I’ve been producing/directing Likewise: Dinner Party for the Sydney Fringe Comedy Festival. Game of the scene came up (in relation to the “Black Box” of scenes in the middle between dinner parties).
So I found this podcast from Rob Norman and Adam Cawley.
A couple of months ago these guys were in Sydney. I loved their take on game of the scene. The business of the podcast starts at 3:31.
Here are my notes for the first 20 minutes of the podcast (after which I got distracted: this is why I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts):
- game of the scene their definition: repeated behaviour expressed between two characters always about how i’m treating you and you’re treating me
- we agree a pattern of behaviour, play that game together
- appears in first 15 – 20 seconds of the scene
- used to be all about story (characters are changed, need new events all the time, will need a narrative), this is a newer way of thinking about scenes
- game of the scene unpacks a repeated pattern of behaviour. if i change the behaviour it breaks the pattern. i want things to stay more or less the same. if i treat you differently i’m playing a whole new game (a series of different characters if you choose a new behaviour).
- how annoying can you be about that one thing: if you change the behaviour it means the scene is done
- use any change as a “commercial” between your behaviours: come back to it: like a verse chorus verse chorus
- find something that the audience likes, repeat it and heighten it
p.s. the featured image on this post is Stu Dowling and Jeff Mesina, both cast in Likewise: Dinner Party at the Sydney Fringe Comedy festival. We’re sold out on the 2 nights that we’re playing: 4 and 5 September 2017.
