Lies

"A director doesn't 'make' students perform. She creates a whole atmosphere that is conducive to humor, exploration, and taking risks. She is a benign gang leader. In fact, she has to be the most intense performer of all--and then be willing to disappear."

-- Elizabeth Swados, in At Play: Teaching Teenagers Theater

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Performing, then disappearing--this is the way to lead an acting class. I read this and other punchy passages this morning, and tried to embody Swados's ideas. We played a game suggested by an exercise in her book, a game which I decided to call "True Lies."

I had noticed that during improv games the kids would start out strong and fizzle as they went along, usually as they started to doubt themselves. It's an odd trend. You'd think they would grow more confident, their movements more strident and their voices greater, but instead, the opposite was happening. I needed a way to get them consciously to gain confidence, to own their space, to self-create authority.

So with an idea from a book and a few whims, here's what I came up with. A pair of kids gets in front of the group. Their dialogue is comprised of one-sentence statements, all of which have to be false. They have to state things, though, as if they are gospel truth. They have to try to top the other person's last lie--the more extravagant, the more specific, the more bizarre, the better. Example:

ONE. I am Barack Obama's best friend.
TWO. I killed a chicken with my mind.
ONE. I cooked a chicken with my mind.
TWO. I ate that chicken and it sucked so much I threw up in your face.
ONE. Barack Obama ate that chicken and liked it so much he replaced the bald eagle with my chicken as the national motto.
TWO. I am Barack Obama.
ONE. I am a chicken.

And so on. Soon the contest would turn into almost a comedic routine, with a straight man setting up a joke and the other giving a funny punch line. So to keep them on the objective--topping each other's lie--I allowed the audience to respond in the same manner as a talk-show audience. They were allowed to cheer, boo, hiss, etc., depending on how well the person had convinced you that their lie was true.

It worked very well. To Swados' description of the improv director, I would add:

The director has to regard all ideas as potentially useful or useless. The worth is in the moment. Energetic games are great for pent-up days, but they will flop with an exhausted group. The director must see the use and use what he sees. Used ideas, now stale, must be left for the moment and replaced with new, fresh ideas; and once what is new and fresh becomes stale, forgotten ideas must be rejuvenated. This is the essence of the theatre: The give and take of ideas over a period of time, the stories that remind us of stories we all know but forgot. We are always visitors.