Improv, Week 2 & 3

This posting will appear before "Improv, Week 1" but should be read afterward.

I hoped Week 2 would be as cathartic and challenging as Week 1, as well as more fun. Instead, the class quickly went from bad to worse. A few people arrived late, which threw off the leader's plan. She had wanted to begin with a circle, to discuss the first class and talk about what we'd do that day. But rather than have us wait, we began with our warmup and then, once the group had assembled, started us on scenes so that we wouldn't waste time.

Perhaps the transition was a bit abrupt, because one of the scenes didn't go well. The two characters became stuck in a circular dialogue, with neither offering new information or a different response to push the plot forward. In reviewing the scene afterward, one of the actors faulted the other (the man) for not responding to her cues. She felt that she had offered a lot in terms of ideas and plot development, but that he hadn't reciprocated. Another student, who had been in the audience, also criticized him for causing the scene to languish and soon the atmosphere in the class deteriorated to a blame game, puncturing the fragile balloon of safety we had started to create the week before.

Our leader intervened, insisting that we own our reactions to what had been a confusing scene rather than pointing fingers. Suddenly, I felt as if we were all children sitting in a sandbox, being chastened by a grownup for having flung dirt in each others' eyes. It was all the more distressing because one of the more vocal critics was a therapist and someone who had enrolled in this workshop before. My inner judge thought she should have known better.

It was time for the next scene. I volunteered and waited for someone to join me in front of the group, but all I saw were frustrated faces. A chill was in the air, and no one wanted to play. The leader asked another person to join me, but this woman became emotional, upset by all the flak that had flown around earlier. The leader asked her to identify the source of her tears and to do a monologue around that. I sat down. My turn would have to wait.

The therapist was then asked to do a scene with the man. She stood up and began by throwing a chair towards him while ranting about their (fictional) marriage. Her rage was real, its intensity not explained by the improvisational scene.

"Out take," called our leader. "What is going on?"

The action stopped. The therapist was able to realize that she was projecting much of her anger at her own (deceased) father onto the gentleman in the class who, in some ways, resembled him. Wisely, and with much more skill than I've seen exhibited by the one group therapist I ever met, our leader asked this woman to do a monologue about her father, rather than dumping her raw emotions on our innocent classmate.

At some point during the class I went from being a participant to a bystander, a witness as several people exposed their emotional wounds. The class was not turning into the fun and spontaneous experience I had expected; au contraire, it was heading into very deep and painful territory. I tried to view the situation positively, being grateful that our leader had the experience and the emotional intelligence to channel people's raw feelings into transformative acts of theater. But I was somewhat angry that the people who were losing control were getting the stage, that the group's energies were being focused on people who were having difficulty with the class format.

Even though I did get to spend some more time on stage, the session depleted and saddened me. I spent much of that afternoon wondering if I would go back the following week.

A few days later the leader called to check in with me to discuss what had happened. I appreciated hearing from her and to have a chance to express myself. The class felt a bit too much like a therapy session, I told her. She assured me that what had happened - an unusual collision of people and their issues - was extraordinary in the decades she has been teaching.

We began Week 3 with a discussion of what had happened in Week 2 and in the phone conversations we had each had with the leader. I hoped that this processing would take just a few minutes, clearing the slate for a fresh attempt at improv, but it turned out that the man in our group was distraught to the point of wanting to leave the class. An older and sensitive gentleman, he simply did not want to spend another minute being the recipient of anyone's latent or blatant hostility towards men, even in fictional scenes. I couldn't blame him. And some of us, it turned out, came to class reluctantly, wanting to fulfill our commitment to the workshop yet not convinced that we'd have any fun in the process. It is a poignant irony that several us were drawn to the class to explore new ways of being and to loosen the shackles of established habits - such as putting duty and the needs of others first - only to have those same habits lead us back.

And so, after spending nearly an hour rehashing and repeating much of what had transpired in the previous week, and each of us letting the man know that we wanted him to stay, we were able to proceed. The group remained intact, but after all the discussion and reassurance I still felt that something very valuable - a sense of possibility? of playfulness? - was lost.