Improvisational Theater Or Where I Got Off The Boat

Improvisational Theater, Or, Where I Got Off The Boat

When I was 17 I ran away and joined the circus.  OK, it was the student body of the University of California, Berkeley, but in 1968 there wasn’t a whole lot of difference. 

There, downy with youth and stupid with it as well, I took a class from Kerry Prescott in Improvisational Drama.

Improvisational Drama, done well, is a beautiful thing to watch.  4 or 5 or 6 actors stand on the stage while the audience shouts suggestions: A Zoo!  Abu Ghraib! Pizza Hut! There is no consultation, there is no hesitation.  One actor grabs an idea and begins to play and the others fall in, creating a world, a script, a play without direction or props or staging.  They just play.

The quality of what happens next depends on the skill of the actors.  They should be a single, cohesive entity, seemingly able to read each others minds.  And there is one cardinal rule they must follow:

Never Deny

Never deny means that when your fellow trouper says ‘Look! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”  you may not say..”Huh?  I don’t see anything!” unless you can do so with such total conviction that all the other actors turn and give startled looks at the fellow who hallucinated that UFO.  What you may not do is drop the ball.

You must enter into the world your fellows are creating and you must know what the rules of that world might be, and follow them.  If you do it well, you will pull your audience with you and they will see what you see.

Kerry Prescott was so good at creating worlds that he was defrocked, lost his standing as a drama professor over an incident in an old tiered classroom on the hallowed Berkeley campus.  He was teaching Intro to Drama to a group of freshmen, and he instructed them to mime a strip tease.  To know what happened next, you would have to have met the man, and seen his power. 

200 freshmen got up and took their clothes off.  All of them.

So it was that he wound up teaching Improvisational Drama in night school.

Prescott was a fine actor himself.  I used to go and see him at the old Steppenwolf bar, doing Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.  It was incredible, especially to a teenager who had never heard of the Theater of the Absurd and had nothing but straight rationalism in her background.

In class, he made us do the famous “Tangerine and white from Spain” bit ( from Tristan Tzara’s Gas Heart) as part of our training.  It was all way cool.

I’ll leave out for now the party at his house, the strip tease I did in the doorway, the part-wolf dog and the salad oil.  Maybe another day.  It was a long time ago and hey, you had to be there.

The point of all this is that from that day foreword, ‘Never Deny’ has been my de facto  approach to everything.  I’m fairly sure that if a man ran past me in the street, tossed me a gun and said “C’mon.  We’re robbing this bank!” that I’d drop the gun and call the cops, but I’m not positive. Maybe I’d be there like Patty Hearst, Tommy gun in hand, looking lost and bewildered on the video tapes.

I know that Never Deny has allowed me to go from upper-class tea party to leather bar to moonshiner’s back room without ever being out of place.  Their world is my world.

It took me a long, long time to find that I had a world of my own and I wanted to live there.

Most of the time.