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Mar
2nd
Fri
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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

10:18am - Comments (View)


Feb
10th
Fri
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Dramatic Improv, part 2

mynerdyimprovblog:

I feel that saying “I want to do dramatic improv” is a useless thing to say because, well, what does it mean? What does that mean, do dramatic improv? 

This is a good question because in last Friday’s post I didn’t really define what I think of as “dramatic improv”. I made an (unreasonable) assumption that most readers would be familiar with It’s Not You, It’s Me (INYIM, from here on in) but we’ve picked up a few new readers since we started the guest blog series and I’ve never really written up what the show was and what we were aiming for. So over the next few Fridays I want to discuss what I mean by dramatic improv, audience expectations and some details about our show INYIM.

What do I mean by dramatic improv?

Personally (currently?), this means an improvised play with a single narrative structure (eg: not a Harold), a set of recurring characters (one actor for each character / one character for each actor) and working within a genre (without the intent to parody or do comedy within the genre). It’s basically a play but there’s no script so I consider it improvised. It’s not meant to be primarily comedic so I consider it dramatic (if someone has a better word for it, please let me know).

Of course we can have dramatic moments within a comedy show. And, yes, as the above author says:

Drama means that you have heightened stakes with clear, personal, grounded repercussions. Which to me means that we should always be going in to our improv ready to play dramatically. 

I totally agree. I LOVE those moments onstage but those moments occur within the context of shows that have the goal of comedy. Ultimately, the audience is there to see comedy and while comedy can indeed by well served by drama, people are there to laugh.

Tangent Alert! Drama and comedy often go hand in hand. Even a cursory study of Shakespeare will illustrate this principle in the hands of a master. Good comedies have dramatic moments to establish who the characters are and their relationships. Good dramas will have comedy to relieve or reset the tension before building it back up again. 

In dramatic improv, we prefer to aim for the latter. Comedy is not forbidden but it’s not the goal and if we never see any laughs, then that’s ok (but, boy, that would be a heavy show). INYIM (with Kirsten Rasmussen and Dan Jeannotte as leads and myself as director) was always structured to be a tragedy. It was a tragedy that we tried to earn through building up and then tearing down. The three of us wanted to challenge ourselves and apply our improv skills to a dramatic story.

So when I say I want to do dramatic improv (or, my preferred term, unscripted theatre), I’m talking about doing a show that is dramatic in nature from start to finish. It’s a show where the audience knows they are coming to see a drama (I’ll talk more about the importance of audience expectations next week). I’m not talking about a scene within a comedy show that is dramatic or taking a dramatic approach to a comedy scene but a full embrace of improvised theatre where the whole point of the exercise is to move people to something other than laughter.

- vinny

(via improvisorsimprovisor)
9:07am - Comments (View)