nine ideas that work

They are:

ROMANTIC
DESPAIR
FIGHT
JOY
HORSE
MADNESS
VULGARITY
THE STANLEY
FOREIGN LANGUAGE REPOSE

These words were written in chalk on the stage by the five actors in a play I saw on Friday night. It's called The Method Gun, and the company presenting it is Rude Mechs. It was at the Off Center. I also saw it about a year ago (a different version) at the Long Center here. It will be in New York City at PS 122 in January 2010 - I highly recommend it - but that is not what this entry is about.

I was inspired by the improvisational-seeming nature of quite a bit of the play, and particularly by the RASA BOXES (whatever that means; that was how they were described when presented in the play) with the above words in them. The actors ran from box to box (there were nine boxes, each with one of the ideas in them) and they incorporated the idea written in the particular box they were standing in into their actions and words.

I wrote them down.

I went to improv class the next day, and each time I got up on stage, I thought of one of those ideas in the RASA BOXES - actually, I started with the one in the top left box, "Romantic" - and took that onstage with me for the scene I was playing. The next time I went up, I took Despair as my emotion. The next time, I thought of a Fight. And so on.

It worked beautifully for me, really gave me something to hold onto.

Interestingly, we are taught that Fighting on the improv stage is dangerous because you have to build on what is happening onstage, and once you get to the point where you're throwing punches or chasing or being chased, there's not much left to build on. I thought about that before I went on. I said the line, "I think you're trying to start a fight!" I said it in kind of a drunkard's voice. And so I became an old, seriously drunk man on a street corner under a street light. (In my mind, I was black, but that's not really important.) It didn't become a fight onstage because the man playing opposite me chose a similar character - "No I ain't! This is MY corner!"

I was feeling it in improv class on Saturday. Sometimes I feel it; sometimes my natural comedian comes out. I feel very comfortable play absurd characters. Or I should say I think I am best at playing absurd characters, and sometimes I am comfortable with letting those characters come out, but other times I feel stunted.

I realized long ago that improv is all about chemistry. And I'm starting to notice patterns in me, the times when I'm really cooking and the times when I feel awkward and even bad. When I took Level One a year ago or so, the class was mostly twenty-something straight white dudes. The more recent Level One I took had a wider mix of types of people, women, blacks, an Indian, etc. I was much better the second time I took Level One, and I didn't think it was because I had already taken the class before.

And now, the Level Two class I'm in has C, a woman with whom I have such a great stage chemistry. She loves to play straight, normal characters (and is very good at them), and she feeds my absurd characters onstage so perfectly. I seriously see the two of us performing together down the road. Or I hope we will. We even have a "team" name picked out:

HOTNE$$ IN A PO$E

Don't ask! (Or do, but not right now. Okay, well, the one key in pronouncing it is that $ is pronounced "dollar sign.")

I haven't blogged a lot about improv. But it has started feeling like a good outlet for my creativity, and I feel myself leaning toward a stronger involvement in it. Time will tell if it's just another passing fancy.