How about someplace that will fit on the stage?
A tiny Thunder dome.
Anyplace that is not enclosed in a dome.
Thunder living room. Thunder bakery. Thunder court.
Ok I heard courtroom.
Tonight I finally managed to get my butt down to the corner of Belmont and Halstead for the weekly long form jam at the Playground theater: Open Court. Above is the host calling for a suggestion for the part of the show I was in...but before I get to that let me set up the night for you.
Now for those of you not in the know this is how Open Court works.
Basically you show up to the theater a little bit before 10:30pm on Thursday (when the show starts). The cost is $5 and for that they give you a ticket - if you wish to perform that night as part of the jam you take the ticket and write your name on the back of it and return it to them (if you don't just leave it blank and go sit down you freeloading bum).
Once the show starts whoever is hosting comes out and introduces two guest coaches (improvisers with some know how from around town) who then draw the names out of a hat (or whatever) in order to form two random teams.
The teams run back stage (which actually means through a door into the alley behind the theater) and meet with their coach to decide on what format their show will take. Sometimes the coach has a preconceived notion of a new form to try, or sometimes the players just make something up (the key here is every night each team plays with a different format - some simple, some really fucking complex). The coaches then run over the details making sure people understand.
The team then decides on a name - does a super fast warm-up - and runs back in... all in all this should take less than 15 minutes.
The coaches come on stage and flip a coin to see who goes first - each team gets roughly 25 minutes to jam and then at the end of the night those same tickets are used to draw for crazy awesome prizes (like a stop watch, or a flashlight, or whatever has been left in the theater storage area that isn't claimed by a staff member).
All in all this is a pretty interesting idea - it has the potential to be incredibly awesome... Tonight not so much.
I quickly realized the level of awesome for either show is almost entirely in the hands of the coach - who has final word on the format of the team's show (especially considering the usual people at this jam are beginning to mid level improvisers - some from a short form, others from a long form background - who don't know each other and have drastic ranges in performance abilities and styles).
The form our coach came up with for our team - was a bunch of great ideas formed into a less than stellar concoction. He asked us what we liked most about forms we had played (personally I don't give a rats ass about forms - I like relatively open forms where the focus is more on scenes and just improvising instead of worrying about what beat you're in, or whatever gimmick you have come up with).
Here is the list he got from the others of what they like in their forms: Tag outs, time dashes, multiple scenes in the same location, character switching & something else I can't recall.
Now by themselves I'm cool with all of these - hell, done right I'm a hundred percent down to throw all these on together and rock.
Here is what he laid out for us (in parentheses are my thoughts):
We'll get one location for all the scenes to take place in
(cool, I've rocked shows like that before)
New scenes will take place in the same starting location we get from the audience, but in a different time...
(OK that's fairly obvious - unless your locale is like a motel, or ball room and you want to show what's going on in the next room, or in the hall, or across the room - but cool)
period - so we'll be time dashing to other time periods - as many as possible: stone age - future - 16th century - etc, to start every new scene
(... first off that's not the proper use of the term time dash - secondly sounds a bit kitchy & short formy, but whatever I've done worse - though I wish you would've let us discover that possibility organically as we played instead of mandating it)
We sweep edit to change scenes, but can use tag edits to take over another person's character
(kick ass - I've experimented with taking on other people's character mid scene, should be interesting - if potentially a little chaotic)
And be sure and remember the key lines of dialog - as we'll be replaying the first scene each time
(what the fuck? I misheard you right, you're joking....that's funny - cause if we did that it wouldn't really leave all that much room to improvise as we'd basically just be playing a big old game of genres, but with less freedom....son of a bitch you're serious)
So in case you missed it - our format (for what is billed as a long form improv jam) was one scene set in a single location that was to be repeated multiple times in different time periods - with a focus on remembering the original lines - and we could switch characters at the start of every scene. Sigh.
Our location when we went in was courtroom (as mentioned above....oh how I would've loved to do this in a tiny thunder dome...or thunder living room) and we all ended up being in the first scene (the original plan was it would be two person scenes so everyone would play the same scene in a different time period, with two different actors in the original roles) - however one person started off as the judge, then a bailiff entered and the rest of us (7 in all) were called in to be attorneys, defendant, random guy in witness stand - yet the only dialog was between three people...
So yeah - every time the scene ended (on the same line - just sometimes delivered slightly differently - as new time period means silly accents - such as French for Victorian era, pirate? for whenever pirates roamed, vaudeville barker for I guess around the 20's, binary for the future, and dinosaur/caveman for prehistoric) we'd scramble and take on a different character that had already been established.
The other team's form was normal scenes but ever edit just had the person editing telling us a fact which was inspired from the previous scene - and lead to the new one.....so they actually ended up having a lot more freedom. It was still fun to be performing even though it was not what I expected (went in looking to do some open scenes ended playing a slightly altered long ass short form game).
However at the end of it all I won two comic books (one of them being Super Man: Red Son....awesome) in the prize drawing and got to maul someone as a pterodactyl on stage - so not a total loss.
Anyway I definitely plan to go back there - cause the idea has so much potential - I just pray I don't end up on a team with a coach is is confused about the meaning of the term long form (I found out afterward most of the people there that night were either from comedy sports or the early second city classes: non conservatory - so aha).
No comments:
Post a Comment