NYT article on Improv
A friend sent me a link to this article from Sunday’s New York Times. (Go to bugmenot.com for an existing logon id and password for nytimes.com in order to see the third page of the article.)
For me the most interesting part of the article was in this discussion of finding the game of a scene.
An analysis of game played out in Mr. Delaney’s classroom after the students read through a script about a relentlessly peppy office worker who insists on seeing the bright side of life, however horrible her experiences. “When I was 10,” she says, “my father took my ear, held it to a stove and burned it. He died in a car wreck later, but joke’s on him because I turned out awesome!”
The scene’s game was not the woman’s suffering, but her absurd refusal to acknowledge her unhappiness. The script seemed to run into trouble, however, when the woman revealed that she had been raped; the problem, Mr. Delaney said, was that the revelation came in the midst of a series of jokes. “I don’t think we can treat that as a joke,” he said, “or the audience will resent you.”
I don’t actually find this particularly insightful regarding finding the game in a scene. I did, however, find it interesting to think about how to approach often-taboo subjects like rape and abuse. Anything from the mundane to the outrageous can be the content of the scene, but the humor, the insight, or the commentary come from how characters react to that content, not the content itself.
I’m probably not going to ever make rape funny because people don’t want rape to be funny and they’re not comfortable letting it be funny (not that making people laugh or keeping them comfortable is the ultimate goal.) However responses and reactions to an object and how I express who I am through an object can be funny (or insightful, or satirical or many other things.)
November 1st, 2007 at 12:10 am
Rambling comments, without enough thought put into them to deserve too much heed:
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.