The Star (Dare To Dream)

The Star (Dare To Dream)

When I was in high school we formed an improv comedy troupe called The Sausage Works. As a burgeoning impresario I was fairly decent at booking gigs and even creating swag, like buttons. We even got airtime on a public access show, a program of which, not coincidentally, I was a co-producer.

What I spent much less time on was developing our craft, rehearsal, or being in any way amusing. Ours was a terrible improv comedy troupe. Good name, terrible improv. Should have put that on a shirt.

In college I was a member of the improv comedy troupe, Rupture, and by that time I had taken some classes and had at the very least the benefit of experience. (More on that here.) One of our crew suggested a wide variety of theater games we could play that would make for good comedy, including Party Quirks, Radio Dial and Singing The Blues.

Once during winter break in late 1988, this same friend suggested we all see the preeminent Cleveland troupe Giant Portions, which at that time included such notable performers as Lisa Lewis, Jeff Blanchard and Marc Moritz.

We all had a fun time, but I was taken aback and a little disappointed to discover that every single theater game we employed in our performance were from Giant Portions’ act. All of this original work I thought we were doing, and we were just copying off another company.

Now, I know that good improvisation is not about the structure you use but how you work with it. All games are merely tools to facilitate spontaneous, honest discovery and emotional reaction.

Having said that, there is nothing spontaneous after thirty years of Party Quirks. I saw Cabaret Dada three times, almost five years apart each time, and though the faces had changed, each time they played Party Quirks and I gotta tell ya, Tourette’s Syndrome wasn’t actually funny the first time.

Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy improvisation, and improv comedy, and have actively sought out long-form improv, when it is available. No one has made a run at it in Cleveland since Dobama’s Night Kitchen.

In my own way, I militantly keep working to push young people into the form at our annual summer theater camp. My journey to Alaska meant missing the second week of our annual Camp Theater (for which I am extremely grateful to my employer) but two weeks ago I had the opportunity to lead a team of middle and high schoolers through a series of basic storytelling exercises, the goal being to be able to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle and end using monologue, two person scenes and a conclusion incorporating an entire team of four.

This year it was much more like a competition, as each of four teams watched each other work and one was declared “winner” by acclamation. They also squared off performing “Jump” improv (competing to see how many different scenarios could they begin within two minutes) and then volunteers played First Line, Last Line with surprising success. It was a very focused group this year, they took the work very seriously. We created our little nightclub, this time called The Star (Dare To Dream) and had a great morning, just performing improv for each other before moving onto the Shakespearean splash scenes for their families that afternoon.

The Star (Dare To Dream). That was the name they chose for their nightclub. One suggested we call it The Star, another added, "No, no -- call it The Star ... dare to dream!"  That's the crew we had this year. They were awesome.

Scared Scriptless: Weekend at Bernie's Sketch

Last Wednesday at Last Frontier, there was a party following Valerie’s performance, and so no Fringe performance was scheduled to take place in the Mariner’s Room. Instead, three guys from the Anchorage improv troupe Scared Scriptless -- John, Warren and Will -- staged an impromptu show, and many went along to see that.

We only caught the last twenty minutes or so, but I really enjoyed the style of sketch they were employing. The physical Weekend at Bernie’s scenario notwithstanding (though that is certainly hysterical the first time you see it) most of the work was cerebral, much of it steeped in argument and counter-argument and the kind of insult humor which works best among aggressively competitive friends.

These were very different games to me, just stepping out to interrupt each other (what we called Give & Take in The Realistic World) to riff on a subject offered by the audience. Objection is a game I will certainly be stealing for use in the future. I had the chance to walk and talk with John my last night in town and he said it’s rare for Scared Scriptless to perform with a skeleton troupe of three.

My fictional improv comedy team The Times (from This Is The Times) is also a three-person company, and I have dithered about whether to rewrite the entire thing with additional company members, but there is a magic in three, especially when you are trying to keep your story neat and compact. Watching three guys ping back and forth like that was particularly inspiring.

One of the things which is most challenging in coaching teenagers to improv is encouraging them to trust their brains, to speak without fear, and most of all to trust each other. We are conditioned from birth basically to be assholes. Every tweener program on the Disney Channel conditions our kids to point and laugh at others, to mock and dismiss. This is not unique to that network, but when my daughter began to watch their programs she immediately began to model the behavior.

The family mutually agreed she had to stop watching Jessie if she wanted to remain a good person.

Yes, we have the opportunity to play fools on stage, but the players need to be there for each other for it all to work. This year the program at The Star (Dare To Dream) included a great many scenarios where people were helping each other to achieve some bizarre goal, and those scenes worked best. It was the scenarios where campers couldn’t separate their personal feelings from the characters they were playing, and engaged in direct conflict that the scenes fell apart.

Our improv guru at Ohio University was the head of the Masters in Directing program, George Sherman. He had been a member of The Compass in St. Louis. You could count on him to attend every single Bobcats basketball game, the man was fanatic about basketball. Because basketball is the sport most aligned with the skills necessary for improvisation.

Come get your Love.

He put it this way; football is like rehearsing a play. You get to experiment and play around in practice, developing a rigid set of scenes or plays which you then perform pretty much the way you rehearsed them on game day. In basketball the practice is drilling the structure of the game in rehearsal, but on the day you trust your instincts and your teammates and anything goes. That’s improv.

Big parade today downtown for the greatest improv troupe in America. #AllIn216 #GoCAVS

The Realistic World

When asked what made him qualified to criticize theater, former Plain Dealer theater critic Tony Brown was fond of saying, “I got the job.”

If you were to ask what made me feel qualified to create a long-form improv comedy, when I had received little to no training in the artform, I could have said much the same thing. I took two courses in college, and I had seen a few club and long-form improv shows.

I shared a detailed history of my education learning through trial and error in a post last summer.

Following the inaugural Dobama’s Night Kitchen production, Bummer, we went straight into rehearsals for The Realistic World.

In 1995 the first so-called “reality” show, MTV’s The Real World had wrapped up its London season, and after four years of throwing seven young people together to show “what happens” (nothing did) the producers were about to begin forcing things to happen. They stopped casting normal people who possessed things like dignity and shame, and started dragging in sluts and assholes.

Impressed as I was with the narratives of the early seasons, especially San Francisco which featured six very likeable people and one dickface who the rest immediately kicked out of the apartment, because that’s what you do. The idea of our performance would be for seven actors to assume alter-egos which they would carry from performance to performance, week after week. A few additional actors (we called them “ringers”) would play pizza guys, waiters, family members or boyfriends, whatever was suddenly called for.

Meet Christine

This first iteration, The Realistic World 1, featured Amanda, Christine, Dan, Erin, Jeff, Marty and Tia - their real names. The setting was a fictional rental house in Tremont (this was confusing, some audience members wanted to know where in Tremont we were performing) and we would use some word association and ask the audience some questions at the start of the show to act as subject matter for the story.

Yes. The very first performance, as host, I asked an audience member to share the worst thing that had happened to him recently and he said he came straight to the theater from his uncle’s funeral. I was literally speechless. I have it on video, I couldn’t say anything. That was AMAZING.

We kept the framework basic, each performance started with a house meeting where all seven actors would share issues inspired by the audience suggestions, and then break into two or three person “give-and-take” scenes (we called them "Change Ups") cutting from one scene to another, and the action (ideally) would build.

Finally the first half of the performance would end with the “Miracle Scene” which took place in one agreed upon space, and into which an unlimited number of actors could appear. In this scene, it was very important for actors on the stage to give-and-take focus, so though you did not necessarily leave, only one conversation was happening audibly at any one time.

It was called the “Miracle” scene after that New Yorker cartoon by Sidney Harris where there’s this chalkboard with an elaborate equation and a blank space just before the solution which reads, “... then a miracle occurs.”

Then we’d do it again, change ups followed by a “miracle” scene. There would also be "confessionals" in which a character would sit on a stool and improvised a monologue about their feelings.

An entire episode was book-ended by a house meeting, during which everyone would toss out grievances or personal news which would be fodder for the show, and we would conclude with house dinner. Each episode someone would be responsible for making “dinner.”

DAN: (incredulous) You made dinner?
TIA: Tacos.
ERIN: Did you make any without meat?
TIA: Yes.
ERIN: (surprised and delighted) Really?
TIA: Yes.
(beat)
TIA: They’re the ones with nothing in them.

The second iteration, The Realistic World 2, debuted twenty years ago tonight, on January 20, 1996. There were only seven "episodes" of The Realistic World 1, and seven for The Realistic World 2, which was directed by Erin Cameron. The cast consisted of myself, another Dave (our names the source of many varied nicknames) Sarah, Trish, Tom, Haley, and Anne.

The first run was an interesting experiment with some wonderful moments, but Erin was able to shape the scenario into a much more polished performance, and we had all learned an awful lot from the first go round. Each member of the original cast was a ringer for this one, and they had the opportunity to create recurring characters within this new neighborhood.

TRW2 was set in an apartment on Coventry, which was much less confusing for everyone and we were able to make reference to many venues on the street with which everyone was familiar.

Haley & David

Living inside of it myself was a bit heady. I created an Über-David, an insecure stock trader with a sharp tongue, I had the opportunity to be the kind of bust-out asshole you might know me as if you only know me through Facebook. However, the fact that I was the oldest of the house members (at 27 almost ten years older than Haley, our youngest at 18) made me the butt of many age-related jokes.

Really. I have been dealing with this shit for a long time.

Anyway, it was exciting to craft an alternate personality and to see how much he might change over the course of seven episodes. The agenda that my character had often bumped up against those of other characters creating some true friction which didn’t always remain on stage.

Critical response to our little experiment was mixed. The Free Times accused us of wanting it both ways; improv comedy laughs and compelling personal involvement, which "this callow troupe isn't up to delivering." Scene said "something this young and hip is a boon to any city which boasts a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame," though they may merely been baiting the Free Times.

We knew we had made some kind of impact when the new "club" improv troupe in town, Cabaret Dada, made reference to us during one of their performances. Asking the audience to suggest emotions, one called out, "Ennui!" Host Jeff Blanchard made one of his iconic skeptical faces and said, "Ennui? What do you think this is, The Realistic World?"

Night Kitchen developed other long-form improvs (One Step Beyond, Soap Scum) which succeeded in providing a definite story structure (urban legends, soap operas) but also relied a bit too heavily on tropes and types. I think what I love most about The Realistic World was the same thing I enjoyed about the first few seasons of The Real World, watching real young people figure out real life situations realistically, with real emotions on the line -- happiness, embarrassment, affection, humor -- everyone reaching to achieve their own personal success or failure. It's what people in their twenties do.

Recently I uncovered our Trivial Pursuit - 90s Edition. Yes, there is such a thing. It came in a silver, metal box with the legend, The most trivial of decades. Indeed, as Carl Jung once said, “May you live in interesting times.” I wish our times were as dull and introspective as they were twenty years ago.