An Acceptable Practice

Last night Joe and I made the unofficial theme of practice “Acceptance”. It’s part of our scheme to develop a curriculum around Truth in Comedy. Acceptance isn’t the first chapter, but it’s the easiest one to jump into, and took the least planning on our part.

I think the biggest success of the practice was playing Conflict Scenes. While we might have strayed a bit from the rules of the game, I still saw a lot of amazing scenes. What happened in our scenes wasn’t what I was expecting, or thought was supposed to happen, but it was nonetheless impressive.

The way Conflict Scenes is supposed to work is, when given an argument inspiring suggestion, to deftly sidestep the obvious argument in favor of a more interesting scene. The intention is that because arguments stagnate a scene and are a breeding ground for denial, a superior improvisor would be able to see beyond the argument and create a scene where the actors work together for something greater.

What we did right: None of our scenes devolved into the pointless back and forth of an argument. Also, I never felt the need to end a scene because it sucked.

What we did wrong: We took the suggestion as a theme, rather than a starting point. All of our scenes still revolved around the initial conflict. This might have been an issue of not knowing if we were allowed to go outside the realm of our suggestion.

What rocked my socks off: We did not turn our scenes into arguments, we instead pushed our conflict into subtext, or made the conflict so large that it became a character relationship, rather than a moment.

Amanda and Ben did a scene with the suggestion “Last seat on the bus”. Ben played a young doctor, and Amanda played a sick pregnant woman. The scene began and Amanda immediately took the higher status, all but forcing Ben into the seat. The scene then became a game of making Ben feel as guilty as possible about taking the seat. Both actors played the game, and they avoided the obvious argument about the seat. Ben only offered the seat perhaps three times in the scene, and only as a sort of aside, a reminder to the audience that they were aware of the obvious argument, and were not, under any circumstances going to go there. Ben would say “Well, at the very least you should take my seat.” and Amanda would respond “No”. That’s not denial, Ben asked the question knowing that she would say no. I bet if she had said “Yes, thank you.” The scene would have been over.

After the break we (the newbies) learned QVC. I love this game for it’s physiological effect. It builds up so much tension in your body, and when it releases, you can’t help but lose some of the other tension you’ve build up throughout the day.