I don’t like improv.
13 April 2009
by R.A. Porter
There. I’ve said it. Feels good to get that off my chest after all these years. All these years of pretending to be a fan, of making excuses for why I can’t make someone’s improv show, of feigning interest in watching people exercise.
Look, I’ve done my share of improv. It’s important to any actor honing his craft to learn to be agile and quick-witted on stage. You never know when someone’s going to go off book. Hell, it might be you, losing your place and forgetting your lines. Though I haven’t trod boards for years, I’m still blasted awake by the actor’s nightmare once or twice a year: it’s my cue to go on and I have not idea what play we’re doing or what my lines are.
Improv can save you. Once, my fellow actors and I – *six* of us – all simultaneously forgot our place in a party scene. I have no idea how or why, but we knew our characters and were able to vamp our way back to solid ground. And it can do much more. It can teach you how to quickly establish character and setting to an audience. To the non-Method amongst us, that can be important.
So if improv is useful to learn, important to practice, and can save your ass on stage, why don’t I like it?
Well, doing squats is essential to a point guard but I’m not going to pay money to watch Steve Nash do a lower body workout for two hours. Improv’s the same to me: a series of exercises that improve one’s ability to perform. They’re part of the road, not the destination.
So, no. Unless I’m thinking about casting you in something, we’re very close, or I owe you, I’m not going to your improv show.
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Tags: improv
April 14th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
I'm gonna play some conditional devil's advocate here (instead of finishing up my skecth, which is what I should REALLY be doing) .
When improv is bad (or even mediocre) it's painful to watch. When it's good, it's exhilarating.
The problem: most of the improv out there is bad-to-mediocre at best.
The bad stuff comes from people trying to be clever, trying to show off how much quicker and funnier they are than the other cast members, or are just trying to show off this goofy character they do that cracks everyone up at parties.
The good stuff comes from people who are spontaneous, authentic, playful, and can have a good time failing in front of a paying audience. When that happens, improv is more like a sport than scripted theatre – unpredictable and thrilling when a good play is pulled off from the edge of disaster. A brilliant mind performing brilliantly is dull…a brilliant mind making a one-handed catch before something hits the floor and breaks is exhilarating.
The problem is that improv requires no preparation or practice. It's also very addictive and thrilling (it's not for giggles that that the aboutthe creation of "TheatreSports" – the format that inspired "Whose Line" and a chain of Comedy Sportz clubs – is titled "Something Like a Drug"). So people with very little skill and no preparation can jump on stage and get a high from just making stuff up in front of an audience.
I do a lot of improv myself – 6 shows over 3 weekends in March alone,including improvised Tarantino, Improvised Hitchcock, and Improvised Courtroom Drama. The Hitchcock and Courtroom shows were particularly good and very well received. But I'm pretty lucky – the group I play with (BATS Improv) has been around for over 20 years, and many of the founders are still playing, and were honing their chops many years before the group was founded. Two of the consistently-best improv groups I've ever seen (3 For All and True Fiction Magazine) came out of BATS.
I've also done bad shows…REALLY bad shows…shows that I've apologize to my friends for afterward. I rarely invited people to shows when I was learning improv as a performance discipline.
But I have students who inivte everyone they know (Facebook spam a-plenty) every time they get on stage, and bristle when someone gives them a note about something they need to work on. I know groups of ambitious students who produce shows and then get their friends to give them 5 star reviews on Yelp. This helps no one, and gives all improv shows a black eye.
(side note – the 3 For All guys, who have been doing this for decades, still review the tape of every show they did right AFTER the show, and jot down notes…all before their next performance. It's not a coincidence they're THAT good).
So….when it's good, there's nothing like it. When it's bad, it's awful. Scripted theatre varies less from show to show (it's generally either good or bad throughout the run), but improv can change night to night. It's the risk that makes it come alive, and when that happens it can create an electricity that scripted theatre can only approximate.
But it probably won't happen when the guy who just took his first class puts a show together.
April 14th, 2009 at 5:48 pm
Thanks for the thoughts, Ken. I guess my problem is that I've never seen improv that I thought was particularly good, including the US and UK versions of "Whose Line". A few laughs here and there, sure, but overall nothing I didn't think couldn't be *much* improved by taking the results of a good improv session as a first draft at scripted sketches.
But I *am* an old fuddy-duddy.