the Montreal Improv blog

Dramatic Improv, part 4

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]

For the final part of this series (you may now descend from your tenterhooks), I just want to talk about the structure of the tragic show we mounted last year. I’ve never been one to develop a format and then protect it like the Coca-Cola formula. Part of the beauty of watching a Harold is in understanding the structure of a Harold.

It’s Not You, It’s Me was designed to be an improvised play with a simple tragic structure. I worked with Dan Jeannotte and Kirsten Rasmussen, two of the most experienced improvisers in Montreal who also both have a lot of experience in scripted theatre. For us, the show was the story of a personal, intimate relationship that ends in failure. It was something we felt was fairly universal and it appealed to us that it was explicitly the opposite of a comedy.

The show had three acts:

• Act One: Courtship 
• This is where our protagonists meet and fall in love. They forgive all flaws and the tone is very sweet/optimistic. Not only are the couple falling in love but the audience should be in love with the couple as well. Comedy here is powerful. Your actors need to be charming and charismatic; cast well.

• Act Two: Commitment 
• Things are going well. The couple binds to each other more and more closely until we reach maximum commitment. Maybe they move in together, start a business, get married, have a baby (any one of these is sufficient). Steps are taken to raise the stakes so when it falls apart, we fall a long way down. The things that will be problems (but are not yet!) are brought in if they have not been introduced in Act One

• Act Three: The Fall
• The cracks appear and/or adversity strikes. Both partners want the relationship to work but the audience starts to see how this can’t work for either party. It escalates to brutal honesty about the flaws in the relationship. And then the relationship finally ends. We need to see the corpse of the relationship. Perhaps there’s a post-break-up scene.

And that’s the general structure of the show. There are lots more details but I’m keeping it short. It ran about 70 minutes but I think with more practice we could get it down to 60 minutes. I think a 50 minute set would be the absolute minimum. A show like this takes time.

One more detail that we added (but isn’t essential, it was a stylistic/amplifying choice) are a pair of opening and closing scenes. It was a cute pair of mirrored bookends. The opening scene flashes forward and the closing scene flashes backwards and we used lighting cues to indicate this (but I think we could have done a better job of it).

The opening scene of the show is set just before the end of the relationship. It shows the couple in jeopardy. Not at their worst because we want to save that for the climax of the dissolution but things are clearly not good. This scene sets the tone that you’re not watching a comedy. It should be difficult/uncomfortable to watch. Tricky because we’ve established nothing (it’s the very first scene!) so being specific needs to be done carefully.

The closing scene comes after we’ve seen the terrible conclusion to a lovely relationship and the damage they do to one another. It flashes back towards the beginning of the relationship to a particularly sweet and close moment between the two. We wanted to show how far the couple has fallen and what has been lost on the journey. Marc later commented to me that he thought it was reminder of why we expose ourselves to such heartbreak, which I also thought was a nice way of looking at it.

And that’s it. Not sure there’s much else for me to talk about. I hope that illuminates a little bit of our thinking behind the show and how the arc of our story ran. I think you could do this show a hundred times and still be surprised. Each relationship is unique and fails in its own way. Also note, this show is horribly draining to workshop and after a show the performers need lots of cheering up so have hugs and/or chocolate and/or wine handy. If you have any questions, ask in the comments or in the Ask Us Anything sidebar.

- vinny

Guest Writer: John Ratliff (Austin)

John Ratliff teaches improv at ColdTowne Theatre. He is a graduate of ColdTowne Conservatory and has trained at iO Chicago and the Annoyance Theatre. When he’s not performing, teaching, coaching, or discussing improv, Ratliff can be found editing copy, officiating weddings, eating some kind of Mexican breakfast, or lying on the floor listening to records.

My friend Michael Jastroch and I were talking about how a lot of the dramatic improv we’d seen (and, in my case, performed) over the past couple of years was more like melodramatic improv. We both like serious theater, but some of what we’d seen felt contrived and stagey instead of open and authentic. Was this, we wondered, just a function of bad acting? Or was it proof that improv only works as comedy? 

Neither, I think. What I suspect we saw was a slightly different version of a perennial improv pitfall: selling out the scene. 

We’ve all heard the note “Stop trying to be funny.” The more we perform, the more we realize that a joke, however hilarious, is usually not worth destroying the reality of the scene. (Well, *most* of us come to realize that.) 

The same thing happens in dramatic improv … except that instead of going for the joke, we’re going for some kind of emotional payoff. 

We probably get cut a little more slack for this than we should be. We’ve all been so indoctrinated with the idea of not going for the easy joke that we start equating “not funny” with “authentic.” 

But what both situations have in common is that the improviser is doing something based solely on what kind of reaction she’s expecting to get from the audience instead of paying attention to what’s happening in the moment.   

Of course, only the improviser herself can say whether she was selling out the scene. The same move (e.g., tearing up a note without reading it) might spring from a spontaneous realization (“I’m just done with him”) or from a contrived attempt to manipulate the audience’s emotions (“I thought not reading the note made it sadder”).   

What Jastroch pointed out is that if you’ve decided to be dramatic, you’ll start ignoring obviously funny things about the scene in order to pump up the pathos, in exactly the same way that you start ignoring everything except the joke in a game-heavy scene. Either way, you’re no longer listening to what the scene has to tell you.  

Aren’t we always telling our students that real life can be hilarious if we just pay sufficient attention to the details? So doesn’t it stand to reason that a realistically played scene, no matter how serious, might have some comic elements in it? 

Last year I was cast in a show called Austin Secrets in which the scenes were based on secrets submitted by the audience. The director had explicitly told us he wanted a couple of serious scenes in each show. But what we found was that — with very few exceptions — even scenes played completely seriously started getting laughs sooner or later. Part of it was just the release of tension in uncomfortable situations, but part of it was the stubborn fact that comedy and tragedy are really just two ways of looking at the exact same material. I think we’ve gotten so used to deciding which one we’re doing and aiming for it that we forget about a third possbility: playing as truthfully as possible and letting the audience make up their own minds which it is. 

My mother, who is generally very supportive of my improv, didn’t really like Austin Secrets. In particular, she didn’t like the serious scenes, because “I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel.” 

Exactly. 

Previous guests: Jill Bernard, Andrea Del Campo, Etan Muskat, Rick Andrews, Kristen Schier, Andy Eninger, Jeroen Van Dyck, Remy Bertrand, Caspar Shjelbred, Sean Michaels, Kareem Badr, RobYn Slade, Ian Parizot, Rachel Klein, Dave Morris, Alex Wlasenko, From the old blog

Dramatic Improv, part 3

[Part One] [Part Two]

Part of the hazard of doing dramatic or non-comedic improv is that it invariably uses the word “improv”. (Aside: I actually dislike the this term I’ve been using: “Dramatic Improv”, but I started with it so let’s finish with it.) For the general public, improv (if they’ve even heard the word) means comedy. Doing an improvised show without comedy would be like doing a stand-up show without comedy. The very first obstacle to doing a show like this was: how do we advertise this thing to people who barely know improv or, if they do, expect comedy?

Setting an audience’s expectations is important here. If people come to see our show expecting “improv”, they will be disappointed. Obviously, there are people doing non-comedy improv but it’s either a tiny percentage or not called improv but it’s 0% in Montreal (not even in French, to my knowledge). I’ve seen many terms thrown around online to try and encompass what I’m talking about with Dramatic Improv: Unscripted Theatre, Improvised Theatre and so on. In Austin, where they have an Improvised Play Festival (*sigh of envy*), I believe the term is Narrative Improv but that also encompasses comedy.

We went with the title It’s Not You, It’s Me: An Improvised Tragedy. The first part described the theme of the show, a break-up (and was a play on the actors’ previous collaboration, You & Me and Me & You). The second part let people know that it had no script and that it was quite the opposite of a comedy. Brain surgery, right?

Letting the public know what kind of improv you’re doing when you’re veering away from comedy is essential and fighting the idea that “improv” doesn’t necessarily mean comedy is an uphill fight that is unlikely to be won. But I think it is a worthwhile effort to try and push improvised theatre away from comedy and finding the label/marketing for it is just one small aspect of it.

- vinny