Weaving The Weird Into The Greater Pattern

I have been in a lot of scenes and I am of the school that we must always take what happens on stage and fold it into the greater pattern we are making. It is always said in improvisation that a master weaver can weave any mistakes into the tapestry so that it becomes a part of it and because of this there is never a mistake.

I believed this always but I ran into a situation in a two person show the other day that just couldn't move forward because there were no honest reactions, no real people,  I found myself constantly trying to react honestly but because everything I received was so insane it made it so I was quickly just being astounded every line.

The audience grew bored because the world built made it so that there was nothing to be surprised at any more. The two characters on stage were too strange for the audience to buy into. The audience can buy into anything if we give them some actual people who speak like people. Even if we find these characters have quirks later the audience is in because you did the work of bringing them to a reality that humans can understand.

Does that mean I can't play aliens on stage? Of course I can. I just have to give the audience aliens that have humanity in them. They have human problems like feeding their family, dealing with their wife being mad about a dirty spaceship (even if she is inside of a host body that she will be bursting forth from), or losing the 10 Life Partnership rings he wears on all 10 of his arms.  We can play weird and strange but the character is still a thin veil, a filter though which the improviser can bring the comedy and tragedy of the human condition to life.

Back to the show where I had too much weird happening above and the audience was checked out. In this show I really remembered the cardinal rule of my improv is that every rule can be broken if needed to forward the piece. All improv rules are just guide lines. As we get better at it we are able to bend and break while still being commited. If we are improvising well we shouldn't even get to a point where the audience is checking out but in this case we did.

In order to jump start the show I had to call bull shit on some of the stuff that had occurred to bring us to a workable place.  It was the weirdest thing I have ever done on stage. I took what my partner and I had built, turned most of it into lies and kept the basic grounding points of location (A Dentist Office waiting room) and why we were there ( to get a yearly check up).  We were 8 minutes into a set that was a mono scene, the audience was checking out, and my improviser brain told me to trust in this course of action and not judge it even though it went against everything I knew.

Once we cleared the rubbish we started getting laughs, we still incorporated those ideas but now it was why we said those lies. We found the real scared people who were just trying to impress each other through weird fake stories and found out they both had a lot in common as very pathetic lonely folks that had found each other.

The show went on and the audience was in again and we had a great set. It was something I definitely could not have done even 3 years ago in an improv scene. My scene partner was grateful as they had felt it too and were glad to have a way to restart even though we were in a single scene for 22 minutes. 

Yes, we must always except our mistakes and weave them into the greater tapestry  but it does not mean we have to trap ourselves. Some times you have to refind your footing and incorporate that refinding of footing as part of the greater tapestry.  Weave in everything and there will never be mistakes, only discovery.

-Jeff Quintana
Artistic Director
Villain Theater