Right, where were we? The last time we spoke, I was deep in rehearsals for the completely improvised play that I'd been directing, 'A Beginning A Muddle And An End,' I'm not stopping for long here today - at least, I don't expect to be - so for now, I'll simply say that the show, for the most part, seemed to be very well received.
Well, for the most part. There were a couple of people who clearly hated it. There were also a couple of people for whom improv wasn't exactly their thing, and the production did absolutely nothing to shake them from their beliefs. But they still found the time to hang back and vocalise their admiration for bravery of the cast who threw themselves onstage (sometimes quite literally) with no idea what the hell was going on (again, quite literally). In fact, with this particular person I'm thinking of, I might well be assuming wrongly that they didn't exactly like improv; I'm just reading that into their lack of effusive praise about the actual show. But they were at pains to praise the dedication and cajones of the cast. In many ways, it was this praise that meant more than any compliment regarding clever or funny storylines that the crew came up with.
Oh, and there was one more section of the audience that didn't exactly warm to us. (by the way, I should point out that the show went very well. There were lots of people that were giddily excited about what the cast came up with. It's just that this particular blog post is about the less flattering elements of the audience). These people had a problem with the show not because they thought it boring, or ill-prepared, or incoherent. In fact, they thought the exact opposite. Rather too much so. In other words, they thought that our improvised show wasn't in any way improvised.
OK, on one hand - our first reaction, indeed - was to take this as some kind of compliment: the idea that everyone was so-damn-slick that it beggared belief - literally, that it was unbelievable - that anyone could be quite that smart to come up with this stuff without some kind of process or plan. I can understand it, to some degree. As audience members, we're primed to see a structure in our stories - sometimes, literally, a three-act one (a beginning, a middle, and an end, if you will). But, since at least two of our un-believers had actually written reviews taking us to task and, in the case of the particularly bad-tempered one, pretty much accused us of breaking the trades description act, I had been advised by many to exercise my right of reply. I had been reluctant to do this, simply because a director replying irritably to what's essentially a negative review can come across as a crate of sour grapes. But when our in-house reviewer also raised an eyebrow at the possibility that the show was made up, I was persuaded.
I won't post my reply here just yet - I'll wait to see if it gets printed in the NVT newsletter first. But the writing of it reminded me that audiences really like to see their improv performers sweat. It can't look too easy, otherwise it just gets drenched in what is, for me at least, one of the cardinal sins of bad improv, a sin that you are capable of even if you're excellent; that of self indulgence.
Well, more on that another time. The coffee shop I'm stealing internet from closed twenty minutes ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment