Joe Bill's Class

[mcnichol]

YOU ARE ALL MISCARRIAGES

[mcnichol]

The audience sees everything.

By the way, this is one of my biggest "things." Those first few moments of the scene are the most crucial to remember and hold onto.

[Jastroch]

The audience sees everything.

By the way, this is one of my biggest "things." Those first few moments of the scene are the most crucial to remember and hold onto.

I wish this was explained to me in my initial improv training. I didn't pick up on this little nugget of wisdom until after I had been performing for a year. It would have helped me a lot, I think.

[HerrHerr]

Stick with your shit and let the improv find out what's really going on with these people.

This is not necessarily a narrative start point (event hough the scene starts with the husband entering). This is a moment, a slice of life of some characters we can grow to love or hate as the scene plays on. This scene starts in medeas rae and is really hard to do sometimes, be in the middle of an emotionally-charged scene that has lots of backstory without overexplaining feelings and emotions and the backstory and without dropping what is pushing these characters forward---all at the top of a scene.

I love it.

[Spaztique]

I think you missed the joke there.

I usually do.

If player A cares about the mess and is being told "don't drop that!"...then that means player B's instruction must also be "don't drop the miscarriage!"

Mess!
Miscarriage!
But...mess!
MISCARRIAGE!

I find this uninteresting.

Actually, it's...

Mess!
Miscarriage!
Miscarriage = Mess!

And then, it'd be ensuing wackiness, laughter, and good times had by all.

You could probably throw in a line like, "You didn't even bother sweeping up the fetus!" And she could reply, "I was busy watching the season finale of Lost, and it ended on a cliffhanger, and I had to call all my friends to talk about it, and they had to discuss the episode with me, and then we all went out to lunch and shoe shopping, so I had no time to even deliver the baby!... They're Prada!" And if you wanted to heighten on the mess thing, he could say, "You already have 90 pairs of shoes! Where are you going to put this pair?!" And she'd say, "Right next to all the others, by that pile of dead animals!" And so on.

I think Bob already said it, but worded differently.

[Dave]

I've really been getting into talking about P.O.V in my classes lately, and this is a perfect example of noticing and holding on to the first thing that falls out of your mouth...a little something that opened a huge door for me after reading Mick's book.

For the rest of the scene no matter what happens...as along as The Husband filters everything that happens within the scene and reacts to everything within the scene from the Point of View of someone who sees everything as a mess and the Wife says and does everything from the Point of View of someone who just had a miscarraige, the scene will be every funny. They can support any walkon or anything that gets thrown at them. They have a clearly defined realtionship, a known location and their Character POV's are solid.

Instead of harping how stupid that looks on paper, try it in your show or rehearsal, disbelievers.

Knowing you don't know everything is knowing... or something like that.

[Milquetoast]

I think about the last thing I'd want to see is a scene describing a dead fetus...

That said, I have to agree with everyone, in that I get that the emotion behind the lines are what drives it. I personally don't know where I would go in a scene like that.

Well, that's not true. I think I'm just thinking there's a right way to play the scene. Which of course, isn't true!

[Jastroch]

I've really been getting into talking about P.O.V in my classes lately, and this is a perfect example of noticing and holding on to the first thing that falls out of your mouth....

Ditto Napier's book openening up some perspective. I've been describing scenes in terms of POV. I bit this idea from Arthur who bit it from Susan Messing, but I'm in love with the idea of coming out on stage as an Adverb or adjective instead of a noun. I.E. If you come out presidential instead of the president, you can maintain the same POV and filter anything through that. If you come out as the President and then someone endows you as a mother of three, you tend to get confused and drop your big idea and find away to make it work.

I've been extending this metaphor a bit in classes and when I coach. Scenes have a lot of nouns... miscarriage, dirty floors, wife, husband... they provide the context of the scene.

What's more important are the modifiers. The adjectives and adverbs that form the underlying chharacter traits and relationships and the game. The emotional, psycological motivation. In this sense, if you stick to the "how" of the scene (how people are interacting, behaving) that what (the context) is entirely mutable.

Relationship, relationship, relationship. If it's there and it's strong, Everything else takes care of itself. Most scenes that fail (that I've observed) don't have a strong relationship. And not just father/son either. Those are contexts. A relationship is more like... passive/agressive, condescention, love, that sort of thing...

Also, Games People Play.

[DollarBill]

Wow, you guys get up too early. Everything has pretty much been said that I would have said. I just love that example... Any ass-hole can come home and yell at his wife for not cleaning the house. Only a special kind of ass-hole would continue to complain after finding out about his wifes painful experience. It blows my mind how repeating the same line can say so much about the state of affairs in that household. The scene could easily derail if you tried to make fetus jokes, or if it broke down to quibling over facts, but that could be one HELL of an emotionally charged argument scene.

I think you could gleen from this, that when having an argument in a scene, it is better to argue about intangible things rather than physical stuff. Or at least when you do argue about physical stuff, every word should be so emotionaly charged that everyone knows what you're REALLY saying. "THIS HOUSE IS A FUCKING MESS!" Means so much more than just that.

Or whatever, sometimes it's fun to just talk about boobies. I'm gonna sit and listen in Joe Bills class tonight since mine got stopped half-way last sunday. More arguments to come!!!

[HerrHerr]

Yeah, dude, these two chacracters could be relatively normal people in a super intense time in their relationship--not just a scene with a jerk or an overly needy person. And that's the fun. Throwing yourselves and the audience into a moment and peeling away the layers of the relationship. Not jerking around audience expectations, but actual growth, where a scne starts in one emotional zone and by the end something of depth is revealed. And it could be very, very funny if it's very very honest.

[Justin D.]

Instead of harping how stupid that looks on paper, try it in your show or rehearsal, disbelievers.

Exactly. This is why it's so hard sometimes to discuss or read about improv. Inflection and visual performance is so key to improv that it's often hard, if not impossible, to relay that through the written word.

[starkserious]

I took Joe Bill's class many years ago at the Big Stinkin Festival...Wow! That seems like a long time ago since it was around 1998. The one big thing I got from it was to STICK TO YOUR SHIT! I remember he had his doing a physical activity but we couldn't talk about it. We had to have an emotional perspective and channel our emotion throught the physical activity. It became very funny and powerful as each of us were affected by what each us said and how it heightened the activity. That has carried forward for me a long time. I still need work on it but I really got it when I experienced it. Mac Antigua did some exercises like that too I found really beneficial. It doesn't matter what the topic is as long as you stay with what you committed to from the outset and allow your perspective to be heightened to what is happening.

One of the funniest scenes I've ever been part of was when I came out on stage and I felt like the Victim of life and once everyone figured out that's who I was they started picking on me and the more they picked on me the bigger my Victim character became. Everything made me more of a victim which ended up with me laying in a litter box.