An Improvised Life

by Alan Arkin

  The groups of three are given specific tasks to accomplish: putting up a tent, taking a boa constrictor out of a packing crate and placing it in a glass tank, bringing a piano through a doorway and into a room, hanging a huge picture. All are activities that require shared physical activity, spontaneous planning, and a lot of consensus. It’s not about making an interesting scene, it’s about accomplishing the physical task. Again, this exercise will fail if people try to be funny or inventive, or embellish. It becomes magical when we see people, still for the most part strangers, struggling to find common ground with imaginary objects and having complicated decisions to make. With this exercise we start to see interesting scenes formed before our eyes, without any attempt to be dramatic or interesting.

  T. S. Eliot said that all drama is about man’s fall from grace and his redemption. I believe that in its most archetypical form this sweeping concept becomes simply addressing a problem and finding a solution. In this exercise we now see the very beginnings of this idea at play.

  It’s too soon for people to feel as if they’re making statements, but in a small way the sense of drama and event has now been subtly added to the mix. A problem needs to be solved. Sometimes we get people who become anxious about not having a character, not having a fix on the dramatic event of the “scene,” not having a strong point of view, and they start to bring a manufactured conflict into play. They decide that they’re going to be argumentative or petulant or bossy, and you can smell that it’s coming out of some fear that “nothing is happening. We’re not getting laughs.” It invariably ruins the scene. This is not to say that legitimate conflicts won’t arise, but these will be the result of ironing out and sharing the specifics of the imaginary objects and the difficulties of the task at hand. Sometimes the conflict will arise out of seeing who has a more realistic handle on what’s happening. These are exciting scenes to watch.

  Looking for conflict onstage is always an easy way to manufacture a false sense of comfort for a performer. It can get you some easy laughs, and it can give the audience a vague sense that something is going to happen, so actors often like to come into a scene belligerently. My understanding is that Elia Kazan instructed his actors to “look for the fight.” I hope this wasn’t true. In the first place, I think most people are not looking for fights. I think most people go out of their way to avoid fights. And secondly, it’s not an actor’s job to go around looking for fights (unless he’s specifically playing a belligerent character, or a psychopath). It’s an actor’s job to explore all the aspects of his character, as outlined and hinted at by the author. Finding the fight might be one aspect, or not. It depends on the play and the author’s sensibilities. In the early days of Second City we fell victim to that hostility in scene after scene to such an extent that one day during a rehearsal Paul Sills bellowed out, “I’m sick of this damned hostility! For the next two weeks I don’t want to see anything but agreement onstage!” Shocked, we tried to comply, gingerly at first, and then after a couple of days of testing the water we found that there was gold in the instruction. We found there was no way in the world to avoid conflict in a scene where two people had different agendas, or even when two people had the same agenda but different vantage points. And what happened was that in watching people attempt to get along, everything became subtler. We’d have to watch the scenes more carefully and pay attention to the nuances. We’d see all the same tensions displayed, but now instead of yelling and rolling eyes and tapping feet we’d see subtle body language and hear difficult and strained pauses, because the truth of the matter is that in all human dealings, no matter how positive, there are tensions. The scenes got so much better, and the word about this new way of working got out so quickly that there are now whole schools of improvisation that insist that you’re not allowed to say “no” on the stage! This, of course, is another form of insanity, because if theater is about human relationships, which is all it is, then you have to include “no” in there too. But let’s throw in a couple of “yes’s” every once in a while, for variety.

  Before the fifth exercise I talk about the two tools that participants will be using for the rest of the workshop. These tools are the basis of every good performance they have ever seen or ever will see, and even more importantly, in my opinion, they inform a successful life as well, but we don’t talk about that.

  The first tool is intention, and once understood, the deal is that you never enter the playing area without your character having an intention, a specific job to do, a function to perform. This accomplishes several things. First, it makes it impossible to have stage fright or to be self-conscious. There isn’t time. You have something to accomplish. Second, it allows you to be alive without self-judgment. You now have something to do that relates to other people, and making clever jokes or trying to be “interesting” will get in the way of what you are trying to accomplish.

  The second tool works in conjunction with the first. The intention you pick should make you feel something. It should give you an emotional context, which then becomes the second tool. This emotional context will give you a felt connection to the character you are playing, so that when you go into the scene you won’t be entering with an intellectual idea but with the sense of a character. These two tools, used with intuition, are the matrix from which everything you do in the playing area comes alive. It takes time and patience to learn how to sense these two tools at work with each other, how to play with them, and even when you do they won’t work all the time, but then that’s the problem with creative work. Once we think we have a handle on something, we change, and the change requires a new way of examining the problem.

  The sixth exercise goes back to a more intense version of the tableau, and for the first time the two tools, intention and the connecting feeling state it puts you in, become something to work with. In this exercise we will have six, sometimes eight people working in a scene. They have graduated from being extras in a movie to being supporting players, which means that there can be several conversations going on at the same time, but with no one trying to dominate the scene or take over. (That’s the stars’ job, and the stars aren’t here.) Our settings are, for example, a unisex beauty salon on a busy afternoon, or the kitchen of an expensive restaurant at dinnertime, or the emergency room of a hospital on New Year’s Eve—places where a lot of different activities can occur simultaneously and yet still have a common thread. Again, people enter the playing area in the order I’ve given them, not jumping into the mix until they have something specific to contribute that will not obscure someone else’s activity. And it’s with this exercise that miracles sometimes occur. If the group is sensitive, and people have their antennae out, these scenes can go on for twenty minutes, often with an extraordinary sense of place and tone, and spontaneously contain complex patterns of movement, levels of motion and flow, that if one had directed them would have taken days of meticulous blocking rehearsals in order to reach.

  In this exercise I occasionally just watch the patterns of movement unfolding in front of me, and marvel at the cohesiveness and beauty achieved, without the groups having had one minute of rehearsal. When I check the faces of those watching, they’re the faces of kids at Christmas, or on the Fourth of July, marveling at what is in front of them. Two or three, sometimes four conversations are going on at the same time, the entire stage is being used, with movement everywhere, and we can follow every bit of it. We in the audience are able to have intimate relationships with a half-dozen characters simultaneously without becoming confused.

  It’s the difference that I see between chaos and anarchy. Chaos is beautiful. It’s the way nature works, endlessly flowing, changing, all the parts bursting with their own richness, their own individuality, and yet constantly in touch with everything else that’s taking place around it. Anarchy is every man for himself, when the individual is not only at the center of the universe but is the only center of the universe. The difference between chaos and anarchy is evident immediately.


  When there is, within the individual, a consciousness of the group, we are watching fractals at work—actors who have taken on, individually, and in reduced size, the characteristics of the larger experience. It’s no longer theater but nature, and it’s right here that I often marvel at the shallowness of so much of our theater and films. How little is demanded of us. It’s as if most directors and writers are sitting next to us, pushing, pulling, turning our heads, focusing our eyes and demanding what we are to see. “Here, here, look over here!” they call out. “Listen to this! Pay attention to this line, this piece of movement!”

  With this exercise all of that changes for me, and I think for most of the others watching, and what is before our eyes is a rich, complex, layered event populated with people mostly without theatrical training who have known each other for about four hours. Watching this exercise changes my sense of how much can be taken in and assimilated by an audience that is not being berated by anyone’s unspoken diatribe on “what’s important here.” I can only attribute this clarity and richness to the unconscious attention that the actors are paying to each other, and to where they are in the playing area—the sense that they are complete individuals and at the same time parts of a whole. If I am watching this exercise and I see that the movement is getting messy, if there’s a traffic jam, I know it’s because someone has come in with a character that doesn’t work. The actor doesn’t have a specific action or intention. At this point I’ll stop the scene, spend some time with the actor, figure out where his intention was off, and we go back to where we were. And then the scene almost invariably self-corrects, and we’re watching fractals at work again. After this extraordinary display of cohesion and freedom, we start tightening the reins. The next big chunk of time gets devoted to twocharacter scenes with very specific built-in intentions.

  I have what I consider to be two main functions during the workshop. The first is to be supportive and not judgmental. To allow people to play. To fail. It’s improvisation. It’s going to fail sometimes.

  My second function is to help people get out of their heads. Their clever place. I can see it when it’s happening. The truth of the matter is, everyone can. When it’s pointed out to the actors, they know it. And so do their scene-partners. And so do the people who are watching. It’s usually experienced by the scene-partners as their own sense of awkwardness or failure, a general discomfort. Those of us who are watching the scene settle into an analytical objectivity, our sense of engagement diminishes, and we, like the person onstage, retreat into our heads.

  I also sense it in myself kinetically. My body moves back into my chair. My sense of involvement diminishes. When actors are fully present my whole body moves forward toward the players and the scene. Something is happening. When I feel that actors have started “playwriting,” working in their heads and not with the people in front of them, I stop and I say gently, hopefully without judgment, “Let’s back up.” I ask them to tell me about the character and what they are looking for. As they start to describe the character and tell me the thing they are trying to accomplish, they almost invariably relax and start to move effortlessly into the emotional state that they have avoided during the scene. In explaining their intention to me, they drop the performance and make real contact. And as I feel their emotional connection with their character start to take hold, I gently stop them and I tell them to stay emotionally exactly in that place, and we start the scene again. Almost invariably the scene is deeper, more spontaneous, and more connected. I’ve tried to figure out the psychology of this process, but it’s remained mysterious. It seems that as someone is trying to explain the emotional state of the character, it allows room for that state to present itself. Often when people begin a scene, in order to “communicate” they try to rev up the emotions and start selling something they don’t yet own, which I think just crystallizes and deadens them, and makes the performance intellectual and selfinvolved. In explaining it to me, in order to make me understand, they are forced to relate to me, and this seems to give the emotional state a place to freely flow, unimpeded from the unconscious. Whatever the inner mechanism is, it works. It makes the scene come alive for the actors, for their partners, and for the audience.

  The improv workshops are themselves improvisations. The nature of the group, its specific identity, its personality, its special abilities and resistances will often necessitate new ways of working. Very often a new exercise comes out of a workshop, sometimes a whole new series of exercises. I never plan for this to happen, it just does.

  I did a workshop a year ago in Toronto mostly with alumni of the Second City troupe who lived there. It was an unusually bright and cohesive group of people and we had a three-day session, which for some reason turns out to be the optimum length of time for a workshop. By the third day a deep and comfortable bond had developed between all of us, and in one of the breaks a younger actor came over and asked if we could talk for a few minutes. I said of course, and he told me that he had great trouble being positive onstage. He could play anything negative, but it didn’t seem possible for him to portray anything joyous. He asked me if I had any advice, and I immediately had a thought. “Can we talk about this in the group? Would you be comfortable with that?” He said sure, so we went back and I said, “Sean has trouble being positive onstage. Let’s create a situation where he’s got to be positive.” I told Sean to leave the room for a minute. When he’d gone I said, “Let’s throw a surprise birthday party for him. When he comes back in the room, shower him with gifts and praise and we’ll see what happens.”

  I found Sean, told him to come into the room, and the entire group, all twenty of them, jumped into immediate action. They sang “Happy Birthday,” they showered him with gifts, they plied him with his favorite food, they sang his praises and within a few minutes Sean had no choice but to lighten up. Within another few minutes he was beaming, and the mission that the rest of the group had taken on, the action that they’d chosen, was working like a charm. The joy was infectious. It ran through all of us, and Sean had an experience onstage he’d never had before in his life.

  Everyone sat back down, but they were all fired up. “Does anyone else want to try something?” I asked. Greg, another young man in the group, raised his hand. “I have trouble taking charge onstage,” he said. “I can’t take on any authority. I’d like to work on that.” “Let’s do it,” I said. “We’re in Detroit, you’re the foreman in an automobile plant.”

  With no discussion, no time for thought or preparation, there was an assembly line in front of me. There were five guys working on the line and a chorus of people acting as cars in front of them. It was like magic. The guys on the line were all goofing off and it was up to Greg to whip the operation into shape. Within minutes he was running the plant, barking orders, pushing people around, telling everyone what to do; it was again an experience he’d never had before.

  Other hands went up. A young woman said she’d wanted to be a ballerina. She’d had an accident and could no longer dance; it was a part of her life she felt she’d never resolved. We jumped into action. We took her backstage to her dressing room, immediately after her debut as prima ballerina at the Met. We surrounded her with reporters, with fans, her family, the other dancers, all praising her to the skies and she basked in glory.

  The afternoon went on like that, and I spent most of it crying tears of joy at the extraordinary degree of love and cooperation that everyone showered on each other. It was a glorious day.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I live in New Mexico and was asked recently if I would work with some of the Native American youth, out of the Pueblos, a lot of whom are floundering and lost. For reasons I’ve never understood I’ve had a feeling of connection with this culture my whole life, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with them and perhaps get closer to them. My wife Suzanne and I agreed to do a oneday workshop at The Institute for American Indian Arts, a local school that’s geared to meet the needs of
the Native American population of the state.

  Normally I plan my workshops for two or three days, with two seeming to be the minimal time that anything transformative can take place, but they wanted to do it quickly and I agreed to one day. I didn’t know what could be accomplished in that short a time, but I thought we’d give it a try.

  Suzanne and I showed up at nine; people started drifting in about nine-thirty. And we learned our first lesson about the culture: Punctuality is not a trait that belongs to these people who are, I suppose, still governed to some extent by the time sense of their ancestors, the sun being the gauge of where one should be and when.

  Around ten A.M. things started to come together. As our session began there was an easy compliance with the exercises, but no real sense of abandon or exploration. Not much joy. I felt more like an employer than a workshop leader. I kept augmenting the exercises, trying to loosen things up—nothing worked. At the end of each exercise I asked if there were any questions, any comments. None came.

  By twelve-thirty only one scene had emerged with any element of personal investment. It was a simple transaction scene. I use this exercise to introduce the idea of tasks and objectives. The setting given to the actors was a pawnshop. The young man who was assigned to come into the shop came in with a necklace to pawn. He made it clear, not by anything particular that he said, but by the gentle, loving way he handled the necklace, that the object had been in his family for generations, that he cared for it deeply, and that he was having trouble parting with it. The pawnshop owner was a tall beautiful Inuit woman who decided to play the role as someone who was generous and loving. It became clear as the scene went on that although she had feelings for the young man’s situation, the necklace was not an object she could use. She told him finally that she could give him enough money to scrape by for a while, and offered him the promise that she would keep the necklace hidden away for a longer period than usual in order to prevent anyone from buying it.