The House That Del Built

There’s a reason I talk about sports a lot in this blog. Besides for a belief that it’s an incredibly helpful and apt metaphor for improv, I grew up playing sports. Primarily softball. I even played ball in college (DIII, baby!) So imagine my delight when I picked up Chad Harbauch’s The Art of Fielding to discover that it’s not only about baseball (which I already knew, and which, if I didn’t, the title should have given away), but about college baseball…Division III college baseball…in the Midwest. The man was speaking my language.

So I shouldn’t have been surprised when in my reading the other day I came across this passage describing what Harbauch calls “the paradox at the heart of baseball” (or, he allows, any other sport):

You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude which…somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

Be still my heart.

I’ve talked about this sentiment before—the driving vitality of improvisation, the urgency and therefore beauty of it, and that Harbauch relates this to sport is telling and apropos and gratifying. But he goes on to talk about another aspect of the fleeting nature of sport, one which is significantly less romantic but equally important, perhaps more important if we are ever to actually grow as athletes or artists rather than simply bask in the glorious fleetingness of it all. He says about baseball, that, in contrast to other arts:

You weren’t a painter or a writer—you didn’t work in private and discard your mistakes, and it wasn’t just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered, as for any machine, was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to elimination of error.

Well that certainly dampens the mood.

Except that Harbauch’s 100% right. On both accounts. To make great art, especially of the transient kind, it is necessary to merge one’s lofty romantic humanism with the pragmatic machinery of competency. And while no single play or scene or choice is actually repeatable (here I think of Heraclitus’s claim that one never steps in the same river twice), what Harbauch is talking about here  is consistent execution. “The elimination of error”, he calls it. Getting it right, at least enough to get the job done.

But how can we talk about “elimination of error” when there are no mistakes in improv, Rachel?! Okay well first of all yes there are, but I’m not talking about that today. What I’m talking about when I’m talking about the elimination of error is a move, done in good faith, that has the potential to throw off your show, your team, your scene. In terms of improv, I call these moments of potential error “wobble.” I do that because, as a director, I can actually see the show start to fall from its equilibrium—it wobbles. Rather than overt mistakes, wobbles are imperfect reactions to suboptimal conditions, the moment before the error. Maybe I actually call them wobbles because of my time doing gymnastics—it’s that observable moment of lack of steadiness before the possible fall, or, to return to baseball, the “bad hop” before the execution of the play. Will the athlete overcome this unforeseen glitch? Will they use their training to right their course, to hit the target, or will they let the wobble get the better of them and lose control of the moment?

To give you a more practical sense of the distinction I make between “mistake” and “wobble”, here are some prime examples of “wobbly” moments in improv:

• Two distinct scene initiations are introduced overlappingly and end up slightly contradicting each other. • The performers perceive that they have different understandings of (or haven’t clearly established and therefore don’t know) some primary aspect of the premise of the scene: who they are to each other, where they are, what they are doing. • A performer mishears or misunderstands the other performer regarding some key detail of the scene and thereby accidentally denies something the other performer (and the audience) understands to be true.

Again, none of these have been done in bad faith, and none are full errors in and of themselves…yet. In fact, how one handles a wobble, I’ve been thinking more and more recently, may be the biggest factor separating okay improv from good and even great improv. And I’m not talking about just a passable recovery (a joke at the expense of the error or a  justification that gets a laugh but kills the reality of the scene), but a lean into the wobble itself that makes it seem like a welcome surprise that moves the scene in a new and delightful direction. In fact, when one leans into the wobble, one can actually trick the audience into retroactively perceiving it as a purposeful and meaningful shift. 

Examples of how to deftly field a wobble can be hard to provide in writing, since part of righting a wobble is responding intuitively to all the facts on the ground (not just the words said but they emotional content, the context, your position, your knowledge of the other performer’s understanding of the scene, etc.) and it’s not always a purely verbal response, but here are some general steps that are key to navigating the moment after a wobble:

Don’t telegraph that a “mistake” has been made—not with your body, not with your face, not with your voice. If you telegraph a sense of error, none of the rest of the steps work. And it’s hard not to. The desire to prove that you weren’t the one that screwed up will make you naturally want to commiserate with the audience against the person who you think did. But, ironically that’s the fastest way to make the audience nervous and cause you to lose the reality of the scene. So stay cool.

Give yourself a calm second to take in the content of the move(s) that just happened and consider how it/they could be true for the scene before you react. So many performers panic in a wobbly moment and do just the opposite—look for a quick fix, a patch to slap on the leaking tire (”That’s my middle name!” Eye roll.). Instead, pause, think, maybe get a pretend beer out of a fake fridge (that’s always my go-to stall for time on stage) and feel the truth underneath the seeming conflict, then respond. It won’t read as a stall if you stay physically and emotionally engaged in the scene. After all, we give ourselves time to figure out how to respond in life, so why not on stage? (A nice thing about this step is the longer you practice it the less time it takes to do it, thereby making the pause shorter and shorter until it often blends seamlessly into the rhythm of the scene.)

Make a choice that is clear, strong and includes your scene partner and all the choices you’ve both made until now. Often during a moment of wobble performers make the mistake of either selling their scene partner out, or, ironically, being too “polite” (read “vague”) with their next offer for fear that that if they put too clear a stake in the ground at this point it will just be thrown off by a subsequent choice. The former makes you look like an asshole, but the latter has the effect of maintaining the wobble longer rather than resolving the issue. As long as you’re not denying the reality, your scene partner is ready and willing to accept your next move, and will be grateful for the added clarity.

Above all, have the confidence to trust that by moving in the direction of the wobble, not by “fixing” it but by adapting to it, a new and surprising truth will emerge (You actually are siblings but your parents have kept you apart all these years to spite each other; the submarine hasn’t left port yet because one of you keeps failing the mandatory swimming test, etc.) The steps above give you and the audience confidence in your ability to move gracefully through the inherent imperfection of an improvised performance and reminds you and them that you are ultimately in control of the show.

And while control could also seem counter-intuitive to improv (Isn’t this art all about giving up control?), I’m talking not about an individual controlling the scene as much as about showing the audience that you, the performers, collectively, are in control of your craft, that you will not make errors of the type that will throw off the performance—that the ball will not soar over the first baseman’s head, that you will not fall from the high bar, that you will right the dive midair and enter the water with barely a splash. And that’s what you want to show them. Because while performance mistakes, in sports and improv, might be exciting or thrilling to watch once or twice as an act of Schadenfreude, it’s stressful and exhausting to be subjected to as a regular occurrence. This is, I believe, one of the major reasons people who “don’t like improv”, well, don’t like improv. And when they say, “I’ve just seen some really bad improv shows,” I think, even more than them not having been “funny” (which I’m sure was also a problem), what these people are (rightly and probably subconsciously) feeling is the anxiety of watching improv where errors are both abundant and overtly telegraphed.

The bad news for your ego is that, unlike the sports highlight reel, if you lean into the wobble particularly well, the audience will likely not even perceive that there was wobble in the first place, so natural and delightful will the adjustment to the shift in the premise/relationship/focus of the scene seem. Which means you won’t get the “credit” for the “save.” The good news is that the discoveries made post-wobble are often the most delightfully surprising of them all. So while the audience may not know to applaud your specific show of virtuosity in the moment, they’ll know that they saw something great, and you’ll get credit for that.

I’m going to start this post with a truth that no improviser wants to hear but every improviser who’s been at it for more than a few years already knows. Namely, that, more likely than not, you are going to, if you haven’t already, hit a stretch in your improv career where, no matter what you try, no matter how you practice, no matter how much you beat yourself up or, on the other hand, how much praise you get for how great you are, you will be, at best, merely competent at your craft. And you will feel it. And it will seem impossible to get out of. And it can last a long, long time.

The first several months of learning improv—especially if you have a natural ability to think on your feet and don’t get nervous on stage—is a thrill. You’re connecting, you’re making moves, you’re getting laughs. You knew you’d be good at this! SNL here you come!

And then, reasonably, this feeling tapers. You move up through the levels and the people who stay are as poised and quick-witted as you. You get cast on your first team and after a few shows of beginner’s luck fueled by adrenaline and all the friends and family you brought to watch your “comedy debut”, the thrill starts to fade and you’re left with just the work ahead. Your “go to”s start to get boring, predictable, even to you. Some days you kill, others you bomb, and you can’t seem to get a handle on the difference. You try to reach deeper for new material, new points-of-view, a fresh perspective, and sometimes they come, but often you feel tapped. Maybe you’re no good at this after all, you think.

This, my friend, is the Vast Plateau of Competency. You’re not doing badly. And a lot of the time you’re actually pretty good, which is what makes The Plateau all the more frustrating. You can see the people below The Plateau not being able to make the moves you can to set up a scene for basic success, to feel a general sense of comfort on the stage, to know how to “find the game,” to “heighten,” to “hit the button.” But ahead of you is a precipitous rock face, and at the top of it stand the people you admire, waving and smiling and doing what looks like effortlessly brilliant work, and you can’t seem to see how you get there from where you are. Will you just be “pretty good” forever?

Keep moving forward, is the easy answer to this dilemma. Even plateaus have their occasional dips and bumps, and you’re in for lots of small bits of growth and regression along the plateau. In fact, the closer you get to that cliff upon which your heroes stand the more you’ll see that the path there is much bumpier than it first appeared, and that there’s no magical, easy route up it.

That’s all lovely as extended metaphors go, but here are some practical suggestions to help you not get stuck and continue to grow while living life on The Plateau:

Embrace slow, unsteady growth. When you first hit The Plateau and realize you’re not as good as your Level 4 teacher maybe led you to believe you were (Don’t blame her; it’s her job to build you up!), you might feel the desire to surround yourself with peers or even people a little worse than you to get that initial rush of success again. Don’t do it. Now is the time when you are ripe for growth. Get in a practice group with people who make you feel humble. Be a student. Be a listener. Live in the ups and downs of your jagged growth and don’t be embarrassed by it. This might mean people “at your level” but who do things you can’t or don’t. Or it might mean a group of people a generation up from you who see your potential and don’t mind you struggling a bit to keep up. Whatever it is, put yourself in a learning stance. Your ego will feel fragile and needy on The Plateau, which is all the more reason you need to reframe its desire for quick affirmations with a craving for subtle, meaningful growth if you want to make real progress.

Take the focus off the laughs. It’s time to give that muscle a bit of a rest. It’s what powered you through classes and your first Harold team. You were so funny. You could always save a scene with a well-timed gag. But you were leaning on that, and it can’t hold you forever. Not only that, but it’s probably become a tool of panic in lots of ways—Can’t quite make choices that seem “good”? Fart joke your way to sweet relief. So let go of funny and give yourself more nuanced, harder-won goals. Acting goals. Connecting goals. Living in the moment goals. Find new footholds. The way is up, not leaning back on what’s worked for you in the past.

Quality over quantity. The Vast Plateau of Competency is the place where you most likely to find yourself doing too many projects, cast on too many teams and shows, spending all your time at the theater or in that dank basement practice room. It’s good to get reps, but here’s the problem with this strategy: you’re often just interacting with everyone else on the same plateau. Because they all have the same idea you do—to work and work until they have a sudden breakthrough. So sure it’s five different practice groups and three duos, but it’s just a round robin of the same people you came up with and keep working with (in fact maybe some of you are actually just directing each other, which like, why?) And because they’re not generally people who are new to you, you have the potential to reinforce each other’s bad habits or pigeonhole each other into the roles you played in class that aren’t serving anyone’s growth. Instead, look for slightly less but more diverse experiences. One practice group with your friends that makes you feel comfortable and gives you confidence, a master class with an instructor you respect, an indie team with players you admire. And it’s okay if you’re only doing one thing for a few months—better that than filling your time with a group you resent that just reinforces your bad habits just to say you’re “doing something”.

Don’t direct or teach; not yet. It’s like people in a stagnating marriage thinking a baby will be the solution to their problems. You’re antsy, you’re bored, and you’re starting to resent your own work, so this is the perfect time to teach it to others! Slow your roll and try changing up your learning and performing routine first. There will be time to teach, I promise. Maybe even further along on The Plateau (it’s vast, guys!), when you start to see the climb ahead of you more clearly and you have a better sense of what you’re aiming for. If teaching and directing is a goal of yours it’s reasonable to try to work with or be taught by or shadow teachers whose style you like and want to emulate so you can start to develop the voice you might use later to teach others. But don’t jump into teaching mode now just because you’re looking for something new. For now, keep the focus on your own growth—your future students will thank you for it.

Maintain your non-improv life and relationships. When you’re living on The Plateau it’s easy for that to be all you see. You have built-in friends, built-in activities any night you want them. But that also creates a feedback loop of shows, then drinks after shows where you talk about the shows (No one loves talking about their shows more than people on The Plateau), then later in the night, the drunken show pitches to each other followed by the drunken stumble home after closing the bar. It’s fun and new and self-reinforcing, but it becomes an echo chamber. All that doing and talking about improv can sap the well from which you need to draw scene inspirations, character points-of-view, authentic relationships. Incidentally, this is probably why meta-“we’re doing improv” or “we’re in a movie” scenes happen so much on The Plateau. Get out of the theater once in a while; breath some non-improv air. It’s good for you, onstage and off.

Now this is all good advice, and probably sounds pretty reasonable and doable, but here’s the hard part—The Plateau is exactly the place where you’re going to feel pressured to ignore it all. Everyone’s going to want to be in a group with you because all your friends are looking to fill their time too. People below you looking up will see you as an expert and ask you to direct their indie team, which will be flattering and seem fun. As you start to get noticed in your community, you’ll start getting more accolades and opportunities you’ve been waiting for, and you’ll want to say yes to them all, regardless of their relative merit or your readiness for them or how well they fit your style or aesthetic or artistic needs. Your theater or community will give you enough to do so that you never have to spend a weekend night (or a Thursday, or a Wednesday) wondering what to do or being alone with your miserable thoughts again. All of this feels great, and comes from a well-meaning place, and doesn’t need to be rejected out-of-hand, but it can lead to some unhealthy internal responses, such as a sense of entitlement that these opportunities are what you “deserve”, a belief that if this is what everyone’s doing then it must be the correct path and pace for optimal growth, or a fear that if you don’t do all these things you’ll be left behind.

None of this is true, of course. If anything, a sense of entitlement inhibits a growth mindset. Nor is there one best path toward your comedy goals, nor will you be left in the dust simply because you said no to that one cagematch team that ended up having a five show run. Every person is unique, and so is their path to growth.

It’ll be hard to stay disciplined—you’ve been taught for the last year or two to say “Yes!” and now you need to find it in your heart to say “No, thank you” to make room for the opportunities that will best feed you. You’ll need to balance the pleasure of belonging and succeeding with the longer-term desire to achieve personal growth that lasts, and the desire for quick rewards with the knowledge that real growth is incremental, not flashy and sexy and immediate.

Recently, I was coaching my high school team through the third beat of a Harold. With adults, I’ll often use—ahem—sexual metaphors to explain the pleasure of the return to and heightening of the previous content in the show during this faster-paced run of scenes, and I was trying to come up with a more—ahem—delicate way to express this same idea to these youngsters. I tried to explain, in a general way, that there’s simply a pleasure experienced by the audience at seeing something you’ve already shown them return—that you’re “tickling” them again in the same spot you “tickled” them before. “So it’s like flirting with someone you have a crush on?” one asked without missing a beat. “Like, how if you like someone you remember the stuff they like and then mention it or get them a Harry Potter Lego guy because they said they liked Harry Potter?” she clarified by way of example. Yes, I said (although I’d never thought of it like this before), exactly.

Think back to the beginning of any romantic relationship you’ve had. Those first few hormone-driven weeks when you’re actively building intimacy through certain behaviors that are pretty common to the “new relationship” experience. Now, what if we could prove that a long form improv performance actually simulates the experience of that new relationship? I mean, for starters, I think we could sell a lot of tickets that way. But more importantly, we’d better understand the performer-audience relationship and how to exploit it (in the positive sense) in order to create the best possible experience for everyone.

One of the behaviors unique to new relationships is the sudden increase of daily interactions. You might have known each other before, but now you’re facebook messaging all day, texting late at night (or passing notes between classes, if you, like me, went to middle school in the 80’s), finding ways to meet up for lunch or coffee or drinks where you wouldn’t have before. And if you didn’t know each other before, that feeling of increased interaction is, of course, heightened almost infinitely. This person was not in your life, and now they are, filling up space and time that was previously filled with other things. That increased contact not only naturally increases intimacy, but increases the sensation of intimacy that you’re feeling by giving you the feedback that you’re choosing to be with this person above other activities or concerns.

Well, when we come to the theater to perform, we as performers are choosing to forego other activities we could be engaged in to get on stage and mess around for thirty minutes or an hour or whatever. Our audience, likewise, has chosen to buy a ticket to this show and sit in our theater when they could have been doing any number of other cool things that night. So let’s assume that, at least for this fleeting moment, we’ve chosen each other in some way. Let’s acknowledge that choice and use it to start from the moment we hit the stage with a feeling of intimacy—let’s get in a relationship with the audience.

Now if you know me, you know I don’t mean that in some cute, abstract, imprecise way. So we have to look at the behaviors and attitudes of mind that make a budding romance (or new friendship, which can be “romantic” in a strikingly similar way) so fun, so exciting, such a heightened experience that stands apart from much of the rest of our daily lives, and simulate that experience to get the most out of the thirty minutes or hour or whatever it is that we’re on that stage.

In systematically considering the features of early relationship-building, the primary feature I want to focus on (after an assumption of mutual “choosing”) is a particularly common and effective behavior that infallibly creates that heightened sense of intimacy that keeps us “hooked” on the other person, and keeps us coming back for more of them even when our hearts have been broken in the past. This behavior is the creation and maintenance of a shared set of references, idioms, images (the “inside joke” is a generally recognized item in this category—it isolates a group or pair of people as apart from normal experience, privy to a pleasure from which others are barred simply by not having been a part of the original experience). You have a conversation about a thing and then reference that thing later to indicate that you both remember and value the previous interaction. Of course, this building up of a shared set of data from which the two of you can draw is built upon the first behavior of increased time spent together, and so they create a feedback loop, an echo chamber of intimacy that, as we all know, can’t last, but is highly pleasurable and self-reinforcing.

If at this point I’m making it seem like everyone is a conniving manipulator set out to simulate intimacy with unwitting targets, I’ll remind us that, at the very start, there’s an assumption that both parties have “bought in” (by choosing to spend their time this way, by literally “buying the ticket,” etc.) I am not describing some manipulation that a pick-up artist might employ, although such self-identified people do, interestingly, exploit these natural behaviors as a way to falsely simulate them. The problem with the pick-up artist, however, is at least one of agency (the “target” can be exploited for a little while in this manner, but will eventually get a sense that she is not an equal participant in the “game” and will grow bored or angry), but is more primarily one of authenticity. The pick-up artist isn’t actually feeling the intimacy he’s creating—he’s just going through the motions of it.

And with that we should return to improv, because to me, authenticity (the “truth in comedy” to which we so often refer) is a prerequisite to creating that true heightened sense of intimacy, in life or on stage. That data set of references, idioms, and images to which I referred before and which is one of the most recognizable features of a budding romance (or intimate friendship) can’t be forced on the relationship—they have to emerge as an organic set of data that have a shared valence to the growing relationship.

Off stage, we can feel the difference between the true “inside joke” or shared data set and the forced one. At the far end of the awkward spectrum, we’ve all had those imbalanced relationships where the other person clearly is attempting to establish a relationship with us by constantly (and often out-of-context) referring back to a single shared experience or reference that doesn’t hold the same value for us as it does for them (“Remember that time we were lab partners?”). On the “harmless but pointless” end of the spectrum there are those people with whom we have passing but frequent interactions (I like to call them “elevator buddies”) who will use a single shared point of reference every time we see them to ease the tension of the lack of intimacy (“So, what’d you think of Lucic last night?” when they know you’re a hockey fan, and that’s pretty much all they know).  And so really, this attempt at creating a shared set of data happens in all our relationships. But if we want to get the most out of our shared experience, our goal as performers should be to build and share that data in a way that is a) mutual, b) organic, and c) sincere.

And here’s where the metaphor meets the stage in a practical way. All those references to shared experience, shared likes, thoughts, etc.? In a show, all we, the performers, share with them, the collective audience, is the experience of the show itself. And that it where the callback comes in. The callback—that prescribed method for acknowledging previous shared and pleasurable experiences with the audience. It’s the improv way of saying to the audience, “Remember that thing we did together or talked about together and liked? So do I. That was cool.”

If we think about it, we probably all know that the best callbacks come from an intuitive understanding of what data from earlier in the show were most amusing and pleasurable to both the audience and the performer. You’ve all seen that callback that is technically sound but somehow doesn’t elicit that deep laugh of recognition that one might expect. Oh, it’s the French guy again. Okay. He was funny, so why isn’t this “working”? Because, like the pick-up artist, the performer has chosen from his “bag of callback tricks,” rather than being present in the shared experience of the performance. French accent callbacks are theoretically funny (it’s a big, memorable piece of data, and accents are generally funny), but if we buy into the theory of the callback as a way of increasing intimacy with the audience by evoking the memory of a positive shared experience, then rather than counting on our assumptions about what makes a good callback, we try to release control, be present in the moment, and sense what both we and the audience might be thinking about and want to be reminded of at that moment in order to maintain and increase the sense that we have “chosen each other” for the night.

This is also why it’s a ridiculous and dangerous proposition to teach students that a particular list of callbacks will get them the most bang for their buck (“always call back big characters,” or “callback a location from the first beat with different characters,” or whatever other number of possible “go to’s” a director might fancy. And it’s also why, though you can teach the technique of calling back things from earlier in the show in a class, you can’t really sense what it means until you start performing for an audience. Because the real secret is that the callback isn’t something you do on your end to please the audience on the other as much as it is something you and the audience agree upon together, in real time, and then you execute, in order to increase both of your enjoyment of the shared experience.

I just got back from a trip to Hawaii, where I enjoyed beautiful beaches and majestic rainforests, and learned how one of the legacies of the natural history of the islands is outsiders bringing non-native plant species over on boats, planting them and, more often than not, very much fucking up the ecosystem.

One vivid example of this is the Albizia tree. In its native lands (it’s primarily found in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands), it’s a great lumber tree, with firm, solid wood. So immigrants to Hawaii brought it with them thinking it would make good lumber in Hawaii as well. The thing is, a tree isn’t just itself, it’s a product of its ecosystem—the soil, the air, the water. And the Hawaiian ecosystem interacted with the Albizia tree in unexpected ways, producing wood that was brittle and weak. It was pretty much good for nothing but suffocating other plant species by acidifying the soil. And it grows like a weed. Oops.

Now I’m not saying that improvisers are like trees, but yes I am. Usually we grow in one particular environment—a certain theater or that first group we played with for a while or a particular teacher who encouraged certain aspects of our play. Hopefully we find success with the methods or style or dynamic in which we’re entrenched. That’s how you grow. But, just like the Albizia tree, your growth is contingent on those environmental factors. That’s not bad, and it doesn’t diminishing our accomplishments or success, but it can make it harder for us to adapt to a new environment.

When I moved out to Boston from Chicago everyone kept talking about “the game of the scene” and I had no idea what they were talking about. Instead of playing “the game,” I was playing in the style I was taught—and experienced success at—back at iO in Chicago. I looked for relationship and emotional connection over a single focal point. And of course there’s overlap between the two (a scene with a strong game should also have strong relationships, and an emotional resonant scene should probably have some discernible pattern as well), but without fully understanding my new environment, I was making moves that, while theoretically “good,” weren’t connecting with the other members of my team who had been trained a different way. I was being an invasive species, incapable of adapting.

After one show where I tried so hard to get my scene partner to be “more emotional” in a scene that I literally started crying on stage, my husband pointed out to me that rather than my scene partner seeming emotionally detached, I seemed melodramatic. I was making it worse by trying to force my perception of a “good scene” onto my scene partner. I was leeching acid into the soil.

In the world of improv, where styles can differ from region to region and even from neighborhood to neighborhood in the same city, being adaptable is perhaps more important than being talented, whatever that means. Of course you need to have that baseline level of competency and confidence on stage, but beyond that, learning how to read the needs of your environment—whether that’s a new theater or a new team or a new scene partner—is what makes someone a truly expert performer. Because improv, being an inherently collaborative art, will never be as much about you being a “rockstar” as it will be about you being able to make a show succeed by giving to it what it needs of you, and having a deep tool chest from which to draw the skills needed in different circumstances.

I still play more toward relationship and emotion than a strict adherence to “game.” That’s my personal preference. But I’ve learned a lot about pattern making by exploring the tools of game, and that’s made me a more adept and adaptable player. And if my scene partner hits game hard up top, instead of crying or trying to force the scene into a place that’s more natural for me, I’m gonna play the shit out of that game (and probably find a way to ground it in an emotional motive at some point, too).

I was at drinks with a friend the other night when he asked me a question I get asked with some frequency: As a high school English teacher, do I think my improv experience has helped with my confidence in front of your classroom?

It’s a fair question, and I usually answer with something like “Oh yes of course they’re related” and something about how “After all teaching requires a high-level of  improvisation throughout a lesson” and so on. It’s not really a deeply thought-out response but more something reasonable true that I have prepared on such occasions when this question is asked.

But on this particular night, for whatever reason, a new and more honest-feeling connection between the two disciplines struck me. “More than anything,” I offered, “both improv and teaching involve the art of finding the balance between your authentic self and a performative simulation of self.” And I realized in that moment that, perhaps ironically, making a sincere, meaningful, human connection with the other (the “students” or the “audience” in these cases) requires one to live on the very edge of this balance. And that is not easy.

Of course, students are inspired by teachers who are engaged, who are passionate about their subject matter, who seem to care about and see the students as individuals. But nothing turns students off (or makes them feel more uncomfortable or unsafe) than a teacher who seems to be “trying too hard,” and a lot of that comes from the teacher not knowing how to or not being interested in putting some emotional distance between themselves and the students. It sounds like a cold thing to do, maybe, but it’s necessary in order, for example, to not take the many missteps of teens as personal slights, to not force your own understanding of a situation or a text over the students’ discoveries and questions, to not take up more space in the classroom than is necessary to guide the students through their own growth and development. Teachers who get into it to be beloved by a captive audience of children make everyone uncomfortable. Get some friends your own age, bro.

And yet, to be totally emotionally cut off from your students and insist on complete obedience without any sense of personal connection disengages them as well, and isn’t a very good lesson in empathy. You want them to understand that you’re a person, as far as they are able, and as far as is appropriate. You want them to know you go home to your husband and kids rather than sleeping under your desk. You want them to know things delight and bother and confuse you just like they do them. You want to connect through your shared humanity. So what you end up having to cultivate—and this takes years—is a “persona” that is seamlessly and naturally “yourself” without being vulnerable or open to your students in a way that makes them feel like you’re not in control of keeping the classroom productive and safe. It’s you, but it’s a version of you that you and the kids need you to be in this context.

When you first attempt to create this persona, it’s stilted, awkward. Watch any stand-up in their first year or two and you’ll see the same struggle. It’s the attempt to create an engaging “onstage self” that is close enough to your own to be likeable and relatable but separated enough from yourself to allow you to feel in control of the room. Because of this struggle, for example, first year teachers can be overly-strict or way too “chill.” They can make classroom rules or protocols that they don’t really believe in or like, and then either seem silly when they try to maintain them or weak when they drop them. And no one is better at sniffing out this internal conflict than kids. They can sense bullshit a mile away. In fact, this struggle to find your persona can account for most of the anxiety, stress, and missteps of your first years of teaching.

Of course, the cultivation of a persona fit for the person with whom we’re engaging is something we’re always doing. It’s just that in our regular life we do it subconsciously, instinctively responding to the dynamic of the relationship to determine what we share, how vulnerable we can and should be, how much our different interests and stakes and status should affect who we are with this person. The only difference here—and it’s a marked one—is that as teacher (or improviser), we are conducting a one-sided performance, because we are the performer, we are the ones expected to “put on a show.” While any teacher who’s seen a student acting completely different in and out of the classroom knows that our students can also be a different version of themselves in and out of the classroom, it’s not their job to do so, whereas it is the job of the teacher. (Interestingly, you can see the same dynamic in an interactive improv show where audience members are asked to tell a story about themselves or give a longer answer as an input for a scene. If that audience member tries to do a “bit” or seems to be making their story up, we get mad, like “Hey, you’re supposed to just be yourself! It’s our job to make up the funny stuff!” And yet they’re just doing what they’ve been watching us do all night, right?)

Watch any comedian in their first few years. Even the ones with great instincts and timing often have the same struggle as the young teacher to find the balance between being authentic on stage so as to connect to the audience at a human level and being someone other than themselves so that it feels like a “show.” Add to this the sometimes mixed-feeling messages we get in improv regarding character and performance: You’ve heard that Del said that every character is just a version of yourself. Your Level 2 teacher encouraged “big characters” (whatever that means). Your first Harold coach told you to “play close to yourself” again, but then you auditioned for that indie team and got feedback that you “weren’t making strong enough character choices.”  A lot of this comes down to stylistic preferences, but the part you can control is, I believe, rooted in discovering and riding that razor’s edge between authenticity and artifice.

The short answer to how to discover this edge is time and practice. The more comfortable you are in front of a class or on a stage, the less jumpy you’ll be, the less you’ll feel like you need to reach for flashy gags or arbitrary rules or to impress your audience. Your own engaged self will start to feel like enough, because the front of the room or the center of the stage will start to feel more and more like home.

But I think I can offer a few practical tips for getting to this place sooner:

Off stage, notice how you cultivate a persona in everyday life. Yes, I am “getting you in your head” about this, but I don’t mean for you to self-judge or worry that there’s something wrong with it. Just notice when you do or don’t tell a specific story to someone, which meme you send to which friends, who you go to when you need advice about different things in your life. Simply being aware that this is something we do all the time can make you feel like it’s less of a “thing” when you’re doing it on stage. Picking and choosing what words or behaviors feel right in the moment is okay and natural and doesn’t mean you’re not providing the other person with the “real you.”

In rehearsal, do the opposite. Let down all your attempts to self-regulate and allow what feels most natural to flow from you in the moment of connection with your scene partner. This doesn’t mean having zero filter or just indiscriminately letting shit fly, because you’re still trying to come from a place of connection, which will naturally affect your choices if you truly listening and attempting to be in relationship to your scene partner. But it does mean not overthinking those responses (like we sometimes do in life—“Do I text him this picture of a pug in a party hat? Will he get that it’s because we were talking about pugs the other night? Will he think I’m stalking him? Do I seem desperate?!”) in order to be able to access true moments that might surprise you or send you in less conventional directions. If you have a good director or coach, they can help give feedback about whether those choices were productive for the scene and resonated to a viewer, and that feedback can help you calibrate those choices even as you maintain a sense of spontaneity and freedom. But attempting to pick the perfect response or line or game or whatever when you’re practicing means that you’re practicing “getting it right” over “being connected,” and that, ironically, will result in a more labored and false-feeling performance once you get in front of an audience.

One of Carl Jung’s more elegant theories is that of the “transcendent function” of the mind. Simply put (and Jung does not often put things simply) the transcendent function is the combination of the conscious and unconscious content of the mind, much like a math equation that adds a real and an imaginary number. In the transcendent function, Jung explains, the mind is able to bring psychologically needed unconscious content to consciousness almost involuntarily, by loosening its judgmental grip over the barrier between the two and allowing the unconscious material to merge with consciousness to create a more authentically human, less artificially regulated experience for the individual.

For a long time it drove me crazy when improv instructors admonished me to “get out of my head,” I didn’t know how to act on that. “Of course I’m ‘in my head’,” I thought. “I’m thinking about and processing the information in the scene and using my intellectual understanding of that information to decide how to react.” And actually that’s a perfectly good use of one’s head. It would be bad if you didn’t do that in a scene, because it would mean you were just reacting to the instincts of your own body rather than being reactive to the stimulus in front of you. But reframing that note a warning against too tight a boundary between the conscious and unconscious has helped me make sense of its true admonition. Rather than worrying about whether I’m “in my head,” I ask myself how well I’m employing the transcendent function. Not “get out of your head,” but “let go of the judgments of your conscious mind over those parts of your unconscious that would be of use to you in this moment.” Not that you let down the barrier completely and drop a deuce on stage because you’ve been freed from your inhibitions—that would probably not be helpful in most scenes—but rather that you stop trying to impose roadblocks beyond those already set up to help you function in the world.

It’s tricky, because the act of improvisation itself is one of the tougher tests for this process of linking unconscious to conscious. You’re supposed to be “in the moment,” to react with authenticity and without judgment, but you also can’t just say or do anything that comes to mind—there are rules, structures, ways of making your scene work better or worse, and you have to abide by those rules and structures while still at the same time seeming (and hopefully being) present and living fully within the moment. You’re supposed to establish who you are and where you are and why you’re there, but you’re not supposed to be clunky or overly expository about it. You’re supposed to find “the game” but still “be present” and engaged. It’s enough to drive you crazy sometimes (I wonder what Jung would say about the psychological state of the average improviser).

To delve further into this paradox of being present while abiding by prescribed rules, one of my biggest challenges when I first moved out east was with respect to the concept of “game” (they don’t talk about “game” in Chicago, or at least they didn’t when I was there a decade ago). I was told to look for “the first unusual thing” to identify the game, but this felt so counter to everything I’d learned about being present in the scene. Unusual to whom? I wondered. To the performer in the scene, noticing a detail that seemed out of the ordinary from my point-of-view? Would that detail have seemed unusual to the character in the world of the scene, though? Or would that simply be the character’s norm, even if I as the performer saw it as unusual? Was I then supposed to register this thing as “unusual” as a performer, then impose further exploration of it onto my character from the outside, as it were?

Obviously I got very “in my head” about the whole process, and honestly, like any other improv technique or philosophy, once you get what it’s after, which is a “good scene,” you stop trying so hard to analyze it and just use it when it works, but only recently did I connect this internal struggle I had with Jung’s philosophy, and doing so helped me realize what was at the core of my confusion and how to let it go.

You see, I’d gotten caught up in the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness, in the barrier separating “me” the performer from “me” the character, and I’d let myself get caught in the web I’d created in my own mind to keep them separate. We all do this, and not just on stage. We try to sequester our embarrassing proclivities, our unsavory desires, any thoughts or feelings we’re afraid might make us the object of judgment or make us harder to love. We do this more and more as we grow up and are taught just how many of those proclivities and desires and thoughts and feelings won’t fly among our friends, our family, our colleagues, our lovers, our self-judging selves.

And it’s not getting better, at least not for humanity on the whole. Modernity, Jung argues, has gotten in the way of the natural self-regulation that would allow for most healthy individuals to enact the transcendent function regularly. Civilization and all its attendant rules and structures have caused the mind to build up an artificially protective barrier between the conscious mind and its unconscious contents. Sure, one can’t live with a totally unregulated barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness (lest one go around saying all the nonsense that passes through one’s mind, or try to complete even the simplest physical tasks while being distracted by every memory, fantasy, or observed detail that one generally stores away in the unconscious mind in order to allow the self to function smoothly in the world). But Jung claims we’ve built up an unnaturally impermeable barrier between the two parts of our mind, and that it’s killing our humanity.

Ironically, an art form born of modernity may be the answer to what ails us. Improvisation, if done with the right intent, can help soften the boundary between the unconscious and conscious mind. It can help to free up the passage of the unconscious content that allows us to authentically connect with our world and with other humans—the collective archetypes that live in the recesses of our brain, the natural human reactions to fear, love, wonder that we tamp down in order to not seem foolish or strange or be judged by others. It can also get us the most “in our heads” as we face the fear that, without time or filter to process the content of our minds, we may slip and reveal a part of ourselves we’d hoped to keep hidden. This can be an embarrassment when that part of ourselves ends up being something we’re not proud of (an accidentally racist or sexist comment we didn’t know lived in those dark recesses of our minds, for example), but if we’re sincere and open to allowing for even the darker aspects of our humanity to work themselves out on stage and with people we trust to help us process what we discover, we’ll find that more often than not, the content we were so afraid to let pass is actually full of wonder and joy and the simple desire to reach out and connect to others, to share those hidden parts with them, to see and be seen, to pierce through the noise of what we’ve been taught we should do or be with the pure and simple truth of what we are.

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time?”

“I’m willing to wait for it.”

There’s plenty more line pairs in the musical Hamilton that reveal the fundamental opposition between the characters of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, but this pair might best encapsulate what distinguished them throughout their lives and led to such bitter conflict between them right until that final, fatal gunshot. It also seems fitting to begin this essay with a line referencing Hamilton’s writing ability, which both saved and doomed him at various points in his life, and which is also one of the attributes through which people compare him to the musical’s playwright and composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda. In truth, we are all “running out of time”—Hamilton (and Miranda) are just moved to act based on this truth.

I want to write about how this all relates to improv, which seems like at once a simple and impossible task. Simple, because the play’s hip-hop inspirations make it highly interested in the improvisatory nature of art-creation, and its protagonist’s “young, scrappy, and hungry” mentality made his acts in life often quite improvisatory. But impossible in that both the play and the narrative of Hamilton’s life involved so much deliberate and careful decision-making, such attention to detail, such concern for the quality of the finished product, whether that product be a musical or a man.

But the primary inspiration I have to connect improvisatory theatrical performance to Hamilton should work well if we accept two major assumptions about each. Namely:

That “improvisation” as a theatrical art is no longer simply “comedy,” nor should it be limited by previous assumptions and restrictions as to its form. People speak of “short form,” “long form,” “free form,” all form,” but all of these nod to a set of previous assumptions about the art that I would like to further shatter: that is needs be “comedic,” that it needs be “recognizable as improvisation” as such to an audience, that it needs be distinct from its theatrical cousin, the written play.

Hamilton is a play about the creation of characters, the creation of character. There is the backdrop of the American Revolution, yes, but at its core I see it as a show about what you’re born with, what you’re given, and how the one filters through the other to create the self, and how the self acts on the world to create history.

In the play, as in life, both Hamilton and Burr are effectively orphans, coming up during the pre-Revolution, both looking to leave their mark on the world. Their fundamental difference, however, is highlighted at every turn. Burr is cautious, judicious, he hedges, he watches, he waits. Hamilton, plucked out of a literal hurricane, is himself a force of nature—unabashed, unapologetic, brash, bold, and decisive. That Burr is the one who gets Hamilton with a shot to the gut in the end was something it was almost impossible for me to remember when I studied American history in school, so ironically out-of-character was the ending for both parties.

I’ve been saying for years in my improv instruction that “A French accent is not a character.” That “A limp is not a character.” We might well say here, then, that “Being an orphaned white male growing up in pre-Revolutionary America” is not a character. Neither is attending Princeton. Or being a lawyer. Because these are all traits shared by two of the most diametrically-opposed historical figures in American memory.

In other words, your circumstances are not your character.

Now, yes, there are some unique circumstances that speak to important differences in Burr and Hamilton—Burr’s wealthy upbringing versus Hamilton’s life of squalor in the Caribbean—but these circumstances, at least according to Mirada, merely reveal the men’s traits:

There would have been nothin’ left to do For someone less astute He woulda been dead or destitute Without a cent of restitution Started workin’, clerkin’ for his late mother’s landlord Tradin’ sugar cane and rum and all the things he can’t afford

Hamilton survived, according to Miranda, because of who he already was, and that identity was essential and undeniable.

Burr, on the other hand, can’t help himself but to wait on the sidelines hoping for a fortuitous break. The man switched political parties to win a contested New York Senate seat. “I changed parties to seize the opportunity I saw,” says Burr, something that would never even occur to Hamilton to be in the realm of possibility.

In the characters of Hamilton and Burr, then, we are presented with a powerful but tricky thesis: that identity is static and inevitable, acted on by circumstance but always with somewhat predictable results (e.g. in the face of adversity Hamilton will be aggressive and bold, Burr will wait it out), but also that identity itself, while static, is not a list of behaviors but a set of methods, a function, if you will, that filters the input of experience through the equation of personal traits to reach an outcome, which is the choice one makes. I happen to agree with this thesis, tricky as it is in terms of the implications it has regarding whether “true change” is possible for anyone to achieve in their lifetime. Without arguing too much about this, I’ll simply point out that while I agree with Miranda’s seeming claim that there is an essence to identity that is untouchably essential, it is also somewhat complex, and it is possible to have different circumstances reveal different aspects of the self, especially extreme circumstances (the way Burr, for all his seeming lack of conviction, is willing to go out on a limb—emotionally and legally—to be with the woman he loves who also happens to be the wife of a British officer, and the way Hamilton, for all his seeming impetuousness, responds to his son’s death with a newfound faith and a desire to retreat from public life).

And still, there is some essence of self to which one always returns. It’s either a comforting thought or a crippling notion, depending on how you look at it, and how at peace you are with who you are. But it doesn’t mean nothing changes. Because the circumstances of life are in constant flux, so too are our selves as they respond to new stimulus.

A detour into the specifics of the mathematical analogy might help explain how identity can be both fixed and moving:

What do I mean when I claim that identity is a function? Imagine the set of all possible selves as an enormous piece of graph paper. What if instead of imagining identity as a set of known points on the grid (I am “a mother”, “a democrat,” “a comedian,” “a teacher”), you imagine identity as a function that defines where the point will go by passing it through some equation? Remember functions from math class? A set of inputs and corresponding outputs represented by something like f(x) = 2x +1 or f(x) = x2 +3x + 1. Put in an “x” and get a corresponding f(x) value. You might remember how some of the graphs of these functions have names—parabola, hyperbola, sine, etc. In any of these cases, the important understanding for our purposes is this: the graph is defined by the relationship of input to output, not by any one static point. In fact, one static point will tell you precious little about the graph of a function. It is only in aggregate that the points (representative of all possible inputs and outputs) start to form a true picture of the function.

And so, when it comes to identity, it is the function we seek to define, not the points on the graph. “Orphan” could be a point on Burr and Hamilton’s graphs. So could “white,” “male,” “college student,” etc. But if we presume that identity is a function, those points will actually fall into different places on each man’s graph as they filter through each one’s fundamental identity—his values, natural affinities and habits, psychological needs, etc. Burr (through Miranda) speaks to this fundamental difference, despite their on-paper similarities, in his defining song, “Wait For it”:

Hamilton faces an endless uphill climb He has something to prove He has nothing to lose Hamilton’s pace is relentless He wastes no time What is it like in his shoes?

Hamilton doesn’t hesitate He exhibits no restraint He takes and he takes and he takes And he keeps winning anyway He changes the game He plays and he raises the stakes And if there’s a reason He seems to thrive when so few survive, then Goddamnit— I'm willing to wait for it

For all their similarities, Burr will never be “in Hamilton’s shoes,” and not because he didn’t watch his mother die on an island in a Caribbean. He will never be in Hamilton’s shoes because his identity function is fundamentally about hesitation and restraint. Both men “survive,” but it is the luck of Hamilton’s nature that causes him to “thrive,” and no amount of waiting will allow Burr to walk without hesitation in Hamilton’s shoes.

A very popular technique of creating an improvised character (and one that I use with students) is the “If This is True, What Else is True” method. You list traits, one by one, connecting each trait with all previous traits. “He likes D&D.” “He lives in his parents’ basement.” “He LARPs on the weekends. “ (And on the whole these exercises can yield something as stereotypical as this.) But given everything we’ve observed about the foils Burr and Hamilton, conducting a character-creation through this means seems like an error in the fundamental understanding of character. After all, one could build a character who “was orphaned as a child,” who “went to a competitive New England college to prove himself,” who “joined the American Revolution as a way to prove his valor and worth,” who “became a lawyer after the Revolution to further prove himself,” and still be describing Hamilton and Burr. Lin-Manuel Miranda spent years constructing a narrative that would rightly distinguish the underlying identities of these two men based on his extensive research into their lives. How is improvisation meant to create deeply distinct characters in real time in a matter of moments? Should we even try?

No doubt the result will not be the same in form or function as a fully-researched, fully-written play, but if we understand the methodology of creating and distinguishing characters through identity functions rather than a list of true but inessential traits, not only can we do it in real time, but the result might be something truly beautiful.

My current pet project, The White Rabbit Show, tells the story of one woman’s journey toward self-actualization. It is fully-improvised (a fact about which many audience members remain incredulous) but it does follow certain forms—it is a “Hero’s Journey” and as such follows Joseph Campbell’s basic outline of such a narrative. It is inspired by Alice in Wonderland, and as such carries some of the whimsical and dream-like nature of that piece. The opening sequence is a mirroring of physicality and statements across the cast that are meant to represent the internal monologue of the main character’s psyche. Then the cast stands around the main character and endows her with traits that seem to fit a pattern. For a while I’ve been cognizant that the traits named should be more “qualitative” in nature—that is, shouldn’t simply be a list of things she does or owns or likes, but should express something of her character—but thinking about Miranda’s overt and unapologetic codification of his protagonist’s and antagonist’s identity functions makes me think not only about the nature of identity itself, but about how to apply that nature to live character-creation in an authentic and satisfying way.

While my project is, by choice and nature, non-scripted, I’d like to think “art recognizes art,” and that there are some lessons in Hamilton for me.

There is no overture in Hamilton. The play begins with a song for its namesake:

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a Forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence Impoverished, in squalor Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?

The ten-dollar founding father without a father Got a lot farther by working a lot harder By being a lot smarter By being a self-starter By fourteen, they placed him in charge of a Trading charter

What is happening here is quite—and Miranda would and does shy away from this word—genius. We open with a list of true things about Hamilton—he is a bastard, and orphan, a son of a whore, a Scotsman. These are true things, important information, but worthless without what comes next.  He “works a lot harder” he “be’s a lot smarter,” he’s a “self-starter.” These are the traits that allow him to actually thrive in the face of poverty, isolation, a literal fucking hurricane.

It’s not that the details of his circumstance are unimportant—going back to the function, they are essential means to reveal his identity which otherwise would remain in a dormant state within his psyche—the x that determines the y. We are how we behave as our lives unfold before us. And that’s not a value judgment, either. Is Hamilton more admirable than Burr because he is an impetuous genius? Maybe. But maybe saying say would be akin to saying the cheetah is more admirable than the alligator because he moves faster. It’s certainly impressive to see a cheetah run, but it’s simply what the cheetah does.

Again, however, Hamilton is a scripted show about real people. How can we possibly create this effect of a consistent identity function in real time, collectively, when the only information we have is that which we create? But I believe that there are ways to take real and practicable lessons from Hamilton into my art. I was struck the first time I heard the opening song of Hamilton by how similarly this opening functions to how I’ve structured my own improvised play in terms of character-creation. And that emboldened me to consider the practical lessons contained within it for my own work. And so, here are a few actual, practical, actionable ways I’m imagining applying the lessons of Hamilton to The White Rabbit Show (and it’s essential to remember that all of this is predicated on my original assumption that improvisation need not be “comedy” or adhere to previous assumptions about its presentation or form. Improvisation, instead, should simply be looked at as an alternative form of art creation, with all its attending strengths and shortcomings):

“Invoking” the Character: Just as with the original Del Close Invocation where we describe an object physically, then relationally, then anthropomorphically, and finally symbolically, we can attempt to create structures for creating truly full characters as well. Miranda’s opening of Hamilton might well be the template for this: State superficial facts about the person that are important but not essential in the true meaning of the word (not “of his essence”), then begin to reveal the character’s underlying and static personal traits, the “essence” of the person, then begin to merge these circumstances with the traits to reveal how his choices result from the combination of the two. At some point move into scenes that reveal more information and test the character’s identity. In this way we can watch the character come into relief in real time while having both sets of external and internal identity data with which to play as the show develops.

The Function Mantra: Just as we’re taught to “name the game of the scene” as a shorthand to getting on the same page with our scene partner, why not, as with a scripted play, name those character motifs. In improv I find that people are so worried about seeming “hack” or “obvious” and so quite often don’t say the simple truth in front of them. Whereas in a scripted play, and especially in a musical, naming motifs (through both language and music) is both encouraged and rewarded by audiences. Burr’s anthem is literally called “Wait For It.” And he says it over and over and over in the song. Wonder if any of us are confused by what motivates the man? Similarly, Hamilton’s first repeated refrain is “I am not throwing away my shot.” And he says it over and over and over. Is it boring? No. It’s reinforcing, exciting, propulsive. What if in an improv show where deep and authentic character-creation were essential we felt free to employ the same kind of mantra-repetition as with a scripted play? The cast of The White Rabbit Show actually began to do this organically when we started working on the character-creation opening, latching onto a word or phrase that resonated with what they knew of the character and collectively repeating it over and over with variations throughout the opening. This helped the protagonist realize that this statement was not simply another aspect of her character, but revealing something essential that could be used throughout the performance as circumstances changed and unfolded.

Those are a few tools. I know there are others. Many others. And even just with those as an example, one might start to consider how an improvised performance that builds characters in real-time (and borrows tools from its artistic cousins to make that process more dynamic, real, and meaningful) could provide a kind of recognition and satisfaction that even a scripted show cannot, beholden as it is to a pre-existing script and plot arc. If we could create truly real-feeling characters, we could perhaps simulate the actual experience of living even more vibrantly than a script ever could, because the character would be truly responding in real time to her life as it unfolds. Yes, it would be limited by the information we can present on a stage in the course of an hour or two, but what it might lose in detail it could gain in urgency and vitality.

In the last performance of The White Rabbit Show, it was revealed halfway through the show that the protagonist’s father was an alcoholic and she and her mother had been enabling him their whole lives. This move fit with our knowledge of the protagonist (she was obsessed with succeeding at her job, she had a boyfriend who kept leaving and coming back and who she looked to for stability despite their incompatibility, and—a detail that emerged serendipitously but took on deep meaning as the show unfolded—her father and the boyfriend shared a name). But it was still a shock—to both the audience and the performers—when it turned out that this was the issue. It was simultaneously felt as a “What?!” and an “Of course!” by everyone in the room. If I had written that out as a play, I know I would have offered up, at least through hints, the fact of the father’s alcoholism far earlier in the show. I wouldn’t have been able to help it, so essential it would have seemed to clarifying who this character was in the world. Instead, the cast took everything that was true up to that point and rooted around for why it was all true, and came out with that. That reveal reframed everything we knew about the protagonist and made what she had to do clear—distance herself from the relationship with both her father and her boyfriend and succeed on her own terms, rather than for others.

I don’t know if scripting this show could have been as good or maybe better in some respects. I do know plenty of audience members thought I had written it, which felt good but also frustrating, like when you have an awesome spontaneous one-liner and someone asks you where it’s from assuming you’re quoting a movie or something (Does this happen to anyone else a lot? Or am I just the only one who gets indignant about it? “I made that up just now from my brain! Give me credit!”). In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is whether I believe that improvisation can do something scripted theater can’t, and I’m pretty much banking my artistic life on the belief that it can.

The more we as improv directors and show-creators take inspiration from other types of theatrical performance, the more we’ll begin to crack open our own art form and reveal the unique tools and capabilities hidden inside. Because improv, like any person, like any art, has its own identity function. And if we’re willing to test and challenge that function by passing it through various forms, circumstances, and experiences, we just might reveal its essence.

The other night, this happened:

Immediately following, and into the morning, I got responses from several good friends supporting, challenging, or asking for more information about that claim. Which was cool...

I replied to them all, but the layers of issues and assumptions involved were complex and numerous enough that it felt like a bunch of 140 character responses were each only going to get one a tiny sliver of my thoughts on the matter. So here’s my first pass at a somewhat thorough explanation of my position, one that I’m sure will court many responses, conditions, exceptions, and other such reactions:

You don’t need a suggestion. You don’t.

Okay fine, maybe sometimes you do. But make that your call and not the demand of some unseen and uncaring improv god. Because unless your show is structured around a spontaneous input—a genre you don’t want to plan ahead for and don’t want one member of the team to be able to bully all the rest into performing, or a story from the audience that you want to reenact or use as inspiration, etc.—there is nothing a random one-word or one-phrase suggestion can offer you in terms of a) spontaneity, b) inspiration, and c) audience connection that simply beginning the show with an open mind and heart can’t provide, and here’s why:

Spontaneity: A suggestion from the audience is meant to ensure that what you’re doing on stage is truly being made up on the spot. And maybe that makes sense for a short form game where the content or rules are meant to tie directly to that suggestion. But in a long form show, your inspiration from the suggestion is either abstract enough (an “A to C” type deal where the suggestion of “pineapple” may lead you to begin a scene on a tropical island without mentioning the fruit itself) that the suggestion becomes a faint memory or, if you really want to “honor” it, quite literal, but, hopefully, quickly discarded for more important concerns like good scenework and strong relationships. What the hell is pineapple going to tell us about why these two people are compelled to be together on stage? Very little. And the audience doesn’t dream that it would. They’re just giving you a word because, well, you asked them to. What they actually want is a good show. So if they’re not expecting to yell out a word, then a performer initiating in a compelling and specific way will provide as much inspiration as any random word can, and probably more.

And not only that, but this proof of spontaneity we hope to achieve by getting a suggestion doesn’t even really work some of the time, especially with long form. I did a show the other night where we got a suggestion, used in in the first scene, then just took off from there for the rest of the scenes, as is common for such a show. The result was that one stand-up at the show said she loved our set, including the first improvised scene and the written sketches that followed. When I told her it was all improvised she was very impressed and surprised, and it dawned on me that she can’t have been the first person to see a long form show and think this, which means that, on the flip side of the audience “trusting you, it’s all made up” is the audience thinking the show is scripted unless every scene is inspired from a new and specific suggestion. Am I going to get suggestions for every scene because some people think I performed a bunch of hilarious sketches instead of a bunch of hilarious improv scenes? If they enjoyed my product, I’d be crazy to go banging down their door insisting they know I made it up on the spot. Why? So I can get “credit” for doing so? While I know in my heart of hearts that the serendipitous comedic result of an improv scene is qualitatively different from that of a sketch, I’m not going to go splitting hairs with my audience about it. This would be akin to a painter overhearing someone praising his watercolor and interrupting them to clarify that, actually, he’d used oil pastels. They liked your art, buddy! It’s cool!

Inspiration: People will argue that you need a suggestion to get the team on the same page, to clear their heads of their own shit and focus on the collective experience of show creation. But this is only a tiny bit true. Of course everyone brings their own assumptions, experiences, thoughts, etc. to the stage. You think hearing the word “pineapple” (sorry to shit on you, pineapple, but you know people love to suggest you) is going to make every performer’s mind go completely blank and enter the stage like an empty canvas waiting for the show to paint on it?  Of course not. And once the initial spark of that suggestion burns off, you’re still going to be left with the performer’s own points-of-view on whatever’s happening, in the show and in their lives and the world, and even with the suggestion, they’re bringing their associations and feelings and yes, whatever they were talking about right before they got on stage, etc. to that stage. The inspiring part is how all those firing brains meet somewhere in the middle through the course of a show, and that can and should happen with or without audience input.

Consider what the difference would be if you just started in cold on a game or scene and then had all the performers be inspired by that—by something that’s already part of the show instead of a non-performance pre-amble. To my mind, there’s actually very little difference other than the audience getting a quick thrill from “They used my word! That’s my word!” Not to say that’s not fun or doesn’t have its place, but it’s no more inspirational than anything your teammate could do or say to begin the show, as long as that teammate is bringing that content with an open spirit and not trying to push the entire show through the filter of it. Someone starts, the other performers respond, a show begins to form. Magic.

Audience Connection: Getting a suggestion at the top of the show as a way of “connecting with the audience” feels to me as preposterous as presuming that taking someone to their favorite restaurant on a date constitutes “connecting with them.” It’s an initiating touch point, a way to start on common ground, sure, but it takes an extended and authentic interaction to make the kind of connections that allow two people (or parties) to feel like they’re actually having a shared experience. Being responsive to both your teammates and to what’s resonating for the audience as the show goes on, and using that feedback to inspire next moves, callbacks, etc. will create a far more impactful sense of community than the fleeting inclusion of a suggestion in a scene or two of a show.  

Now, I say all this, and on the flipside one of the best improv shows I’ve ever seen was a Stepfathers DCM show where the suggestion was “rewind,” it began with a scene in a video store, weaved its way through several other scenes, and then, halfway through, two of the performers pulled out to the front of the stage and started “rewinding” the whole show up to that point, sending the performers backward through the show until they reached the first scene again, then playing out all the previous scenes in order with commentary by the performers “watching the video.” So all of my arguments are not to say a suggestion can’t be an inspired and inspiring part of a show. 

But I use this example because it is an outlier, not the rule. What I mostly see is a long form team assuming they need to get a suggestion, getting that suggestion, then either getting hamstrung by it for so long that whoever gave it starts to wish they’d kept their mouth shut (“I didn’t want a half an hour of pineapple scenes”) or dropping it within a few seconds and doing what they’re inspired to do in the moment anyway.

So, if you want to get a suggestion, for whatever reason, take that suggestion seriously. Treat it like part of the show. Let it inspire you the way another performer might. But know that, for any given show, this isn’t necessarily any better than doing the same without a suggestion. It’s fine and good to read your audience: do they need to give a suggestion to feel like they’re seeing improv? Maybe, if they’re a bachelorette party that was promised a ton of audience participation by the box office. But hopefully the box office steered them away from your hour-long monoscene performance or Harold show with the admonition that they “might like something a little more interactive.” But barring that expectation, do you owe the audience the integration of a suggestion into your show? And if they think you do, could a good, clear host help the audience change their expectations in that regard? “We promise that the teams you’re about to see will be making everything up on the spot. They’re trained professionals: do not try this at home.” You get the idea.

We toss these two words around, sometimes interchangeably, but I’d actually like to take a moment to think a little more deeply about what we really mean when we use each, and what that difference can say about how we approach teaching and learning.

Talent is (according to its dictionary definition), “a natural aptitude or skill.” Skill is (defined by the same source), “the ability to do something well.” At first blush, the two truly do seem interchangeable—in fact, the later is actually present in the definition of the former. But, upon close reading, there is one distinguishing feature between them—talent is everything skill is, but it is specified as something “natural.”

But, here’s the thing about that difference: Honestly, who the hell cares? If skill is truly everything talent is, but learned instead of inborn, who could that possibly matter to but the person who gains it by acquisition rather than birthright? In any professional field, any art form, any endeavor really, if one has built up the skills to succeed in it, one will be on equal footing with the person who had it from the start in all regards except the time one had to spend to get to that level. And in some regards, acquiring the skill rather than having the talent to start with can be a serious advantage—“talented” people who have not had to work for their success often take inevitably defeats much harder than those who’ve always known that success is something one pays for with effort.

Any stand-up can tell you that natural ability counts for a small piece of one’s success, the rest being made up of years and years of plugging away at open mics, honing one’s material, putting pencil to paper (or finger to iphone) and doing the work. And yet, maybe because it’s not scripted, we sometimes assume that natural ability counts for more in improv that I believe it actually does. Sure, some people have charisma, or a good sense of timing, etc., but in the end, the skills it takes to succeed at a very high level can be learned and practiced and mastered.

As an English teacher, I deal with the chasm between “talent” and “skill” on a daily basis. In my role in the classroom, I am tasked to teach students measurable skills through the study of literature that will help them get good grades, do well on standardized tests and be competent thinkers and writers through adulthood. And in order to do this, for all my students, one of the first notions I have to disabuse them of is that interpreting literature is a talent that you either have or you don’t.

Instead I will tell the students point blank, day one of 9th grade, that while there are kids for whom literary analysis of text comes more naturally, I can promise them that I can teach the students for whom it does not the methods that, if applied diligently, and barring a serious learning issue (which of course some students in every class will have), will approximate the talent of their more “naturally gifted” peers in a way that will be indistinguishable to the outside observer. Yes, it will take a bit more work on the back end to learn and apply these methods of interpretation, but in the end the outcome will be the same, and in that case, who cares how you got there?

Analyzing symbols in literature is one of the hardest things for students to do. Indeed, some students can find it impenetrable, a black box they simply believe is not within their grasp to understand. But I’ve actually found that if you break down the natural process that the “talented” interpreter of literature goes through, almost every student (barring a serious difficulty with abstract thinking) can reach the same depth of interpretation.  In order to understand this case study, I’ve listed the steps to that process below, broken down and presented in their simplest form:

First, consider the symbol’s actual function in the world as a real thing. The symbol is a bird, let’s say. Birds fly. They migrate. They have feathers. Make a list. Don’t judge anything on the list. They spread pollen. Sure. Some don’t fly. Great. 

After you’ve made your list of attributes of the symbol, look at it in context of the text. When and where does it come up in the story? What’s going on for the character? He’s in a taxi. He’s afraid to go home because his parents don’t know he’s been kicked out of school. It’s winter. He’s drunk. Great.

Now put the list of literal functions of the symbol together with the context in which it appears and look for matches between the two sets of data. Birds fly. When it’s winter they migrate south. They get away from the cold. This character also wants to “get away.” In winter. He’s afraid of what’s awaiting him at home. But he has nowhere to go. He probably wishes he could just fly away like the birds, but he’s stuck. The birds are an unrequited wish.

(And that’s The Catcher in the Rye in a nutshell.)

Notice, also, that there are three steps to the process, which is not a coincidence. I find that just as comedy is performed in patterns that tend to come in threes, teaching comedy (or really teaching anything) can almost always be broken down into a three-step process (which is good because beyond three items the human brain gets surprisingly bad at retaining information). Take my “Freedom, Power, Responsibility” rule for pattern making. Or my “Feel a way about a thing” scene start which requires 1) Improviser 1 to say how they feel about something, 2) Improviser 2 to feel a way about how Improviser 1 feels and 3) the pair of improvisers, based on these two bits of data, to make sense of what their relationship is and what’s at stake in the scene. It really doesn’t matter what the process is as long as you, the teacher, have found it to be a helpful set of steps to arrive at a “good scene” and are capable of conveying the process in a clear, teachable way.

In this way, it also doesn’t matter what style you’re teaching (except that in an comedy school, there’s a strong benefit to having the style that’s taught from level to level be consistent so students can actually grow and mark process toward performance goals). You wouldn’t expect a class to just “get” a short form game without explaining the rules, just as you wouldn’t expect someone starting UCB to “get” game without having it broken down. That doesn’t mean some people won’t get it right from the start—whoop dee doo, they’re your Level 1 class star. Big deal. But there’s plenty of people who just need the steps explained and suddenly they’re killing it. On the flip side, they might never get those steps explained and, despite what you can see is a sincere engagement with the process, they can’t seem to do a good scene at a basic level. In my experience in the English and improv classroom, this is almost always due to the teacher not breaking down the process into manageable steps, or, if the process was adequately broken down, the student is trying to “skip steps” and get to the result faster because he thinks that having to work through the steps makes him “dumber” or “less funny,” respectively. 

So it’s our job as teachers to tell our students—and believe ourselves—that this is just not the case. That, sure, the student who’s lights-out from day one may have a gift, but that gift won’t necessarily even take her the distance, especially in an art that requires collaboration and a thick skin. Give me the student who is earnest and honest and ready to work through the process over that lights-out day one kid any day. Of course, it’s especially nice when they’ve got a mix of some innate talent and a willingness to be thoughtful about the process, but given the choice I’ll take thoughtful over funny any day. And again, the more the diligent student practices, the more the steps will become second nature, the time it takes to do them collapsing toward instantaneous so that their work really is impossible to distinguish from the person of “talent.” And at that point, who cares?

There are few things lovelier in this life than watching a person doing what they were born to do. Whether you imagine a vocation to be a gift from God or a conscious act of self-actualization, whether you call it your “zone” or your “happy place” or whatever, I believe that we all have a way of being in this world that reveals our truest self, and that living this way enriches our lives and the lives of those around us.

To watch Magic Mike XXL is to see Channing Tatum living out his vocation. Of course, there’s the dancing (Seeing his character laughingly shake his head upon hearing “Pony” come on the radio then succumb to its siren song with his body feels as much like a plot device as an acknowledgement of Tatum’s own deep understanding that whatever else he becomes, he is deeply and fundamentally a dancer). But it’s more than that. Tatum is so at ease on screen he makes even potentially cloying lines seem honest (“My God is a woman” out of another mouth might have sounded condescending and “cute,” but out of his it seems sincere and playful and maybe even true).

But I’m not just going to go on about Channing Tatum for pages, though I could. Because this idea of vocation that he lives and breaths is actually also the core premise of Magic Mike XXL. A group of aging male entertainers, on their way to their last stripper convention, not only find themselves and, in some cases, their perfect match (Good for you, Richie!) but also find the strength to use their fullest most authentic self as fuel for their art. Throwing their costumes out the window, literally, they free themselves from the artifice imposed upon them by the conventions of their art form and seek to make a new kind of performance (still within the bounds and structures of the form—they all end up in thongs in the end, don’t worry!) that is bolder, truer, more resonant, and, because of this, sexier than all the firemen and cavemen and sailors in the world.

The feminism of Magic Mike XXL goes deep and in many wonderful directions (sorry, that wasn’t on purpose, but I’m leaving it!), but for the purposes of this piece, it will suffice to point out that seeing men be their truest selves, revealing their earnest passions, and encouraging, honoring and cherishing women who do the same, is a more potent fantasy than a two-dimensional donning of some “traditionally masculine” caricature that doesn’t truly resonate with the person portraying it.  Authenticity is sexy. And not just sexy as in “sexual,” but “breath-taking,” “tingle-inducing,” “transfixing.”

This, I think, is the takeaway of the film for any performer in any art. Yes, when you are on stage you are “someone else,” but inasmuch as you can be inspired by your truest self, you will engage the audience at that much deeper a level. I also don’t think that it’s an accident that the turning point of Magic Mike XXL in terms of this journey toward identity affirmation is a joke. High on molly, the boys stop at a convenience store and send Richie in to make a seemingly humorless girl smile as proof of his own performative power.  He enters the store and begins a goofily self-serious strip tease, made sillier still by the context (he uses a bag of Cheetos as a prop and the coolers at the back as a wall upon which to grind) and the fact that the girl will not, it seems, provide him with the smile he is seeking. The song ends and, shirtless and dripping with water from a bottle he’s squeezed out in mock ecstasy, Richie looks at the girl and asks, “How much for the Cheetos and water?” The girl smiles. It’s funny. And sexy. Because, yeah, Joe Manganiello’s hot as hell, but more importantly, in this moment, he’s also silly and cute and self-aware and just wants to make this girl’s day. And he does. Not with his abs or his apparently extremely-larger-than-average member, but by looking the girl in the face in a moment of vulnerability (for him, not her) and saying the most honest thing he could in the moment, which just also happened to be the funniest. Because comedy has the power to reveal truths that can be harder to get at in other ways, and harder to receive too (oops there I go again!). 

It seems to me, based on personal conversations and social media, that more and more male comedians are actually interested in being good feminists on stage. This is good news for all genders, as comedy that seeks to find and celebrate our shared humanity rather than highlight and exploit the things that keep some of us feeling “less than” others is much better for everyone. But I’ve also found that these well-intentioned men sometimes don’t know where to start, or worry that thinking about being progressive all the time will “get them in their heads” in a way that will hinder their work.

So, first of all, I will say unequivocally that I do not care one bit that my or any other person’s call-out of misogynistic performing practices “gets people in their heads.” In fact, I’d argue that until they internalize more generous choices, people who behave badly on stage should be way up in their heads, judging themselves and analyzing where these alienating choices are coming from and how to untrain themselves from making them. Men spend way too much time not having to think about or apologize for their bad behavior, so a little anxiety now and then is perfectly fine with me. Ask a woman how often she’s “in her head” just based on the anticipation of a potentially sexist or demeaning initiation from a male improviser and you will stop complaining about feminism putting you “in your head.”

The good news, however, is that I have more than broad admonitions about “being better” to offer. Because, of course, being the analytical wonk that I am, I, too, am unsatisfied with notes that don’t have clear, actionable fixes associated with them. “Stop being a dick” is not so helpful, and will likely be met—understandably, if unfortunately—with resentment, denial, and resistance.

So, instead, I offer the following case study:

I was teaching a workshop last weekend, and two men and a woman were engaged in a scene. The exercise was to do an activity but talk about something else, so they were three teenagers in a science class lab talking about a teach who got fired:

Male 1: I heard it was because he was sleeping with a student. Male 2: Yeah, I mean, he’s so old. What would be her motivation for doing that? After a brief silence… Female: Well, he is sort of handsome. Male 1: He’s bald and has a limp! Male 2: Wait…was it you?! Were you the girl who slept with him?! Female: (understandably frazzled) No!

At this point I just couldn’t watch this scene play out anymore. First of all, because it’s a tired premise and I’ve seen it a million times before and I was bored with it. But in terms of problematic gender issues, there are two major ones at play:

The man’s denial of information established by the woman (sure, that doesn’t necessarily have to be gendered, but in the case of a clear gang-up of the men against the woman, the denial becomes part of that dynamic).

The man’s turning of the joke onto the female, and in a way that sexualized her where she didn’t ask for (or indicate that she was going for) that.

And it’s not just a matter of calling out “bad behavior.” These two “bad choices”—a denial and an alienation of one of the scene partners—were causing the scene to come to a standstill. They were bad improv in addition to being sexist. So, not wanting to let the men “get away with” their choices but also not wanting to waste the potential for learning in the moment, I gave the following side coach:

“I want you to flip this from a misogynistic scene to a feminist one right now. {Female}, you already said he’s handsome. Unless you’re wrong there’s something else and more interesting going on for these two boys in their denial of that. For all we know he looks like Stanley Tucci with a sweet wooden cane. Tell me what’s really going on.”

And this is what they produced: Female: I don’t know, I mean, he’s just charismatic. Boys (in character) start to get visibly flustered. Male 1: I’m charismatic. Male 2: Yeah, it’s not that hard. This elicits a huge laugh. Male 1: There’s guys our age who are charismatic! Female: No…no there aren’t. Male 2: I rolled an 18 charisma last night! Huge laugh. Male 1: That’s the best you can roll! Another huge laugh.

Amazing. By honoring the female’s contribution to the scene and following it to a place that made them vulnerable, the men created far richer, more three-dimensional characters, and in doing so also created a much fresher, more honest and interesting scene, and got far more satisfying laughs. Because making fun of the girl who slept with her teacher (based clearly on that teacher’s exploitation of a power dynamic for which the girl shouldn’t be held accountable) is far less honest and interesting than the reality of this situation evoking anxiety in two teenage boys who don’t quite know how to be confident in their awkward teenage selves or how to engage their female peers.

Rather than being afraid of being “called out” in these moments, performers should seek these kinds of corrections, and directors shouldn’t be afraid to give them, even stating as directly as I did that the problem is a gendered one and how it might be fixed. Because giving a note that gently steers the performer away from the specific choice without giving instruction about how one might avoid that category of choice in the future is also not so productive. So don’t be shy about naming the problem. If you do so—and accept such notes—in a spirit of goodwill and collaboration, everyone will grow. The fact that I received a “thank you” email from one of the male workshop participants specifically for the instruction I gave in that scene reinforces my confidence that we were able to turn a potentially alienating moment into an opportunity for learning that benefitted everyone, and gave me hope that men are ready and eager to face these issues head on.

There’s a famous scene in the Bible when the Pharaoh, distraught from a recurring nightmare that none of his wise men can satisfactorily interpret, is told of a man in jail who can interpret dreams. He’s told this information by his cup bearer, who himself had a dream in which he was taken from jail and reinstated to his post—all of which came to pass—which strengthens the case for the man’s interpretive abilities. The man, of course, is Joseph, and what happens when he’s released and comes before the Pharaoh is known to most people with a Judeo-Christian background (or with a love of animated films): he interprets the dreams correctly and the rest is history, or legend, or whatever.

But how that story goes down is actually very interesting, and can be particularly instructive to improvisers looking to increase their level of authenticity in their scenework. The main question is this: How on earth did Pharaoh know that his wise men’s interpretations were “wrong” and Joseph’s was “right”? But immediately? I mean, it’s a weird dream. To decide that the “right” interpretation is this very specific prediction about seven years of plenty and seven years of famine is weird. The Bible says Pharaoh knew he was right because he “saw that the spirit of God was in him.” But I like the Medieval Biblical commentator Rashi’s simple, humanistic take even better. He says Pharaoh knew the interpretation was “right” because “when one hears the truth one knows it.”

So simple, with no need for a reliance on some all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe. It’s quite transcendental, really. You just know the truth when you hear it.

What if that were the only rule we had in improv? Try to speak the truth; try to know the truth when you hear it. Reject things that don’t feel true by seeking a truer answer. Stop when you’ve found that answer. Act on that truth. I’m not saying anything novel, but I think it’s easy to forget, and to layer on the rules and the styles and the forms over that deeper, most essential need and desire of comedy to make us laugh by telling us the truth.

So what if that were at the core of how we taught improv? Not, “Is that funny?” “Is that the game?” “Is that the right heighten?” But, “Did that feel true?” Students, having been humans for most of their lives, and unless they are sociopaths or compulsive liars, are pretty adept at sensing the truth in their real lives; asking them to translate that to the lives of their characters requires only a bit of training. A few areas of focus might be:

Teaching students to treat their characters as people, not joke delivery systems. If the character is real and full, then their truth will be self-evident. If the character is just a mouthpiece for a gag or a pun or a game, it will probably be harder to be sensitive to when the integrity of their identity is made or broken.

Teaching students to treat their characters’ relationships as real. If you’re sitting around waiting for the funny thing, you can miss each other on stage altogether. You’re each waiting your turn to lock into the game or the gag, to make the next move or find the button. We actually do this in life sometimes, too, and not only is it a lot less enjoyable than being present and letting the other person affect us, but it can lead to a sense of hollowness in the interaction, which, if you’re not being watched, just leaves you feeling like you wasted your time, but if you’re on stage, leaves you and your audience feeling cheated and demeaned.

Teaching students to call out their own and their scene partner’s untruths. Something doesn’t feel true—go ahead and call it out. Say “actually that was bullshit.” Literally. Out loud. Say, “Come on, I know you better than that.” To the character. Make them be honest, just like you would with a real person. It’s not a denial if it’s an honest conclusion that the offer given was a deflection. “Yes, and” also means treating characters like full people, and full people get called on their bullshit, or should.

Teaching students to build truth upon truth. When something feels right and true, follow it. Not just by adding stuff or examples to the category, but by saying yes hard to the truth and then honestly asking what other things are true if this thing is. Sometimes the next move or statement will surprise you—you literally won’t know it’s coming until you hear yourself say it—and that can often be the most satisfying to both the performer and the audience. Like Joseph, some spirit beyond yourself has inspired you to speak the truth, and like Pharoah, your scene partner and the audience will instantly know it to be true upon hearing it (I’d like to think that this recognition is what accounts for much of the “breaking” performers do on stage—an inability of the body to remain unreactive in the face of such a revelatory moment).

Seeing your first TJ & Dave show is a rite of passage, like a pilgrimage to Mecca or a baptism, or any number of other religious metaphors signifying a change from one state to another. Other improv groups are great, but few (none?) transcend the way TJ & Dave do, making us believe in the world they create and, maybe even more importantly for practitioners of the craft, making us believe in the work itself, in its capacity to transcend, to say something important, something necessary. TJ & Dave, at their best, make improvisation feel essential to the human experience.

To finally have a book that attempts to capture that transcendence and essence feels both exciting and frightening. How could they possible express anything near the beauty of what they achieve on stage in the pages of a static text? But lucky for us, TJ and Dave aren’t just improvisational geniuses; there are also smart. Like, smart smart. Brainy smart. Intelligent. Well-read. Thoughtful about their craft. Articulate about their thinking. You know…smart.

You might think, “Of course they’re smart! Just watch them on stage.” But it doesn’t have to be that way. I know many improvisers who are total savants at their craft but can’t talk about what they do in a way that really helps a reader or a student get a handle on it, much less learn from it in a practicable way. The lovely thing about The TJ & Dave book is how clear and precise and expressive the two of them are able to be about a process that seems so effortlessly brilliant in the moment.

It’s a nice thing for someone like me, who fundamentally believes that, although there is the rare “improv savant,” most improvisers, no matter how naturally funny or clever or interesting they are, only become truly brilliant through effort and thought and consideration of the craft. If TJ & Dave had said in their book that they are brilliant because they are special, and that the kind of brilliance they display is something you can’t explain, can’t teach, can’t learn, I would believe them, because they are just that good. But they don’t say that, and they don’t seem to believe it.

Instead, Improvisation at the Speed of Life seems to exude an expansive love for human beings and their capacity to listen, to collaborate, and to be affected by each other. “In short,” Dave exhorts, “live life mindfully.” We can all do that; or at least we can all try.

I think it bears pointing out that despite their almost symbiotic performing relationship, they do approach the work as individuals to some extent. Dave has a background in stand-up and scripted theater; TJ went a more traditional “Second City to iO” route. They are complementary performers, not identical, which anyone who’s seen a show can see. And they’re quick to point out how the other is the one responsible for the duo’s greatness. At one point, when Pam (their co-writer and an improviser and teacher in her own right) tries to compliment a bit of stagecraft she’d admired in a show she’d once seen of theirs, Dave is quick to assume the brilliance must have been something TJ did. TJ refers to seeing Dave in a Chicago production of Glengarry Glen Ross and being blown away by Dave’s skill as an actor. I’m sure it’s no accident that the two members of the greatest improv duo in the world each credit the other for that greatness.

The distinction between them does wear away a bit as their philosophy as a duo emerges more clearly, especially once the preliminary background material (How did they get their start? Where did they meet? With whom have they performed?) falls away, and we are left with a few simple and powerful admonitions regarding what they believe to be best practices:

Listen. Not to the words (which they argue should be kept to a minimum), but to the way your scene partner moves, the look in her eyes, the feeling beneath the words. Then respond honestly (which for them is about what all that listening has told you about the reality of the world of the scene). That’s it. Pretty much.

It gets a little more specific than that, of course—it’s a 200-ish page book. They talk about how the rules we all learn in improv classes are pretty much a load of hooey (with well-intended principles underneath, which they define). They say some great and instructive things about two principles that drive their listening and reacting: weight (the import and tone of the situation as you observe it in the scene from the moment it begins, not based on any contrived attempt to label it) and heat (the intensity of the relationship which can be discerned from body language, eye contact, and other non-verbal means of communicating). They explain how really listening for the weight and heat of the scene can lead you to each “next little step” of the scene in an honest, logical, meaningful way. They talk about how playing a character means truly inhabiting that person, and about how to inhabit the space in as authentic a way as one does a character. At this point, though, I’m just going through the chapters one by one, which you should do yourself, because each one is a unique revelation around a common theme: the simple axiom of listening—really listening—and responding with honesty.

This approach isn’t for everyone, and they’re the first to admit it. They explain that they are putting on a very specific show: 50 minutes, played out in real time, with only two improvisers playing all of the parts. But beyond the specifics of the TJ & Dave form (the specificity of which, to my mind, doesn’t undermine the truth of the general principles the duo puts forward) they remind us more than a few times that their style is not for people primarily concerned with getting laughs. Anyone who’s willing to call out Joan Rivers for doing a bad scene is clearly ready to smash the idols of laugh-getting to rubble, and they do. What they do isn’t comedy, they’re quick to point out, but they’re not opposed to laughter as a “byproduct” of truth and honesty and surprise and genuine relationship, and they give you plenty of arguments for why, at least to them, this is a more satisfying approach than a concern for how many laughs you get or whether the audience seems to be having a good time in the moment (their desire for a sound that humans might make that would indicate engagement is one that resonated deeply with me—how many false moves would we avoid if we could hear and trust that the audience was interested even if they weren’t laughing?).

Del Close’s ghost is ever present in the background of the book, his demand for a particular kind of improvised performance full of truth and crafted out of nothing less than the fullness of the human spirit seeming to directly guide TJ & Dave in their endless pursuit for the “Great show.” Like many great improvisers, Dave has his story of a death-bed conversation with Del, when he told Dave to “Keep this stuff going.” And although many others were influenced by Del and sought to carry on his legacy, it seems that Dave, maybe more than anyone else touched by Del, has made this request his earnest life’s work. In this way, knowing how he and TJ go about their work feels like the closest an improviser starting today can get to learning from Del.  

I, in particular, appreciate that aspect of the book, having begun to improvise a few years after Del’s death. I was particularly delighted to see them define the Harold as an attempt to “turn a single idea into a variety of themes and ideas through group exploration…A Harold explores themes, notices patterns and allows them to weave together.” As an admirer of their work, it was gratifying to me to see them defining a structure so dear to my heart in many of the same terms I myself use to attempt to convey the Harold’s magic and potential. On a personal level, those two little pages toward the end of an already inspiring book did much to reaffirm my beliefs about what the Harold (and long form improvisation) is and can be. The perfect dessert at the end of a satisfying meal.

Pam Victor is a lovely guide through the journey of the book, one part fan and admirer, one part working improviser and improv teacher trying to figure out her own values and goals and style. The interview sections with her sprinkled throughout the book dig deeper, clarify, or provide examples of the principles they’re talking about. They can be a bit tonally uneven in places (I got the feeling that some of the more bantery spots were full of spontaneous charm that didn’t quite translate into print) but they’re important for the way in which Pam’s probing can elicit a more precise explanation of an initial insight, and seeing that thought process unfold rather than just being given the final “answer” is the closest you can get to watching TJ & Dave improvise while reading a book where they explain how they improvise. TJ & Dave never treat Pam as anything but an equal in the quest to find that perfect improvised moment (It’s not a coincidence that Pam writes a blog called “The Zen of Improv”), which makes sense given their humility and belief that it is not their specific brilliance that makes them great, but listening, and truth, and following that next little thing.

As you read, you start to get the distinct impression that what TJ & Dave are aiming for is nothing short of improv nirvana. In places, they can get downright Buddhist, as when they describe the show as “a river we slip our canoe into and follow where it takes us”, as well as Platonic (referring to the “ideal” to which they strive). This “Great show” to which they allude—the one that would make them hang up their improv hats for good—seems to be so perfect as to be out-of-reach for a mere mortal, which is lucky for us, since it pretty much assures us that TJ & Dave will continue to get on stage every Wednesday night in a futile and beautiful attempt to reach it.

As a teacher of high school English, I've long since abandoned any notion that I could possibly teach my students content sufficient to qualify as an adequate basis of knowledge of Western literature. No matter how you define the canon, no year-long course or even four-year English curriculum will even scratch the surface of the breadth of important, meaningful and beautiful texts that exist in the world.

Instead, I have found that the single most powerful key to unleashing a desire to encounter and deeply consider texts beyond the confines of the classroom is a confidence in the skills required to do so. I am much more frequently told, for example, that an interpretive methodology I have taught students has changed the way they see all texts than I am told that a single text changed their lives.

As a teacher, of course, it's sometimes hard to give up on teaching some of my favorite novels, stories, and poems—sometimes the very ones that inspired me to teach in the first place. But to presume that I know which texts will end up inspiring my students is to impose my own understanding of the world on them. Instead, by giving them the algorithm by which to interpret any number of texts, I hope to ensure that they will be able to access inspiration where it finds them, not just where I found it along my own journey.

A teacher of mathematics might be able to make this argument even more succinctly: rather than teaching students to memorize what will end up being an infinite number of equations, teach them the rules, functions, and algorithms by which they can derive those equations. Sure, little kids memorize times tables, but even then they only do it up through 10x10. And in a good math education, memorization quickly gives way to methodology (remember FOIL?) which, hopefully, in the end, gives way to theory (Remember why FOIL works?). To be truly inspired by mathematics, and to truly own one’s learning in the field, one must go beyond the memorization of facts and begin to understand the system itself—its coherence, its beauty.

Hopefully my point here is starting to become clear: to truly inspire and help students reach their own potential in any given field, it’s best to focus on skills rather than content, on the universal algorithm and not the single equation.

We’ve all had (or been) that improv teacher who, when giving notes, instead of focusing on skills, focuses on the actual content of the scenes themselves, almost as though they’re being workshopped to be turned into a sketch (which, you know, if that’s what’s happening, then cool, but if not—not cool).  Telling a student that one detail would have been “funnier” than another, or that you wished they would have found a particular button that eluded them without telling them the principle behind why these would have been satisfying is the equivalent of telling him that the ducks in The Catcher in the Rye represent Holden’s fear of growing up without teaching them how to look for and decode motifs in literature in general. Sure, the student might gain an appreciation for what the symbol is doing in that particular text, just as they might have an appreciation for how that particular detail would have enriched the scene they’ve just done, but the feedback is a closed circuit that begins and ends with the content at hand, and leaves the student powerless once your “wisdom” as their instructor is pulled out from under him.

So, yes—content matters, but only in that it is the delivery system for skill-building. Note the difference between:

When you bowled you should have done it really badly, like by pushing the ball between your legs and grunted. That would have been funnier.

And

Because you were clearly trying to act like you were a better bowler than you were to impress your date, having the reveal at the end of the scene of just how bad of a bowler you were would be really satisfying and validate our understanding of the subtext of the scene.

The first is prescriptive; the second is instructive. I won’t argue that prescriptions aren’t ever effective (sometimes someone who’s just not getting it needs to be told what to do until they start to internalize how those choices yield better results), but I will argue that the sooner and more frequently we can move to an instructive stance the more rapidly students will gain and retain skills. To return to the English or mathematics metaphors and align them with their improv note equivalents, we might give examples of these categories in the following manner:

Prescriptive: English: No, Billy, fire represents passion.

Math: No, Billy, 2+2 isn’t 5, it’s 4. Now you know for next time.

Improv: Do x. It’s funnier.

Instructive: English: Okay, so remember how other times in the text when we’ve seen fire it’s during a moment of heightened emotion?

Math: Remember, Billy, how when we add a number to itself we get double the number? So the answer would actually be 4.

Improv: Okay, remember how we talked about setting up and then fulfilling expectations? Doing x would have done that.

And, if we’re feeling like the moment and the student are both ripe for it, we might even delve into that most delicate and skillful of teaching moves by asking a question that we think might allow the student to reach the answer him or herself, thereby allowing the student to generate his own correct answer based on what he does know. This would look something like the following:

Generative Question: English: Okay, so when you think of fire, what are some of the feelings it evokes? Have you seen fire in other texts? What does it seem to represent in those?

Math: What do you notice about this list of numbers added to itself? Do you see a pattern that you might apply to this problem?

Improv: What could you have done to give the audience a sense of closure and satisfaction there? What do you think would have fulfilled their expectation?

The whole “Women aren’t funny” argument, while still clung to by a few fearful little boys, has been generally dispelled and demonized in the current century, and with good reason, since it’s utterly false. There is, however, still a consequence of the historical pervasiveness of that belief, in particular as it relates to a specific comedy type that seems to be a relative rarity: the straight woman.

When I say “straight woman” I mean it in the sense one means “straight man”—that sometimes-essential half of a comedy team that tethers the person with the ridiculous point-of-view to the earth just enough to make the whole thing relatable to an audience. The straight man (let’s start calling them a “straight player” from here on out to attempt to at least somewhat undo the gender bias inherent in the term) calls out the crazy and in doing so neutralizes it so that it is funny rather than so absurd as to be deemed meaningless. And while my observation of the lower numbers of women filling this role is based mostly on my anecdotal evidence of years of comedy watching and performing, I will venture the claim that women don’t generally succeed in comedy as straight players.

Sure, you can give me a list of women you consider “straight players” (I’ll give you a list of some of my favorites at the end of this essay)—anecdote is not data. Neither is it data to point out that a popular show at the Del Close Marathon comprised of all the best “straight men” from all the best Harold teams is comprised solely of men. Maybe that’s for the sake of the double meaning of the team name, but having been on and observed my fair share of improv teams, I’m hard-pressed to name more than a handful of true straight players that are also women.

Here are some of my theories as to why:

Women who are encouraged to do comedy in the first place are the ones who are more outwardly “comedic” when they’re younger. A serious-seeming introverted girl with a wicked sense of irony generally doesn’t get noticed for that trait the way an extrovert who runs around the house doing voices and pulling pranks does. Incidentally, that second girl also often gets told she’s a “tomboy” or knows “how to hang” with boys, reinforcing her belief that to continue to stay relevant in comedy she has to keep the boys entertained. (Note: This argument obviously assumes a cis-gendered female, which means it has its limitations, for sure, but it’s worth pointing out for the majority of female comedians who grew up female in a world that regarded them as generally comedically “less than.”) Okay, so let’s say you make it through your female childhood still wanting to be a comedian. You then have to contend with the following realities:

Women who want to be considered “funny” have to “prove” their “funniness.” On the simplest level, a woman today is still coming at comedy in the hole, preemptively having to dispel the ridiculously false perception that she will not be as funny as her male counterparts. So she has to parade her funny around like a comedy peacock. She has to be big, bold, do funny voices. “Oh, she’s funny. I didn’t expect that” the men say, so pleased at discovering this rare dessert flower, or she gets the infamous, “You’re so funny for a girl.” Again, we’d like to hope this mentality is dying out, but I promise you your female comedian friend has heard it more than once in her career.

A woman who is “serious” on stage (or off) can be seen as “argumentative,” “contrary,” or even, the fate worse than death—a “nag” or a “bitch.” Because part of the point of the straight player is that she says, “Wait a second, hold on—this is crazy.” And a woman who does that with a straight face—in life as well as on stage—runs the risk of being seen as a killjoy (just watch how men respond to female comics why try to out misogyny on twitter). And, taking into account the erroneous assumption that she might not be funny in the first place, a woman who defaults to straight-playering also runs the risk of being perceived as not being “in on the joke” or “ruining the fun,” whereas a man, who is given the benefit of the doubt of getting the joke and wanting to have fun from the start, has the freedom to challenge the joke without seeming to have missed or quashed it altogether.

Women in comedy know they need to “stand out” to get noticed and get (and stay) ahead. No matter how well they do, women continue to compete against themselves and each other for far fewer spots on teams and casts. Because a woman knows that your average Harold team takes maybe two girls, she needs to stand out as “funny”, in the audition and in the months or years leading up to the audition when she’s been watched by the people who call the shots. And you don’t generally stand out quickly or clearly by being the kind of workhorse that straight-playering demands. Men, on the other hand, often feel less immediate pressure, and have the luxury of “paying their dues” and “proving their worth” as a straight player (especially given how the items above allow them the freedom to play that way from day one without repercussion).

So, what can we do in the face of all of these potentially disheartening factors? Sure, I can point out the historical and cultural reasons why women seem to not feel free to be or get rewarded for being straight players, but I also prefer to believe that times are changing, that people are wising up, and that there are some proactive things we can do to move the needle even further. Here are a few suggestions:

Notice and reward good female straight players. If you’re in a position of power, start being more cognizant of these talented women, and cast them as you would a straight man. If other people in your casting cohort try to argue she’s not “funny,” stand your ground and point out all the great support she did in the audition, how she made others look good and made scenes make sense. Say how valuable she’d be on your or anyone’s team. Then put your casting where your mouth is.

When these women do get cast, encourage and help develop their natural skill, rather than trying to force them into bigger characters or broad physicality. It’s good to stretch people, for sure, and everyone should get out of their comfort zone once in a while or stretch their range, but don’t act like her natural style of play is a liability, and don’t treat women who play bigger or wackier as default “better comedians” just because they seem more willing to look silly on stage. It might just be how they’re comedically wired.

Extoll great female straight players: Jane Curtin, Abbi Jacobson, Amy Poehler (who can be silly, yes, but who also knows when to go to town and when she’s needed to ground the universe. Watch any recording of her playing with the UCB Four to see a master class of someone straight up holding down the fucking fort). And make sure to extoll them not just as good foils (“Oh it’s so funny when Abbi freaks out at Ilana’s antics!”) but as great comedians in their own right (“Jane Curtin’s delivery on Weekend Update was always so killer”).

Improv is currently enjoying the success that comes with being the “corporate team building” activity du jour. Much like the “Outward Bound”-style ropes course trend in corporate training and team-dynamic building that began in the 1970’s, improv is more and more coming to be considered the effective method for teaching members of schools and organizations how to connect, collaborate, and create.

On one hand, this is great for improv—it means exposure for the art form, and increased appreciation from non-performers regarding its powerful applications. 

But—and at first this may seem like me shooting myself in my own potential-money-making-corporate-gig-foot here—like all great trends, it’s also a bit of a sham.

You see, as improv begins to settle into its status as a go-to tool for teaching the tools of effective organizational interaction, it also runs the risk of losing sight of some of the nuances of its own foundational principles. And not only that, but its primary message of “Yes, and,” when taught simplistically or in a vacuum, might actually run counter to a large body of powerful current research about the nature of dissent and its role in healthy organizations.

If at this point you’re cringing and covering your eyes with your hands, terrified to see what comes next, I can understand. But don’t worry, I promise it turns out okay for improv in the end. But in order for improv to come out on the other side of this argument stronger than it came in, it needs to be taken to task on this issue. It’s strong; it can take it. 

You see, many recent studies have been conducted regarding the effect of dissent on the growth and function of organizations. And they reveal, to a one, that organizations that are overly monolithic, that do not promote healthy discourse and disagreement, actually stagnate in terms of growth, market share, corporate culture, etc. It’s fascinating stuff (here's just a few links), and it all points to the fact that allowing stake-holders an authentic and productive space to share differing views on policy, management, corporate culture, etc. actually makes for more facile and growth-oriented organizations.

At this point, it’s not looking too good for our friend “Yes, and,” at least if you’re trying to apply “Yes, and” in a literal, myopic way that you can put on a slide and quickly teach to a group of HR reps. “Improv means always saying yes.” “There are no wrong answers in improv.”

Bullshit.

Any truly skilled improviser knows that “Yes, and” doesn’t mean “never say no.” Sometimes, your character’s appropriate response might be to say “no” (for example, to a person who asks you if they should jump off a building at the top of the scene). And yet, even to students who are coming to learn the craft in order to be practitioners on stage, we sometimes start by telling them to “always say yes.” What happens, of course, is that later in their training we admit that this simplified view of “Yes, and” was only a “training wheel,” and that now that they know how to agree as a matter of course there are plenty of situations where they might technically disagree while still forwarding the action of the scene. It makes some sense—without any frame of reference, and with (usually) a good deal of apprehension and fear to overcome, forcing students new to the craft to engage at the basic level of saying “yes” helps remove the road block of negativity and negation that can stop an interaction in its tracks. 

But it can also be disingenuous, and maybe even dangerous. Maybe dangerous because it sets up a foundation for the role of “Yes, and” that is at best a bit simplistic and at worst an unethical and willful misrepresentation of the fundamentals of collaboration that actually serves to silence the kind of healthy dissent from which we grow as people and groups. It’s a dangerous assumption that belonging to a team or group or community means always saying “Yes” to it in a literal sense.

In America, some of our greatest patriots and heroes are people who said “No.” Of course, what they were really doing was saying “yes” to something bigger. “No, I will not pay your taxes,” because “Yes, I believe in the right of a people to self-governance.” “No I will not sit at the back of your bus,” because “Yes, all human beings have the right to be treated with respect and decency.” In both these cases, the thing being denied is a specific case while the thing being affirmed is a universal principle. In the end, it’s almost always the case that you can get to that universal principle upon which all parties agree (Plato was a master of this), but it can often be hard to get people to agree on the best manifestation of those principles in practice. But just because something is hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t practice doing it. In fact, it’s what we need to practice most. And “Yes, and” could be a powerful tool to do so—maybe the most powerful—if we were honest about what it meant from the first day we taught it. If we could look organizations in the eye and say, “’Yes, and’ is a powerful consensus-building tool, but it will not—nor should it—sweep real points of disagreement and nodes of dissent under the rug. Instead, by agreeing where there is common ground, and further agreeing that there are points of disconnect where a practicable ‘yes’ is not as easily won, we can strengthen our commitment to listen to and truly hear each other, and to make productive communal decisions based on authentic dialogue.”

Admittedly that’s hard to get into a two-hour training in a ballroom at the Hilton. But, like, maybe not that hard. Not if you work backward from a belief in the value of dialogue and dissent as your given. Not if you truly believe—as a management team or as school leaders or as administrators—that the “no”s that divide us are smaller than the “yes”es that unite us, that a sincere “no” can never hurt us as much as a disingenuous “yes.” There’s a million exercises—some that already exist, others that we could probably make up right now if we put our heads together—that we could use to teach people how to disagree with genuine respect, how to find the fundamental common ground “yes” beneath the initial “no.” What about a scene exercise where, no matter what the first person said, the second person had to disagree with it, then the first person had to justify that second person’s disagreement (so that they are justifying the other person’s dissenting truth) and then the two people work toward something they can both agree on based on the initially conflicting positions. Something like:

Person 1: This roller coaster is so fun.

Person 2: I hate roller coasters.

Person 1: Because your grandmother was thrown from the top of one at the World’s Fair by a jealous lover.

Person 2: Yes, that’s right. They always make me think of the impermanence of happiness.

Person 1: That’s why I’m proposing to you on this one, right now. Now when you think of roller coasters you’ll think of our love.

I mean, I just made that one up just now. We could work out the kinks. The point is it’s not hard to come up with rules for improv exercises; the hard work is in sitting down and thoughtfully asking ourselves what the deeper lesson is that we are imparting to our students. Sometimes just getting them to literally say the word “yes” rather than the word “no” is a worthy enough end goal. But to assume that these fully-functioning humans aren’t capable of other, more nuanced approaches to agreement and consensus-building is, I believe, selling them, and ourselves as “experts” (which we sometimes forget we are), short.