The Moral Need for Improv

Laughter rarely comes with a script.

By Topher Kandik

Can improv theater improve quality of life? Here’s an exchange from the beginning of a recent Washington Improvisational Theater (WIT) performance: Player to audience member: (playfully) OK, give me something you did today. A: (blank stare, silence) P to A: OK, well you must have done something. Tell me the first thing you did when you woke up.

This is Washington’s version of spontaneous redemption.

A: (silence, then...) Um, I don’t remember. I’m pretty much a mess before I have my coffee.

P to A: (hesitantly) OK, well you must have... gotten out of bed. (leading)You did get out of bed, right? (General laughter.)

A: Yeah.

P to A: Well, there’s something. Did you go to work?

A: Um, yeah.

P to A: OK, now we’re getting somewhere. What do you do at work?

A: I sit in front of a computer.

P to A: OK, did you go out for lunch?

A: No, I’m busy. I just sit in front of my computer.

Scene begins with a player as the anonymous audience member, sitting in front of her computer with no memory of how she got there and with no intention of leaving until she feels as if she can go without recrimination.

Is this Brave New World or what? In DC, political speeches are rehearsed to the last gesture and rebuttals are written before the original speeches are even spoken. Television shows and new-fangled products are launched amidst a highly choreographed strategy of focus groups, advertisements, and promotion. Reality shows, amazingly, pass for real-life experience. War is televised into the safety of our living rooms. The list goes on.

Maybe this stuff passes for real life because we want it to. Maybe we believe it because it’s all we see. But there's a real, moral need for spontaneous activity, not only in our cultural life, but in our life. Period.

Enter improv theater.

Based on spontaneous suggestions from the audience, improv players strive to produce real theater moments without the use of script. Somewhere in its exploration of the nature of spontaneity, improv theater airs out the fusty inner life of an overworked, under-imagined Washington culture.

But don’t take my word for it, follow along and decide for yourself.

While improv theater generally claims roots in the Commedia Dell’Arte movement of the Italian renaissance, WIT Artistic Director Katie Carson suggests an earlier parallel with humankind's first storytellers.

An Abbreviated and Darwinian Explanation of Oral Communication

Human beings first formulated words in an attempt to communicate urgent, usually life-saving messages that enhanced our chances of survival. As we evolved, we began to use words to communicate perhaps more mundane needs, and, eventually, began the practice of small talk.

From small talk, humans eased into the art of embellishment. This practice eventually evolved into the full-blown art of storytelling (We now know storytelling hasn’t followed a strict evolutionary pattern. How possibly could we explain the

To review, storytelling has, somewhere at its core, a linguistic survival gene, and improv theater is built on the bedrock notion that this gene has been dormant for too long. In Washington, DC, improv groups such as WIT are dealing with this gene’s dormancy one live performance at a time.

A Brief History of Improv Theater

Improv theater is the creative offspring of two quirky parents.

Viola Spolin is the plucky grandmother of modern improv. She began using improvisational games in the 1920s to introduce Chicago schoolchildren to theater. Her son, Paul Sills, working in and around the University of Chicago in the 1950s, started The Compass, a seminal political troupe that eventually morphed into Second City.

The Chicago School’s alumni list reads as a improvisational Valhallan role call (John Belushi? Here. John Candy? Here. Here. Gilda Radner? Here. Lucy Pickles? Here. Ed Asner? How did Ed Asner get on this list? (sigh) Here.) and, together with its games and sketches, is a predecessor to and talent-sharer with Saturday Night Live.

Improv’s father, Keith Johnstone, began a movement called Theatersports in England (isn’t it funny that the British are funny?) in the mid 1950s, and eventually settled down in Calgary, Canada, to hone his craft. Theatersports explores spontaneity through mini-competitions in which groups of players are pitted against each other and judged based on a predetermined set of criteria. The overall strategy is not necessarily to win, but to engage your fellow players into performing as a unit.

Like many trends before it, Washington caught the improv train a little late. Perhaps it just isn’t in our Washingtonian blood to be trendsetters. Perhaps we need a little time to pick up a trend, hold it in our hands, make it our own.

In the mid-1980s, a previous incarnation of WIT played in a church on 16th St. Later, the second, perhaps greatest generation of WIT reincarnated itself and remains at the forefront of the Washington improv theater movement. Currently looking for a permanent home, WIT is the most prolific of DC’s varied troupes and is currently engaged (when in town, that is; this year, alone, they have traveled to Seattle, via a brief tour of duty in O’Hare airport, and the Dirty South Improv Festival in Chapel Hill, NC.) at DCAC after playing three times a week at Chief Ike's Mambo Room since the beginning of the year.

The choice of space, Chief Ike's, is a curious one, and I can’t recall ever being in the place with a single light on (I don’t recall much of Chief Ike’s at all, truth be told) before I went to my first WIT show. The stage, however, is incidental to the action, and the charm of some of the players makes the smell of stale beer and utterly unimaginative décor passable -- maybe even preferable -- for the telling of an improv morality tale. Even within the short span of a performance (shows generally last about 90 minutes), you end up selecting favorite players and following their roles throughout.

Each show, as indicated, is performed sans script, and suggestions from the audience are taken as a starting point for the players to, um, play. Scenes start with one, perhaps two players on stage and, as needed, their ranks are joined or diminished. In this manner, players wander on and off the canvas of action, and scenes meld deliriously into other scenes; characters and themes appear and reappear, soon to fade away; and, at times the action even halts entirely.

Throughout the evening, the shows themselves can be unevenly played, but the pure brutality of a skit gone bad is somehow just a different form of enjoyment. Just like other nights out, perhaps at Chief Ike's, with your chums.

To paraphrase Sally Gifford, a raspy, grande dame of the Washington improv scene, WIT, through its constant community (and by that, I mean improv nation-building and re-education classes) has helped to legitimize and build a real community of players and groups. Currently, more than 15 groups perform fairly regularly in the Washington area.

With names such as Attic Salt, Comedy Gears, ComedySportz (a nationally affiliated comedy theater troupe that sprung from the loins of Johnstone’s Theatersports), Capitol Goga, DC Unscripted Players (DCUP) (the name is a personal fave), Dropping the Cow, Erasable Inc., GAC Reflex, Georgetown Players (GPIG), Improvocation, Infinite Moose, Laughingstock, Lecoq Instructor, Misty Demory, Screaming Puppets, and Under the Beltway, these groups came together last year at Art-o-Matic in an improv version of what sounds like a mini-Woodstock.

This rally highlighted both the togetherness and the vitality of Washington’s improv theater scene. As Gifford, Art-o-Matic’s improv coordinator/producer/sex symbol describes it, more than 100 performers and 15 acts played over a three day festival that featured classically conceived scenes, mini-seminars, and, eventually, spontaneous group sets, or insta-teams of players, never before acquainted on-stage and acting together -- all without one official trace of brown acid (or the modern-day version of brown acid): corporate sponsorship.

This is Washington’s version of spontaneous redemption.

Many of these troupes also offer improv classes. According to most who talk about improv theater, the number one skill an improv player needs is to be an acute observer of reality (perhaps that’s true with other forms of art, as well). At the class I attended, we drilled on noticing each other’s clothes, movements, gait, and emotions. We took time to be comfortable with each other and recognize what our fellow players were thinking, acting, feeling, and how to reflect that outwardly in ourselves.

We were told to trust each other. To trust ourselves. We were taught to act in the moment. Once we had these techniques down (it just takes practice, I was repeatedly told), we had the fundamentals for creating real theater scenes. Perhaps more importantly, we were given the seeds to save ourselves.

Most of those in the improv theater community have undertaken improv comedy as a second career. There is a dream to build a group home, an asylum, for improv theater (and its many varied cousins) in the District. To hear WIT Managing Director Mark Chalfant evangelize on the subject, it just may happen.

For the sake of Washington’s inner life, I hope it does.

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