hot soup, and A burns his tongue making it difficult for him to talk. C thinks it’s hilarious because A has to give the valedictorian speech in an hour. Cut to the speech. A has trouble talking. C thinks it’s hilarious. Why is C such an asshole. A said he had trouble find an unusual thing in this because there are people like C all over. Time dash for L and K. Same thing as scene one.

Group game 2: We slipped on banana peels in the opening, so I did a presentational group game in which I am the host of a Candid Camera-like show about old Vaudeville gags. Generic. But again, I was just glad to have a premise and for the scene to be continuing that I didn’t give it a second thought.

Terry called it after this, which I’m glad he did because we were just going to go through more of the same. My third beat would have been R and I having sex in a car on the tracks of L and K’s train. The lessons: 1) Fuck fear, 2) Find out what’s fun about the unusual thing, 3) Fuck generic tropes.

Anyway, Harold #14 was performed on Thursday, January 7th. One of the things that complicated this Harold for me, besides the above, was that the night before, in practice for my other performance group Player Piano, we had worked on not arguing during our scenes, on yes-anding in a literal manner to build them up, and I was still very much stuck in that mode when it came to my scenes today. In fact, when left to my own devices, I tend to badly fall back on argument as an easy dramatic device. That much was proved today in my first session of Armando Diaz’s Instant Brilliance class. We were supposed to initiate one-person scenes off a suggestion, and both my initiations for the exercise started arguments. I argue with myself in a scene! This is a personal defect, one that helped lead me into philosophy in the first place, but one which really stands in the way of certain scenes, scenes which might advance to interesting and funny places out of agreement, scenes that just get stagnant otherwise. Thus an entire practice where we weren’t allowed to argue was extremely beneficial. But as we’ll see, some scenes need an argument because that would be the honest reaction to what is going on.

While I don’t remember the suggestion, we did the pattern game, but while we had fun with it, we didn’t create a lot of games. There were some, maybe one or two, a lot of half-ideas, and mostly just words. We managed to do something though.

1st beats: R stepped out, which was rad because one of Kevin’s notes to her in 301 was that she didn’t take the initiative enough, and so I thought it was awesome that she was the first one out for the first Harold of our 401. C stepped out with her. The scene centered around her having a sprained ankle and claiming she could drive. C was too young for his license, and R demanded that she drive to pick up supplies for the party they were throwing later. Then myself and a classmate A stepped out. I thought she might initiate, but she didn’t so I had something ready from the opening which was “seeing someone you know in porn” and said, “Hey honey, I was just watching some pornography, and I saw you in one.” She replied that it was indeed her. The scene then needed an honest reaction from me, which should have been something like, “What the fuck?” or “Oh my god.” Even a yes-and answer, “I’m ok with that. We have an open marriage. I didn’t expect it to be this open, but you know,” would have been ok, but drilled into my head from the night before was “NO ARGUING” and my first instinct was to “What?!” it, but instead I did a tepid in-between an argument and a yes-and. The scene was funny, mostly because of A, but my attitude definitely dragged it down. Then three of my classmates did a scene off of something from the opening about panning for gold. They were 49ers and Native Americans were after them. It was mostly them talking about what they should do about the Natives.

Group Game 1: Someone initiated, off of a mention of toilet paper in the opening, giving away free charmin. Then someone else was giving away free baby wipes and then free leaves. It turned out we were in Charmin Land, a part of the Mall of America. Then everyone was tagged out and we were in a Quilted Northern sweatshop. Someone hoped that the Brawny guys didn’t kick the place in. C waits a few beats and kicks in the door. Edit.

2nd beats: C initiates with opening the door for a party guest. I don’t see anyone hop out, so I do. R still wants to do things for the party on her bum ankle, C and I try to stop her. Maybe a bit too much, as I physically picked her up and sat her down. I kind of expected her to fight back though (in my defense). Prior to this, I was trying to figure out what the game of my scene was. Terry, our coach for A Dangerous Woman, has been working with us on game, and we’ve all come to an incredible realization that once the game is named, it is ultimately a million times easier to play it. The best I could come up with for my scene though was that it was something like an off-handed remark (A mentioned in beat 1 that I said she wasn’t spontaneous enough which led her to do porn while we were married) led to broken marital bonds, so the game of the scene might be something like Breaking Norms From Minor Comments, so I thought a good second beat would be something like us robbing a bank because I said to A that she wasn’t spontaneous enough. In retrospect, this was difficult, and we 1) didn’t have to be the same characters. What is difficult about it is that I would make her that character and then have to convey the information to her. I could have been that character myself and initiated, “You said I wasn’t spontaneous enough? Well, everyone in this fucking bank put your hands in the air [shoots a shotgun at the sky].” 2) The spontaneous thing doesn’t make a lot of sense in this, and I would have to come up with a different off-hand comment. As I am writing now, it might make sense to have the offhand comment be about my wife not making enough money, and then initiate with, “Honey, I was just in the basement, and I saw all this counterfeit money lying around.” We conserve the pattern of breaking some kind of norm, and the justification can come out of that later (I don’t have to build the offhand comment into the initiation). However, I was too much of a pussy to initiate, so A did it, and said “I let another family adopt your son.” Honest reaction would have been something along the lines of “What the fuck is wrong with you?” I instead staid sternly, “That’s negligent.” Halfway is not a good place to be in. Scene three was s time dash with the 49s tied to a stake trying to communicate with the Natives.

Group Game 2: Someone initiated with kneeling to pray. There was a lot of confused stuff, but the game turned out to be that this was a church in Williamsburg, and we all thought it was cool to attend it. We didn’t really play that very hard though. All I could think of for some reason was crucifix-shaped sunglasses.

3rd beats: C and R just played the Ailment Won’t Stop Me game hiking on a mountain. Blackout by Kevin.

Rusty!

He was telling us a story about his Harold team Robber Baron. A Harold they performed a few weeks ago, they had the chance to do something new and interesting, and they dropped the ball. And as he was telling us this, you could tell that it really got to him that they had this opportunity to do this and missed it. And what had stopped them was fear, which, more than anything is the improvisor’s biggest obstacle. “What if the audience doesn’t like this?” “What if this doesn’t work?” “What if this isn’t funny?” All these nagging questions prevent us from moving forward, from doing things in scenes and after doing them seeing where we go from there.

I remember something Kevin was saying in 301, that making these active choices and following through on them is what allows scenes to open up, and that really didn’t click with me until Terry talked about fear being what was in the way of of making those choices. Active choices aren’t choices about being active in a scene – you can be active and still boring. It’s about making bold choices from a place of strength, about not holding off the premise of the scene because you’re scared what will happen once it’s out there. But once it’s out there, that’s just the beginning.

Harold #13 was performed on Sunday, December 19th with my Sunday performance group, which I think is going to be called A Dangerous Woman. Terry coached us on organic opening and on embracing it, on going to places where we were uncomfortable and afraid, and within an hour we were doing really weird and fun organics that led to some really weird and fun scenes. There were still problems, and I may have edited the opening too early, but maybe we can call this the Gun Violence Harold. (Part of the problem too is that after doing 10 or more openings over the whole of practice, the ideas start to blend together, so we were remembering things we did from all the other openings that night, and it slowed us down a bit when we were going to initiate scenes.)

1st beats: K and R (formerly B, but the other R can no longer be in the group) step out to do a scene from the opening where people were walking through a strange neighborhood and there were things in the trees. I jump down as a birdwatcher, and they try to give me their wallets. I stayed in the scene way too long and took their wallets to try and make an active decision. “Uh, if you’re giving them to me outright. The Birdwatchers’ Society could use the money.” I think L then did a walk-on as another birdwatcher, and eventually we were edited. Then L and C did a scene again straight from the opening, about two hicks who really loved their guns and had comically large weapons. They shot a deer. It was annihilated. Funny scene. Then we all paused and tried to think of something. I can’t stand those minutes where we’re not doing something, so I just jumped out. This is often bad because I don’t have a decent initiation in mind. I grasped for an image from the opening, and remembered Lee threatening suicide over not doing well on a video game. “If you kids don’t finish this video game, I’m going to blow my brains out.” Or something like that. It evolved that I had bought them a Nintendo and they were neglecting it to play outside, so this was my way of motivating them. Eventually I pull the trigger but not until the end of the scene. Terry’s note was great. First, I didn’t really take what Lee did from the opening, about him killing himself because someone beat his score, but it worked out, but Terry said I should have just pulled the trigger early on to see what would happen. Goddamn what a good note.

Group Game 1: Another standing on the backline wondering what to do, so I jumped out and pulled another image from the opening of driving a tank. We worked together, and eventually, it was about me shooting normal Iraqi people who I suspected of terrorism for no reason. Apparently, I couldn’t see it, but my first shot, L dodged it. Terry’s note was that the backline should have alerted me to it, and that that’s what was fun and interesting about the scene. A person that can’t be killed because he or she is so good at dodging. It was a fun scene regardless. Eventually I killed the reincarnated Christ, who I thought was a glowing terrorist that floated down from the sky.

2nd beats: Mostly continuations of the games. I initiated the first one by jumping in as a parachuter. Again, K and R give me their wallets and L jumps in. C and L are in a giant car now. Terry’s note on that was that they should have started off right into the action instead of talking about it. Still fun. Then I set up a scene where I have wired my car to explode, and if the kids don’t beat Tetris, that’s it. It was a dead man’s switch, and they sass off, so I blow us up. Again, I should have done that earlier. Also, I should have given more justification.

Group Game 2: This was fun. K initiated (maybe L) as if he was lost and we all walk out as if we don’t know where we are. K says he guesses this is “lost central” and we all pounce on him because he’s making jokes. “What, Mr. Comedian, our plight is just fodder for your jokes?” It was pretty fun, but it never really developed. I was just thinking about this, and  it would have been funny if it had progressed to the point where we built a brick wall behind K and set up a mic for him.

3rd beat: This is easy to write about because we only did one before Terry called it as we sat in silence trying to think of more connections. L initiates with him and C as their hick characters, “So you want us to shoot them, if they don’t do well.” He was pointing at me, and so I was the father character. “If they don’t both win this game of parcheesi, do it.” We got edited a bit later. I forget what exactly happened. But that was it. Probably the best Harold we’ve done.

I was thinking of this both because of a lot of the blogs I read have been talking about the rise of the authoritarian mindset in American politics and because my Sunday group suffers a fair amount of the time from individualmind. Instead of building things together, people will hold on to ideas or go off in their own direction instead of really paying attention to each other. There a weird tug then between the form we’ve chosen – Harolds with organic openings, which require a rather dutiful allegiance to ones teammates over oneself – and our own individualist leanings. I wonder, as well, how much of this is Enlightenment/rationalist thinking that we have all been inculcated with, a conceptual framework that prizes the individual above the group.

Harold #12 was performed on Sunday November 22^nd and while not the best thing we’ve ever created, was certainly better than a lot of other Harolds we’ve done (and to be completely fair, we’ve only done five together and only two – including this one – with organic openings, so expecting much more than “okay” is perhaps unrealistic – not that we shouldn’t hold ourselves to a higher standard, but just that maybe we shouldn’t be dejected when we don’t create a hilarious work of art). When I try to think of what the theme was – if any – the best I can think of is that this was the Callous Disregard for Human Life Harold. Not really, but that wove its way around the scenes. Our opening was ok, hampered both by the size of the small practice space and the mien of the group. There was some heightening and game finding, and a lot more agreement than there has been previously (a lot of thanks goes to our coach for devising exercises to work on that).

1^st beats: L walks out and then I do, and he initiates with something inspired from the opening where everyone was tipping over a cow. We were on a farm and testing whether it was true that if you cut a chicken’s head off, the body ran around for a while. We killed a chicken, then tried a cow. I kept trying – unsuccessfully – to pull in something from the opening where our callous disregard for the animals’ lives was due to us thinking we were better than them, which is originally what I thought the game was supposed to be. Eventually we run out of animals, and it’s just the two of us, and I ask if I can borrow L’s knife. Edit. Then R and R (who so far have done the majority of Harold scenes together) step out and R (I may have to rethink this naming scheme…Let’s say R and B). R initiates from the opening, that the movie she’s watching is terrible, so she’s going to hang herself. I can’t remember the opening perfectly, but I thought the game had been heightened in the opening so that the protagonist was such an aesthete that she was willing to kill those that didn’t agree with her aesthetic sense. Regardless, the scene was a bit unreal (not that L and my scene didn’t veer into the cartoony the minute I adopted Squiggy’s voice), but there was good support from the back line as we were other cinema-goers telling R to sit down. Then C and K come out and K initiates a scene from the opening where we had all talked about how great an invention orange soda is, so he had sold all his possessions in order to buy orange soda. Good scene.

Group game 1: I initiated this one from the opening from something I really liked when we were heightening the orange soda thing. We said at one point that orange soda was the greatest invention ever created, and then listed some inventions it was better than, so I came out and said, “Thank you for inviting me to Menlo Park, Mr. Edison. But, while I enjoy your inventions, none of them compares to my Candied Bar.” Since it was a group game, I just assumed others would come in with similar inventions, but it got muddled as the back line didn’t budge and then L, as Edison, started talking about an invention competition. No one on the back line ever did a “cut to”, so we just stood around talking about the competition. Then K came out and showed us his invention The Thumbed Tack. Then a bit later there was a merciful edit.

2^nd beats: One of the things I really learned this session was that ultimately, my duty is to think of a decent second beat before I really participate in the scene going on at the moment. That means actually analyzing what the game is. Instead, what I’ve been doing is splitting my time, mostly dedicating myself to helping out in the current scene and in the margins thinking about the second beat. That of course leads to what happened in our scene. Now, in the first beat, the game of the scene isn’t about murdering people, but rather about testing an urban legend or unbelieveable fact. I think the first thing out of L’s mouth in the first beat was that he had heard if you cut a chicken’s head off, it’ll run around for a while. One of my main problems is adhering too closely to the opening, so when everyone was tipping a cow as a prank in the opening, I may have pulled that into our scene and made cutting off the chicken’s head a prank on the farmer. This means I wasn’t really listening to L. So, for the second, I started playing a prank on a couple, burning down their house. If anything was good in this beat, it was C and K playing the doomed couple. They played it so real that I am still laughing at their deaths (because there is something deeply wrong with me). At least I got out a justification for why we were doing this. R and B then did a second beat where R was strapping explosives to herself because she had a bad day at the office. Nothing terrible about this scene except that B didn’t really react honestly. C and K’s second beat had to do with them being out on the street now, and all K had was all his orange soda. I did a walk on as a guy trying to buy a soda from K who refused.

Group game 2: If there’s a second of space where no one’s doing anything, I feel compelled to keep things moving along. I didn’t mean to start both group games, but there was that pause – the pause where as an audience member I start to wonder about the group and get taken out of the performance, and so I do whatever I can to avoid it when performing even if I have no solid ideas – so I jumped out and used a half-idea I had tucked away from the opening about a flasher. I think I initiated, “How do you like this?” The rest of my teammates put us in a park, and instead of us all yes-anding the situation in an honest way until we got to a game, we all – with the exception of C and K – just played it a bit silly. Working like that ends up really stifling scenes because when one doesn’t act honestly, one has to continually think of artificial moves to keep the scene going. If a guy flashes you, you don’t admire his sculpted body. You tell him to get the hell away from you. Starting from that honest place then allows us to blow the scene out naturally.

The 3×3 tournament finals were last night, and one of the teams These Guys Look Like They Read (Will Hines, Kevin Hines and Erik Tanouye) basically ran a clinic in honest reactions. It was probably one of the most instructive sets I’ve seen in a while because they spent the time truthfully playing off each other and truthfully calling out each others’ emotional states and used all of that as a fundament so that when they got sillier and sillier, they really earned it and none of it felt forced or unnatural. I think C described the set as “liquid”.

This may be one of the problems though in performing premise-based improve as a novice. Because the game is handed to everyone on a silver platter, there’s a severe temptation to start off silly, and it really takes a lot of practice and a lot of discipline to reign that in.

3^rd beats: Regardless of the overall quality of the Harold, I do like that we’re becoming more comfortable making connections – making non-forced connections that is – which is my favorite thing about a Harold. Again, I misread the game from L and my scene, but at least connected it a bit with R’s game, as I and L were flying a plane into a business office as a prank. C again played an office worker realistically going about his business. R came in then weirdly off-game started competing with our plane over who would be the first to hit the building. It would have been a million times better to have R and B just play their game (maybe even show up with the explosives from the 2^nd beat  in C’s part of the scene instead of adding a third section – although I did like our stage composition with three distinct sections of action, like a triptych). Then there was an edit and L was trying to buy orange soda from K, and then L and I got in a ridiculous bidding war. When K still wouldn’t sell, I slit his throat like L and I did with the animals in the first beat, and our coach gave us the blackout.

Again, not the worst thing ever created and certainly on the road to improvement.

Regardless, Harold #11 was performed Sunday November 15^th 2009. I don’t know if I even want to categorize the theme. The organic opening seemed slow and meandering, and though our coach said it wasn’t bad, I think he might have said that simply because it wasn’t a total failure. At first I thought the problem might have been because we weren’t really heightening anything, but my teammates pointed out a more fundamental problem: there wasn’t even basic agreement. One person would call out our activity, and another person would automatically try something else – not riffing on the original thing and heightening, but rather just trying out something completely different. No agreement led to very few moves that could become games.

1^st beats: I took something from the opening where we were doing yoga and someone said, “This will really fix my life,” and it heightened from there. So I started out playing a basketball game where I believed that physically exerting myself would make me born anew. The game turned out to be though that basketball was a metaphor for my shitty life, so my friend for whom everything was going great was also good at basketball, and I was terrible. The second scene had R and R as sisters at a seafood restaurant and the one hated seafood because it made her sick but went because she wanted her sister to be happy. We kept bringing out more and more disgusting things for her like fresh-ground cod and brine. The scene was ok, but I really wanted to see the sister who hated seafood to be honest about why she was there. The scene really missed that truthful kernel and became too cartoony as a result. The third scene featured A and C as a couple. There was no real game to begin with, but they yes-anded until it emerged that C used grandiose hand gestures to the point where he started to mime everything he did in a condescending manner. Funny stuff.

Group game 1: This was based on something from the opening where we were all running, so someone initiated that we were getting ready for the NYC marathon. C revealed that he didn’t really understand what was involved and that became the game of the scene. We slightly heightened by revealing that a marathon is 26.2 miles, that he’ll probably shit and piss himself, etc. It wasn’t bad.

2^nd beats: L, my scene partner, initiated that we were in a bar, and I should hit on a woman to help me get over my shitty life. I try hitting on A and begin crying. L, without trying, ends up picking up A, while I weepily buy her a glass of wine. R and R are now in the hospital where one has donated her liver to the other. It kind of follows the game of the first beat (beat one: Doing things you hate for love, beat two: martyring yourself for love). I got to come in though and give R “painful liver dialysis”. Scene three – C initiated this accepting a proposal from A; they continued the game from the first beat and A had a nice justification for C’s wild hand gestures: his grandfather died from being still (or something like that).

Group game 2: I initiated this one from a half-idea from the opening where we were all carrying a body. So, we were digging a grave and after yes-anding for a bit, we realized it was a cemetery for fat people, and we were callous about what we were doing. Eventually, we went over and started pushing a giant, fat man sans coffin into the hole we dug while we called him names like “fat fuck” and “fat prick”. A comes in as the dead man’s child and we say we’re sorry for her loss. Then I said something like, “I’m sorry your dad was such a fat piece of shit.”

3^rd beats: I initiated that L and I were running a marathon, and about a mile in, I start crawling and yelling at him as we discuss how terrible my life is. Then R was a surrogate for other R’s baby. A tug out pregnant R, and something else happened, then we got the blackout.

This was like a 30 minute Harold. More aggressive editing is needed.

Harold #10: We’ve been doing scene painting as our opening after the moderate failure of our faux-Living Room. We really never simulated a living room, and more or less did a pattern game Armondo. Scene painting is working out much better, and after studying Reuben Williams on Saturday, I was very eager to keep working with it. Basically, they took any idea out of the scenes that they could. For the past two weeks, we kept getting stuck because we’d use the scenes themselves, and then after we did three scenes, one in each location, we’d struggle to find an idea to use. This time was much better. The suggestion was “opera”, and the three scenes we painted were 1) a garage where whomever lived there had set up a faux-beach using kitty litter, a baby pool and a taning lamp, 2) a chorus room where very specific colors meant different voices and different pencils were for writing different notes, 3) the study of a very lonely old man who has a wall set aside for pictures of his friends (when he eventually has some).

1st beats: M and A initiate a scene in the garage, where M was worried that A was living a fool’s dream. It took a bit and a bit of side coaching to get it moving, but once it did, it was good. M wanted A to get a job and get out of the garage, but A just wanted to pretend to surf. They lived in the midwest. I initiated the second scene with C, where I was an old man, “Come on in, paperboy.” I took the idea from the third scene painting where I was a lonely old man who just wanted friends. I made a good choice when I took the paper from the paperboy after paying him and then threw it onto a large pile. I wish we had gone on to explore that and the fact that I kept a ledger detailing all of the neighbors activities, but instead we went really weird and sad, and ended with the paperboy giving me a hug because I craved human contact. There was almost a bit in it about how my own children probably lived in town but had told me they lived in another state. Then J and J started a scene about an OCD writer.

Group game 1: W initiated a scene about a chorus that had very specific pens and objects for everything they had to do. We really did well yes-anding and agreeing with each other, and it was getting more and more absurd. M justified this by saying we were an OCD chorus, and I think that may have changed the game. After that, it wasn’t so much specific tools we needed to do anything (need the Harmony Light on if we were going to sing harmonies, for example), but now that we had specific mental tics like touching each others heads before we left a room. We worked together really well though, and once the OCD things was named, kept hitting that game.

2nd beats: A and M were analagous, and A now built elaborate houses of cards instead of studying for the SATs. He said it would help with the analogies though. “Cat made of cards is to real cat as a house made of cards is to a real house,” which was a funny line. Then, I initiated a second, analagous beat. However, this is where I am running into some difficulties, and C gave me some good advice later which I’ll say something about, but once in a 301 class, I and my scene partner R were olde-timey police officers walking the beat. We yes-anded and realized that we had cleaned up all the criminals in the town, but we had done so through extreme violence. There were no more criminals left though, so I ask R, while menacingly smacking my nightstick against my hand, “So, is your uniform up to code?” (which I should have just said as “Looks like your uniform isn’t up to code.”). The second beat (with some side coaching) was an analagous scene with firefighters. We had put out all the fires in the town but had done so by smashing the houses which were on fire. Then I look at R and ask her if her uniform is flamable. So, our teacher had coached us so that the second beat didn’t just play the game but almost followed the template we created in the first scene. So, I’ve been under the impression that second beats don’t just play the game, but also try to hit the same narrative structures of the first beats.

This isn’t so, but under that impression, I started the second beat as a woman who called the EMT to help her, but it was just a ruse because she was lonely. What I should have done instead though was play the game (lonely person desires human contact) in an analagous way that took the bare bones of the game and transported them to another setting. I could have been a boss who asks his employee to work late on a report so they could hang out together. Or something like that. C suggested to me that when doing analagous second beats, we should strive to boil the game down to its most essential form and build off of that, which seems to be a smart move. Not only does that help to solidify the game, but it also makes the scenes more full.

The third scene was J as an OCD artist this time, but the game kind of fell into J just being an a-hole to J as he used one of J’s paintings to extend his own canvas. This made me really realize, along with watching some of the stuff that happened at Harold Night this past week, that being an asshole in a scene is not a fun choice. In my 301 graduation show, I ended up being an asshole, and not only wasn’t it fun to play, but the audience didn’t respond well to it. If you’re going to be an asshole, you better be on game.

Group game 2: M initiated by saying to W, “Over here is where the baby’s things will be once we have one”. I had stepped on as her husband, and we all just started naming places where things will be, and apologized to W for baby proofing the house and for bedtime being at 7:30 and for there being no swearing in the house. Eventually he was in a high chair and we were feeding him baby food. C tagged M and myself out and played the same game, “This is where my amp’s gonna be when I finally have my band.”

3rd beats: Probably some of my most fruitful 3rd beats yet, which is what I love about this group. Everyone is smart and committed, so these things kind of flowed out. M chastised A for writing a law brief that was just about fantasy football. I walked on to make sure that it was typed with the football keyboard. Then W tackled me. And of course, just now, I thought, “Man why didn’t I say ‘Hey, the tackling light isn’t on’.” Shoulda coulda woulda. The second beat, I pointed to A and was again the old man, this time visiting with A in his beach garage. M comes in as a construction worker that needs the sand back, I call back to something from my first beat, and our coach calls a blackout.

I think we struggled a lot, and at least from C’s standpoint, he says he didn’t see the connections I made in the 3rd beats (a law brief that was just about fantasy football would be typed up on a special keyboard that only is used for Fantasy Football, right?! I do disagree though about the second scene since my character and A’s character were similar enough that putting them together seemed organic), but personally that was the first time real game cross-overs occured to me (as opposed to repeating ideas or callbacks that I’ve used before in 3rd beats), and I think overall this wasn’t bad, especially since it’s only the second Harold this group’s ever done together.