Why not teams?

Last year when we were about to open our theater, we needed performers, a lot of performers. We had a slate of shows that we wanted to produce for the opening, but the company was just Angie McMahon and me. We decided to have auditions, but what were going to ask people to audition for? A show? A team? Or an ensemble?

In the past, I’ve been involved in theaters that have been team centric, most notably iO and the UCB Theater in New York. Team centric systems have their pros, but the more I’ve thought about them over the years, the more I’ve become dissatisfied with them. The main problem I have with them is that they are brittle. Teams break easily. People move away or get better gigs. People get on each other’s nerves and feel trapped where they are. Or they get so annoyed with one another that they begin to lobby the powers that be to cut people. If a team fails, then you need to figure out what to do with the performers. Often good ones are lost in the shuffle.

Continue reading “Why not teams?”

A Crazy Idea, That Came Together

Sometime last year, I thought of a crazy idea. What if I tried to squeeze the plot of all 40 episodes of Game of Thrones into 1 hour of absurd comedy theater. I had seen something like it years ago when I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company do the entire works of William Shakespeare in one act. It was a bawdy, raucous, fun show that felt like something you might see buskers do at a street festival.

I realized that Game of Thrones might deserve the same treatment. I could distill the show down to its important plot points and its most heightened moments and then retell them in an absurd way that would entertain both fans of the show and their friends who have been dragged along with them.

small-Alex-Manich-playing-varys-(photo-by-Kevin-Mullaney)1So last December I recruited a team of writers from our ensemble and we started re-watching the episodes, season by season. We outlined the plot, took notes on the characters and kept track of our favorite WTF moments (there are a lot of them in GoT). We started writing whatever came to mind, whatever was funny, almost like writing a sketch show inspired by the TV series.

Eventually our show started to take shape, we had drafted a couple hours of material. But I knew much of it didn’t fit the original idea. And there was so much story to cover. Still, the outline was laid out, we had a plan, it was going to work. And then we did auditions and our plan got thrown for a loop.

small-Seth-Origitano-playing-oberyn-martell-(photo-by-Kevin-Mullaney)4Auditioners brought in their favorite 2nd or 3rd tier characters and we realized we had to cast these actors and include the characters they wanted to play. Their takes on them were just too fun. If you had told me that Tommen or Pycelle were characters that would make the final cut, I wouldn’t have believed you. But once we saw them on stage, we knew we had to include them.

In the end we cast 17 actors to play 47 speaking parts, which is a little insane for a show that is supposed to be an hour long. But we wrote and rewrote and trimmed and cut and rearranged until we have the show that opens tonight. It’s probably the funniest thing I’ve ever directed and all the credit should go to the wonderful writers and the very funny cast.

I hope to see you there!

Some Notes and Tips for Monoscenes

What is a monoscene?

It’s an improv form–a structure for an improvised performance like the Harold or La Ronde.

Often in a play, a series of scenes are set in one location, all in a row with no break in time. For instance, the structure of Chekhov’s most famous plays are all pretty similar. They consist of four acts, and each act happens in a different setting. Characters enter and exit many times during the act and each time the combination of characters on stage changes, a new scene is formed. These are called French scenes.

French scenes are the building blocks of monoscenes. You start with 1-3 characters on stage doing a scene. Eventually one (or more) characters exits or enters and a new French scene occurs with the new combination of characters. There are no sweep edits or tag outs. Entering or exiting is the only way to “edit” within a monoscene. A monoscene can be 10 minutes or an hour. It’s up to you.

The term monoscene was first coined when I was working with the Swarm for their show, Slow Waltz Around Rage Mountain.
The term monoscene was first coined when I was working with the Swarm for their show, Slow Waltz Around Rage Mountain.

Think of it as a series of beats

Each beat is probably around the length of a scene, between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. The lengths should vary, but most beats should be at least a minute long. If you are getting a lot of 30 second beats, you need to focus on making beats longer and holding off longer before you enter or exit.

Within a beat the characters should mostly be talking about one thing. One beat can end, and a new one can start when:
Continue reading “Some Notes and Tips for Monoscenes”

New Theater Diary: 4 Days To Go

4 days to go before we enter the space that will be our new theater. Angie and I are working every day and there is barely enough time to update this diary, but I’m going to do my best.

Every day seems to bring a new package of things we need for the theater. We got a cash register delivered on Tuesday for our bar and brackets to mount the speakers the day before. Lots of little things trickling in from Amazon. What a pain it would be actually be driving around getting all these things. Our big shopping day will be tomorrow.

A significant chunk of my responsibilities is to work on the website. I decided to re-write the code for the site from scratch and implement a lot of features that I felt would be nice to have but would be hard or impossible to implement in WordPress. I think that as our audience and students interact with the site, it will become more and more useful over time.

We’ve put up some new classes, a few one day workshops on different topics and an improv performance class for advanced students.

Finally, with the help of the ensemble, I’ve come up with names for the two improv shows that will be opening in October:

  • #trending is the name of our improv show which uses a panel discussion about the week’s viral internet content as it’s inspiration for scenes.
  • Based on a True Story is our version of shows like Armando and ASSSSCAT, but an interview with invited guests will stand in for the monologist.

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Game of the Scene – Examples in TV Sketch Comedy – Portlandia

I’m finishing up a Game of the Scene class through Under the Gun Theater this week and I have often found myself using examples of sketches from TV sketch comedy shows. Once you know what to look for, the Game of the Scene is easy to spot.

This Portlandia sketch has an extremely simple game: two characters ask each other over and over if the other has read something, to which the answer is always yes. What’s unusual or funny about this? For me, it’s satirizing the idea that being the best read is a competition. They don’t bother to actually discuss any of the articles, underlining that they are only mentioning the articles to score points, to find that one thing that they have read, but the other has not.

The “if that, then what” is very straightforward. They pile on the examples, heightening the absurdity by generally making each subsequent article more obscure, and by speeding up the tempo so fast that they can barely hear what the article is before they claim to have read it. There is some nice misdirection twice where Armisen almost sounds like he is going to say that he didn’t read the article, but instead says, “I did not… like the end of it.”

Finally they exhaust the questions part of the game and then add a few variations, first by Maggie bringing in a new copy of Portland Monthly that neither of them have read yet. They attack the magazine like animals in order to prevent the other from reading it and pulling ahead in the competition. This leads to them devouring newspapers on the street and getting run over by cars on the way to ripping apart of phone book across the street. The final tag is just a voice of someone on the street saying, “Hey, it says, ‘Don’t Walk.’ Can’t you read?”

Once again, it’s a very simple game, hard to miss. But they pack in a lot of heightening in a very short amount of time. Improvisors might look at this and think that this is too simple. But in order to play more subtle, nuanced and/or complicated games, you have to be capable of executing the simpler ones first.

Hump Night Interns

We have 6 more Hump Night shows before we take a break for the summer and I’d love to find a couple of interns to help out with the show. I’m looking for people to help by taking photos, posting to our social media and looking for ways to improve the overall experience for our audience. We only have 6 shows left, so it’s not a long commitment. If you’d like to also take the upcoming Game of the Scene class or summer Improv Boot Camp for free that can be arranged or just do it to help out with the show. We can use the help! Just fill in the form below and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can (answering the question is optional).

Please share this with your friends if you know of someone who might be interested.

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Why Improv Boot Camp?

This summer I’m trying something quite different from what I’ve done in the past. I’m going to be teaching a new kind of intensive improv class. It’s an Improv Boot Camp, a training program designed to work specific skills, develop a powerful set of tools, and to practice them many times in different ways over a four week period.

Most summer intensive improv programs have a fairly broad spectrum of topics that they try to cover. If you are just starting out in improv and you are looking to get exposed to a lot of different ideas and try many exercises in a short period of time, you should look at those programs. Those programs can be quite stimulating. But they can also be overwhelming. So many great ideas, but far too few chances to practice them. Often the classes are too large, and you might only do an exercise once, on one day, never to try it again.

My program is for the improvisor who has some experience. They know the basics. They already have a notebook full of ideas and concepts. They enjoy improv, and they want to be great at it. What they need is practice, not another 20 exercises that they’ll only do once. Continue reading “Why Improv Boot Camp?”

Questions, Arguments, and Trying to be Funny

In your first few improv classes you often get very broad guidelines of how to create good improv scenes. For instance, you are taught things like “Always yes-and your scene partner!” or “Never ask questions!” or “Don’t try to be funny!” These rules are often useful, but improvisors tend to hold on to them too long. They judge their scene work against these rules when the rules don’t apply. And these rules get in the way of learning new things.

For instance when I teach people how to discover games in their scenes, I encourage them to ask questions and to disagree with the other character. We talk openly about trying to make the scene more funny, and this frustrates some improvisors. Sometimes it frustrates them so much that they reject the concept of the Game of the Scene altogether, and that is a shame.

Questions

Why do we tell students to avoid questions? Continue reading “Questions, Arguments, and Trying to be Funny”

No Gap Dialog

A lot of improv dialog tends to settle into a regular rhythm, a ping pong back and forth that we encourage in new students. I say something, you listen, pause briefly to consider what I have said and respond. Then I pause briefly to consider what you’ve said and respond to you. This is one way to build a scene, but if this rhythm continues throughout the scene, it can be deadly boring—one polite line of dialog after another with a short polite pause in between each one.

Instead, try something I call No Gap Dialog. Here is a good template to try:

  • Two players enter and start a scene silently.
  • The players can take some time in the beginning of the scene to take each other in without speaking, 5 to 10 seconds of silence up top is good.
  • Then once one player speaks, both players must speak to each other without any pauses at all. They should almost be cutting each other off and finishing each other’s sentences.
  • Have someone side coaching you. They should snap their fingers if you are pausing between lines. And they should try to keep you going without gaps for about 60-90 seconds.

Do a round of this and see how it feels. What do you notice? Continue reading “No Gap Dialog”

Affordable Care Act: It’s Time to Sign Up

I last had employer health insurance when I worked full time for the UCB in 2005. I had cobra insurance for as long as I could after I quit, but that ran out in 2006. At the time, I didn’t think it was a huge deal. I anticipated getting another job soon or getting insurance as a freelancer.

Over the next few years, I was able to make a living by being self employed. But I never had good health insurance again. I was denied coverage because of a previous condition, a sleep apnea. And once I was denied coverage, it was impossible to buy my own private insurance.

I did buy these 6 month policies every once in a while. They did not cover pre-existing conditions and they did not roll over, meaning if I got sick during one 6 month period, that would then become a pre-existing condition for the next 6 months. In other words, it was pretty crappy insurance that would not protect me if I got a serious, protracted health problem. These plans are among the ones that can’t be offered anymore, because frankly, they suck.

Then the Affordable Care Act was passed and I hoped that I would not become sick before January of 2014. I was lucky. I haven’t had any serious illnesses in the last few years. And I made it. Last week, I used healthcare.gov to enroll in a health care plan for the first time in 7 years. My insurance begins on Jan 1.

Apparently, I’m just above the income line that I would be able to get a subsidy, so I’m paying for it all by myself. But it’s a relief to know that when I get sick in the future, I’ll have access to good doctors and that I’ll be protected from losing everything if something terrible does happen.

Although the ACA isn’t perfect and it’s not what I’d have preferred (I think some kind of single payer plan would have worked much better), I’m grateful for the opportunity to buy into a healthcare plan.

If you don’t have coverage through work, I strongly encourage you to at least go through the initial steps and see what plans are available. You may be surprised how affordable it is. And you still have time to enroll this week and get coverage by January 1st.