Immersive Theatre’s Superpower, Part 2: Improv and not Improv

When it comes to wielding the superpower of response, nothing compares to improv theatre.

Improv’s life-blood is being responsive. It’s made-up on-the-spot, more human in many ways than a play. Without a script or even a set destination, improvisational actors have to respond constantly to each other, and they’ll often incorporate audience response as much as they can. Basically, they don’t ignore a damn thing.

Audiences explode with laughter when a performer deftly responds to something that just happened. The more an improviser can integrate the reality of the current situation, the better. “Your name is Carly, and you’re a biologist? Let me sing a song tailored just for you.” “Damn, I just forgot your character’s name in this scene. Let me acknowledge that with a quick quip.” Crowds go wild.

The atmosphere becomes electric. This is LIVE! The audience feels special, because they are witnessing something real and unrehearsed, happening only in the here-and-now of this time-and-place.

Note how audiences of comedy-improv are not the same folks wandering into your local professional blackbox. One does not get from a play what one gets at an improv show, and vice versa. Can immersive theatre—devoted to designed storytelling and live response—capture both audiences? I hope so. (Granted, there aren’t a lot of comedy immersives being done right now, and people want comedy. Thoughts for another day).

SPECIALNESS

Giving audiences a sense of “specialness” is key to improv’s success—and immersive theatre takes that to the next level. The more room we allow for response and relation, the more audiences will go away feeling special. That’s a serious gift.

The generation brought up with “special snowflake” sydrome is all grown-up and looking for entertainment. We want to brag to friends about the once-in-a-lifetime thing we witnessed last weekend. We want the celebrity experience. When an actor chooses us for a scene or incorporates our presence or, better yet, actions into the show, we feel HUGE and will undoubtedly brag about it at the watercooler that is Facebook.

IMPROVISING INSIDE A SCRIPT

But immersive acting is not improv. I’m an utter dunce at improv and was intimidated at the prospect of being cast in my own show (a choice we made for financial reasons. Okay, and I’m not terrible at it). To my delight, I discovered I could handle immersives just fine. My goal isn’t to be imaginative or funny; it’s to be honest to my character in that moment. Improvising within those parameters comes naturally to me. It’s more like when something goes wrong on stage, and you address it…except that happens about 20 times a performance instead of once a production.

At a recent show I attended of True West, an actor struggled to hang up a phone on the wall. Once he finally got it to stay, he flipped it off—the realest and funniest moment in the performance. That’s improv. That’s the wondrous “live” part of “live theatre,” that we trumpet so proudly to get butts in the seats, but so rarely actually occurs. Ask any actor or avid-theatre-goer for a favorite  moment in a play: my bet’s they’ll recall some wonderfully wild improvised moment.

Immersive theatre guarantees that improvisation happens every show. Instead of waiting for a prop to go rogue, immersive theatre introduces the wild card of the active audience. Everything and everyone is in play—electricity pervades the air. And people love the hell out of it. “Every show’s different” is a promise that immersive theatre actually makes good on.

But here’s the rub: in a play or otherwise rehearsed piece, audiences can always tell the difference between improvisation and the script. The voice shifts, the body changes. (Which says something about how far actors are from being convincing humans. Oh, well. It’s hard.)

Immersive actors should learn to shift seamlessly between the two modes: script-improvised response-script. We don’t want the improvisations to stand out as “of a different kind”—the more improvised the entire show feels, the more special the audience feels. In The Man From Beyond, we made a deep commitment to pass off the fantastical as actual. If we did our job right, you should find yourself asking “Is this real? Or part of the game?” Everything, from my props to my actors, needs to feel real in The Man From Beyond (well…with one major exception…and that’s specifically designed to feel fake).

“Stop acting” is my go-to note as a director.

A THIRD STYLE OF ACTING

Acting schools approach improv and scripted acting as separate disciplines—you will rarely encounter a true master of both. With immersive theatre, we now have a third style of acting, somewhere in-between the two pillars. It’s not all fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants like improv: there’s a story (or at least a very specific scenario) that doesn’t change night to night. But it also lacks the rigidity of scripted acting: there’s an audience around you that you cannot ignore.

Should we open a special school? As a holder of a useless master’s degree, I’m not clamoring for it, but I’m positive we’ll get there eventually. Right now all immersive actors are learning on the job, and probably each show will always have a learning period, as the available real estate for response depends greatly on the immersive’s structure.

Scripted improv?

At Strange Bird Immersive, we keep a living document that we call “l’esprit de l’escalier,” or more simply, “answers to weird responses.”

In improvisational theatre—or even in staged acting, when something goes wrong—a performer often thinks of the super-clever response after the moment has passed. But immersive actors, thanks to the genre’s devotion to small audiences and extended runs, will most likely face that moment again.

While there’s a very long tail for audience responses, I can attest that the same sorts of behaviors keep coming up: laughter in this section, jackassery at this question, some guy lies that he did it (when he didn’t) just to see what you’ll do about it, etc. We write down every unusual audience behavior and then set an ideal response to that behavior. This way audiences can get the best response without breaking immersion. More than making me look cool under pressure, the document primarily serves to give new actors in a role a jump-start on the behaviors they are likely to face.

Is anyone else keeping logs like this for their immersives?

I’m sure improv actors are appalled right now: it’s against the spirit of the whole thing! Isn’t scripting improvisations like this taking away the electricity of the moment I’ve been praising this whole time? Maybe. Like all things in acting, it depends on delivery. What I do know is it does make the script and the improv feel more of the same kind, and I think I value that more. Plus it saves us from asking every new actor to the fight the wolves anew. It’s the responsible thing to do.