Maximize Your And

Because almost everyone can Yes.

My friend Geraldine Carolan suggested that I write about how to bring your unique strengths and experiences to the stage. Geraldine is an improv vet from various SF theaters such as Leela and Endgames, and we run into each other multiple times each year at a number of festivals. Recently we performed in Tampa with our friend Michael Astrauskas as the trio Love Hammer. She comes from Galway, Ireland, something that I have no experience with. She is also married with a child, something else I have no experience with.

I’ve actually been working on something to this effect in my head for a while. Along with my belief that anything not prewritten is permissible in improv, I also believe that playing close to yourself is not boring and it is interesting and being able to pull from it will make you a better improviser.

I couldn’t think of a better term so I’m dubbing it Maximizing Your And. There’s many more parts to it than using your lived experience. Maybe you are part of an incredibly esoteric fandom. You know how great it feels when a piece of media makes a knowing wink at you, the target demographic. In the improv world, you can be that knowing wink! Maybe you know how to do a standing backflip. You can be the standing backflip person on your team!

This is why all your teachers and coaches and gurus will tell you to go out and lead a full life outside of improv. The more things you put into the machine, the more varied and interesting stuff will come out of it onstage. And that doesn’t mean you have to move to Zimbabwe or get a job on a shrimp boat. It could be something as simple as playing video games or reading books. Trying new food. Or simply going about your day but in a more mindful and observant way. Much like the inner game of tennis, you can get better at improv just by thinking about stuff a lot.

This requires active participation in one’s life, and all the trappings that come with it. When you’re at work, pushing that broom across the warehouse floor, you really have to feel the weight of that broom and how it interacts with the shreds of paper on the ground. When you go to the fridge, you have to take stock of the various juices and their disparate containers: orange, grape, cran-apple, watermelon limeade. When you’re driving through town, start looking at strip malls and how they’re laid out: nail salon, Arby’s, tax preparation services.

We’re aiming for specificity and verisimilitude. These objectives are not universal, but they’re what I look for in good scenework. I’ll give you an example of a time I dropped the ball: earlier this year I tried to do a scene where I was an accountant. Now, I took a single accounting class in college ten years ago. So I was onstage talking about LLCs and S-Corps and annual reports, and maybe I did okay, but it felt like when a small child tries to tell you what their parents do for work. It’s also why I hate when performers don’t “play at the top of their intelligence,” because I know you know how a door works. In the theater it’s more fun to see people knowing things and doing things competently.

Here’s another example, of a time I did well: one time during a show there was a scene set in a mattress store. Two players were acting out a couple who couldn’t agree on a mattress. I sold mattresses for four years across two stores. So you know when I came out as the mattress salesman, I had all the lingo down, I had all the jargon, I rattled off all the real payment plans, and I’m sure for those 30 seconds I looked like a golden god onstage. Everything that came out of my mouth was 100% real because I had my spiel down pat. And I like to think that made me the perfect scene partner for the couple buying a mattress, because they could immerse themselves more in the world of the mattress store. I took the heavy lifting of creating the world off of their shoulders, so they could focus on their relationship. And normally I would think being a mattress salesman is very mundane, and not fun to watch onstage. But as I became my work persona onstage, I felt like I was tapping into that same specificity and verisimilitude that I enjoy watching, and it quickly felt very comfortable to be up there.

All of this is to say, you don’t need to be mother of teenagers from Galway or a shrimper from Zimbabwe to be interesting and engaging. You can be a mattress salesperson from right here, and simply that is enough to have your moment in the spotlight. But it’s important to have that recall, so you can access all the parts of your brain at a moments notice. And I don’t want to get all woo-woo guided meditation mindfulness exercise on you, but maybe if you want to replicate the world around you better, it would behoove you to truly pay attention to the world around you.