One of the things I hate about “heinous acts” on stage: be it something obviously uncomfortable like rape, or something that American audiences will make room for, like senseless murder, is that its almost always a dishonest performance, in a sense. The characters are almost always cartoony caricatures or cardboard stand-ins.

There’s a guy in one of my classes who constantly kills people on stage. He almost always does it when he (A) doesn’t know how to resolve a conflict or (B) disconnects with his scene partner and doesn’t know what to do. (Of course, the converse is that people often don’t want to connect with characters being killed either. How many times does a character get shot and continue standing there, disbelieving or denying that the bullet really hurt)

Anyway, its interesting that the article talks about resentment, rather than “appalled” or “disgusted”. I think an audience resents it when you (A) make them laugh at something they don’t want to laugh at or (B) lead them down a road and then force them to abandon you when you turn the subject to something that’s too uncomfortable.

If a scene is going to be about something that difficult, I think that it has to be an extremely honest scene. That means a few things: not surprising with a horrible subject for one… say, having a sympathetic (or cartoony villianous) character turn out to be a rapist, pedophile, etc.

I suspect that a good improvised scene about rape isn’t going to have the rapist on stage for long, if only because most of us aren’t really willing to try and honestly portray a rapist. Even if I were willing to put myself there, I’m not really willing to make my audiences feel unsafe about that subject. For that matter, most of us aren’t willing to portray the victim, at least until after the fact. I’m not sure that’s the kind of freefall we want to push ourselves into, because the character (and therefore the audience) are also in freefall.

So I’d guess a healthy improvised scene about rape is probably an after-the-fact scene, and ends up being about recovery, or acceptance, or simply dealing with a broken world. And there’s actually a surprising amount of healthy humor to be found in those subjects.

I was surprised by the page-turner quality of the chapters (and was thus more tired than i should have been during my 10am meeting…)

I really enjoy his conversational writing style, and his ‘let’s be honest about what improvisers are really like’ approach.

Keep up the good work.

http://www.unexpectedproductions.org/living_playbook.htm

Slang is especially interesting, because there will often be different sections for the various classes and cultures that were important at the time.

Using the right slang really helps the audience picture where you are. Also, the only experience most people have with actually seeing other decades is on film, so in some cases it helps to mimic the acting style from that era.