Something Like a Chicken Sandwich

Fear Post-Mortem

2011-11-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

I've been wanting to do a quick run-down of my take-aways from directing and performing in Fear. I can't believe it closed only a week ago. The problem with a one-week run is that your so focused on the show opening, then suddenly it's closing you're on your way to your last show and you need to pick up gifts for your production team so they get random things you could find at Andronicos.

Then suddenly it's over.

What did I learn?

For a directing standpoint, I learned that it really doesn't matter who you kill off when. I used to think it did. I used to think you needed to find the protagonist early on so you could folllow their story and make sure they stayed alive so you don't end up telling a bad sci-fi horror movie plot that ends with the wrong character still alive.

Then I realized in a modern horror-story, especially an improvised one, you don't need to worry about that at all. In the post-Scream self-aware horror-story landscape, every convention has been turned on its head and broken for effect. Hell, you can even trace that back to Psycho, where Alfred Hitchcock had the audacity to kill off his biggest star right at the beginning of the move. Horror stories are all about playing with expectations. If you set someone up as the hero and then you kill them off, clearly you did that on purpose for effect. If they live to the end, you must have done that on purpose too.

In improv you have the ability to adjust on the fly. If the person you all thought was the protagonist gets killed, then you're telling a different story, and you start telling that new story. In the first show, I kept Susan's character alive when she clearly wanted to be killed because, in my mind, she made it to the end of the story. Had that happened a couple shows later, I would have just killed her and saw what happened.

By the end of the run, we'd played this out to the extreme wherein the killer actually wins. The last two shows had the evil element triumph at the end of the show. Sometimes that's just the way it goes. You have to let the story be what it wants be, but I don't think we could have let the killer win until we let go the idea that certain people had to live to certain points in the show. Or maybe I just needed to let that go, but either way, we got there.

The other big lesson I took away was to communicate. In improv, you always have to walk a fine line between over-communicating your hits and not communicating them well enough at all, but there's other levels of communication as well. Twice I found myself onstage about to kill someone in a certain way and I realized I had no way to accomplish it safely with out communicating what I wanted to do to my fellow improvisor. But I had no way to do that silently. So, in both case, and in both cases it was with Merrill, I simply told her under by breath on stage what I was about to do. "I'm going to stab you in the ear." "I'm going to trip you over backwards." She knew what was going to happen and could accomplish it safely, and I'm sure no one in the audience heard or saw. There's no reason not to communicate on stage, if you can do it properly.

Then there's communicating backstage. You have a hit. What's the bare minimum of information you need to communicate to someone to put them on the same page as you? I knew I needed to do a scene with Larissa's character, but as the killer, if I just grabbed her and brought her onstage for a scene, it's reasonable to assume she'll assume I intend to kill her. That's not what I wanted. So I told her "I want to do a scene with you. But I don't want to kill you." That gave her what she needed and we could a scene on the same page. It took two sentences. I didn't detail what I wanted to happen in the scene. That was all I needed to say.

Those are the things that stuck in my mind. The cast was kick-ass. Everyone did a great job of playing intense emotions and killing each other with panache. I loved it.

Fear: Full Run Summaries

2011-11-01T14:28:00.000-07:00

Here are show summaries for the entire run, including slightly edited versions of the three I posted previously.

Tuesday, October 25: First the Eyes

The ghost of a Civil War general returns to arural Maine B&B, possessing one of its unwitting guests (Alan), forcing himto kill until the General (Christian) has enough power to regain human form andspend one night with his love (Susan). First the eyes, then the thorns, thenthe blood, and then the soul.

Wednesday, October 26: The Queen Christina

The law firm of Rogers & Rogers charters theship Queen Christina to find an island lighthouse owned by one of theirrecently deceased clients. In spite of the Captain’s (Greg’s) efforts toprevent it, the ship finds the island itself, but anyone who sets foot in thelighthouse is changed forever…

Thursday, October 27: Harold’s Door

A group of teens in the town of Littleton, MTsneak into the abandoned 1950s research facility and bomb shelter under theschool playground to drink and make-out, but there’s a reason the facility wasabandoned. One teen’s (Christian’s) father (Bryce) has beentrapped in a demon world, and he’s ready to return with his new friends.

Friday, October 28: Yellow Eye

The university grad students on Arcola Island have thelush tropical island to themselves for a winter-break archeological dig. Whenthey learn of the lost treasure of the pirate Yellow Eye, their paradise turnsinto a nightmare when one student’s (Merrill’s) greed drives her to murder.

Saturday, October 29: Bogsville

Bogsville, Louisana is a pleasant, quiet town surroundedby swamp. But the murky waters hide a murkier underbelly to the town that isonly revealed when Vondra (Mia) returns from her home in the swamp to visit hercousin Sheila (Susan) and runs into her former flame Mickie (Greg).

Sunday, October 30: All in the Family

The Newville Ski Lodge had been built in the 1940s by thesuperstitious and strict Newville family patriarch. It included 13 ski runs, 13lifts, and an indoor apple orchard with 13 trees of 13 different kinds ofapples. His grandchildren soon learn that,even in death, he exacts strict punishment for breaking his rules through hisever-loyal servant Christopher (Alan).

Monday, October 31: Sunshine Acres

Sunshine Acres is a place rich people go to "getbetter." Only the treatments they get are a little unorthodox.Cynthia (Larissa) finds out a little too late that Caretaker Ursula (Mia) isn'twhat she thought she was, and Caretaker Michael (Clay) is EXACTLY what shethought he was.

Fear: Shows 1 - 3

2011-10-28T12:00:00.000-07:00

We've had three performances of Fear, which puts us a little less then halfway through the run. In a normal run, three performances would have taken us through the first weekend. The shows went very well, if I do say so myself! Here's a look at the briefest of brief show summaries for each:

Tuesday, October 25: First the Eyes

The ghost of a Civil War general returns to a rural MaineB&B, possessing one of its unwitting guests, forcing him to kill until theGeneral has enough power to regain human form. "First the eyes, then the thorns,then the blood, and then the soul."

Wednesday, October 26: The Queen Christina

The law firm of Rogers & Rogers charters the shipQueen Christina to find an island lighthouse owned by one of their recentlydeceased clients, but anyone who sets foot in the lighthouse is changed forever…

Thursday, October 27: Harold’s Door

We've had quite a few interesting deaths so far involving such things as eye-gouging, castration, and being pulled through a portal into another dimension by demons. We have reports of audience members scaring their spouses by whispering "first the eyes" while trying to fall asleep. We've even had a few repeat audience members already!

The show runs through Halloween night.

Fear Rehearsals 6 and 7: Happiness and Texture

2011-10-06T10:33:00.000-07:00

Rehearsal 6 came just a week after rehearsal 5 back in September. Rehearsal 6 was just two weeks after that and a few days into October. The scary thing is that rehearsal 6 was our last rehearsal as a complete cast. There will be a partial cast rehearsal in October while I'm out of town. Bryce will helm it and steer the cast through the final stages of the narration concept (that we're still working out). We've arrived at a stage that we often arrive at in our rehearsal process: we have all of the tools we need for the show, but we haven't actually used them all to build a show yet. To be more specific, we haven't done a run that made it into the second act yet. That will have to happen during rehearsal 8, especially since a key element of the narration layer can only be worked on in the context of the end of the show.

But we did learn some valuable lessons about the narration in rehearsal 6. We were focusing on the opening narration to start the show, and we kept having problems. Then we realized that the opening shouldn't painted a gloomy foreboding picture of our location, but should make it seem like the happiest, most wonderful place on Earth. For one thing, this will provide a nice contrast. For another, people know what show we're doing when they sit down. They're going to know that as wonderful and beautiful a place as we're describing is, there is a dark underbelly. Something bad is going to happen. We don't need to tell them that. They know that already. They'll already be building within them selves a sense of dread.

In rehearsal 6, we left the opening behind and began the delicate process of inserting the narration into the rest of the show. We only got as far as a few very interesting first halves (what was going to happen that winter at Hanover Farms?), but we learned that (so far at least) you really can't do too much narrating. It doesn't break from the reality. Rather, it heightens it. It brings more texture to the show and fosters the audience's imagination to really see what's happening.

We also learned that likable characters can be seriously flawed, or even... unlikeable. It seems like a paradox, but it's not. People are people. If they're real and complex, they're going to have likeable aspects and unlikeable ones. Playing characters in that way will hooked the audience even more into them. We care about them because we see ourselves in their faults and in their triumphs.

Tickets are on sale now! Remember, the show only runs for 1 week, 7 performances. Don't blink, or you'll miss it.

Fear Rehearsals 4 and 5: Creepy and Intense

2011-09-12T16:00:00.000-07:00

For our August rehearsal, we started out focusing on scenes with creepy undertones, hence my What is Creepy post from around then. Then we ran a couple of first halves. I knew we weren't ready yet to do a run, but I wanted to see where we were exactly. The process showed me, and the cast I think, where some of the holes we have yet to fill lie.

During the long month between our August and September rehearsals, I spent a lot time thinking about what sort of suggestion to get from the audience. Something that would solve some of the problems I could see during the half-runs in our rehearsal. In doing so, I stumbled across an idea to add a layer of narration to the show.

We spent the first half or rehearsal on Saturday playing around with it. The idea definitely has promise, we just need to work it at the next rehearsal to see if we can get it where it needs to be. I'm not describing it because it's hard to describe, and I have no idea what form it will take when all is said and done.

For the second have of rehearsal on Saturday we worked on violence and death. This is a key aspect of this show, but one I had wanted to wait to work on until absolutely necessary. We went over some improvised stage combat techniques and then we took turns doing little scenes where one character killed another.

They were intense, because as Merrill said "We're really good at it."

That's why we have always done this show as a short run. You just can't live in that sort of emotional space for very long, whether your the killer, the victim, or the audience for that matter.

Here's an early draft version of the flyer:

What is "Creepy"?

2011-08-12T07:00:00.000-07:00

What makes something creepy? When we get the feeling that something is creepy, it’s generally a warning sign. We’re always looking for small subtle changes in our environment that could lead to danger. We’ll get the creeping feeling that something isn’t quite right. We might not be able to put it into words, but subconsciously we know something’s wrong. This is the essence of “creepy”.

Something is creepy if it’s not quite normal. People can be creepy. Places can be creepy. Just about anything can be creepy as long as it’s just a little off.

People who exhibit one emotional state are creepy. If you look at someone for 5 seconds you might see 10 different emotional states flash across their face. People are constantly changing their emotions and degrees in which they feel those emotions. Even if someone is happy all the time, they’re not the same level of happy all the time.

People who have no self awareness are creepy. We all have some level of self awareness. A lack of it is itself creepy but it also makes other behaviors creepy as well.

For instance: Inappropriate touching. If I touch you inappropriately and I know that it was inappropriate and telegraph that I know that by apologizing, joking, being embarrassed, or making it clear that I was trying to provoke a reaction from you, it’s not creepy. But if I touch you inappropriately and have no awareness that it was inappropriate, it’s creepy.

Another example of this is obsession and “really liking” something. We all “really like” certain things more than the average person. We’ve all been obsessed with things from time to time. But, we are aware of it. We know we like this thing too much. We know we’re obsessed with something. We have perspective on it. We know it’s not normal, so it’s ok. If we don’t show that awareness, if we think our obsession is normal, that’s creepy.

In short, a person is creepy if they exhibit an abnormal behavior or trait while showing no awareness that it is abnormal.

Children often come across as creepy. They’re sort of in a no-win situation. For one thing, they are inherently different than adults. They act differently. They’re proportioned differently and look different. They generally have no self-awareness. If they act like children, we find them creepy because they’re not acting like adults. If they act like adults, we find them creepy because they’re not acting like children.

Locations can also be creepy, if they’re abnormal for no discernible reason, or if they’re abnormal in a dangerous way. Kubrik made the Overlook Hotel in The Shining creepy by deliberately making it spatially impossible. The set was rife with impossible doorways, hallways, and windows. Dark places are creepy because they might contain hidden threats. A room full of cobwebs is creepy, but not for the reasons you might think. Walking through a spider web is scary because you didn’t see it and there’s probably a spider on you now. Cobwebs become cobwebs when a spider abandons the web (by either leaving or dying). A room full of cobwebs is creepy because it implies a lack of living things. For one thing, the spiders are all gone. “Why have all living things left this place?” It must be dangerous. For another thing, nothing has moved through this room recently to knock down any of the cobwebs. “Why has this place been so abandoned?” It must be dangerous.

Objects can be creepy too, especially ones that are meant to look like living things. Dolls almost look human but are always just a little off. Masks can look creepy on their own or can make someone wearing them look creepy because they distort features or hide them. Any object can be creepy if something about it isn’t quite right.

Making the show creepy will do more than just help set the mood. It will put the audience on alert and make them easier to scare.

What is "Fear"?

2011-08-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

What is “fear”? Why do we fear things? Simply put: we fear things that might kill us. Change, the unknown, and anything we don’t understand might kill us, so we fear them. Then why do we fear things like public speaking? People don’t generally die from that.

We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved, intelligent beings, but the fact is that we’re not nearly as far removed from the wild as we like to think. Of the 200,000 years or so of human history, we lived about 185,000 of those in the wild. Before we were human, we spent about 3.8 billion years evolving out of the first single celled organisms. Civilization is a very recent development (and even today there are people living in the wild).

So we aren’t hard-wired to instinctually fear things that would kill us today in a modern world. We fear things that would kill us in the wild. We don’t fear public speaking because we fear speaking. We fear standing up in front of a group of people who are all looking at us. That’s a very exposed and dangerous position in the wild. You don’t know what this group of people is going to do, and as far as your instincts are concerned, that group of people might as well be a pack of wolves.

If we instinctually fear things that would kill us in the wild, why do people do stupid things like wade into raging streams above roaring waterfalls? On a certain level, people enjoy being afraid. If they didn’t, no one would come to our show. There’s an evolutionary advantage to that. If we avoided fear at all costs, we never would have left the cave to look for food and would have died out a long time ago. Seeking out the occasional fright helps keep us in practice.

Sudden changes in our environment scare us because they could be threats: a loud noise, a sudden silence, a flash of light, a person in a room you thought was empty. But it goes beyond that. How do we avoid living our lives in fear? We learn how the world works; we develop belief systems; we come to expect certain cause and effect relationships. In a sense, we decide what’s possible and what’s not. When something happens that we have come to believe is impossible, it scares us not only because it is a threat but because it throws into question the rest of our beliefs. “If I’m wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?”

How does this help us scare the audience? We’re going to scare the audience by scaring the characters in the show, but our characters are human and react like humans do. As actors and improviser, we can simply choose to be afraid of whatever is happening. If the audience closely identifies with your character, they won’t care exactly why you’re afraid; they’ll just be afraid for you. This only goes so far (but should not be discounted).

Instead, we now have a few strategies we can employ to scare our characters. We can threaten them with death or physical harm. Instinctually, we fear those things. (A serial killer about to break down your door and hack you to bits = scary.) We can also show them impossible things such as supernatural phenomenon. (Your sibling who just died sitting at the foot of your bed singing you a lullaby = scary.) More subtly, we can set up expectations and then break them. This can be as simple as screaming after a long silence or as complex as having our hero’s lover knock on the door before entering throughout the show only to have the monster knock on the door at the end.

Basics of a Horror Plot

2011-08-03T16:36:00.000-07:00

Basic Horror Plot:

Once upon a time... There was a group of characters.

And everyday… Those characters did stuff.

Until one day… Something put those characters in danger.

Because of that… Some of them succumb to the danger.

Because of that… They fight to get out of danger.

Because of that…

A. They succeed. The danger is defeated forever. At least one of them survives.

B. The danger is not defeated forever, but at least one of them succeeds in escaping it (for now).

C. The danger prevails. All of them succumb. (This is Torture Porn: Not what we’re doing.)

The Evil Must Succeed on Some Level

The difference between horror and thriller is that in horror you actually see the effect of the danger. In thriller, the danger threatens an outcome that the hero fights to prevent and succeeds in preventing. The outcome never comes to fruition. In horror, the danger succeeds, at least in part. The outcome and its effects are seen (and horrify the audience). Our hero fights to prevent it from happening AGAIN either to themselves or to others.

Armageddon is a thriller because the asteroid never succeeds at destroying the Earth.

Silence of the Lambs is horror because we see what both Buffalo Bill and Hannibal Lecter are capable of.

The Evil’s Intention is Therefore Important

The intention of the evil determines whether or not it succeeds. If the villain in Cape Fear were simply trying to kill his old defense attorney, it would be a thriller, but he’s not. He’s trying to get revenge by terrorizing the attorney’s family. He succeeds at this, but eventually the attorney stops him. This makes it a horror.

The alien in Alien, Michael Meyers in Halloween, and Jason in Friday the Thirteenth are all trying to kill (for different reasons). They succeed in killing. They just don’t kill Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lee Curtis, or whoever it is that survives in Friday the Thirteenth.

The demon in The Exorcist isn’t trying to kill. I haven’t seen it in a while, but I imagine the demon is trying to make people question their faith.

The intention of the evil also figures prominently in ghost stories. Ghosts are rarely trying to kill. Often they are trying to help or warn people of other dangers, but a helpful ghost can be just as dangerous as a malicious one.

The Hero Must be in Danger of Succumbing to the Danger

If the hero isn’t in direct danger, it’s thriller. In other words, I can’t be fighting just to save a friend, family member, or loved one. I must also be fighting to save myself. Taken is a thriller because Liam Neeson is in no direct danger of becoming a sex slave himself. He’s just trying to save his daughter.

The Danger Must be Extraordinary

Death is an ordinary danger. Being shot is an ordinary danger. Movies about snipers, like Phone Booth, are thrillers not horrors. For death to be the danger, the method must be an unpleasant one or involve some mental anguish. “A fate worse than death” is an extraordinary danger. In short, the danger must be horrifying.

Fear Rehearsals 1, 2, and 3: Catching Up

2011-07-26T17:00:00.000-07:00

I have been grossly negligent in writing about Fear rehearsals for two reasons. One: I’ve had my head squarely up the ass of Act One, Scene Two. My role involved far more work than I had anticipated. Two: With rehearsals a full month apart, there’s just not the same pressure to blog about rehearsal right away. When we’re rehearsing every week, if I don’t blog immediately, suddenly there’s another rehearsal to write about and I get behind. With rehearsal every month, I have loads of time and then suddenly there’s another rehearsal to write about.

We’ve had 3 rehearsals, sort of. The first involved just a small group of ensemble members as we tried to decide if we had enough people to do the show as just that small group. We decided we did not, so we asked a few people to join the show. Normally we have auditions, but because of the special nature of this show (spread out rehearsals, compressed run, etc) I decided just to ask people to join the cast. I do not recommend this. It’s a lot easier to cast from a small fixed pool of possibilities than it is from the entire world.

The second rehearsal, therefore, was the first with the entire cast. We’re having longer than average rehearsals (4 hours instead of 3), and for this one we spent a great deal of time working on space-object work. Or rather, we spent a great deal of time working with actual objects. We don’t often improvise with props (although if you’ve seen Act One, Scene Two you might not know that). It was interesting to see how using props changed the nature of the scenes as well as to note how we actually use real objects differently from how we frequently pretend to use them when we improvise.

Our second full-cast rehearsal was just last weekend. As is often the case in our rehearsals, I’ve spent a great deal of time thus-far focusing on the first few scenes of the show. In the first rehearsals, we worked a lot on characters. Last weekend, we focused on building environments and worlds that we could play in.

It’s amazing how long and short 4 hours is. It’s also amazing how long and short a month can feel. This whole rehearsal process is something of a structural experiment. It’s a little too soon to tell how well it’s working, but the rehearsals have been great so far.

Act One, Scene Two: Opening Night #machineofdeath

2011-07-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

We opened Act One, Scene Two on Saturday, July 9, with a special Machine of Death cross-over event. The show's first scene was a piece written by Dinosaur Comics author Ryan North for the book Machine of Death called Murder and Suicide, Respectively. Ryan joined us for the interview by phone (he was in Florida for the final Shuttle launch), but David Malki ! of Wondermark was in-attendance (pictured above) to sign books and give out death slips.

They both took part in the interview:

The show itself was a lot of fun. If you were there, here's what you saw; if you weren't, here's what you missed:

Dr. Isabel Rosch (Joy) and Dr. Sidney Nelson (Christian) have been developing the Machine of Death, and in so doing, have stumbled upon a genius idea: with rats and statistics, they can send a message to themselves from the future... and maybe avoid their own predicted deaths: murder and suicide, respectively. Meanwhile, director of marketing Charles (Steven) is anxious to monetize the Machine (while avoiding knowing his own results, of course). His plans are slightly derailed when Sidney inexplicably quits, having won the lottery (message from the future!), and goes on an open-ended rock-and-roll bender. As news of the Machine leaks out into the world, it attracts the attention of relatives, and then the general public; the now pocket-sized machine finds its way into every mall in America. But the tidal wave of its effects starts with its inventors: Charles is still longing for Isabel, who’s pining for Sidney, who’s gone off the deep end. While trying to avoid their predicted ends, our characters accidentally bring them upon themselves...

Now, at the end of the show, if you were there, you'll remember that Joy's character took a fall. Then Joy improvised the most realistic space-object blood anyone had ever seen. We're pleased to announce that after a night in the emergency room, Joy is alright and the proud owner of 3 staples in the back of her head. Phew. We know you like to get method Joy, but that's taking it a bit too far!

Steve with Joy's script:

Act One, Scene Two: Second Preview

2011-07-12T11:00:00.000-07:00

On Friday, July 8, we had our second preview featuring a fist scene from playwright Annette Roman called After the What the...!?

She didn't want to give too much away about the piece in the pre-show interview, and neither did I:

I sat next to her during the show, and based on her near constant laughter, I think we did a good job. Here's what happened:

It’s the Rapture, or is it? Samson (Greg) sits at home with his wife (Mandy), teen-aged daughter (Joy) and 8 year-old son (Steven) getting more and more agitated as the minutes of judgement day tick away. Then his spiritual leader Pastor Bob Judas (Clay) arrives to say a surprising group of people have vanished. Meanwhile, in heaven, Eve’s boyfriend Adam (Steven), Adam’s atheist mom (Joy), Eve’s transgender Aunt Jezebel (Merrill), and the old Arab immigrant couple the El Sawhis (Mandy and Greg) learn that God is going to send them back to Earth for three days. Then they can choose whether they come or get left behind. Adam tries to figure out how to bring Eve with him. Pastor Judas loses his faith and finds Jezebel, and God is too busy playing mini-golf with Gandhi to pay too much attention.

After the show we had a talk-back with the audience. We like to do these after previews so we can find out how well the show met the audience's expectations. We always learn new things and have a good time:

Act One, Scene Two: First Preview

2011-07-11T11:00:00.000-07:00

I haven't written anything yet about Act One, Scene Two except for a quick post over on Experiment Farm (read here). That post will give you the background on my involvement as the show's Literary Manager.

The first preview was Thursday, July 7, and featured a first scene by playwright and improvisor Dan Wilson entitled Silent City. In the words of Trish, the show's Assistant Director, Silent City "takes the conventional noir detective story and gives it a bitter, comic twist, complete with gender role reversals."

At the top of each show, we're bringing the playwright up onstage to interview them about their piece and about their writing-style in general. The point of this show is to improvise the piece how they might have written it, so the interview gives the performers all sorts of good information to work with. Here's Dan's interview:

The show itself was a lot of fun. Here's the "official" show summary that will go out in this week's email to our mailing list:

P.I. Carol Stone (Stacey) is a woman, a failed meteorologist, and completely deaf. Although you'd think all of those things would be a disadvantage in a town full of darkness, she has a knack for solving crimes. In her first big murder case, the seductive Brad Grube (Christian) reports his sister Maxine missing. Another lone woman crime-fighter, Detective Diaz (Mandy), pals up with Carol to solve what turns out to be her murder. Was it evil ODC-afflicted speech pathologist Herr Redding (Clay), who had an affair with her, or another of her ex-lovers, Steve Stevenson (Aaron)? Partnered by the eager, exact direction-following, incompetent William (Steven), Carol neglects repeated texts from her boyfriend Peter (Greg), putting their relationship seriously in jeopardy. However, having figured out the clues, Peter rushes to unmask Diaz as the real murderer, who confesses all in a final fit of clear communication. Peter and Carol make up and marry, and the play ends with on a happy note - just as their next case starts with William's falling through the office door, stabbed in the back.

Stories within Stories

2011-05-25T12:00:00.000-07:00

If I tell you a story about something that happened to me, you can question me directly about the details, and you can think I’m lying. It's harder to suspend your disbelief.

If I tell you a story about what a friend of mine told me happened to him, you can’t question the story directly, and you don’t doubt that I am telling you the truth about what I was told. I’m not lying. Once you believe that I’m not lying, it’s easier to then believe the story I’m telling you because you’ve already agreed to believe in something. It's easier to suspend your disbelief.

That’s why so many horror stories, especially novels, are stories within stories, Frankenstein being the prime example.

Studies (that can’t find references to at the moment) have shown that once you get someone to say “yes” to one thing, it’s easier to get them to say “yes” to another. Salesmen use that to their advantage all the time. They ask you a simple general question that you’re likely to say “yes” to first and then continue with their pitch.

It’s the same principle.

A1S2: Un-Scripted Needs Scripts!

2011-05-11T10:29:00.000-07:00

I'm serving as something of a literary manager for Un-Scripted's summer show Act One: Scene Two. Why does it need a literary manager? Because it needs scripts!

I know, it's a paradox. To find out all the details on how you can submit a script, and why the hell we need them go here!

Tim Bauer, local playwright, author of the play Zombie Town and the blog Direct Address, and cast member in Un-Scripted's own Great Puppet Musical back in 2007, has been consulting with us on the project. He posted about it to his aforementioned blog here.

Voices From the Past

2011-03-19T22:07:00.000-07:00

I keep journals, off and on. I have since high school. Most of them are fairly unreadable today, even for myself, but sometimes I go back and read parts of them anyway. Generally I skip over my youthful, hormonally induced rants about my insecurities and read the parts that chronicle interesting events I lived through or witnessed.

But tonight I stumbled across one of my more philosophical musings, written almost exactly 17 years ago. At the time, I was describing why I wanted to do theater and direct plays, and I will transcribe it as I wrote it:

I like plays because it's the perfect thing. It exists in one performance. It affects the audience and you can see its effect. That's all it's meant for. All other performances are academic. A book or a painting may have an affect in one hundred years, but what good does that do the author? To write a book you have to wonder "will anyone read it and what will they think?" Then comes "will people in 100 years read it and what will they think?" That's stupid. You can't sit there and watch them read it. I want to direct and see people's responses. Any thought of the future is stupid, pointless.

Then the immediate next section reads:

I like things to have an end. A movie doesn't end because someone can see it again. A book doesn't end. Someone can read it again. A person can stare at a painting for days. A play ends. It may be performed more than once, but it's never the same way twice.

I've been thinking a lot lately about why I do improv, why do I find it so much more satisfying than other art forms, and my thoughts have been running almost exactly along those same lines that I wrote down 17 years ago. In fact, I wouldn't say the above is actually true of scripted theater, but it is true of improvised theater. Simply add the word "improvised" in front of the word "play" above. It's no wonder that I took to improv so thoroughly.

ToTG Week #5 Show Summaries

2010-12-20T09:33:00.000-08:00

Witherlite - Thursday, December 16
Suggestion: Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network)

Young Oxford student Tesla Witherspoon (Michael) didn't have many friends. Numbers meant more to him than people. After suffering one too many humiliations at the hands of his fellow students, he befriends inventor Jeramiah Turnbottom (Christian) and soon Tesla has created his own invention: The Witherlite - the first electric lightbulb. Soon Tesla is the richest most powerful man in London, but along the way he turns his back on Turnbottom and wins then loses the love of his life Ms. Turner (Mandy). Did the ends justify the means? Not even Tesla is certain.

Algae - Friday, December 17
Suggestion: Jaws

The beachside city of Brighton begins drilling special hotsprings to bring in tourists. Problem is, after they start drilling, people start disintegrating and dying in the springs. The mayor, Bartleby St. James (Paul), is hellbent on continuing to drill more springs, no matter the risk. A London journalist Howard Hubbard (Greg), a grizzled ship's captain Barnaby Willkins (Christian), and a discredited hydrologist Edna Sharpedge (Mandy) join forces to fight the true cause of the disintegrations: Ancient Red Algae released by the drilling. Are they going to need a bigger boat?

Filkins - Saturday 3pm, December 18
Suggestion: Dexter

Tom Filkins (Christian) works as a sketch artist at Scotland Yard with Inspector William McGinty (Alan), an Irishman turned London lawman. Tom has a lovely wife (Joy) and two perfect kids, Emma (Mandy) and Nicholas (Alan), but he also has a dark secret: He kills and butchers London's most despicable criminals. As the City lives in terror of "Jack the Ripper," Tom's daughter Emma and his partner McGinty start putting the pieces together, but Tom knows that once something is broken, the pieces can never be made whole again.

Sara in Hatland - Saturday 8pm, December 18
Suggestion: Alice in Wonderland

Poor young Sara Townsend (Melissa) dreams of a wealthier, more colorful life where she can stay a child forever. Then one day she journeys down aisle 47 of the hat shop of Mr. Hatter (Greg) and Mr. Lupine (Scott) and finds herself in a strange and magical world where all the inhabitants are hats. Along the way, she encounters many strange and magical beings, including the imperious and dangerous Queen of Hats (Mandy). Enthralled by the Queen's power and riches, Sara loses track of time, forgetting that if she stays there she will become a hat herself and never be able to return to her family. Will she stay in Hatland forever or return to her simple life with her mother (Joy)?

ToTG Rehearsal #17: The Last One

2010-12-16T15:00:00.000-08:00

We had our last rehearsal on Monday night. We still have 7 shows to go, but they happen in the next 7 days with no room for a rehearsal in between.

We worked on singing and trying to nail a few things that we've still been searching around for on stage in shows. The opening number was the first thing we tackled. We're experimenting with adding slightly more structure to it than its had. The results were promising; we'll have to see how it works in a show.

Then we worked a little on short crowd scenes to be used as something of a sorbet throughout the show. I guess they don't cleanse the palate so much as serve to remind the audience that there's a larger world in play than just the characters we're following.

Then we worked on having some scenes run into songs and finally we worked on what to do if the musician is playing a type of song that you the improvisor doesn't really want to sing in the moment. The answer is to basically sing the type of song you want to sing and the music he's playing will either contrast it nicely and make everything very dynamic, or the musician will change to match what you're doing. Either way we shouldn't feel trapped by the tone of the song being played. Something that's easy to forget in the moment.

Then we ate lots of cake and went home.

ToTG Week #4 Show Summaries

2010-12-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Lord of the Book - Thursday, December 9
Suggestion: Fantasy (Lord of the Rings)

A large red leather book has been passed down through generations to David Atwater (Alan) under strict instructions that it never be opened, but David can't resist cracking the spine. Soon he finds himself and his servant Frederick (Christian) being chased by denizens of the underworld hell-bent on retrieving the book. David must take it to Ayers Rock in Australia and throw it into a bottomless void, while the last remaining descendants of Atlantis pursue him and their lost book of magic. If he fails, all of England will be overrun, but can he succeed without it costing him his life?

The Godmother - Friday, December 10
Suggestion: The Godfather Saga

The Flannery sisters Nan (Merrill) and Colleen (Mandy) leave Ireland and move to London with their younger brother Arn (Alan) in search of a better life. When they open a small watering-hole, they run afoul of Elizabeth Boudicca McGinty (Melissa), a 3rd-generation Irish immigrant who controls everything around the docks. The stubborn sisters try to fight the McGinty clan, but their scuffle erupts into a bloody war with no winners.

Henry Darling and the Lost Jewel of Technocticlan - Saturday 3pm, December 11
Suggestion: Indiana Jones Adventure

Archeologist Henry Darling (Alan) retrieves the lost jewel of Technocticlan only to have it taken from him by his French counterpart Jacques Sinclair (Greg). As Sinclair builds a pyramid under the city of Paris to harness the jewel's power for the vile French, Darling must not only reach the staff of Amun Rah in Eqypt before the French, but he must save the love of his life, Anna Tompkins (Merrill). Can Darling and his trusty side-kick Frederick Hayes (Christian) save the world from the French?

West End Story - Saturday 8pm, December 11
Suggestion: West Side Story / Grease

When Mary Lingshen (Merrill), a flower girl from a violent family, meets Patrick Wilcox (Michael), servant to London's richest man, they instantly fall in love, but in England servants and merchants are sworn enemies. When Mary's brother Frankie (Paul) finds out about the romance, he and his pals beat Patrick up in a bar fight. Mary and Patrick vow to marry anyway, but before they can, Frankie's continued harassment gets Patrick fired. As Patrick despairs that Mary will no longer have him, he runs into Frankie on the street. They fight and Patrick kills Frankie... in front of Mary. She runs away, and Patrick turns himself in to the police only to be sentenced to hang.

His hanging is in the square on a busy market day, but Mary does not come as she cannot stand to look at him. He dies thinking of her, his feelings unchanged.

ToTG Rehearsal #16: Arguing, Plots, & Time Jumps

2010-12-09T13:00:00.001-08:00

We actually learned a lot from the performances last weekend, and I don't want to gloss over that by jumping right into rehearsal.

We were arguing too much too early in the shows. Characters were trying to convince the hero or villain to do or not do something. Why is that a problem? Well, it's subtle. A horror movie wouldn't be very interesting if a character actually tried to convince the heroine not to go down into the basement in her nightie to check the circuit breaker. Characters need to be allowed to get into trouble. The solution isn't to agree with everything the hero is doing. It's perfectly OK, in fact it's desirable, to have an opposing opinion. Just don't try to convince the hero to agree with you. State your opinion but leave it at that. Instead of saying "you need to not go down into the dark basement because it's dangerous" you say "I would never go down into the basement on a night like this." Then the hero is free to disregard what you said and walk into trouble.

In a few cases, we stuck closer to the original plot line of the suggested story than we ever have in the past, and those shows were some of the more successful ones. Sticking loosely to the plot freed us from having to worry about where the story was going, but at the same time our finished products were very different from the originals. The Star Wars show in Saturday was a good example of this. We basically just translated Star Wars into Victorian England plot-wise, but we accomplished it with just Luke, Ben, Leia, and Vader characters, plus some "Storm Troopers" and various other characters unique to our story. As a result it felt more like the source material that Lucas might have used to base his story on rather than a rip-off. It was very interesting.

But now onto rehearsal...

We worked on allowing the narrator to not only time jump over things we don't need to see "and then they traveled to England" as well as to substitute narration for action. The narrator can say "and then he swore up a blue streak that would have made a sailer gouge out his ears," but then we don't have to see it. This is a big change from traditional improvised narration. Normally saying something like that would be pimping the actor on stage to do something hard/funny/impossible. In a normal story, however, we don't need to see what the narrator just said. This can be very liberating, but tricky to navigate and actually do.

We also worked on making bigger physical gestures and making better use of the physical space.

I feel like there were many many other very useful things we worked on, but as usual once I get a few days on from rehearsal the specifics start to leak out my brain. I think we will just leave it at that and rush headlong into Week 4.

ToTG Week #3 Show Summaries

2010-12-08T14:00:00.000-08:00

Week Three of A Tale of Two Genres sported a science fiction theme. If only Dickens had joined his contemporaries H.G. Wells and Jules Verne in the early days of sci-fi, we might have studied some of the following tales in English class:

Fine Young Cannibals - Thursday, December 2
Suggestion: Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)

In an effort to save his dying mother Priscilla (Joy), Dr. Clenchface (Greg) works tirelessly to develop an anti-aging serum. He tests it on the poor vagrant population of London and succeeds in reversing the aging process! Unfortunately the serum also robs people of their senses, turning them into mindless cannibal zombies. When Priscilla tells her son that she does not wish to live forever, he must confront his own fears and find a way to save London.

The Soot - Friday, December 3
Suggestion: Wachowski Brothers (The Matrix)

James Abernathy (Christian) has a simple life, but everything to him seems covered in a layer of soot. Then a mysterious Duchess (Mandy) who claims to be his mother frees him from the soot and makes him the aristocrat he was born to be. Soon he finds he's being trained for more than just a place in the aristocracy. The Duchess is waging a war on the industrial revolution and he has been chosen to lead the charge. When she is kidnapped by Agents from Scotland Yard (Alan & Michael), Mr. Abernathy must penetrate their inner sanctum and rescue her.

Professor Who? - Saturday 3pm, December 4
Suggestion: Time Travel (Doctor Who)

Professor Evangelus (Scott) creates a clock that allows him to travel through time and space. Modesty Greene (Merrill), the daughter of Aloyisius Greene (Greg), famous sea captain and friend to Prof. Evangelus, longs for adventure and excitement, but gets more than she bargained for when she meets up with Prof. Evangelus and travels to ancient Egypt. Soon Modesty is kidnapped by the Sleepers of Eldritch who are trapped in time and more or less imprisoned in Big Ben. With Modesty in danger and all of London stuck at eternal midnight, the Professor has no time to lose.

Tower Wars - Saturday 8pm, December 4
Suggestion: Star Wars

Peter Gillowsby (Michael) lives in the small rural town of Ardenshire, miles away from the power struggles in London where the King was securing his totalitarian power. Then on his 21st birthday his boss, Mephisto Haverford (Christian), gives him his father's sword and reveals to him that he, Mr. Haverford, is the last of the Queen's Special Guard. He offers to train Peter in the ways of the Samurai. Meanwhile Lord Grimsby (Alan), head of the King's Secret Service and a Samurai himself captures Emma Whitefield (Merrill) and tortures her for information on the resistance. Peter and Mr. Haverford rush to the Tower of London to save her, but Mephisto is slain by his old pupil Grimsby. Peter attacks Grimsby in a fit of rage only to find out that Grimsby is really William Gillowsby, Peter's father. As the dark lord is thrown into the moat, Peter and Emma barely escape before the Tower burns to the ground.

ToTG Rehearsal #15: Ready For Your Solo?

2010-12-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

We started Monday night by doing an exercise in exaggeration. In pairs, one person would say an adjective, and the other would describe a character using that adjective but in an exaggerated way. "Dudley Longshanks was so tall that his his top hat scraped the clouds and caused lighting." The point is, he's not really that tall, but we can use metaphors like that in our descriptions as narrators.

Then we worked on solo songs. We'd have six people go up. One person would narrate us into a scene. The scene would play out a little, and we'd have a solo song. We tried to cycle through everyone, but do to time constraints towards the end we sang some duets.

From a vocal perspective, I find myself getting more comfortable singing higher in my range. I'm not sure where that's coming from. My problem for years was trying to sing too high in my range, or singing above it a I guess. Then I started deliberately singing lower, which helped a lot. Now I open my mouth and higher notes are coming out, but they sound good so I'm going with them. Maybe now I'm actually singing in my range instead of above or below it.

ToTG Week #2 Show Summaries

2010-12-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Play it Again, Jonah - Friday, November 26
Suggestion: Wartime Romance (Casablanca)

Persephone Sweetbottum (Melissa) wanders the seedy streets of London searching for news from the front of her fiancée, Jonah Whitehouse (Greg), but he is trapped behind enemy lines in France. As he struggles to survive, he becomes tempted by the sweet farmer's daughter Sophie (Merrill), but when he is betrayed by the local resistance, he manages to escape back to England. Can he find Persephone before the mean streets consume her?

The Trouble with Sarah Appleton- Saturday matinée, November 27
Suggestion: Alfred Hitchcock(Vertigo)

There's a new pastor in town. When Sarah Appleton (Merrill), the troubled wife of the local inventor (Paul), comes to him for help, Pastor Dartel (Michael) becomes embroiled in a chess match he never quite understands. Then Sarah's twin sister Dora (Merrill) comes to town and changes the game. Can the pastor hold on to his sanity--let alone his life?

The Spice Who Loved Me - Saturday evening, November 27
Suggestion: James Bond (On Her Majesty's Secret Service)

Only one man can stop Godric Nobchomper's (Michael's) plot to seize control of the spice trade: White. Jeremiah White (Paul). The Victorian superspy returns from assignment in India to tackle the case, only to find Nobchomper's real ambition is to control the world's food supply! The fate of the world rests in his ability to rescue the sweet ingénue accountant Melissa Etheridge (Mandy) from Nobchomper. Will White stop the poisoned cinnamon from infiltrating England's shores? Will he save Miss Etheridge? What side is Paprika Forkworthy (Joy), England's only female naval captain, really on?

ToTG Rehearsal #14: Who am I?

2010-11-24T13:00:00.000-08:00

Again, I missed a couple rehearsals. One was mandatory, but I was out of town. The other was optional, but I was previously engaged. As a result, I didn't play preview weekend, but I did take notes on Friday night.

Monday's rehearsal we focused on singing and some of the different types of songs we might need to sing during the show. We also wanted to make sure, while practicing, that we were hitting the genre. During the shows last weekend we tended to get a little side-tracked by Dickens and the genre didn't creep in until a few scenes into the show. Even though Dickens' pace is very slow, we need to hit the genre running because we don't have 1000 pages to play around in.

We started with environment songs. We've worked on these a lot because we're starting the show with an environment song. We generally find it handy to pick a type of song for the opening number just to get the show moving.

What we've discovered is that environment songs are really the opposite of the narration. The Narrator starts with broad platitudes about the world and focuses in to the scene. People in the environment songs need to start with something specific ("beer for sale") and then generally broaden to a platitude ("drink cures all ills"). Our environment songs have had trouble when we get stuck in the specific and just sing "Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub. Pub." over and over again.

Then we attempted to move on to "the way the world works" songs. I say "attempted" because we had trouble nailing them. Not because we were getting the song wrong, but because we were attempting to do scenes into songs and the scenes we were doing weren't naturally lending themselves to that type of song. Merrill, for instance, sang a lovely "who am I?" song because that's what the scene called for.

We did discover, as a result, that you can pretty much pull out a "who am I?" song at any point and they're fairly easy to sing. You don't need to come up with any new information, you just articulate who you are, doubt whether you want to be that, and then conclude one way or another.

As a side-note, Les Miz has come up a lot during this rehearsal process. Partially because it takes place in a similar era, but also because you can find an example of just about every type of song in Les Miz. For instance, a "who am I?" song is like "Who am I (24601)?" Just about every character has a "need" song, even ones that die a few scenes later. It's just full of examples.

In fact, here's the 2nd Encore from the 10th Anniversary Concert special featuring 17 Jean Valjeans from around the world. See if you recognize the Japanese Valjean:

ToTG Week #1 Show Summaries

2010-11-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

Jasper's Lot - Thursday, November 18
Suggestion: Stephen King

Trouble is brewing. Young Cecilia Holmes (Joy) has reached marrying age and her father, James (Michael), has not yet chosen a suitable husband for her. So, in an act of rebellion, she has set her sights on the opium-smoking, servant-killing, secretly vampiric tanner, Jasper Diehl (Gregg). What she doesn't know is that her father and his friends Muriel, Dudley, and Pamela (Mandy, Paul and Merrill) are members of the Mystical Order of Immortals. As the waring sides battle, James is turned into a vampire. Cecilia must find her own inner strength in order to stand up to Jasper and defeat him once and for all.

A New Dawn - Friday, November 19
Suggestion: Stephenie Meyer (Twilight)

Young Jason Watson (Michael) hopes to start his life afresh at the Twitchwit Boarding School, but soon finds he is tormented by the closed minded students and people of the town who do not accept him because he is a poor orphan. Still, the haughty Dardanella Pickwick (Melissa) finds something about him irresistible and takes him under her wing, but Jason is more than just an orphan: he is a vampire. Can their budding romance survive his true self or the werewolves that hunt him? With a little help from Miss Modesty (Joy) and the visions that she needlepoints, anything is possible.

ToTG Stephen King & When I'm Playing

2010-11-19T18:00:00.000-08:00

The first performance of A Tale of Two Genres was last night! I did not see it, but I hear tell the genre gotten was Stephen King. (Last night's backstage white-board pictured above.) This resulted in: "Edwin Drood if Jasper was a vampire and Rosa's dad was the Highlander." Sounds pretty awesome to me. I will be at the show tonight, but as I was unable to attend any of this week's rehearsals, I am not performing.

If you want to know when I'm performing, without having to slog through the entire play schedule, here you go:

November 26, Friday
November 27, Saturday 3pm
December 2, Thursday
December 3, Friday
December 4, Saturday 8pm
December 9, Thursday
December 10, Friday
December 11, Saturday 3pm
December 16, Thursday
December 18, Saturday 3pm
December 20, Monday

ToTG Rehearsal #11: Going Long

2010-11-11T12:00:00.000-08:00

No, you didn't miss anything, or rather I did. There were no posts on rehearsals 9 and 10 because I did not attend them. Rehearsal #9 was an optional rehearsal and I had a prior commitment that night. I stayed home from rehearsal #10 to try and nip "malingering low-grade cold" in the bud, which I did to questionable success.

So, rehearsal #11. This was also an optional rehearsal, but all but 2 people were present. After warming up we dove into doing the first half hour of a show, without music.

Frequently, in shows past, when getting a genre from the audience, we ask the audience to think of a story they like, but then rather than shout out the story, we have them say what type of story it is. For this show, we're experimenting with actually having them say the story they're thinking about. Last night we got "Big". Then we discuss with the audience what type of story that is. What about that story do they want to see? What other stories are similar? We got "Freaky Friday", "13 going on 30", but we also got "My Fair Lady". The crux of the genre was someone being transformed and forced to be something they're not. The "magical" element was not the most important part.

I'm really excited about this path to a suggestion. I think it will give us a better idea what the audience really wants to see, while giving us concrete examples to build on or incorporate (without having to recreate "Big" specifically in Victorian England).

We told a very fun story of an inventor who's daughter's brain gets swapped with an orphan's in an accident in his lab. Along the way, we discovered a few things about narration and tag-team narration. I also did not play a single character in any scene, but because I spent various chunks of time as the narrator, I did not feel I had been "shut-out of the story".

Then we did another one. This time we got "Much Ado About Nothing", but the important aspect was not Shakespeare, but the love/hate romantic comedy of Beatrice and Benedict. Other examples were "Taming of the Shrew", "10 Things I Hate About You", "Moonlighting".

Then we tried it. Somehow, perhaps because of the original Shakespearean suggestion, we ended up with a main character who was a woman pretending to be a boy at an all-male boarding school. This did not leave much opportunity for a Love/Hate RomCom. I tried, highly unsuccessfully, to shoe-horn a love interest into the story (a man pretending to be a woman teacher). While, the whole thing was very messed up, we laughed a lot at our mistakes and the giant holes we kept digging for ourselves.

We also learned, from both runs, that we can name people ridiculous things, and while everyone off-stage and in the house is dying from laughter, the cast and narrator can play it straight and hold it together. (We accidentally named characters "Thurston Howell" and "Hamburglar" last night.)

ToTG Play Schedule

2010-11-04T12:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the current play schedule for A Tale of Two Genres:

November 18, Thursday – Greg, Joy, Mandy, Merrill, Michael, Paul
November 19, Friday – Christian, Greg, Joy, Melissa, Michael, Scott

November 26, Friday – Alan, Greg, Joy, Melissa, Merrill, Scott
November 27, Saturday 3pm – Alan, Joy, Melissa, Merrill, Michael, Paul
November 27, Saturday 8pm – Christian, Joy, Mandy, Michael, Paul, Scott

December 2, Thursday – Alan, Greg, Joy, Merrill, Michael, Scott
December 3, Friday – Alan, Christian, Mandy, Melissa, Michael, Paul
December 4, Saturday 3pm – Christian, Greg, Joy, Mandy, Merrill, Scott
December 4, Saturday 8pm – Alan, Christian, Greg, Merrill, Michael, Scott

December 9, Thursday – Alan, Christian, Greg, Joy, Merrill, Michael
December 10, Friday – Alan, Mandy, Melissa, Merrill, Paul, Scott
December 11, Saturday 3pm – Alan, Christian, Greg, Michael, Paul, Scott
December 11, Saturday 8pm –Joy, Mandy, Melissa, Merrill, Michael, Paul

December 16, Thursday – Alan, Christian, Mandy, Merrill, Michael, ~~Paul~~ Scott
December 17, Friday – Christian, Greg, Joy, Melissa, Michael, Paul
December 18, Saturday 3pm – Alan, Christian, Greg, Joy, Mandy, Melissa
December 18, Saturday 8pm – Greg, Joy, Mandy, Melissa, Paul, Scott

December 20, Monday – Alan, Christian, Mandy, Melissa, Merrill, Scott
December 21, Tuesday – Greg, Mandy, Melissa, Merrill, Michael, Paul
December 22, Wednesday – Christian, Mandy, Melissa, Merrill, Paul, Scott

ToTG Rehearsal #8: Focusing on Dickens

2010-11-02T17:00:00.000-07:00

Monday night we started a little late as a few of us huddled in the lobby of Off-Market listening to the Giants win the World Series on the radio.

In rehearsal, we revisited some of the narrator exercises we did last Wednesday as a warm-up and then moved into doing straight Dickens scenes. We didn't worry about another genre. We just tried to get the Dickens right.

This allowed us to not only improve our Dickens chops, but really fine tune some of the narration technique. Mandy keeps saying the narrator in Dickens is there to heckle. They point out the absurdities and the amusing bits. They give us backstory. They tell us how the actions of the characters make them feel but only to a degree. This was one of the subtle points we got into last night. The Dickensian Narrator doesn't give us piercingly deep insights into the character's inner psyche. Remember, this was the world before Freud. A world where it's hard for us to imagine the Victorian sense of the mind. The feelings the Narrator relates are largely observable (but are perhaps missed by the other characters).

The Narrator also doesn't relate actions, unless adding context to them. It's not just "he walked up the stairs." It's "he walked up the stairs, barely able to keep his feet after such a fright."

I also had opportunity to play a 4 year-old boy in one scene. Dickensian children are generally just little adults, because Victorians treated children like little adults. They worked as servants or in factories after all. It was good to practice that.

We ended by practicing scenes from different places in a longer story. A first scene, a scene from the end of the half, and a scene from the end of the show. In between we talked through the rest of the show by having the actors stand in a line and step forward to relate a short sentence describing what happened next. This worked quite well. While we didn't choose a genre, we let it naturally become a supernatural story that became something like a Dickensian version of the Little Mermaid with demons.

ToTG Rehearsal #7: Narrating Giants

2010-10-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

As I did not take a picture at last night's rehearsal, here is a link to an image revealing how to explain the internet to a 19th century British street urchin, i.e. Oliver Twist.

Last night, while everyone else in the Bay Area was watching the World Series, we had rehearsal!

We started with a very useful exercise wherein we moved around as upper-class Dickensian characters and introduced ourselves to each other and talked as if at some sort of gathering. Not only did this allows to practice creating names but remembering them, as well as upper class social mores, accents, and posture.

Then we repeated the exercise as merchants or "middle-class", and finally as lower class.

This was a great way to sink into the different social strata, and reminded us all how difficult it is to remember a name you just said or heard.

Then we moved into some narration practice. Mandy's broken down Dickensian narration into three levels: What's going on in the larger world; What's going on in the story; and What's going on in this particular scene. The idea is to start broad and slowly narrow down to what's actually happening on stage.

We practiced this in tag-team pairs where one person would say the first bit, the other the second and the first the third, or some people went back and forth even more times adding in even more subtle gradations.

A couple of interesting things came out of this. One, we discovered how hard it is to not only remember names, but to remember place names you've just made up. We had the idea of having a book in the narrator spot where he/she can actually write down names they've just said. We're not sure if this will work or not. When writing, it's nearly impossible to clock anything else that's going on, but in theory it's a good idea.

Some people found the tag-team approach harder, some easier, and we realized that there's no reason we couldn't do that in an actual show.

Then we split into two groups and took turns with one person improvising a monologue, on person serving as the narrator, and the other person serving as the audience. The narrator then provides any necessary backstory, reveals the actors emotions, or just reinforces what's going on by repeating things.

We discovered we have a long way to go working out the give and take. It was hard not to talk over each other. In the most successful won that I did in that regard, Paul and I were trying so hard to not talk over each other, that we ended up with lots of very long dramatic pauses. I'm not sure how well that played.

We also learned, that the narrator can foreshadow future events by pointing out that a character would live to regret some decision or another. For minor characters you can even go so far as to tell the audience their ultimate fate when we first meet them ("so-and-so would die of consumption in 3 years time" etc).

Finally we moved into full-on scenes with a narrator, again with the narrator not only setting the scene but revealing backstory and emotion. It works very well. As an improvisor, you have a lot less work to do because the narrator is telling you your subtext. As the narrator all your doing is watching what's going on and pointing out the obvious subtext. After all, subtext is always easier to see from the outside.

ToTG Rehearsals #5 and #6

2010-10-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

I didn't have time to write about last week's rehearsal, and it's always hard to write about a rehearsal after too much time has passed. We mostly worked on singing "Environment" and "I Am" songs. An "I Am" song is a variation on a "Need/Want" song wherein you sing about how your life is and then at the bridge imagine what your life could be like. We've discovered this is an easier way to get at a need or want because if you just try to sing about what you want, you always end up wanting love or something clichéd and general.

This Monday, we worked on scenes that lead into songs and then ran a couple 30 minute show starts. We learned that its hard to do an underdog-style training montage under a song when not everyone knows what an underdog-style training montage is. I learned that even if there is a method to my narration madness, I can't forget to pay attention to what's happening on stage and make my fellow improvisors look good.

ToTG Rehearsal #4: Narration Across Scenes

2010-10-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

For this week's rehearsal, we focused on trying out some of Mandy's crazy Dickensian Narrator ideas across multiple scenes. The idea is that a spot will light one area of the stage constantly, and performers will move in and out of the spot and thus in and out of the Narrator role throughout the show. The stage will never go completely dark, and the gaps between every scene will be filled in by someone narrating. This, in theory, should give the show more of a "literary" or "presentational storytelling" feel.

Now, the type of narrating we're doing is already difficult. What we discovered traveling from one scene to the next is that it's also extremely difficult for the other improvisors. The natural inclination is to stand back off-stage listening to the Narrator, not only because we're trained to always be listening, but because you naturally assume because the Narrator is talking that they have a hit for the next scene. Alas, that may be furthest from the truth. The Narrator is really just saying anything to fill the time and very well may have no idea where the story should go next.

The other improvisors need to be ready to jump out on stage and "start" a scene underneath the Narrator. Their job then becomes wrapping whatever their saying around to what's happening on stage. The next problem is that once you get onstage and "start" your scene, it's nearly impossible to clock what the narrator is saying.

So there's a lot of working against traditional improv training here:

-The Narrator is narrating the story, not the scene. The Narrator shouldn't be saying what's happening in the scene ("Then Nancy slapped Bob across the face") and the improvisors shouldn't be trying to do what the Narrator is saying (if the Narrator is giving backstory, we shouldn't see a dumb-show flashback).

-The Narrator is not in control of the story. Just because they're talking, doesn't mean they know what the fuck is going on. You can start a scene without them. You can also tag them out of the Narrator role.

-While listening to Narrator while on stage doesn't run counter to traditional improv training, it does seem to be really hard if you're focused something else. This one, I guess, more reinforces traditional improv training.

It was one of those rehearsals that made your brain hurt, which was the point I suppose. Hopefully by showtime it will be second nature.

ToTG Rehearsal #3: Translate

2010-10-06T10:00:00.000-07:00

For this rehearsal, we started working on translating other genres into Dickens. We started with a simple exercise in pairs where one person would say something modern and the other person would translate that thing into the Dickensian equivalent. Such as SWAT Team = The Queen's Special Tactical Bobbies. (My favorite was "ebonics" = "Gaelic".)

Then we did a few scenes combining genres with Dickens, including Tarantino, Mamet, Romantic Comedy, and WWII Submarine Drama. (It's been a long time since I heard a Crimean War reference in an improv scene.) These were all largely successful and quite fun. I can't wait to do it for a whole show.

We finished off by practicing more environment songs, only this time we added the second genre layer to them. We did Horror, Post-Apocalyptic, 50's Over-Sized Animal Monster Movie, Sci-Fi, and Pirate. We experimented with adding a verse to the environment song, sung by someone who was an actual character in the story as opposed to a throw-away character.

I think the take-aways were:
-Leave room for other singers
-If you're singing a verse, don't sing a verse that's too far away from what's happening on stage
-You can find a traditional chorus, or returning to the phrase patter from the verse can serve as a chorus

ToTG Rehearsal #2: Singing in the Living Room

2010-09-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

In a long tradition of occasionally rehearsing in Scott's living room, we rehearsed in Scott's living room this week. While it's amply large for a living room, it does make for a cramped rehearsal space, so we focused mostly on singing.

We started with Point-of-View Songs (the Un-Scripted version of which is explained in some detail here). We experimented with having a narrator do a lead-in to the scene/song. By employing the Screaming Caterpillar tactic discussed previously, I did a rather successful narration intro to a song wherein a recounted a long series of events that resulted in one of the characters in the scene having a limp. I did not start off with no idea where I was headed however. I thought to myself, what is the point I'm trying to convey? It could be something about the location or a character or a circumstance. I know, I thought. I'll give a character a limp. That caused a loose idea to pop into my head, and I started as far away as I could, figuring I could wrap it around to the cause of the limp. Which I did.

I've been practicing this Dickens Narration idea (and reading The Mystery of Edwin Drood). I've found when I really start with nothing, I tend to ramble nonsensically, but when I deliberately start far away from a place I know I'm trying to get to, I'm more successful.

Our singing was pretty solid. I am out of practice and will need some time to find my range again. Fortunately I feel rather confident I will find it in time.

Then we worked on the elusive Environment Song. We've attempted these many times and never really gotten one to work in a show. The idea is for minor throw-away characters to sing a short phrase or mantra over and over related to their character in a sort of medley. The point is to set the environment, not try to establish characters or emotional content. Lots of musicals have them. It just so happens, that one of the best examples of this type of song comes from the musical version of a Dickens book. It's the song "Who Will Buy?" from Oliver!

The ones we did in rehearsal went well. It remains to be seen whether or not we can pull one off in a show.

ToTG Rehearsal #1: Narrating

2010-09-24T21:23:00.001-07:00

Rehearsal! Rehearsal! Rehearsal!

Rehearsals for our next show A Tale of Two Genres, an Improvised Dickens Musical started last Monday. I’ve been looking forward to this show for a long time, and not just because I haven’t done a show since Un-Scripted: unscripted closed back in March. This is a pretty unique show in the history of Un-Scripted and, in general concept, one we’ve wanted to do for a long time.

Over the years, while selecting our seasons, we’ve longed to do a “genre combo” show. I’m not sure how it happened, or when it happened, but at some point, Un-Scripted developed a proficiency and an affinity for genre work. When we started getting “good” at genre work, we added an extra layer of complexity by doing “genre combos”. In truth, if I really wanted to trace the origins, it would go back to ideas Brian and Christian championed back in their days at BATS about having strong Theatresports personas that did entire shows in character.

In any case, genre combos became something of a specialty of ours. At first we’d combine two genres. Then we started adding more. Anything to keep things just harder than we were used to. But we could never figure out exactly how to turn the concept into an entire show. They just came up a lot in short-form shows or for “medium form” one-offs at festivals.

Now enter into the picture another show format that had been bandied about for years but never made the cut: Supertrain 1870. The idea was to do the Supertrain format set in the 1870’s. Why? Well, it would be an excuse to do something of a steampunk show without trying to market a steampunk show to people who don’t like steampunk. Or without wanting to label things as steampunk to avoid the inevitable backlash against steampunk as a genre.

Then a chance one-off show at a festival last year brought all of these elements together. One of the genres we (and I use “we” in the royal sense as I was not in this particular show) got was Dickens along with John Hughes and a few others I don’t remember. We had so much fun translating John Hughes into the Dickens era, the seed of a new format was born.

We’d do a show where we got a genre from the audience, and combine it with Dickens. It would scratch some of our steampunk itch (because after all steampunk is mostly translating modern technology backwards into Victorian England) and it would scratch our genre combo itch in a marketable form. Then we made it a musical to keep things just harder than we’re used to.

That’s what makes the show unique. Near as I can figure, this is the first full-on 3 hoop show we’ve ever done. (Ok, Bollywood seemed like it had a million hoops, but because Bollywood is inherently a musical genre, it was really just 2 hoops: Bollywood and puppets.)

After one rehearsal, the vast potential for fun only seems to be growing, but we’ve also seen how many challenges we have ahead of us. Our cast is solid, and I’m looking forward to playing with everyone. The first rehearsal involved a good amount of getting to know each other, warming up our brains and our voices, and ultimately tackling one of the first tools in our tool box: narration.

Dickens had a strong narrative voice. (I must confess my first-hand experiences reading Dickens are sorely lacking, especially considering I have a degree in Literature and performed at Dickens Faire for a season. I will have to correct that immediately.) Generally, narrated improv scenes involve a narrator telling the actors what to do and the actors doing it, with some push-back to create a semblance of give-and-take. This is completely different. This is backstory, physical description, commentary, and round-about metaphorical descriptions.

Eee gads, it was hard. I got up there for my first stab as a narrator and my brain froze. Immediately I did all of the things we had just been told not to do. Instead of talking for a long time, I barely talked at all. Instead of describing the characters and their relationships, I described what they were doing. I sucked.

The next time I got a little better, mostly by employing by employing what Brian used to call The Simpson’s Screaming Caterpillar Opening. The Simpson’s developed a style (as typified by the Screaming Caterpillar episode) wherein the show would start with some incident that ultimately had nothing to do with the rest of the episode, but in a round-about way set off the events of the episode. So I started rambling on about a tree growing somewhere in Scotland and eventually discovered how it related to the characters on stage and what they were doing. I’m not sure it was entirely Dickensian, but it got a good response.

For me, the challenge is going to be to jump and justify. Let my mouth go off about anything and trust I’ll find a way to loop it back around to what’s going on. It’s also going to be about reading a lot more Dickens very quickly to get a better ear for his prose.

How to use a "Soft Opening" for a Business Meeting

2010-07-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

I used a variation on the "soft opening" to start a business meeting yesterday. I'm continually amazed at how well it works. Tell people to clap, and they do!

A "soft opening" is something we use at Un-Scripted to open most of our shows. As I think on it, it's probably been years since we last started a show with anything other than a soft opening. Before the show, at least one performer comes out and talks to the audience. Then they say "the show's about to start, we're all going to go backstage and run back on, and you all are going to clap and cheer". I'm paraphrasing, but that's the idea. Then when you come out to start the show everyone cheers.

But they not only cheer. If you tell them to cheer loudly and make a lot of noise, the will do that too. Now, you can't just demand this off them. You have to present it nicely and often times saying you want them to do it because it will make the performers feel good helps. The point is though, that they do it.

What I used in my meeting today was more a variation on an old street performer trick that's basically the same thing. It was a pretty casual meeting to begin with and people were already in something of a lighthearted mood as they gathered into the room, but then as we were getting started I said something like "Ok, we want everyone who's not here to think this is the most fun and exciting meeting ever, so on the count of three everyone clap". And they did.

It does a couple things. By applauding, it tricks people into thinking they're enjoying themselves. (It's the same idea as smiling to make yourself feel happier than you really are. Once you smile, you start to feel happier because we associate smiling with feeling good.) For the purposes of this meeting (which was really more of an interactive presentation), it also helped train people to speak up and ask questions. It let them know they could participate actively. And hopefully, it does make everyone who's not in the meeting think, "what's going on? That sounds like fun." That's why street performers use it. If they get everyone to clap and cheer before they start, more people will come over to check it out.

Then everyone clapped at the end of the meeting without being prompted, because they'd been trained to by the opening.

The thing to remember when giving a presentation or running a meeting, is that these people are your audience, and they will generally act just like any other audience. Use that to your benefit.

How Improv Cost Me Free Nachos

2010-07-09T17:00:00.000-07:00

I went to go see Jaws last night at the Cerrito. They were showing it as part of their "Classics" series, and had a little trivia contest before the show. I knew the answer to the second question before he'd finished reading it, but rather than raise my hand to actually win the free nachos, I just said the answer under my breath with an air of satisfaction.

Why didn't I actually try to win? It hadn't occurred to me at all to actually raise my hand, and I puzzled over why.

The answer: I'm an improvisor.

As an improvisor, when I go see an improv show, I consider myself not really an audience member. Rarely do improvisors want to see the same things from a show that a regular audience does. So, I don't give suggestions or participate really because I don't want to push the show in a direction that my thrill me and the actors but not the rest of the crowd. I'm not representative of the audience, I don't feel.

So I've trained myself so well not to interact when interacted with, that I didn't raise my hand. And that cost me nachos.

You owe me nachos, improv.

Beer Theater Tonight

2010-07-03T09:27:00.000-07:00

Last fall I performed in Beer Theatre at Impact. Basically a grad student was working on his thesis and needed to do some research on how medieval plays were actually performed (i.e. drunk) and wanted to test how drinking at various levels changed the performance. (I learned that when you're drunk, it's not that you don't remember your lines--because you do--it's that you just don't care.) It was super fun and everyone wanted to do it again.

Since then the student has started his own theatre company and tonight Beer Theatre is happening again as essentially a fundraiser for Front Line Theatre and Impact. 8pm at La Val's. Get there early if you want tickets. It will sell-out fast.

I'm not performing this time. I was asked and agreed to do it, but then when I realized that it no longer had a research purpose, my enthusiasm waned. And then I realized how few weekends are left before the wedding and I started to hyperventilate.

Why did my enthusiasm wane? I'm something of a nerd and the academic angle appealed to my geeky nature. Without that, Beer Theatre becomes Bar-Prov-Sports. Now Bar-Prov-Sports can be a lot of fun for performers and audience alike, it's just not my thing. I mean, Un-Scripted basically exists for the sole purpose of not being Bar-Prov-Sports and we're constantly having to fight people's assumptions that all improv is Bar-Prov-Sports.

I think that was what made the first Beer Theatre so much fun for me. It was an excuse do to that sort of thing with an actual driving reason behind it other than "hey, that would be fun".

It is super-fun though, so if you're in Berkeley tonight, check it out.

In the Middle

2010-06-23T17:00:00.000-07:00

In a World… opens in a few weeks. I’m not in it, as I’ve mentioned. That means by the time our holiday show starts rehearsing, I will have gone about 6 months without doing improv. Fortunately, Christian has started teaching classes again, and after several weeks being thwarted, I was finally able to attend on Monday.

I had a great time. It was a small class, which made for lots of personal attention. He’s using a very interesting narrative based approach in an effort to come up with exercises that actually translate to better performance skills. I don’t really want to go too in depth, because they’re his ideas and I wouldn’t do them justice. I just want to point out that he’s not spending a lot of time dwelling on protagonist work, at least not directly.

Now, I want to point out an interesting tidbit that I took a way from class. As usual, it’s something I knew already, but enjoyed hearing so concisely put. Basically, that the protagonist has to start in the middle. By that I mean, they must have hope of moving up towards their goals, while at the same time have room to move further away from them. If the protagonist starts at the bottom with no where to go but up, you’re not going to have a very interesting story.

It's always election time

2010-06-10T17:00:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed I haven't been blogging about the rehearsal's for Un-Scripted's next show. That's because I'm not in it. I know, I know... tragic.

In the meantime, however, voting has started in the SF Bay Guardian's annual best of the bay poll. Lots of local papers have "best of" polls, but the Guardian's was the first and as such is the most prestigious. We actually won it back in 2008. Not too shabby huh?

Here is our "official" pitch, taken from our Facebook event page:

In 2008 the Un-Scripted Theater Company was voted best theater company by the San Francisco Bay Guardian. In 2009 ACT, the biggest theater company in San Francisco, took the title. The voting has started for 2010, and we're really going to need your help to overcome ACT's large subscriber base, not to mention every other theater company or comedy troupe pushing to take the highly competitive category of Best Theater Company.

http://www.sfbg.com/bestofthebay2010

But hey, we don't just want to win the title in name, we actively strive to create the best theater in San Francisco using improvisation as our medium. At the Un-Scripted Theater Company, we try to push the envelope of improvised theater with 2-hour improvised plays, movies, musicals, comedies, and dramas. If you've ever seen one of our shows, you know what I mean. Improv and theater is our lives, and creating amazing live productions worthy of being called the Best of the Bay has always been our goal ever since we started in 2002.

http://www.sfbg.com/bestofthebay2010

So please take a moment and vote for the Un-Scripted Theater Company as Best Theater Company located in category 3 on the ARTS & NIGHTLIFE page. And when you get to the end of the poll, please feel free to write the Un-Scripted Theater Company in as something you love in the 25 word or less write in category.

This blog has moved

2010-04-29T08:16:00.001-07:00

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Improv and Bad Movies

2010-04-08T10:00:00.000-07:00

This article, aside from being hysterically funny, was clearly written by someone with a working knowledge of improv:

The Single Most Ridiculous Movie Premise Ever Made

Read the whole thing to see what I mean. It's about the movie Tiptoes the trailer for which circulated around the interwebs a while back in the "I can't believe this was an actual movie" category. Don't miss Gary Oldman in "the role of a lifetime!"

Rehearsal #11: Games and "Middle" Scenes

2010-03-10T17:00:00.000-08:00

All Female-Cast this Thursday!

We had our last rehearsal for the show last night, and we made it count.

Lyn returned after two weeks in China, so we spent the beginning of rehearsal going over what we’d learned and worked on over the last couple weeks. Then we moved on to playing games.

In the shows we’ve gotten into something of a rut of playing the same handful games all the time (and even playing them at same points in the show). Our homework was to come in ready to introduce a game within the style of the show that we hadn’t really done yet. I set up the “audience word song” game by pretending to be Clive Anderson hosting a show like Who’s Line Is It Anyway. (I called it What’s My Line Anyway.) That’s an idea I had a few weeks ago, to try and set up a scene as a scene from a different improv show. Let’s see if I can do it in a show.

(Mandy said I did a good Clive Anderson impersonation. I also got good feedback on my George Lucas impersonation in the show last week. Who knew I could do impressions of arcane celebrities?)

After a heated debate on whether or not the game Oxygen Deprivation (a.k.a. Head in a Bucket) could be performed without a set up, we moved on. (Personally, while it could be done without a setup and the audience would catch on, I think it would be stronger with one. An example for the no-setup faction was Spit-Take which we play sans intro. My feeling is that spitting water at a shocking statement is something that could exist in reality. But putting your head in a bucket of water on the side of the stage doesn’t exist in any reality outside of an improv show, unless one is given to it. Another example given was Bell Games that are played without setups. I actually don’t like those either. I think they break from the reality we’re creating and are stronger when set up somehow.)

I took notes a couple times last weekend, once while I was also lighting. I noticed, perhaps only because as the lighting improvisor I was particularly focused on the scene’s endings, that scenes tended to fall into three categories: Sketch or Short-Form Scenes, Slice of a Long-Form Scenes, and Self-Contained “Middle” Scenes. I also noticed that we didn’t know how to end the latter of those. I could see the improvisors getting deep into a “Middle” scene, realize it needed to end, and then search for a Sketch ending, which wouldn’t end the scene.

We spent some time working on these and quantified some of the differences. A Sketch Scene riffs on an idea and ends when it peaks. It doesn’t really matter if the character change or not. They probably don’t. We don’t often know because the scenes are very surfacey.

A Slice of a Long-Form Scene has a lot of backstory. A lot has happened before this moment and a lot will happen after. It’s a tiny piece of a large arc, and as a result the scene’s arc itself is rather flat. The character’s probably don’t change unless this slice happens to be the change moment.

A Self-Contained “Middle” Scene has a beginning, middle, and end. It has a complete arc within itself. One character might go on that arc or all of them, but for the scene to end the arc needs to arc. For that to happen, a character generally needs to change.

That can be the key to saving a scene that’s not going anywhere. Simply allow your character to arc, build emotion and the release it, and that becomes what the scene is about.

Rehearsal #10: Dance and Play

2010-03-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

We started off last night’s rehearsal by working on dancing. We end up singing a fair amount in this show and anytime there’s singing, there’s likely to be backup dancing. So we worked on movement and basic dance vocabulary a little. Then we took turns leading steps with a couple followers and finally had someone fake sing a lead vocal while three people danced behind them. The point was to be aware of stage picture and style matching so that the dancers all look like they belong from the same show.

One of the cast members of this show, Dave, is a social dancing instructor. He ran us through a quick 15-minute lesson in partner dancing, and I learned so much in that short period of time! About how to lead. About how to follow (in improv you never know when your character might be a woman). It was amazing!

Then Christian wanted to work on letting one scene inform the next, not necessarily overtly, but through taking some element of the first scene and using it in a different way in the second. Then we added on top of that the desire to perform more theatrical and play-like scenes. That’s accomplished by not looking at each other so much (improvisors are trained to make eye-contact a lot which is necessary for beginners but isn’t necessary in plays), speaking obliquely (characters in plays frequently don’t directly answer questions or they carry on separate conversations concurrently; the key for doing this in improv is to not let the offers drop even though you’re not immediately responding to them), allowing for small parts (you might be onstage the entire scene but only have one line), and only saying as little or as much as the playwright wrote (meaning, some lines can be incomplete thoughts and some lines can be monologues).

After we did that for a while, we added yet another layer: we played arms, moving bodies, audience lines, he said/she said, scene in reverse, etc. The point here was to not let the game’s hoop derail the scene. Instead use the hoop to inform the scene. You’re still doing a committed scene from a play, it just happens to be the forward/reverse version.

This weekend’s shows should be a lot of fun and feature some unique casts. Friday and Saturday’s casts are identical: Christian, Clay, Mandy, and Melissa. Ever wondered if it’s really improvised? Come see the same cast perform two nights in a row and find out!

Thursday’s show features an all-male cast: Alan, Christian, Clay, and Dave. Next Thursday’s show features an all-female cast: Lyn, Mandy, Melissa, Merrill. Come to this week’s show and you can get in to next week’s for just $10!

Rehearsal #9: Tenor Switch

2010-02-26T12:51:00.000-08:00

Whoa, what happened? Suddenly it's Friday and I haven't blogged about Tuesday's rehearsal. (Well, our new dog is what happened.) The further away I get from rehearsal, the harder it always is to write about.

We do continue to rehearse throughout the run of the show. That allows us to spot issues during performance and then work on them in rehearsal. I don't know if the production team spotted any specific issues we needed to work on, but we did sit around and talk about our experiences in the shows.

The main thing I remember about rehearsal, aside from having yummy yummy key lime pie for Clay's birthday, was a new game we stumbled into called "Tenor Switch". It started out as a playwrights exercise. We took two similar playwrights with opposite tenors and played Genre Switch with them. We did Tennessee Williams & Beth Henley and Eugene O'Neil & Neil Simon. It was soooo much fun. We soon learned that it didn't really matter if you started with playwrights, what mattered was switching tenors from light to dark when the bell rang. I hope we break it out in the shows this weekend.

We have a couple of last minute discount offers for this weekend. You can still take advantage of them:
- Use the coupon code "CRAZY" when buying tickets online through our website and get 65% off! This offer is only good for this weekend's shows.
- Say "Wish Clay a 'Happy Birthday' for me" at the door and get tix for just $8! This weekend only.

Rehearsal #8: Run Through #2

2010-02-18T13:00:00.000-08:00

We did another run-through last night, this time with the cast of Friday night’s show: Dave, Mandy, Merrill, and myself.

We were not in the theater itself, but the one across the hall. As always, tonight will be a storm of chaos before the show trying to get everything ready, but I’m trying not to think about that.

Let’s see if I can pull some takeaways from last night out of my sleep deprived mind:
- We mixed a few longer, slower-paced, scenes into the evening last night that felt like they came straight out of a play. The takeaway was that these scenes can exist side-by-side with shorter fast-paced “sketch-like” scenes, and we shouldn’t be afraid of them or their length. (And lighting improvisors should light them as if they’re from a long-form, not from a short-form show.)
- Commit, something, and something else. I can’t remember. Christian had some three word, three point note. It was brilliant.

Special side-note for Merrill who’s not reading this anyway: Don’t worry so much about getting things “right”. The point-of-view song didn’t falter until you started doubting yourself and worrying about doing it correctly.

Highlights:
- Living at Wonderland
- “Gladiolas” on the porch
- Who’s Afraid of Noel Coward
- Selling your script and getting laid
- Interviewing the great actress
- Everyone needs a secretary

Tonight we have an actual show. My voice seems to be holding out ok, but I’m exhausted. Tonight should be fun! Tomorrow should be even more fun, as long as I can stay awake through it.

Rehearsal #7: Run Through #1

2010-02-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

We did a run-through last night at rehearsal with the cast of Thursday night’s show: Christian, Melissa, Lyn, and myself. I’m glad I got to play with Melissa, because I’m only in the 1 show with her (see the play schedule here).

We were in the actual theater where we’re doing the show, although we didn’t quite have the stage set up how it will be. We still need to put up the doors and wings on the sides of the stage. I’m not sure when that’s happening.

It’s an interesting space to perform in. The stage is larger than we’re used to and it’s raised, which also makes the ceiling shorter than we’re used to. The lights come at you pretty much from eye level, which is always fun.

The run itself went well. The takeaways were:

- Be wary of getting stuck in a “tone rut”.
- Work to vary the number and combination of performers in scenes. It’s easy to get stuck in “2 on / 2 off – 2 on / 2 off” and end up only doing scenes with one person all night (as evidence by the multitude of Christian/Alan scenes).
- Passenger more / fill out background characters.

Some of the highlights of the “show” included:
- “That’s how we did it in Wisconsin!” A Midwestern couple goes swinger speed dating with some cheese.
- Benjamin Franklin, Franz Ferdinand, and Francisco Franco teach children the word “fecundate”.
- Superhero House. The new reality show featuring a very drunk Batman arguing about kitchen cleanliness with Superman.
- “It’s a Meal” and “It’s a Mule”.
- Frankenmime
- Lesbian love in Shakespearean Iowa.
- Room-mate love and existentialist foreign films.

As usual, my “highlights” are probably skewed to scenes I was in, because those are the ones I remember the best. I’m sure other people did brilliant stuff I’m missing. Of course with such a small cast, there weren’t many scenes I wasn’t in.

Tonight we have another run through with Friday night’s cast, which also includes me. I’ll effectively be doing 4 shows this week. Which is great, as long as my voice holds out. Come see me Friday night. My brain should be good and fried by then.

Un-Scripted: unscripted Cast List!

2010-02-14T12:08:00.000-08:00

Here is the play schedule for Un-Scripted: unscripted! Note the all-man show on March 4 and the all-woman show on March 11.

Full Cast:
Alan Goy
Merrill Gruver
Melissa Holman
Mandy Khoshnevisan
David Madison
Clay Robeson
Lyn Travis
Christian Utzman

Thursday, February 18: Alan, Christian, Melissa, and Lyn
Friday, February 19: Alan, Dave, Mandy, and Merrill
Saturday, February 20: Christian, Dave, Lyn, and Melissa

Thursday, February 25: Christian, Clay, Melissa, and Merril
Friday, February 26: Alan, Dave, Mandy, and Merrill
Saturday, February 27: Alan, Clay, Dave, and Merrill

Thursday, March 4: Alan, Christian, Clay, and Dave
Friday, March 5: Christian, Clay, Mandy, and Melissa
Saturday, March 6: Christian, Clay, Mandy, and Melissa

Thursday, March 11: Lyn, Mandy, Melissa, and Merrill
Friday, March 12: Alan, Dave, Lyn, and ~~Melissa~~Merrill*
Saturday, March 13: Alan, Christian, Clay and Mandy

*Transcription error in the original list

Rehearsal #5 and #6: Song and Match

2010-02-11T18:00:00.000-08:00

Two more rehearsals, two more to go. After rehearsals Tuesday, I had the strange realization that normally at the point in the process (with 3 rehearsals left at that time) we’d have more than 3 weeks until opening night. Instead, we had a little more than 1.

Tuesday we sang. We had a new musician we’d never worked with come in to play so we could get to know each other. Like a first date at a coffee shop that couples argue about later as to whether or not it counted as a date. I suspect you’ll see him play some shows for this run. His name was Jacob.

What did we sing? Well, we warmed up a lot with scales and a Dona Nobis Pacem. We did some simple Chorus/Verse songs and Verse/Chorus songs in a semi-circle. We did the Un-Scripted Theater Company version of a point-of-view song in groups. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Three people start a scene, then they each take turns singing a verse about their inner thoughts on the topic at hand, then they all sing at once. When they sing together they’re singing “chorii”, or rather each is singing a simple chorus to the song they sung without trying to unify the choruses or really be heard. When three people sing their own thing all at once:

A. The audience can’t really follow content.
B. It sounds really powerful.

Then generally everyone gets another solo verse and you end on another round of chorii. Ideally the person with the most to say will sing the last solo verse.

Typically in short-form improv shows, a point-of-view song goes like this: One person starts and sings “I love cheese”. The next person, forced to take a different point of view sings “I hate cheese”. The third person also forced to choose a different point of view and feeling pressured by the rule of “Comedy Comes in Threes” to be funny, sings “I am cheese.” We try to avoid this way of playing the game because it’s a lazy shortcut.

Then we did three scenes with songs as if they were snippets from a full-length musical, with an eye towards making out musical scenes more nuanced. The tendency in short-form is to cram an entire story of plot into one 4-minute scene. We’d rather the scene feel like a slice out of a larger work.

We performed one series of these in the time period of “Viking”, which I had never seen before. I wish we’d get that as a suggestion more.

We finished with the “Audience Word Song” Game, wherein you get a list of words from the audience while the singer is out of the room, they start a song and are then shown the words one at a time having to work them into their song as immediately as possible. This does not require singing a brilliant song. The game is impossible. The audience knows it, and roots for you the whole time. As long as the song isn’t a non-sequitorial mess, the audience loves it.

Wednesday. Wednesday. Wednesday. We did more of what we did the Wednesday before, running every cast member through 6 scenes focused on playing with them. We did not finish everyone, but moved on after a while to an exercise in style matching. One person would leave the room. The other three would decide on a genre/playwright/time period/film director to do the scene in. Then the one who doesn’t know just has to follow along and style match as best they can.

The distinction I think, with this exercise, is that it is not a guessing game. You’re not trying to get the other person to guess the genre right. If you know the genre, it’s not your exercise. You just play it as committed as you can and give the other person something to match. That’s their exercise: matching and letting go the need to get it right.

We performed one of these in the genre of “Bronte”, which I’ve also never really seen before. I wish we’d get that one more too.

Rehearsal #3 and #4: Doors, Games, & Ensemble

2010-02-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

Ah, yes… We had two rehearsals this week, and as they’ve both blended together in my mind, you’re going to get them in one post.

We continued our work on space-objects by working on space-object doors. We had a couple of epiphanies. For one, no one holds on to a door knob the entire time they open and close a door, yet improvisors seem to do that universally for space-object doors. Generally we use the knob to unlatch the door and then swing it open. We grab on to the side of the door to open it further or guide it closed, or we catch it behind us. (I also noticed today that, depending on how heavy the door is, we don’t just use our arm muscles but throw our whole body weight into it.)

And then there’s the twirl.

When opening a door that pulls towards us, we often open it and then do a little twirl as we spin around to pull the door closed. Try it and see.

We also did some work on games and playing games without setting them up. Now, in this format, at any time during any scene someone off stage or on might ring a bell. It could be any bell game in the world or it could just be a bell. The actors in the scene just have to decide how to react to the bell, and that’s the game you’re playing. We discovered that not every actor has to be playing the same bell game at the same time. Oh the possibilities…

I also made some people do an alphabet scene as a half-life scene.

A large part of the success of this show hinges on us building a good ensemble. Part of that involves learning what everyone likes to do. To that end we spent some time talking about what we like to do in shows and what excites us about improv. This is something we’ll probably do at several rehearsals because I already know I forgot stuff I meant to say. There are so many aspects to consider.

Then we started an exercise that will continue through at least one other rehearsal because we didn’t get through everybody. One person is on the “hot seat” and is in every scene for about 6 scenes and every one else rotates in and out getting a chance to play with them and learn what makes them tick. We got through Merrill, Dave, and Lynn last night.

Things are going well, I think. And quickly too. Tickets are on sale now!

Rehearsal #2: Walk Like a Man

2010-01-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

We started off our second rehearsal with the photoshoot for the program and flyer. Normally this might not happen so soon, but considering we open three weeks from yesterday, we needed to get it done.

Then we moved into space-object work, which somehow lead us into a discussion about playing cross-gender characters and the difficulties therein. We spent a lot of time walking around trying to look like men or women. Or more specifically, attractive men & women and then unattractive men & women.

The primary difference between the way the sexes walk is how we counter balance. Men, who generally are wider on top and have a higher center of gravity, counter balance with their shoulders. Women, who have lower centers of gravity, counter balance with their hips. A woman's arms swing differently too, as their breasts are in the way.

Attractive men tend to stand up straighter, throw their shoulders back a little, raise their elbows slightly as if they had muscular arms, and lead with their abdomen as if they had a six-pack. The also walk with a little bit a jaunt or swagger.

Attractive women do the same thing, essentially, only they tend to highlight their chest or butt depending on which part they feel looks better.

Unattractive people are more slouchy. They protect themselves by covering up their front sections and tend to walk flat-footed, landing on the middle of their feet. They never look comfortable, even when they're trying to look casual.

Of course those are sweeping generalities and intended to inform the physicality of the characters you're playing, but useful nonetheless.

We also learned that Clay, Christian, and I have all dated at various times in our lives a twin.

Rehearsal #1: We're already behind

2010-01-27T19:00:00.000-08:00

We had our first rehearsal for our first show of 2010. It’s official: we’re kicking off our 8th season with Un-Scripted: unscripted!

This will be the third year in a row we’ve done this show, each time with a different director. I was at the helm of the previous iteration. I confess it was not a show that played to my strong suits as a director. I’m glad Christian’s in charge this year (and hopefully I’ll come up with a show that fits me better to direct in 2011).

It’s going to be a small cast version of the show. I believe we had 5 people per show last year. This year we will have 4, which will make for a hectic, high energy, no time to stop and think show that should be very fun and challenging to perform. The total ensemble for the show is 8 people large, 4 of whom are regular Un-Scripted members (me, Christian, Mandy, and Clay) and 4 non-members. We have one returning player (Merrill) and three first-timers (Lynn, David, and Melissa), making for a nicely gender balanced cast.

We spent a lot of time last night getting to know each other, which is extremely important for such an ensemble based show. We need to know each other well and know how to make each other happy by the time the show roles around. We need to learn to really play together and have fun.

We worked a lot on the “everything warm-up” which is an extension of Jeff England’s Duke’s of Hazard warm-up that just devolves into playing every circle warm-up game all at once. Then we moved into doing genre based scenes without setting up the genre first. After all, this show is all about starting scenes without explaining them.

I’m not sure what we’ll work on tonight. That’s right: we have rehearsal again tonight. Why? Because the show opens in 3 weeks! We had a bit of a space kurfuggal, so this run which was originally supposed to open in March and run through April is now opening in February and running through March. And we’re not in our usual space at the SF Playhouse. Instead we’ll be returning to Off-Market where we once performed Love at First Sight (only we’ll be in the larger theater across the hall).

So fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a fast ride!

Let It Snow Week 5

2009-12-23T10:00:00.000-08:00

Check out the Let It Snow Interactive Map, featuring every town the show has ever featured, complete with performance date, show description, and a picture from the town itself!

***

For the Birds – Thursday 12/17/2009
When a reality film crew led by brothers Chuck & Chester (Christian & Bryce) and their French cinematographer Jaque (Michael) comes to Bodega, CA (pop 571), everyone wants to be a star. Laverne (Jodi) attempts to step into the limelight, but her rise to stardom is complicated by Chuck & Chester both falling in love with her, an angry ghost (Karen) who puts the "Hitchcock curse" on film crew, and a local femme fatale Tiffany (Merrill). Add in the ever-ready and eager firemen (Bryce, Michael & Christian) and the quiet town of Bodega is in for quite a ride.

Why not, Minot? – Friday 12/18/2009
Inga (Lisa) has always lived in the shadow of her attractive out-going sister Olga (Mandy) in Minot, ND (pop 36,567), but when her friend Bart (Clay) writes her a letter from college signed “Yours Truly”, Inga has hopes of love. Will she overcome her shyness to go out with him when he visits for the holidays? Will Bart overcome his meddling mother? Will they get a pheasant for Christmas dinner before the mountain lions get them? Why not?

A Steak through the Heart – Saturday Matinee 12/19/2009
Love-em-and-leave-em Jerry (Christian) makes a bet with his co-worker Pete (Dave) that he can date Pete’s ex-girlfriend Ilene (Jodi) for a full 8 ½ months. Somehow he makes it through the August fish fry and Thanksgiving with Ilene’s drunken family. He just needs to make it through Christmas to win Pete’s car! Then Ilene finds out about the bet, and Jerry learns she meant more to him than his little black book. Nothing that a steak dinner at the Port Hotel in Port Washington, WI (pop 10,467) and a marriage proposal can’t fix!

Photo Finish – Saturday Evening 12/19/2009
Nancy (Trish) runs one of the three bars on the one street in Dayton, NV (pop 5,907). She wishes just once the horse would win the annual race against the Harley. To even the odds, the town decides to hold the race during the holidays on an ice track. Even then, Phyllis (Mandy) is determined to keep her unbeaten streak aboard the Harley alive, while Nancy goes a little crazy rooting for the horse. In the end, they both learn it’s just a race, but what a race it was!

Rehearsal #12: Fin

2009-12-17T19:00:00.000-08:00

Last night we had a light rehearsal. It was the last rehearsal of the run, which is always something of a bittersweet affair.

We spent a fair portion of the beginning of rehearsal pouring through the care package we received from Leakesville, MS. (Thank you!) The family who had come to the show and suggested that town sent us a lovely card, some books, the local “Coffee News”, autographed pictures of two local beauty queens, and some tasty food items. Yay! Here's our special thanks:

Then Mandy and Susan talked about some things from the previous weekend’s shows that really worked for them. Mostly they’re really enjoying the subtler, less protagonist-dominated stories we’ve been telling. And apparently the shows Friday and Saturday did a good job of establishing a protagonist early without them taking over the show.

Then we all warmed up our voices and everyone took turns singing a solo song with a set-up from Susan specifically targeted at something we each should be working on. My set up was to sing a song as the local holiday pageant director and to get into detail about the amazing plans I have for this years pageant and what those plans meant to me. I had a good time with it. I could really see the crazy things I was coming up with. That, and I was occasionally even singing pretty notes. Karen remarked about that as well and said she knew a voice coach who might be able to help me develop my range. I might just do that.

I was really impressed with everyone’s songs. People took their direction well and ran with it. Hopefully that will shine through this weekend.

**

If you haven’t seen the show yet, you’ve go one last weekend to catch it!

Let It Snow Week 4

2009-12-15T12:30:00.000-08:00

Check out the Let It Snow Interactive Map, featuring every town the show has ever featured, complete with performance date, show description, and a picture from the town itself!

***

Long Day’s Journey into Christmas – Thursday 12/10/2009
When the local high school geometry teacher Crandall “Bernie” Hendrickson (Alan) loses his desire to teach, he becomes a comically alcoholic Scrooge. His wife Margaret (Merrill) clings to her family for support including her Uncle Alfred (Bryce) and niece Dawn (Jodi) who’s visiting from Wisconsin. Unexpectedly Dawn’s romance with the town cab driver Pete (Lisa) teaches Bernie he still has something to teach his students. There’s a lot of promise in Kalamazoo, MI (pop 76,145).

Your Home is Your Castle – Friday 12/11/2009
Carleton (Dave) returns home to Newcastle, NH (pop 1,010) after 10 years away in the big city of Portsmouth and wants everyone to know he's no longer a womanizer. He’s serious about his foot-model girlfriend, Cyndi (Susan). His sister Margaret (Trish), the town schoolteacher, is skeptical as are his friends and exes, but the local Reverend (Clay) helps her to see how people can change. It all ends with a wedding (a surprise to Carlton)...because "your home is your castle in Newcastle."

30 Minutes to Everything – Saturday Matinee 12/12/2009
Sam (Michael) is 34 and wants it all, but he’s torn between his love of ice football and his dad’s (Dave) insistence on building gingerbread models of famous civil war battles. Then he finds himself at the center of a catfight when his longtime (but non-committal) girlfriend and local junior CIA agent Marcie (Jodi) vie for his affections. Who will be victorious on this ice-strewn battlefield of love in Stafford, VA (pop 124,000)?

A Doll's Palace – Saturday Evening 12/12/2009
Charles (Christian) just wants to be a man, but running the Bothel, WA (pop 30,150) Doll Palace museum under the thumbs of his mother (Mandy) and aunt (Karen) has left him emasculated. Then his controlling girlfriend Becky (Trish) leaves him. Could a budding romance with the local tomboy grease monkey Skeeter (Jodi) make him a man?

What I Learned from Week 4

2009-12-14T19:00:00.000-08:00

(Former Let It Snow director Tara McDonough at Kellyville, OK)

I was in one show last weekend, but I learned a lot from that one show.

One thing I learned is that running the opening is hard for this show. I have new found respect for Tara doing it alone all those years. This year the host isn’t even alone onstage and it’s still difficult. I’ve run it three times and messed it up in three different ways. I should get one more crack at it in the matinee this Saturday. Wish me luck.

I also learned that I’ve come a long way in my protagonist work. I’ve traditionally been the master of avoiding the protagonist role. Even when I actively sought it out, I would unconsciously shed it. This run, I’ve been one of the main protagonists three times. Thursday night I went out on stage with a character fool-proof for not being the protagonist. He was bigger than the other characters on stage. He was broader. He wasn’t “normal”, and he didn’t care about anything. And yet somehow it ended up me.

Why?

Let me set the scene: to start the show Merrill and Karen went out on stage as high school students. They began talking about college and Merrill very quickly became the protagonist, at least in my mind off stage. So, in order to raise the stakes for her as a high school student who wanted to go to college, I came in as the world’s worst Geometry teacher. I told them they’d never need Geometry. I told them I didn’t care, that I was a borderline alcoholic, and I put on a movie for them to watch. Then I left.

However… Merrill a week before had played a protagonist high-school-student who wanted to go to college. In her mind, she could not do that again, and eliminated any possibility that it was her. Unfortunately the audience didn’t know that, nor did the show. The show wanted her to be the protagonist, but she didn’t, so she threw it on me. Why? Because she felt that my character had more going on in his life.

Ruminating on this opinion for a while brought me to this theory: It’s not what you say that makes you the protagonist, it’s how you act. Yes, on the surface, my character had a lot going on, but because I didn’t care about any of it and wasn’t being affected by it, I was not the protagonist.

Except of course I was because the story quickly began revolving around me. This left me in the strange position of being a protagonist who didn’t really care. My want became caring, which worked out, but isn’t exactly the most dynamic.

The show also took rather a dark turn through the second part of the first half. Why? Because people were taking my joking “borderline alcoholism” too seriously and making it a big deal. Suddenly it wasn’t a joke but tragic. Had people taken it lightly, it would have played lightly. By taking it seriously, it played darkly. Fortunately Bryce found a way to end the half on an up note even after Merrill had just sung a sad, depressing song about my alcoholism.

But back to the opening scene. It’s sparked another theory: If you’re going to go out on stage with someone to open a show, and your intent is for neither character to be the protagonist, then you either need to character-match and have both characters feel the exact same way about things, or you need to start talking about a character who hasn’t entered yet and begin endowing them as the protagonist before they even get on stage.

But if you go on stage as distinct characters and start having a status interaction, one of you will become the protagonist of the moment, and in the first scene of the show that will target you as the protagonist of the story.

Rehearsal #11: Protagonist

2009-12-10T15:04:00.000-08:00

Rehearsal! Yes, we had rehearsal on Tuesday. What did we do? We did some protagonist work. Mandy and Susan had deliberately not done any heavy protagonist work during the rehearsal process to this point in hopes of telling some more varied richer stories. That has certainly happened, but we’ve also run into problems with “protagonist ball”, where no character is willing to take a hold of the protagonist role. Then when a character does grab a hold of it, everyone tries for it. It’s a little strange.

Even though we still don’t want the shows to be protagonist centric, every show still needs to have a protagonist and their journey to hang the rest of the show off of. They might only be in a few scenes here and there, but they’re the through line. So we still need them.

We worked on this by doing the first three scenes of a bunch of shows. We’d get a town and a little bit of info and then do three scenes as if we were about to do a whole show. We tried to make sure the second scene reflected on the first in some way and pertained to the main character of the first scene even if that character wasn’t on stage. This should help keep our stories from straying too far a field.

Unfortunately, a lot of people teach that the second or even the third scenes of a long-form should have nothing to do with the first scene or each other. I’m not sure why this is. I guess they’re really teaching people how to tell triptychs. I think it’s also a result of different definitions of what “long-form” improv is. Some people consider a half an hour of unrelated scenes to be a “long-form”. I’m not sure why. I guess in that definition “long” pertains to how long you go without breaking the 4th wall to address the audience out of character. To me that’s just short-form masquerading as long-form. If the scenes don’t connect together to tell a cohesive long story, it’s not “long-form”.

Of course, I also wouldn’t consider half an hour long, or 45 minutes to an hour for that matter. San Francisco is possibly the only place in the world where “long-form” means a two hour show with a single narrative, much the same as a play or movie.

Back to rehearsal, the show starts we did all went very well. We learned a lot about listening and zeroing in on offers. Generally speaking, after just a few scenes you have everything you need for the entire show. That’s why we often practice the first three scenes of a long-form, because they’re the most important in a lot of ways.

We also did some movement work, trying to use the stairs, windows, and the door with purpose. That was fun.

(No picture of rehearsal to embed. Clay took one, but I can't get twitpic to load. You can try to see it here.)

Let It Snow 2009 Week 3

2009-12-08T13:00:00.000-08:00

Check out the Let It Snow Interactive Map, featuring every town the show has ever featured, complete with performance date, show description, and a picture from the town itself!

***

M-E-R C-M-A-S Spells Merry Christmas – Thursday 12/03/2009
Teenager Darla (Trish) is on a mission to shake up Goble, OR (pop 2,744). After growing up in a town so cute that the town holiday signs are missing letters, the kindergarten teacher (Mandy) tap dances at the Goble Tavern, and the elementary school Santa is really the janitor (Michael), she's itching for some danger. She gets her wish when tap-dancing teacher Tabitha (Jodi) storms in from rival town Clatskanie. Tap-off in the Tavern! Darla soon learns it doesn't matter how you spell "Merry Christmas," as long as you believe it.

You’ve Gotta Be Smart – Friday 12/04/2009
Carly (Merrill) is tired of being poor and living with her extended family in Española, NM (pop 9,688). On the other side of the tracks, Derek (Christian) spends all his time in the family mansion working on his low-riders with his younger sister Elizabeth (Lisa). When the two meet at the town bowling alley/casino, Carly hopes she’s hit the jackpot, while Derek just hopes he can avoid a gutter ball.

East De Pere is Right Here – Saturday matinee 12/05/2009
Pete (Alan) and Shirley (Mandy) have been best friends in East De Pere, WI (pop 20,000) since they were yea high, but when a picture shows up in the town paper of the two of them ice skiing from the same tow handle, all the town assumes they’re an item. To prove they’re not, Pete dates another girl, and Shirley gets arrested storming West De Pere as part of the French Explorers Historical Reenactment Society. Soon they both learn their heart’s desire was right here all along in East De Pere.

Practical Marge – Saturday evening 12/06/2009
The whole town of Hornitos, CA (pop 64) knows Marge Ballard (Trish) as “Practical Marge”. She runs the town bar, raises her daughter Jenny (Susan), and shovels manure on the family ranch under the watchful eye of her demanding father (Bryce). One day she just snaps and builds her own hut out in the desert, and her father and Jenny learn they can’t live without her… except that Jenny’s been making a lot of money scaring out-of-towners on ghost town tours. It’s a Christmas Eve to remember for the Ballards.

Rehearsal #10: Fine Tuning

2009-12-03T20:49:00.000-08:00

We started rehearsal last night with the fun and silly Dukes of Hazzard warm up, which then evolved into the every-circle-warm-up-game-at-once warm up game. Always fun. Always enjoyable.

Then we talked a bit about protagonists. We haven’t done much protagonist work in the rehearsal process, mostly because Mandy wanted to experiment with not doing that. All told, that approach has resulted in some interesting ensemble shows that are really about everyone in the town. The problem is that we’re not doing a good job of recognizing from to scene to scene who is the protagonist of the scene.

To help with that, we did some PRAWN circles. PRAWN is the Un-Scripted Theater Company’s version of CROW.

P – Protagonist
R – Relationship
A – Aim
W – Where
N – Nuance

We also worked on talking to the audience. Before our shows, we like to go out and mingle with the audience. One purpose of this is to explain the show ahead of time so we don’t have to spend a lot of time on that at the top of the show. But that’s not the only reason to talk to the audience. In fact, that’s really the secondary reason to do it. The #1 reason (and the element we’ve been missing) is to create a feeling of community with the audience, to connect with them as people so that they’re already rooting for the performers to succeed. So we worked on talking to each other how we might talk to the audience.

Then we did some scenes where we worked on blocking. Not improv blocking, but stage blocking, or in other words moving with purpose. And we worked on facing out more even when we’re talking to people on stage. One thing we discovered in a scene that I did with Bryce, is that being onstage in front of the door you can be inside a room with the door leading out, or you can be outside with the door leading in. AND you can move through the door in such a way that the scene moves from inside to outside or vice-versa. Cool.

We did sing some. We focused on short 30 second songs. I had a hard time with this and am interested in seeing how this works in the show. It was difficult for me without the context of a show. Without back story, the 30 second songs all felt contrived.

Oh! And we did some movement exercises that resulted in some very interesting “dances”. The point was to practice moving with purpose or standing still with purpose. Clay recorded one on his iPhone and posted it to twitter. View it here.

There’s a show going on right now as I type this. I have the night off and am spending it writing and watching the Oregon/Oregon State Game. I don’t know who I’m rooting for. I guess I’m rooting for Let It Snow. Oh! And we got reviewed in the Marin Independent Journal.

Rehearsal #9: Vague Recollections

2009-12-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

We did have rehearsal last Tuesday. Unfortunately a pesky thing known as Thanksgiving Weekend got in the way of me writing about it. Now a week later, it’s hard to remember what we worked on.

I know we did some opening numbers. I know that because we used each other’s hometowns for suggestions and gave Merrill that special Let It Snow glow when we did hers.

I also remember doing some “environment” songs. These aren’t necessarily songs designed to create a physical location, but they exist more to color the town. They’re light, up-beat, throw-away songs that aren’t sung out of a deep emotional moment. That makes them hard, because we’re so trained to sing in emotional moments. Singing something fun just to sing is an adjustment, even though it happens in musicals all the time.

The only one I remember is the one I was in. It involved a customer finally showing up at a rabbit farm. There was lots of hoping involved.

Let It Snow 2009 Week 2

2009-11-30T13:15:00.000-08:00

Check out the Let It Snow Interactive Map, featuring every town the show has ever featured, complete with performance date, show description, and a picture from the town itself!

***

Blinking Red, Blinking Yellow – Friday 11/27/2009
After Cletus (Christian) breaks his leg playing the angel in the mortuary’s Angel Pageant, Marcia (Susan) takes a shot at winning his heart. When she misses, she uses the Saturday night Blinking Light Social as an opportunity to make him jealous by kissing another boy. Only she ends up the jealous one when Cletus dances too close to Sara (Merrill). There’s more to life than being dead in Leakesville, MS (pop 1,026).

Life is Not a Game – Saturday matinee 11/28/2009
Twins Jeff (Christian) and Judy (Mandy) share a deeply uncool secret in Mercer Island, WA (pop 22,650). Neither of them are in the 400-person-strong high school marching band. Instead, they trade off being inside gorrilla suit, the Marching Islanders’ mascot. Their tech-geek parents (Scott & Trish) can’t understand why their kids aren’t happy in spite of all the technology-based hoops they make them jump through everyday to keep them sharp. Can the holidays save this family, or will they crash like the blue screen of death?

Barbs of the Heart – Saturday evening 11/28/2009
Different generations clash in DeKalb, IL (pop 39,000) when the new NIU agriculture students show up for their first day of work on a real farm. Meanwhile Luke (Michael) gives his family’s stockpile of barbed wire to Sally (Mandy), but he can’t bring himself to tell her he loves her. When Luke’s brother Peter (Bryce) returns on break from rival school U of I, he threatens to steal away Sally’s heart. Love is a thorny issue in the birthplace of barbed wire.

Let It Snow 2009 Week 1 - All Performances

2009-11-23T19:00:00.000-08:00

Check out the Let It Snow Interactive Map, featuring every town the show has ever featured, complete with performance date, show description, and a picture from the town itself!

***

The Same but Different – Thursday 11/19/2009
After finally asking Mary (Alyssa) out on a date to the Holiday Parade, Chet (Alan) gets conflicting advice from his friends Max (Bryce) and Carl (Dave) on how to treat women. Meanwhile Mary takes advice from her cougar mother (Karen) and octogenarian surfer father (Bryce). Watch your step in Vero Beach, FL (pop. 16,939) where the old folks still have lots of pep!

Not So Secret Spots – Friday 11/20/2009
Brothers Jack (Clay) and Christopher (Christian) work for their father Edward (Michael) at the family gas station/apple orchard, but Jack hardly works. Instead he chases the love of Susan (Lisa) who’s really in love with Christopher who’s too busy working to notice. Throw in a crazy poet (Jodi) who’s in love with both of them and the junk shop/moonshine still owner Agnes (Merrill) who’s in love with Edward, and you’ve got trouble in Paradise, CA (pop 26,408).

Let It Snow Week 1, Performance 1

2009-11-20T11:47:00.001-08:00

The show was a lot of fun last night and probably one of our best first performances of a run. The audience seemed to really enjoy it. (You can read a lovely email one of them sent me here.) I ran the opening and interviewed the audience member about the town. In the middle of it I realized I’d never done the opening of Let It Snow before and really had no idea what questions I was supposed to be asking, but I think I faked it pretty well. We got some good feedback during the talkback session after the show about what types of questions to ask. Very helpful.

The town was Vero Beach, FL. Here’s the official blurb:

The Same but Different – Thursday 11/19/2009
After finally asking Mary (Alyssa) out on a date to the Holiday Parade, Chet (Alan) gets conflicting advice from his friends Max (Bryce) and Carl (Dave) on how to treat women. Meanwhile Mary takes advice from her cougar mother (Karen) and octogenarian surfer father (Bryce). Watch your step in Vero Beach, FL (pop. 16,939) where the old folks still have lots of pep!

Things were very relaxed backstage throughout the entire show. No one was panicking about what should happen next or how we were going to get out of some hole we’d just dug for ourselves. The show itself was also very relaxed and character driven. For the first time ever, we had a show without enough plot. We just needed a little something else to happen to bring in a little more conflict and dramatic tension.

Why was there so little tension? Largely because of a split second decision I made in the first scene. Alyssa and I quickly became the protagonists and love interests in that first scene. After establishing that I’d been working up to asking her out to the Holiday Parade for two years, and singing a song about how I needed to ask her, I had to decide: Do I chicken out at the end of the song and make the show about asking her out, or do I just ask her out at the end of the song? Not wanting to bridge, I asked her out at the end of the song, and immediately felt the giant sucking sound of the plot flying out the window.

That is the sweet spot I need to find: when bridging isn’t bridging, but building tension. Still, personally I’m overjoyed that we finally went too far away from plot. Now we can pull back the other way and hopefully find the sweet spot.

Rehearsal #8: Holy crap we have a show tonight.

2009-11-19T13:16:00.000-08:00

We had our “last” rehearsal Tuesday night before the first performance. I put “last” in quotes because we continue to rehearse throughout the run. Why? So we can learn from the shows and make them better as the run progresses.

We did two first-halves of shows, talked through the second half and then performed a closing number. I was in the first one. It was pretty much the train wreck I expected it to be. We had a lot of offers on the table. Every character seemed to want to get of the town. We didn’t have clear environments. People weren’t listening all that well, and instead of swimming around in the characters, we got lost in plot.

That said, there was some really strong stuff. Good characterization. Good singing, etc.

The second was much better. Learning from our mistakes, they had very clear environments, kept from veering to hard into to plot-land, and did some wonderful things.

I’ve been trying to crystallize what I think I learned down into one bullet point, and here’s what I think it is: If something happens in the story (i.e. a “plot point”), nothing else should really happen until we know how all of the pertinent characters feel about that something that happened.

I’m excited about being in the show tonight! I think we’ll learn a lot doing an entire show in front of an actual audience. (I was so caught up in the rehearsal, that I didn’t take any pictures.)

**

Mandy posted to the show blog:

A Let-It-Snow Letter from the Past!

Play Schedule

2009-11-16T19:00:00.000-08:00

So here's when I'm performing. As always, this is subject to change:

Thursday 11/19
Friday 11/27
Saturday 11/28 – evening
Friday 12/4
Saturday 12/5 – matinee
Thursday 12/10
Saturday 12/19 – matinee
Saturday 12/19 – evening

All shows are at 8pm except the matinees which are at 3pm. If you'd like to see the entire cast list for a given night, you can check out the Un-Scripted Events Calendar and just click on the show you're interested in.

Rehearsal #7: 7 Kinds of Love

2009-11-11T19:00:00.000-08:00

Last night at rehearsal we had a photoshoot for headshots for the program. We take our own headshots for our programs so that we can keep them consistent and give them themes that go along with the particular show. For Let It Snow, everyone’s dressed in hats or scarves or holding something that indicates “winter”. Fortunately we didn’t have to take a new shot for everyone in the cast as many people have already been in the show.

While the last few people were getting pictures taken, this week’s choreographers taught their dances. When the photos were done, we had our last round of choreography. Once again we saw how talking during dance numbers doesn’t take anything away from them (and by talking I mean counting or describing the dance moves, not just rambling about something) and how important it is to sell what you’re doing from the waste up even if your feet are hopeless inept. Oh, and diagonal movement is cool.

Then we warmed up our voices, did a round of DNP, and tried our hands at improvising rounds. That was incredibly difficult. I think it might be impossible to do in this show but perhaps possible in a short form or cabaret type show. We also did a very interesting dynamics exercise where we experimented with singing at different volumes. One takeaway from that exercise was just how effective singing quietly can be, especially mixed in with singing loudly.

Next Susan ran us through “7 Kinds of Love”. Everyone got to sing a love duet, and Susan set everyone up in a different type of love duet (for a total of 7 duets in all). I sang with Jodi, and our set up was that at the start of the song one of us was in love with the other, but the other one wasn’t. Then by the end of the song we were to switch points of view. Oh, and we were singing such that the other character could hear what we were singing. Oftentimes in duets your singing inner thoughts that the other character isn’t hearing. In any case, it was a very fun song to sing.

Then we moved into point-of-view trios and large group songs with an eye towards finding different types of songs that could be used to end the first half. There are no hard and fast rules for ending a half, but generally something with a lot of energy and a lot of characters is a good way to go.

We have previews next week! We still have to load-in the set and have one more rehearsal before we unleash this puppy on an audience. I can’t wait. This show’s so much fun.

Rehearsal #6: Exit Pursued by a Bear

2009-11-04T19:00:00.000-08:00

Last night’s rehearsal was all about improv! We’ve spent a lot of time working on singing and dancing, and it was finally time to focus on some scene work.

We warmed up by playing “Bitty Bitty Hop”, which is similar to “Bippity Bippity Bop” only you have to physically hop before the person in the middle says “hop”. The game then proceeds as usual.

Then we split up into groups of three and did a “coloring” exercise. For the first iteration, one person flipped through an imaginary Town Annual (like a town yearbook) while the other people asked detailed questions about the items discovered in the book. Then who was being asked the questions rotated and the imaginary record became a time capsule and then an actual high school yearbook for the final iteration.

Next, we split up into pairs and talked about our improv goals for the show, what we’re working on, etc. I want to play more characters that aren’t in control of their situations. My characters tend to have an answer for everything, and I’d like to explore playing some that get in trouble and don’t know how to get out of it. I’d also like to improve my space object work and push the show into new and interesting locations. Of course there are other things too, but those are the big ones.

After that we did some quick protagonist work. We just had 3 or 4 people start a scene and everyone watching raised their hand once they thought they knew who the scene was about. Once most people had raised their hand the scene was stopped and we found out if we all agreed. Generally we did. In the past we’ve spent entire rehearsals on protagonist work, but everyone seemed to have a handle on what made someone the protagonist (being likable, the most normal, effected by what was happening, set apart from the other characters somehow, etc).

Then, we moved into some large group scenes. Six people would go up to perform (we’re planning casts of six people every night) and do two scenes. One a public scene with lots of people and then a second private scene between just two. Somehow we naturally fell into doing these two scenes seamlessly without any sort of blackout or hard ending between the scenes. We’d have a group scene and then eventually the side characters would leave two people alone for the private scene. It felt very “play like" as if the actors had scripted entrances and exits.

We capped things off by doing two 15 minute long forms, figuring in an actual show we’ll only have time for about 15 minutes of plot anyway. The first one involved a pair of identical twin teenagers struggling to date and find their own identities. The second involved a group of co-workers. The twin story reminded us all that, like in Shakespeare, even if the actors playing the twins look nothing alike, the other characters can find them so identical that they can’t tell them apart. The co-worker story reminded us that a workplace can be an even smaller small town within a small town.

We finished off by splitting up into groups once more to discus the main takeaways from rehearsal. I think one of the biggest was “listen, listen, listen”. We had a lot of missing offers, multiple names, confusing family relationships, etc. Name people. Repeat names. Be obvious about the environments you’re creating. Things of that nature.

We also learned that Bryce can wrestle a bear.

Rehearsal #5: Dancing with the Improvisors

2009-10-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

We rehearsed last night in a mirrored dance studio at ACT, largely because our regular space was booked but also so we could do some serious dance work. We started with the standard dance warm-up, made all the more interesting by the option of looking at yourself in a mirror doing it. Then we went into the choreography teaching exercise.

Alyssa took a small group of 4 people out on to the ACT balcony and taught them a wonderfully simple dance that involved standing in a straight line while bouncing and leaning in different directions. Of course, I do not do it justice. It was wonderful. Karen took the rest of the group (one of the assigned choreographers had thought they were on the schedule for next week) and put us into a long sequence of stepping around and crossing each other. Again, I do not do it justice, but large group numbers are very effective.

From there we moved into some couples dancing. We always work on couples dancing in Let It Snow rehearsals, but so rarely do we do it in shows. I’m not sure why. I’d love to see it and do it in a show. I think one hurdle is that it’s hard to do in groups because everyone has such a tenuous grasp of the footwork that they can only do it over one span of distance. With every couple traveling at different rates, traffic jams become problematic and messy. But maybe one couple doing some dancing behind someone singing a solo would be easier to work into a show? I don’t know. I’ll have to hunt for ideas.

Then we warmed up our singing voices with some Dona Nobis Pacem and did a Color/Advance exercise. We did it once telling a story and then we did it again singing a song. It was amazing how much more natural coloring is while singing. We often talk about not putting plot elements into our songs, and I think that exercise really drove home how little plot you need in a song. I think I even learned more from directing the other person’s song than I did singing my own.

Then we moved into some faux opening numbers. “Faux” because we didn’t focus on the words at all. We mostly sang gibberish. The focus was on the backup dancing. We worked on developing movement to go along with our choruses and on crisping up the background dancing during verses.

I think the biggest thing we learned from all this was “Commitment”. Commit to your movement, and it’s ok to put all of your energy into one gesture rather than having lots of extraneous movement. As clay said “have a moment, not a seizure.”

We also learned that having a “leader” during the backup dancing behind verses makes them so much easier. So, commit to being the leader. Either take control or if you sense that you’re in charge, go all the way with it. And, perhaps more importantly, don’t be afraid to say what you’re doing. Tell everyone in plain English what attitude you want them to affect or what dance move you want them to do or what direction you want them to go. It’s easy to forget you can direct movement with your voice, but it’s so helpful when people do it.

Then we closed by singing some solos (or rather having everyone sing their own solo simultaneously) with the focus being on dancing during the song, either while singing or during a clearly defined dance break. Frankly, in terms of my own work, I’m discovering that I like exploring footwork more than arm or torso movement. But I also discovered that the more footwork I did, the more natural arm and torso movement became. I’ll have to push that further.

(Sunset from the ACT balcony last night)

Rehearsal #4: Oops, I missed it

2009-10-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

I did not go to rehearsal this week as I was recovering from some strange non-flu virus that had me sleeping 24 hours a day. Here's Clay's picture from rehearsal:

As I understand it, they started with this week's choreographers teaching their dances:

Clay -- aggressive poppy hip-hop
Trish -- tense contemporary conflict (Massive Attack!)
Merrill -- flirty girl pop

Then they did some singing and finally some show starts.

Rehearsal #3: Formations

2009-10-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

Last night at rehearsal we started a little late due to the crazy rain storm we had yesterday. We moved pretty quickly into Mandy’s dance warm-up, which you can see in all of its glory here. And then split up into three groups so that three more cast members could teach us choreography. Susan taught her group a Fosse-esque tap routine. Dave (the group I was in) taught some zombie dancing, and Michael led some sexy partner dancing. The big take a ways were: 1. moving towards or away form the audience looks cool. 2. looking like you’re having a good time is way more important than being spot on with the dance moves.

From there we went over some group dance formations. Things like circles, lines, columns. And ways to move around in those formations. In previous shows we’ve tended to get locked into one or two formations. We’re trying break out of that and make things more textured.

Then we warmed up our singing voices and practiced some Verse/Chorus songs in a circle before attempting some actual opening numbers.

The opening number of Let It Snow has always been very structured. It’s a good way to kick the show off right and set the tone for the rest of the night. Mandy & Susan are mixing it up in several ways. First off, instead of one person going out to set the chorus, everyone is going to go out and “inhabit an environment”. Mill around, interact. Be somewhere that suggests the town. Then one person will emerge to sing the song’s first verse, while everyone’s still inhabiting the world. Then a second person will start singing the chorus. Everyone will notice them. Then when everyone repeats the chorus along with them, they’ll assume a formation. We’ll return to that formation for every chorus, but assume new formations during the verses. That will hopefully spur some more movement. Fortunately so many people in the cast have done this show before and everyone can handle all this complexity.

We did three opening numbers last night. The three towns we did escape me at the moment, but the details weren’t important. The important thing was seeing that structure in action and seeing that it can work and look good. We also learned to “mill” with purpose and energy, to really grab the moment when you want to sing the next verse or set the chorus. The new structure makes it less apparent who’s going to sing next.

Next week we focus more on improv and the week after on dance. The shows coming up fast! Did you know that ticket are already on sale? From now until November 1, you can use the coupon code “SPECIAL” to get 25% off when you buy tickets through our website. Buy Ticket Here.

Every Day Improv

2009-10-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

Susan's teaching a class in the East Bay in October:

Every Day Improv with Susan Snyder
Enjoy exploring the world of improvisation in a low pressure, playful environment.
Increase your confidence, improve your public speaking skills, and enjoy the experience along the way. This class is for adults wanting their first taste of improv, and those returning to deepen their range of improvisational expression. Shy people welcome.

Dates: Sundays, October 18 & 25
Time: 12:30-3:30pm
Location: Temescal Arts Center, Oakland, CA
(street parking, walking distance from MacArthur BART)
Cost: $40 single class/ sign up for 2 or more $30 a class

Contact Susan

Rehearsal #2: A Little Bit of Everything

2009-10-08T07:30:00.000-07:00

For our second rehearsal for Let It Snow we did a little bit of dancing, a little bit of singing, and a little bit of improv. Sort of an overview of the entire show.

I got lead my favorite name-game warm-up exercise for the firs time with this cast. Since we didn’t do the exercise during the auditions, this was several cast members first time playing. Even so, it went very smoothly. We made it all the way up to four patterns. It went so smoothly in fact, I kept thinking I was doing something wrong in leading it.

Mandy and Susan want everyone in the cast to experience being a choreographer. At every rehearsal three people have to teach a group of 3-4 other cast members some sort of choreographed dance. I was one of the choreographers this week. We had to choreograph a minimum of 16 counts, so that’s what I did. It was mostly stepping and jazz hands with one complicated turn. In any case, it took me the entire 10 minutes to teach it.

Then as we watched the other groups perform their dances, I was astounded to see how complicated and long other people’s pieces were. I should have done more, but at the same time I showed all you really needed to do was 16 counts. Still, good to see how far people are willing to push things.

Then we worked on the Verse/Chorus song structure we’ve been experimenting with. Instead of starting a song with a chorus, we start a song with a verse. Then the second person to sing sets the chorus. It’s more like regular songs, but can be tricky. Still, it went well. We followed that up by singing duets. Mandy and Susan had everyone pair up and sing a duet all at the same time. That way everyone got to sing 3 songs.

Finally we did two show-starts. Susan had printed out some brief info on small towns that we used as suggestions and then dove into the first three scenes of a show. We did Genoa, NV and Cranbury, NJ. I was in the Cranbury one and played a not-so-swift hardware store employee who confused “asphalt” for “screws”. There was some good word play in that scene including Susan saying “I think you’re screwed” and Dave singing a song about it not being his “fault” they were out of “asphalt”.

The take-aways, I think, were to look for themes to develop (“Nevada started here in Genoa, so we’re going to start something”) and to remember small towns do have upper to upper-middle class residents (we tend to only ever play working-class folk). We also saw perhaps the first scene in a Let It Snow rehearsal or show ever to take place in someone’s garage. Lisa also did some kick-ass space object work establishing the hardware store.

Rehearsal #1: Dancing and Group Scenes

2009-09-30T13:29:00.000-07:00

We had our first rehearsal for Let It Snow! 2009 last night. We’ve done this show three times previously (2004, 2005, and 2007) making it our first quadruple threat show! (I think we did only did You Bet Your Improvisor and The Short and the Long of It three times each, but the complete list of all Un-Scripted shows seems to have not survived the new web redesign. Hopefully it will be reappearing soon.) But we’ve never done Let It Snow! like this before. For the first time ever, someone other than Tara is directing it.

Tara developed the show based largely on her experiences growing up in a small town in Maine. In fact, she was so committed to her vision of the show that she has moved back to a small town in Maine. This regrettably makes her unavailable to direct the show. This year the show is being directed by Mandy with a healthy dose of assisting from Susan. Now, while audience members frequently confuse Mandy for Tara or Susan for Tara, technically speaking Mandy & Susan are not Tara. Rather than wondering “What Would Tara Do?” Mandy & Susan are going to just going to do what they would do within the same framework. Thus the show will inherently be different, because, as previously stated Mandy & Susan are not Tara.

This show marks a number of other firsts. It will be the first time ensemble member Clay has ever performed in Let It Snow! It will also be the first show Trish performs in as an ensemble member. We also have a nice mix of returning and new cast members. The full list is:

Bryce Byerley - ensemble
Dave Dyson - ensemble
Michael Fleming – previously in Shakespeare the Musical
Alan Goy - ensemble
Merrill Gruver – previously in Shakespeare the Musical
Alyssa Harvey – previously in Fear
Karen Hirst – previously in Theater the Musical and Let It Snow!
Scott Keck – previously in… many shows.
Mandy Khoshnevisan - ensemble
Clay Robeson - ensemble
Jodi Skeris – new!
Susan Snyder - ensemble
Trish Tillman - ensemble
Christian Utzman - ensemble
Lisa Wang – new!

And we got off to a fine start last night. We opened with some ice-breaking exercises so we could all get to know each other and then launched right into dancing. Mandy ran us through a series of moves and then made everyone lead the group in some dancing to different styles. It was a workout, fortunately I’ve been hitting the gym in recent months to prepare.

We capped off the day with some improv! We worked on group scenes where several characters ganged up on another for some reason. Why? Because those scenes generally give the audience the sense that the characters all know each other very well. As Keith Johnstone says (paraphrased) “friends play with each other’s status while strangers leave each other’s status alone.” But these scenes are often difficult to improvise, as they can easily devolve into everyone talking over each other.

All-in-all we did a reasonably good job. We learned to focus on nuance and relationships as opposed to activities. I was in one scene the set up for which was a group of people waiting outside for the fishing license shop to open for the season. Quickly it became endowed as ice-fishing season and Scott and Karen launched in with Northern Minnesotan “Fargo” accents. I was amazed at how much fun I had doing the Fargo accent and how easily I was able to do it. Within the scene I was actually aware of how I wasn’t thinking about the accent at all. It was just coming out. I love doing accents and I’d forgotten how much I love doing Fargo.

Mostly though we all did a good job of talking over each other just enough to look like friends, while still being able to hear what was going on. A promising start!

Fear 2004

2009-09-17T19:48:00.000-07:00

This poster was framed and at the bottom of the stairs leading into La Val's when we did Fear in 2004

At Last Night's Audition

2009-09-16T11:20:00.001-07:00

Let It Snow! - Auditions

2009-09-10T17:45:00.000-07:00

Improvisors Wanted!

The Un-Scripted Theater Company is holding auditions for its next show, Let It Snow!, an improvised musical for the holidays, filled with good old-fashioned Broadway singing and dancing. (Think The Music Man.) The show is set every night in the hometown of an audience member, and over the three seasons that we've performed the show, we've visited small towns from North Pole AK to Manunka Chunk NJ to Wailua HI, and lots of places in between. It's a really fun show to perform, and always an audience (and improvisor) favorite.

We're looking for improvisors who ideally have longform experience as well as an enthusiasm for singing/dance.

** Auditions will be in the evening, on Monday, Sept. 14th, and Tuesday, Sept. 15th.
Rehearsals will be on Tuesdays, starting Sept. 29th; the show runs
Nov. 19th - Dec. 19th.
All of the above in downtown SF near Union Square.

If you're interested in auditioning, email Susan (click here) for more information or to reserve yourself a slot -- make sure to mention which date you'd prefer. Our auditions are conducted more like a rehearsal or class, so be prepared to stay for at least an hour. If you're wondering whether you should audition, the answer is almost always yes! We pride ourselves on our fun, low-pressure auditions, and we always love meeting improvisors, so come on down and give it a shot!

www.un-scripted.com

Ensemble Rehearsal #7: Genre Combo

2009-08-20T18:35:00.000-07:00

This week we multitasked by having a business meeting first and then rehearsal. Fortunately we were able to plow through our meeting agenda fairly quickly and still have time for a reasonable rehearsal.

As per usual, we sang some Verse/Chorus songs. Then we practiced the format we’ve accidentally performed at our last two shows (the SF Theater Fest and the Temporary Improv Fest). That being getting 3-4 genres from the audience and doing them all at the same time. Let’s see if I can remember what we did:

70’s Detective TV Show, Jane Austen, Brecht
Slasher, Mark Twain, Shakespeare
80’s B-Movie Sci-Fi, Caveman, Checkov

It’s really impossible to process all of them at once. Generally you have to use one genre mostly as setting and another for character or plot elements. At any given time your just focusing on one or two hoping someone else is picking up the others. It works fairly well. We also think they work better when at least one of the genres is more general (like “tragedy” or “horror”).

That was pretty much it. Again, a short rehearsal.

The Toiletries That Ate San Francisco

2009-08-17T08:17:00.000-07:00

In 2006, the Un-Scripted Theater Company did a show called the Impossible Film Project. The show worked something like this:

A team of improvisors and a director wih a camera get a suggestion from a live audience and then take to the streets of San Francisco to shoot a movie guerrilla style. As they finish a tape, it's run back to the theater where the audience sees it almost live.

I was fortunate enough to be in a few of these and serve as the director/camera man on a few as well. This was one of my favorites. We had a lot of fun making it and I have never actually seen the entire thing before. (The nature of the show meant you didn't get to see the film you were shooting screened.) Now it's all up on YouTube and I can present to you The Toiletries That Ate San Francisco!

For this film the suggestion was an actual object, a bag of toiletries an audience member had with them. The improvisors had no pre-planned script. All they knew was the style of the movie: 1950's B-Movie.

Featuring:
Kimberley MacLean as Buffy
Maggie Farril as Bambi
Christian Utzman as Dick Moondoggie
and in an uncredited role:
Brian McBride as The Mad Scientist

and countless extras from the streets of San Francisco

Directed by Alan Goy

Ensemble Rehearsal #6: Steady Going

2009-08-13T16:02:00.000-07:00

I don’t have too too much to report about Tuesday’s ensemble rehearsal. We leapt right into more of the Verse Chorus Verse songs I mentioned in Rehearsal 4 with similarly strong results. Then we went back to the exercises we did in Rehearsal 2 that resulted in the inadvertent one-acts. Again they were really solid.

We told a story about some distracted bank robbers that turned into a game of “torture Bryce’s character”. There was an epic futuristic war story that veered too cinematic in style and didn’t feel as much like a play. Then we had Pinter meets Albee meets Becket in a story about gambling and rent payments. That one was fun. Finally we told an upper British love tragedy about a butler pining for his mistress.

We experimented with ways to make the characters more diverse while still style matching with some success. In the “gambling” one I consciously tried to style match while playing a completely different pace than the other characters. It was hard, but I think it worked.

Improv For Everyone

2009-08-12T16:36:00.000-07:00

Susan's teaching a class in the East Bay in September:

Improv for Everyone with Susan Snyder
Enjoy exploring the world of improvisation in a low pressure, playful environment. Increase your confidence, improve your public speaking skills, and enjoy the experience along the way. This class is for people wanting their first taste of improv, and those returning to deepen their range of improvisational expression. Shy people welcome.

Dates: Sunday, Sept 13th & Sunday Sept 26th
Time: 12:30-3:30pm
Location: Temescal Arts Center, Oakland, CA
(street parking, walking distance from MacArthur BART)
Cost: $40 single class or sign up for both for $60

Contact Susan

Ensemble Rehearsal #4: The Best

2009-07-29T18:20:00.000-07:00

After starting rehearsal learning some Bollywood dance choreography as a warm up, we spent some time discussing, among other things, what we wanted to be working on. We realized that we often spend a lot of time focusing on our faults as improvisors and how we can improve them. Of course, because of the nature of the art form, we have to do this so we are all capable of juggling any and all balls that might get thrown at us. As an example: I need to be able to play the hero, villain, love interest, or side characters depending on what the show needs.

But what we don’t do is push ourselves to get better at the things we’re already good at. Bryce is really good at playing villains. How can we push him to get better at playing villains? If we start giving each other notes on what we’re good at and challenging each other to get even better, we’ll find out what we’re good at, grow in new ways, and learn new things that everyone can benefit form. Very exciting.

It all reminded me of something I had heard August Wilson say in a master class. Every time he sat down to write a play he set out to write the best play that had ever been written. Otherwise, what was the point? Why bother? I tried to research an actual cited version of that quote and what I found was even better:

For years I sat in that chair and tried to best my predecessors, to write the best play that’s ever been written. That was my goal until I ran across a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright, who said he didn’t want to be the best architect who ever lived. He wanted to be the best architect who was ever going to live. That added fuel to the fire and raised the stakes, so to speak. Now you’re not only doing battle with your predecessors but with your successors as well. It drives you to write above your talent. And I know that’s possible to do because you can write beneath it.

That’s how I want to write. That’s how I want to improvise.

Then we moved on to singing. Typically when we sing songs in rehearsal we do a “Chorus/Verse” song, where one person starts by setting a chorus, we all repeat it, and then we all take turns doing verses. Except we never end up singing songs like that in shows, and really, very songs are like that to begin with.

During the last Shakespeare show, they worked on “Verse/Chorus” songs. The idea was to start with a verse, like most songs do, then the next person sets the chorus (but we do not repeat it together yet). The next person does a verse and then everyone sings the chorus together. Then everyone takes turns singing verses. The result is much more like an actual song, and hopefully more likely to happen I a show (with practice).

We took this a step further though and tried to merge with the exercise the work we had done on acting in other people’s styles. The idea was to mimic the person’s singing style. Not the notes, but the tamber, cadence, vowel structure, etc. This pushed people outside of their normal vocal patterns and pointed out patterns and habits that we people had. All very useful.

Ensemble Rehearsal #2: Inadvertant One-Acts

2009-07-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

For the first time ever, the Un-Scripted Theater Company has been having ensemble rehearsals where we get together and play without preparing for any specific show. Last night we had the second one of these and did some really interesting work that was simultaneously unlike anything we usually do while still being stereotypical of our work.

We started by doing a character movement exercise lead by Mandy. There’s a name for it, but I can’t remember what it is. It involves moving around the room and taking on different physical characteristics as a way to experiment with different physicalities and movement styles. We wanted to work with how movement influences character and break out of the movement ruts we individually typically fall into to.

To move this idea into scene work, we did a variation on an exercise Christian often uses in his classes. One person started a scene as a character they wanted to see inhabit a world. Then other people came in not exactly mimicking that character (because we didn’t want scenes with 5 of the same character) but mimicking that person’s acting style, as if everyone in the scene had graduated from the same 8 year acting school. Similar speech and movement but not identical. Coming from the same place, but not the same.

The resulting scenes were more like one-act plays than any scenes I’ve ever seen trying to be one-act plays. We theorized a number of reasons for this. One being that because every character in a play is written by the same person, all of the characters have a similarity that this mimicking recreated in our scenes. Another was that we weren’t entering the scenes at the next plot point but at the next character point. We didn’t enter once we knew what should happen next, but we entered once we had the next character that should be in the world. As a result the scenes didn’t have strong protagonists, yet felt like every character was the protagonist at one moment or another. (Something we had worked on more directly and less successfully during Theater The Musical.)

No one ever felt pressured in these scenes to come up with what should happen next. Even when something was happening in the scenes, the scenes weren’t about that. They were about the characters and their relationships, which are what stories should be about but often aren’t.

Every scene we did could have been fleshed out into an entire play (or I suppose a sketch if that’s how your mind works) or could have been a brilliant improv scene in performance. Here’s a brief list of the scenes with hopefully just enough detail to jog my memory down the line:

- A disgruntled teacher’s lounge with a gay yoga instructor and a classic porn stash.
- A “black widow” haunted by her murdered husbands and a “black widower” haunted by his murdered wives go on a date and decide to join forces: Blithe Spirit meets Arsenic and Old Lace meets The Brady Bunch.
- A cowardly deputy saves the town in spite of himself. Tarrantino meets Deadwood meets Blazing Saddles.
- Two strangers finally speak to each other on a subway train after countless train rides together.

And many others. I wish we’d taped the rehearsal.

BOB Voting

2009-06-30T08:10:00.000-07:00

Voting for Best of the Bay 2009 ends TODAY at 5pm. So while you’re voting on PAGE 2 for the “Un-Scripted Theater Company” for the BEST THEATER COMPANY category, here are some of my picks (ok, they're actually Christian's and I copied them from his Facebook) that I think you should consider for your vote as well. Remember, you can vote from anywhere in the world, so tell your parents to get out the vote for the things you love in the Bay Area too.
http://www.sfbg.com/bobpoll2009/

Best Dessert – Bi-Rite Creamery
Best Bakery – Tartine
Best Theater Company – Un-Scripted Theater Company
Best Emerging Artist – Uriah Duffy
Best Dive Bar – Zeitgeist
Best Burlesque Act – Tit 4 Tat
Best Place to Buy Bikes and Gear – Manifesto
Best Place to Buy Vinyl – 1-2-3-4 Go
Best Local Designer – Wild Card
Best Quirky Specialty Store – 5 and Diamond
Best Place to Meet Someone – Baxtalo Drom The Lucky Road
Best First Date Spot – Paxton Gate
Best Local Web Site – un-scripted.com
Best Bicycle Mechanics – Freewheel Bike Shop
Best Arts Organization – Half Priced Ticket Booth in Union Square
Best Classic Artist – Dave Warnke

Let your voice be heard! In 50 words or less - This is a great place to tell the world how much you love the Un-Scripted Theater Company.

What I've Learned About Directing

2009-04-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

From the Flickr Commons

I’m in the midst of tech week for the show I’m directing for Impact, or “hell week” as it is often called. Directing an improv show and a scripted show back-to-back has been a stark reminder to me about the differences in the two processes. Over all, both are easier and more difficult at the same time. There really is no equivalent to hell week for an improv show, or at least it’s not on the same scale.

I also learned a lot doing these two shows back-to-back, or perhaps I learned more from simply directing for the first time in 4 years or more. The main lesson I’ve learned about directing an improv show is that it’s more like teaching a class than putting a show together. As a result it requires a much more well thought out curriculum from the very beginning, well before the first rehearsal or even the auditions. Un-Scripted: unscripted, being a show that did not require an obvious set of specific skills to perform, in retrospect I should have picked a set of skills that I wanted to work on and constructed the rehearsals around that larger purpose. That seems so obvious now, I’m surprised I didn’t think of it originally, but alas I did not.

As for what I’ve learned about directing a scripted play, I’ve learned I need to communicate better with my designers, push them and the actors harder, and generally trust my instincts. Perhaps it’s less trusting my instincts and learning to recognize my instincts. If something doesn’t seem right, it’s probably wrong.

Un-Scripted: unscripted Wrap Up

2009-04-22T18:00:00.000-07:00

Posting about our Bollywood show in Chicago made me realize I never really wrapped up the posts about Un-Scripted: unscripted.

As I mentioned, I was not at Rehearsal #9 because I had already started rehearsals for Impact Briefs: Puberty . Here though is the rehearsal in time-lapse:

I also missed all but 1 show closing weekend as I was on a business trip in Dallas. I did however catch closing night which featured the best last scene of a run ever:

All told, we upload 16 clips from the show, which you can watch here.

If you'd like to watch the entire rehearsal process in time lapse from beginning to end, here it is!

Bollywood in Chicago

2009-04-21T15:39:00.000-07:00

“Sold out weeks ago” I believe was the statement I had heard weeks ago, and yet there was a notable contingent of empty seats in the house Saturday night for our performance of The Great Puppet Bollywood Extravaganza at the Chicago Improv Festival. (I’m fairly certain we had a larger crowd for our show at the festival back in 2005.) Hmm… I am told the marketing material for the festival contained a very poor description of our show (a “90 minute puppet show” or some such) which just goes to show you should always pitch the show you’re actually doing not the one you think your audiences want to see.

In any case, we still put on a fun and solid show for the folks who braved an unseasonably warm and drizzly Chicago night for the 11:30pm show. Fortunately the good folks of the festival gave us a full 2 hour time-slot in an actual theater to do our show. (Most improv in Chicago is an hour long which we learned is partially because theaters rent space by the hour for about the same amount we get space for an entire evening.) Unfortunately this meant our show didn't end until almost 1:30. You haven't lived until you've taken an intermission at 12:15am.

I’m sure eventually we will get some footage up on our YouTube channel, but for the time being, here’s the show summary that will appear in this week’s email:

Pooja, Sagar, & Raja's Excellent Adventure or A Revolution in Time

Sagar (Christian) and Raja (Alan as puppet George) take a job with the eccentric village plumber (Dave as puppet Andy) so they can court his daughter Pooja (Mandy). But Pooja is betrothed to the evil Rajiv (Clay as puppet Dungeon) whose father, the mad Dr. Chowdhury (Jenny as a finger puppet) wants to take over the village with his inhuman ideas about science. Instead of working on her father's wind-powered indoor plumbing device, Pooja, Sagar, and Raja build a time machine that takes them on an adventure across time and space and pirates. Will their travels save Pooja from her arranged marriage, the town from destruction, and Raja from certain death?

I managed to work in the phrase “What the fish?” many times, and helped shape a time travel plot that actually made sense, complete with my character from the future showing up in the present and dying at the top of the second half. This made for some really interesting scenes between my character in the present and the characters who knew I was going to die. Then of course came the highly satisfying scene near the end when my character finally got stabbed.

Drama you can only have with time travel really.

I think my singing was even halfway decent too, as I continue my quest to actually sing in my range. Much harder to do than it sounds.

Rehearsal #8: Keep it Going

2009-03-19T18:27:00.000-07:00

As we get deeper and deeper into a show, especially a show that’s going fairly well, there becomes less and less to work on in rehearsal. They become more or less an opportunity to connect and keep everyone on the same page. That’s mostly what we did this week. We worked on some games (Oompa Loompa Comentary, Genre Combo, Genre Slide, Genre Roller Coaster, State Trooper) and ended early. It was also St. Patrick’s Day, and I didn’t want to keep people too late in case they had plans or just wanted to beat the drunken traffic home.

The show runs for two more weekends, but this is actually my last. I’m directing Impact Briefs: Puberty which opens in May and needs to start rehearsals ASAP. All that is to say, I likely will not blog about next week’s rehearsal as I won’t be there.

Rehearsal #7: Everything at Once

2009-03-12T12:29:00.000-07:00

After a very successful first weekend of shows, we had rehearsal on Tuesday night. We started with a warm-up that I had noticed the cast of Saturday night’s show playing before the show. It involves standing in a circle and playing every improv circle warm-up game all at once with no introductions or explanations. One second your playing bipity bipity bop and the next your playing kitty wants a corner or the Dukes of Hazard, or anything really. And it doesn’t matter if people don’t know the game you’ve just switched to because the whole point is to style match and fake it, or just change the game right away to something you know.

We had a great time and laughed ourselves quite silly.

Then I wanted to move into an exercise in “building scenes” and style matching. The idea was for one person to come out on stage and say a couple things to help establish the type of scene they’re doing and for other people to come in and add to the scene while matching the tenor and style. Unfortunately moving to an exercise started by a single person onstage killed a lot of the energy we had just built up in the warm-up. In the future I might not lead with this exercise.

Then did another round of the bell-game exercise we did in Rehearsal #3 in order to break out of the “new choice” rut we fall into whenever a bell rings on a scene. After that, we did another rapid-fire round of introducing scenes and getting suggestions without stopping the show.

I’ve realized a better way to describe this concept is that every interaction with the audience or scene set up has to be done as a scene itself (which then leads organically into another scene, meaning you can’t have a scene to get the suggestion and then a completely unrelated scene using it). That also means improvisors can’t reference theatrical terms like “scene” or “actor” and such with out first establishing a context wherein that’s allowable. (“Welcome to the Westfield Community Theater Players production of such-and-such” etc.)

I admit it is difficult to come up with these creative intros and even harder to segue them into scenes without always using “now let’s see that film” or “now the Westfield Community Players will act that out”, but that is the point and challenge of the show. Just because it’s hard to do, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.

Another way of looking at it is this, if you want to use the audience as an audience, you first have to establish that they’re not this audience in this theater watching Un-Scripted: unscripted. First you have to endow them as a different audience at a different show and then go from there.

Bryce was detained at work and arrived at rehearsal very late. When he arrived we ran him through the meat grinder by playing scene after scene with him until finally we were all ready to be done. We closed with another round of “every circle warm-up game at once” and that was the end! Watch it all in time-lapse:

Un-Scripted: unscripted Week 1

2009-03-09T18:47:00.000-07:00

I had a moment in the show on Friday night that transcended being simply a “magic of improv” moment and became a “magic of storytelling” even a “magic of culture” moment.

I knew I wanted to do a scene with the bell (a little desktop bell-man’s bell frequently used in improv games), but I didn’t know what I wanted it to be. Because we’re not explaining many scenes in advance in this show, just about any scene might find itself “dinged” by the bell. Then it’s up to the improvisors in the scene to collectively and instantly decide what bell means, or what effect it has on the scene.

The default response tends to be New Choice, where the improvisor says or does something different from what they just said or did until the bell-ringer is satisfied with the new direction of the scene, but it could mean any number of things including Accent Switch, Genre Roller-coaster, Move-On, etc.

So I brought the bell out onstage and placed it on a chair, in a position of status, and then sat backwards in another chair looking at it intently. Mandy joined me onstage and as soon as the lights came up I said “I traded the beans for this bell.”

And that’s when it happened. A knowing chuckle rippled outwards through the audience as everyone in the theater and everyone in the cast knew that the bell was magic, without ever having to say the word “magic.”

That’s how I want to be able to tell stories, be they onstage or on paper.

**

We had a really solid opening weekend with three fun and well received shows. Saturday night was so sold-out that even I didn’t get a seat. So please buy your tickets in advance online. If you’d like to see some clips from last weekend’s shows, Clay has posted 6 scenes on the Un-Scripted YouTube Channel in High Definition (click the HD button for Hi-Def):

The Roman Empire Strikes Back - Parts 1, 2, and 3
Rap Battle: Chocolate vs. Crochet
Shrödinger’s Hepcat
Acting Class (with Joseph)

**

Here’s how I didn’t get a seat at Saturday’s show. As we were closing up the house, I took a quick glance at the audience and saw 1 free seat, which I assumed Bryce would take as he was taking notes that night. So I went out and headed up to the booth. A few seconds later Bryce came up to the booth saying there were no seats left. As the booth only holds two (Bryce and Joy who was running lights), I had no place from which to watch the show.

I heard parts of it.

Rehearsal #6: Time-Lapsed

2009-03-07T23:10:00.000-08:00

Rehearsal #6: Final "Dress"

2009-03-05T15:27:00.000-08:00

We had our last rehearsal before opening on Tuesday. After warming up we talked through a few business items related to the show and then launched into a quick tutorial on how to use puppets. We’ve worked with puppets a lot in Un-Scripted, and I’d love for them to make appearances in this show as well. We practiced with them a bit and then talked about how to interact with the audience (in general, not related to puppets).

Then we ran a couple mock first halves. I wouldn’t call them “dress rehearsals,” not only because we weren’t dressed for the show but because we were in a rehearsal space, not the theater and we did not have a keyboardist.

The first one went amazingly well. So well, in fact, I hope they can do as well tonight in the show! Highlights included:

Row Boat Cannibalism
Playbook Star Trek
and
Mamma I Don’t Wanna Learn Needlepoint or cut off my left breast to be an Amazon warrior.

The second one had a tough act to follow and was a little more shaky. Highlights included:

Australian/French/Japanese/Russian Children’s Shows
Silent Tea
and
Bryce’s beat poetry typewriter scene.

Tonight we open! Sweet. I don’t play until tomorrow. Tonight I take notes so I can help guide things in the right direction. Hope to see you there!

Load-In

2009-03-03T17:33:00.000-08:00

We had load-in last night for the show. Although, as Mandy said, we didn’t load in so much as clean up. The previous tenants in the space left it a bit of a mess. I don’t really understand why groups do that. People are slobs.

In any case, we cleaned up, set up the cyc and the legs, arranged the lights. I figured out how to arrange the box office in a suitably aesthetically and functionally pleasing way. Clay and Joy made the concessions cart look pretty. Christian and Dave arranged the concessions and t-shirts. We were out of there by 9:30. Of course that makes it seem like a short load-in. Clay and Mandy started at 3:00 with the rest of us showing up closer to 6:00.

Watch all 6+ hours of it in time-lapse!

Play Schedule

2009-02-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

Now, these are always somewhat subject to change, but here's when people are playing:

3/5/2009 8:00 Christian, Dave, Joy, Clay, Trish
3/6/2009 8:00 Alan, Scott, Jeff, Mandy, Trish
3/7/2009 8:00 ~~Alan~~ Christian, Jeff, Mandy, Scott, Trish
3/12/2009 8:00 Bryce, Clay, Dave, Joy, Trish
3/13/2009 8:00 Alan, Christian, Dave, Jeff, Trish
3/14/2009 3:00 Bryce, ~~Christian~~ Alan, Joy, Mandy, Scott
3/14/2009 8:00 Alan, Bryce, Joy, Mandy, Scott
3/19/2009 8:00 Alan, Bryce, Jeff, Joy, Mandy
3/20/2009 8:00 Alan, Clay, Jeff, Joy, Trish
3/21/2009 3:00 Alan, Bryce, Christian, Mandy, Scott
3/26/2009 8:00 Christian, Clay, Dave, Joy, Scott
3/27/2009 8:00 Clay, Dave, Jeff, Mandy, Trish
3/28/2009 3:00 Bryce, Christian, Joy, Scott, Trish
3/28/2009 8:00 Bryce, Christian, Clay, Dave, Mandy

Changes made 3/7/2009

Rehearsal #5: Birthday Rapping

2009-02-25T19:00:00.000-08:00

We had David Norfleet at rehearsal last night so we could practice singing. After suitably warming up, we started by improvising some songs in the style of the Andrew’s Sisters. We do this by having one person stand in the middle with two other facing them. The middle singer sings a song, while the two on either side do their best to harmonize with the singer while singing the same words. It helps if they look directly at the singers mouth and learn to lip-read from profile.

Then we went over Mandy’s Barber Shop Quartet concept from last week. With some help from Mr. Norfleet, we were able to get this down into a fairly doable state. This basically involves a lead singer singing a song in 4 measure chunks, with the backup quartet repeating each line in harmony.

At this point, we took a break and had some lovely birthday cake in honor of Clay’s and Dave’s birthdays, both this week. Fully charged with our sugar rush, we moved into some point-of-view songs and scenes into songs before capping the evening off with me pimping people to sing songs I wanted to see them sing. Highlights included Scott & Jeff’s Beastie Boys style rap. Dave’s rap with Christian providing a “sample” chorus while Trish danced. And the Spring Break gang butt rape reunion song. Don’t ask.

Rehearsal #3 in Time-Lapse
Rehearsal #4 in Time-Lapse

And last night’s rehearsal:

You’ll notice the green background. We have a “Green Screen Challenge” going on right now for an as yet undetermined prize.

Rehearsal #4: Photo Mania

2009-02-20T18:30:00.000-08:00

Tuesday's rehearsal was consumed by the photo shoot for the program and the flyer. It's always hard to get much done at a "photo shoot" rehearsal, but invariably they are necessary because they're the only time you know you'll have a chunk of the cast together at the same time.

To try and keep this one from being a complete wash, I told people to bring musical instruments. Then, anyone who wasn't onstage being photographed was in the back of the house jamming and improvising songs. I want music and song to be a big part of this show, and since this show really is about us having a good time, playing instruments we enjoy playing fits in perfectly. We will have a keyboardist at every show as well, but self-played instruments add so much (in a Sweeny Todd Revival sort of way).

As I was busy helping out with and occasionally art directing the photo shoot, I really have no idea how the jamming sessions went. Although I did hear a good song about a repo man and Scott sing a wonderful blues number.
The photo shoot itself went quite well and was tons of fun, as they usually are. Hopefully it resulted in some good shots and the overall concept for the flyer will actually work. I’ll post images here once we have it.

After we finished taking pictures, we broke down the photography equipment and worked on transitions into songs, either through scenes or in-character introductions. One of the highlights of this section of the rehearsal was a strange sort of interpretive dance. I’d love it if something like that happened in a show.

What sort of instruments did people bring that you might see played in a show if you came? Guitar, ukulele, two different kinds of drum, a squeeze box, a flute, and a harmonica (which I brought but really need to learn better how to play before I break it out in a show; my technique is good but I don’t know what notes I’m playing). And that doesn’t even include the acoustic base and mandolin that might also make its way to the shows.

We capped the evening off by experimenting with Mandy’s crazy idea on how to improvise Barbershop Quartet singing, which worked amazingly well. Once we’ve ironed out the kinks and I have a better grasp of what exactly we did, I’ll write more about it.

Only 2 more rehearsals left before we open! Ticket are on sale now. If you use the coupon code “special” when buying your tickets on Vendini between now and Tuesday 2/24, you get 25% off!

Also, see why Joy missed rehearsal.

Slide Show of the photo shoot:

Rehearsal #3: Just Have Fun

2009-02-13T17:10:00.001-08:00

We were short handed at our third rehearsal. I knew Scott and Clay would be absent in advance due to previous conflicts, but then suddenly Trish and Bryce got sick. I’d originally planned on having the photo shoot for the flyer at rehearsal, but with so many people absent, I decided to reschedule it for next week.

This left me with a full three hours and 6 of the 10 cast members to kick around in. We got started with some warm-ups and got to know a couple of our new interns in the process. Then I wanted to move into working on games.

We started by going over spit-take. This is one of my favorite improv games and we ran a few practice scenes to show the people who had never seen it how it worked. For those of you unfamiliar with spit-take and the way we play it, this is spit-take: You play a scene wherein people are drinking water. When someone says something shocking, you spit out your water on them. This game is designed to teach having big reactions on stage. Over the years we’ve discovered a lot of finer points to the game (in the beginning it’s funnier not to spit) and find it best to practice it without water (miming the spitting).

After that I had people take turns playing a scene. At some point in the scene someone from off stage would “ding” it. Then the players had to decide for themselves what the ding meant. Were they playing new choice? Genere switch? Move on? Or, as we discovered, some new game? It was their choice. But of course they couldn’t talk about what game they were choosing to play, they each had to just start playing it, which made for some hysterical moments when players were playing different games from the same bell.

All this resulted in some fun new games. Things happened as a result of the bell ringing that I’d never seen before, such as inner monologue rapping, Upper Class Brit/Western Hick switch, and a food replicator gone haywire.

Then we ran the format for about an hour or so, or ran it as best we could without a musician or an audience. We had a lot of fun and discovered some more new games, such as Brecht Forward Reverse. That’s really the best part of this show, is discovering fun things in the moment. You can’t really do that if you’re locked into a set-list or if you have to set-up your scenes in advance. Just go do it and see what happens. It’s so much more fun.

**

We did shoot a time-lapse video of rehearsal, but it will have to wait until Clay returns from his Caribbean adventure to be posted to the intertubes.

Rehearsal #2: Dynamics

2009-02-06T20:03:00.000-08:00

Rehearsal number TWO! Ah… it felt like slipping into a nice comfortable pair of shoes. Now I remember what directing feels like.

We were at the Dark Room, and we started (after suitable name-game warm-ups) with just practicing setting up scenes in character. In order to get over the initial inertia, I told people to start by setting up scenes and games while in Shakespearean characters. Then, once people had the hang of it and the creative juices started to flow, we expanded into more free-form styles.

Then we took a short break and moved into trying to establish a scene in a genre as quickly as possible without telling anyone which genre you were trying to establish. This exercise has the added bonus of developing style-matching skills without people really being aware of it. Shh… Don’t tell them.

THEN we did a status exercise that Tara developed at the Un-Scripted retreat a few years ago using a card game called Blink. The game has cards with various designs, but the key is that the design is repeated anywhere from 1 to 5 times. So it’s like having a whole deck of cards just 1 through 5.

Here’s how it works. Everyone in the scene pulls cards that represent their statuses to various elements of the scene. A card for their status to themselves, to each other character in the scene, and to the environment. Then you set people up in a scene. Setting people up in a scene is rather important for this exercise because the set up will imply certain status relationships that will either be in line with or opposite of the status cards they chose. The results are always very dynamic scenes.

Watch it all time-lapsed down to less than two minutes:

Rehearsal #1: Knocking Off the Rust

2009-01-28T21:34:00.000-08:00

Boy am I rusty! I haven’t directed anything since The Short and the Long of It in 2005, almost 4 years ago. That’s hard to believe given that at one time directing was what I wanted to do, as a career. Of course I wanted to direct scripted plays, because, you know, that’s where the money is.

My directing muscles have all atrophied. I need to do some serious work to get them back up to speed. Fortunately Christian and Mandy were both at rehearsal last night to pick up the slack when I lost all ability to articulate. Of course it didn’t help matters much that I was in the midst of a full on seasonal allergy attack coupled with the fact that we were rehearsing at Stage Werx, a wonderful space mind you, but one that I appear to be allergic to regardless of the season. All this is to say that I was stuffed up, exhausted, and generally spacey. Not good things to be when dusting off the directorial parts of one’s brain after a long period of disuse.

Under the circumstances, I think I did remarkably well. To begin with, I have a great cast. Not only do I have a full 6 ensemble members in the show, but Scott, Trish, and Jeff are all Un-Scripted veterans, and Joy, the newcomer in the cast, did improv with Clay back in Boston. So already there’s chemistry there.

I wanted to ease into things for our first rehearsal, so we started with my favorite name game and then moved into scene work. I had everyone set up a game they wanted to play or see played. Then I had everyone set up a scene in a genre they wanted to see. By the time we finished with that it was already 9:30 and my brain had officially started shutting down for the evening. We finished off with a rousing round of The Dukes of Hazard game that Jeff taught us during Bollywood.

All-in-all a solid start. Now I just need to figure out what we’re doing for the rest of the rehearsals.

You can watch last night’s rehearsal in its entirety shrunk down to 2 minutes through the glories of time lapse photography, our new favorite toy:

Callbacks and Casting

2009-01-25T16:37:00.001-08:00

Wow, that was hard. We had callbacks on Wednesday night. They went really well, but I was left with the difficult task of whittling down 10 people to 2-4. In the end I opted for 4:

Joy Begbie
Jeff England
Scott Keck
Trish Tillman

That's three people have been in our shows before and one newcomer. I'm excited. I think they'll stretch us in good directions and we'll stretch them likewise. Now I just have to decide what to do at these rehearsals that start Tuesday.