eileen mary o'connell

I encounter a lot of students and players who struggle with thinking too much onstage. What’s generally happening is they are trying to figure out what to do, or the best thing to do, rather than just doing what has already occurred to them.

The fact is that we are always thinking, in the sense that our brains are never off. When we sleep, we dream. Try not to think of anything and you’ll find yourself thinking of something. People who meditate generally try and focus on something simple to drown out the noise of their own thinking. So we can’t actually not think, but we can choose where to put our focus.

For example, I am sure we have all had the following experience. You are about to meet someone for the first time and you begin preparing to say your own name. “Hi, I’m Miles.” “I’m Miles, what’s up?” etc…Then you introduce yourself, say your name and realize that you didn’t catch the other person’s name. Your focus was on preparing to say your own name, kinda stupid, when it should have been on listening for the other person’s name. Just that little bit of thinking caused you to miss the entire point of the exchange.

So when we are improvising where should we put our focus? Simple, our focus should be on listening. What we actually do, choose a character, play a game, further a story, etc… is just a matter of trained reaction.

Our mental, emotional or physical reaction to stimuli represents who we are at any given point in time. For example, a child might first think that fire is pretty and reach for it. Upon learning that it is also hot the child will no longer reach for it. Who the child is, is now changed. We are the same. Our lives up to this point determine how we react to any given stimuli. This is also true when we improvise.

When I started improvising I was not very good. I would say I sucked for about four years. This was primarily because I was trying to figure out what was going on rather than just reacting to it. Now eventually, slowly, I got better and better and better. I thought it was because I was figuring it out, but what really happened was that over time my reactions to certain stimuli, a character, a situation, a line, etc… had changed. Who I was had changed.

Your reaction is all you get. No one is more than they are right now. In trying to be so is where we fuck up. We hear a line of dialogue, we have a reaction, we ignore or try to be better than our reaction, we think, we come up with a second or third option, but now we are no longer in the moment, we aren’t focused on listening or playing our character, we are in our head. We think we can’t come up with anything when actually we have come up with too much. What we should have done was the first thing that occurred to us.

I can’t tell you how many times in a class I have watched a scene go bad and in my notes said, “Well, at the beginning of the scene my first thought was this…” Only to have the student tell me, “ I had the same first thought, but then I thought…” It drives me crazy. They had the exact same first reaction as I did. The only difference between them and me was they chose not to trust it.

Much more often than not, our first reaction is the best possible move. I rarely, if ever, see a student think their way to a good move. If you think your way to a mistake, which I see all the fucking time, now you have to analyze your thinking and the only real lesson is you shouldn’t have been thinking so much. When you trust your first reaction, correct almost all the time, and it winds up being a mistake, well, we just learned something about ourselves and, if we own it, we are changed.

Any questions?