Will Luera is the Artistic Director of ImprovBoston, former Artistic Director of the Lowell Comedy Festival, former Mainstage Director at ImprovAsylum, and Artistic Associate of the Chicago Improv Festival.
The Physics of Improv I - All things being equal
When I teach improvisation, I often use physics as my metaphor. I was a physics major in college and continue to geek out about science on my off-time. It is still a topic I am very passionate about. Having a theater that sits in between Harvard and MIT is certainly helpful as well.
When teaching classes about “The Physics of Improv”, I often focus on the “gravitational pull” two characters can have on each other as defined by physical distance or about the “Conservation of Energy” in a scene. The article I’ve written here is for a class called “All things being equal” which focuses on scenes at an “atomic” level. I developed this class as a way to explore choices being made in the pursuit of the comedy of contrast.
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Contrast as a form of comedy has a long tradition and has a very simple form of execution that is almost intuitive for many of us. The contrast of a scene can manifest itself in a variety of different ways whether it be via stagecraft (physical, vocal, emotional, status) or as a comparision to different sets of facts (within the world on stage, the real world we actually live in).
Most of the choices I see fall within emotional contrasts. For example,
- “If I’m angry about A, then you’re angry about B” OR
- “If I’m angry about A, then you’re happy that I’m angry about A.”
While these are valid scene start choices, I think we can make different choices to explore the deeper contrast between two characters and, in turn, find larger truths.
Now, as we all know, nuclear energy is the potential energy of the particles inside an atomic nucleus. The particles are bound together by various forces and when the particles are liberated from each other, a larger amount of energy is released. My goal is for actors to be able to release that large amount of energy deep within the scene.
The way I workshop this is by starting to think of our characters as equal on all major personality traits and characteristics. One popular example I use is asking actors to start a scene as two happy fifth-grade teachers in a teachers lounge (or some other occupation and location) and neither of them is allowed to talk about the room or the building that they’re in. With this direction I’ve neutralized three major points of emotional contention (point of view, status, location). It’s amazing what begins to emerge with this little bit of direction.
Suddenly, the actors have to explore the deeper specifics of the relationship before they can find the contrast. As a director, I’ll sometimes find myself coraling actors “back to center” as they reach out for an argument based on the three contention points I noted above. By keeping the actors on track with their characters in this way, they continue to explore the relation and then, at some point, a minor contrast will be found which will completely open up the scene and release the true potential energy of the relationship.
In a recent run of the example above, about thirty seconds in, the two actors discovered that one of their teacher characters liked using regular pencils and the other preferred mechanical pencils. This small detail spoke to the “greater truth” of the scene and within seconds the potential energy was released and the scene took off. In a very humourous way, we learned about the traditional vs. contemporary differences of these characters. Once the potential energy of this relationship has been released, allow the actors to pull in additional facts that were once restricted. How does this “truth” reflect off of the location they’re at, the jobs that they hold, etc.
An interesting by-product of this exercise is that by setting up a scene that neutralizes the three common points of contention, you end up with a new set of scenes that were often less explored. Teachers don’t need to talk about school or students; Police officers don’t need to talk about perps or donuts; and janitors don’t need to talk about cleaning supplies. You’ll begin to notice that by forcing the actors to look deeper for the contrast, a more interesting variety of scenes begins to emerge that are not just funnier but also more real.
Contrasts is a given in comedy and can be seen in almost all forms: commedia, vaudeville, sitcoms, stand-up and most improv scenes. By allowing most characteristics of your characters to be equal, it forces you to not invent differences but to explore who your character really is and how that interacts with who your scene partner’s character really is. As you go through that exploration, you start peeling away the external layers of your character to see what’s inside… at an “atomic” level. And it’s at that level that the most potential for an explosive scene lives.
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