A photo of the elevated train line.
This afternoon’s class was about realism. We had a fill-in teacher named Steve (apparently the flip side of having experienced players for teachers is that they have gigs to go to).
After some warm ups we had “real” conversations (as ourselves) in pairs. Then Steve stopped the conversation and put the spotlight on each of the conversations in turn, giving the players something unrelated to do (eg fix a car, fold the washing). The idea was to continue the real conversation while doing the action. I’ve seen it done at jams with characters, but never with “real” conversations. Takes the pressure off the object work. Remarkably it was very watchable.
Steve reminded us of the Pulp Fiction scenes where the hit men were discussing big macs and etc on the way to a hit. This is “real”.
Realism he says, is the foundation on which we can build crazy. Stephen King novels spend 25 – 50 pages building up “normal” before switching to horror.
So we then did scenes from our own experience (rather than cliche). We did a funeral, a break up, a confessional, a fight with your parents, a visit to the hospital, being pulled over by a cop. Fortunately none of us actually had first-hand experience of a prison visit, so we skipped that.
After each scene we debriefed what the cliches were (compared to the reality). In the later scenes he got us to “tilt” (my word, not his), introducing something outrageous. For example in the hospital scene a woman’s husband is dying with less than a month to live. The husband’s work colleague says she’d do anything to help. It goes on for 3 minutes or so. “Yes, you can get me some clothes from home” etc and then “Actually my husband always wanted a threesome”. The laugh when it came was HUGE because so unexpected (even though we’d heard the instruction to go all out funny).
Of course it takes a troupe. Even the people who are IN troupes say they find it hard to take a scene that slow and meaningful, to pay out the pay off til it’s good and ready. Hmmm, challenge!!
Now at Second City Mainstage to see the Best of Second City, a sketch show, in which our teacher Shad is playing tonight.
