 I'm just going to mic you up and then turn on the speaker. Sorry. We'll do the big introduction. I'll be able to stand on the move. That's too much. Absolutely. I think he gave you a long voice. Sit back here to make yourself longer. Let me turn this on and then we'll get started. One of those, I guess it's great, is that you have the USB port built in that you just jam it in and raise it as well. I have found, by the way, a new system for doing transcriptions way faster. We'll talk later. Hi everybody. Hi Harry. Hi Susan. Thank you all so much for coming. As you all know, I'm Terry Stratton, Director of Education and Outreach here at the Guild. It's my pleasure to welcome you to the John Miskill tonight and to this DG Academy seminar. We actually had Jeff come to our national conference last year in Fairfax, Virginia, and his seminar was one of the most popular. I've gotten emails from people asking for us to repeat it, so here we are. Hopefully a lot of them are also on live play TV and can be picking it up. If you could please turn off your cell phones and your pagers and anything that will make noise. Again, we are audio recording, so if you ask a question at any time during the event, make sure you speak up so the people online can hear the question in case it's a question they want to know the answer to as well. And as always, if you have ideas for other seminars or events that you'd like to see here at the Guild, we're pretty full here for the fall, which is exciting, but I'm still looking for the spring. Send me all suggestions that you have, and I will appreciate it. So without further ado, I am very happy to introduce to you drama skill council member, playwright and all-round great guy, Jeffrey Sweet. Oh, thank you. All-round great guy. That's something to live up to. I was hoping to misbehave it. Well, anyway, hello. Okay, improvisation and playwriting. A number of years ago, when I was a kid, I'd noticed that a lot of the most interesting people working in theater and film at the time came out of one place. They came out of a place called Second City, which was an improvisational theater in Chicago. And I wanted to read a book about this, and it turned out nobody had written the book, so with that wonderful step of logic that I ended up writing the book. So I went running around the country, interviewing people like Mike Nichols and Paul Sills and Barbara Harris and Alan Ark and then Joan Rivers and had a swell time for a number of years. But I thought I was taking a vacation from playwriting because it seemed to me that improvisational theater by very definition didn't have any use for writers. It was material that was developed on the feet. You know, actors got up and improvised based on premises, and the writer really didn't have much to do with this. And, of course, I was wrong. Otherwise, there'd be no point in holding this seminar. At a certain point, I realized that what made a good scene improvisationally also pertained to making a good scene that was written. I mean, after all, we're facing the same injunction from the audience, which is, you know, behavior that's interesting, that's compelling, stuff that the audience can invest in, stuff that the audience wants to see, to watch characters pursuing objectives. So I started looking at improvisational theory and trying to see how it overlapped into playwriting theory. Many of you know who Viola Spolin was. Oh, I see lots of heads nodding. Are there any heads nodding? I can't see. Anyway, I had the pleasure of meeting Viola, who treated me miserably. You know, I was interviewing her and she was alternately charming and telling me, oh, you're asking the wrong questions, darling. I mean, you just don't, and then she would answer the questions and I'd get the material that I wanted. But Viola pretty much codified the pioneering work of codifying and essentially developing what are known now as theater games. I'll tell you where they came from. She was hired in the 30s to put together a children's theater for the WPA, and she didn't want to direct kids in an authoritarian way to say, okay, when you say your line here, stand over there on the third tile and look at the exit sign and belt it out loud so that everybody can hear it. She thought that pushing kids around was sort of abusive and intimidating. What she decided that she was trying to do was to get the kids to collaborate on creating moments for the plays that they were rehearsing. So for instance, at one point, she was working with teenagers, a boy and a girl, who were supposed to be doing sort of a romantic scene and their body language was, well, pretty much my body language now, just very constricted and very, instead of saying, well, for God's sakes, use your hands, which would have been a terrible thing to say. She said, all right, we're going to play a game and she started making up a game on the spot. It's called Contact and the rule of contact is that for every line that you have to say to the other person, you have to figure out an organic way to make physical contact with the other person. And the kid's point of concentration shifted from being, oh, God, I really would rather be outdoors playing or why do I have to sit here and do this awful thing, to figuring out how to satisfy the rules of the game cleverly and that's what they did, was they kept figuring out new ways of making physical contact and Viola would laugh with delight and say, oh, that's marvelous, that's wonderful, that has to be in the final show and indeed the final show was made up largely of moments that the kids had invented themselves in response to the games. So she kept coming up with, she kept coming up with these kinds of games and she had a son and her son was raised watching how his mom worked and her son's name was Paul Sills. I don't know how many of you know the name Paul Sills. Again, names here, heads here are nodding. How are you doing? And Sills used these improvisational theater techniques to first work with the repertory company in Chicago that was called the Playwrights Theater Club then to help found something called the Compass Players, which was the first real ongoing improvisational theater in America which is where Nichols and May and Shelley Berman all came from and then he put together a more polished version of the Compass and it was called Second City which opened in 1959 and has been going pretty constantly since. So, I was interested in how these games related to playwriting theory and I was also interested in, I also had a conversation with Sills which changed most of my ideas about the theater. You see, here's what I thought the theater was about, okay? I thought, you know, a person of talent, perhaps a genius, a writer would write something and a person of enormous taste with a fat pocket producer would recognize this, you know, would take an option on the play and hire directors and actors to realize the vision of the playwright and I thought that was what the theater was about and I sat down to talk to Paul Sills and rather quickly was disabused of this because he made me realize there were absolutely essential elements to theater. Can anybody guess what those two essential elements are? That's one, audience is one. So what does the audience have to have in front of it in order to be happy and say, oh, hooray, there's a show on. Actors, that's all you need to have to have some kind of theater. I'm not saying it'll necessarily be great theater but theater existed in the world way before there were playwrights here before anybody was literate enough to hammer words onto a page. So at that point I realized, well, gee, if all you need to have some kind of theater or actors and audience then the playwright's job is an extension of the actor's function. If the actor was making stuff up spontaneously what a playwright did was plan ahead and so playwriting is an extension of acting. Now there are some people who would disagree with me on this. Edward Albee would disagree with me on this and I respect Edward Albee as I do a few people so I'm not going to fight with him but I believe something different. I believe that playwriting is an extension of the actor's function and that the job of the playwright is to give opportunities for the actors to create compelling behavior. So now let's get back to the idea of improvisational theory. Well, there are various different games that can be used to help develop playwriting skills. I'm going to demonstrate one right now. It's a monologue. It's a boy who's 10 or 11 years old and he's talking to a friend of his and he says to his friends, he's supposed to show up at 10 o'clock. It's what, 10, 15, you know. My mom says, hey, he'll probably be here soon and he's probably just stuck in traffic and I say mom, it's cool, it's all right. He shows, he shows, if he doesn't show I got homework to do, I can call Larry, I can play chess and she says, you know, I'm cool, I'm fine, I'm okay. You know, I'm fine. So like 10, 20, you know, I'm up in my bedroom and I'm looking out the window. I look across the street and he pulls, his car pulls up and see him get out of the car. He's walking up the walk to the front porch. My room's over the porch. I can hear them talking. She says, you're late. He says, don't start. She says, I'm not starting. I'm just observing that, you know, you said you're going to be here at 10 o'clock. He's now, what, 10, 20? He says, I got delayed. Yeah, sure, I'm sure you got delayed. Well, you know, if you want to maintain your shift and you go on like this for a while and I call out and I say, hey, you know, you guys, I can hear you. And he says, well, if you can hear me, you know, I'm here, right? Come on, sport. Let's get going. Grab your jacket. Let's go. So I, you know, I put on my jacket. I come downstairs. Mom kisses me on the cheek. Yeah. I got to go cross. You know, I get in the car. He says, I'm sorry, I'm late. I said, fine, it's cool. It doesn't matter. You're here. He says, I got delayed. I said, fine, it doesn't matter. We're here. So what are we going to do this week? What is it this week? We're going to go to the museum. We're going to play miniature golf or, hey, I know it would be just loads of fun. Why don't we have lunch with your girlfriend? Can we just do this? Can we just go? Can we just do this? All right. So tell me, what's the story? What's going on? So today is what day? Yeah. Or what day would you technically call that? Visitation day. Visitation day. OK. Let me point something out. By the way, terrific. Parents are divorced. The man is the father. I never said father. And today's visitation day. I didn't use any of those words. If I had used any of those words, what effectiveness this little piece has would have gone out the window. Because what I did purposely was not to use any of those words that you would supply them. It meant that you had to be an active participant. You had to create the meaning of the scene. Those are the three most important words in the scene, and I didn't use them. We often have this idea that in order to get an idea across to the audience, we actually have to say certain things. And frequently it is more effective not to say them, but to create the circumstances under which the audience supplies this most important idea for themselves. You guys got it. You didn't have to, you know, I didn't have to spoon feed you. I gave you very specific actions. And you said, OK, what matrix of meaning could encompass these phenomena? You know, who is the guy across the street? Who would talk to this boy's mother like that? What would the circumstances be? And you filled that in. But I'm a great believer that that's one of the things that we're trying to do with an audience is we're trying to create the circumstances under which they become so wrapped up in the immediate moment that they start filling in the important information. And that means that they're not passive. There is little more deadly in the theater than to invite an audience to be passive. If you create the circumstances under which the audience becomes an active part of the event, if they come up with the meaning of the scene for themselves, if they come up with and fill in the key details themselves, then they can't fall asleep. They're leaning forward. They're saying, oh, I have to put this together. And they do. It's a way of keeping people active. It's a way of making certain that they're part of the process. I'm going to make a few observations, and then I'm going to ask some people to try this. One observation is, I don't know if you noticed, but I never used the past tense. I kept it in the present tense. Why? I think the stage flourishes in the present tense. I think we were watching to see what characters do, what choices they make now. As soon as you move to the past tense, the energy leaches out of the scene. This is one of the reasons why novelists tend to write very bad plays, because they're mostly so used to writing in the past tense that when they start writing plays, that habit carries over. Take a look at stuff written by, you know, like William Faulkner tried writing a novel. Big, long speeches in the past tense. Great, great writer, miserable playwright. And that's one of the reasons, is that the past tense is deadly on the stage. It doesn't mean that you can't relate stuff from the past, but when you do relate something from the past, you use something called the historical present, which is something you use all the time. What is a historical present? You set up that the action that is being narrated happened in the past, but you relate it in the present tense. Sometimes you can do it with just one line. I was walking down the street the other day, and suddenly I see this guy, he must be six foot two, and he's got a scar on his face that looks like the map of Argentina. I know I've seen him someplace before, and as I look at him, he looks at me, our eyes meet, and suddenly I realize, aha, America's most wanted. I start to run. He's running after me. I make turn to corner, I run into an alleyway, except it's not an alleyway, it's a dead end. And as I turn around, I see him approaching, and the shadow of the top of his head is the tips of my shoe. Well, obviously I lived and survived, you know, because I'm telling you the story. But you heard how by going into the present tense, there's suddenly a sense of danger, and instead of relating something from the past, I am narrating, re-experiencing it, which is something you probably notice that you do yourself when you're talking to friends about a particularly vivid incident in your lives. You may start in the past, but more often than not, you will find yourself slipping into the present tense because as you relive it, you narrate it. So the present tense is tremendously useful on stage. Past tense tends to dampen the energy. So, okay, that was one thing. I use the present tense a lot. What else was I going to say? Oh, yes, I also used almost no adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs are, I think, junk writing. Somebody once sent Chekhov a novel for his evaluation, and Chekhov wrote back and said, oh, this is a very interesting novel, and think how much better it will be once you cut the adjectives. Why? Why am I so down on adjectives and adverbs? Because they are evaluative words and the evaluation properly belongs to the audience. What's more interesting to say that Larry is cheap, stingy, or for me to say that Larry tipped 50 cents on the $30 check? If I say Larry tipped 50 cents on the $30 check, you come up with cheap, stingy, right? So the evaluation belongs to you. So I think that the evaluation belongs to the audience. So that's, what else did I, was that, oh, well, okay, unspoken word, keep it in the present tense, and avoid adjectives and adverbs. I think those are the three major points. All right, anyway, so the exercise is called the power of the unspoken word. And this is how it goes. I'm going to ask for people to try improvising short monologues, keeping it to the present tense, avoiding adjectives. Think of a noun and try to invoke the noun in our minds without using the noun. Okay, does this make sense? I'll give you an example. No, the workmanship is just wonderful. The mahogany, the brass, the lining is just extraordinary. But I swear to you, if I buried my father in this, he would rise out of the grave and grab me by the throat and say, you spent how much? Yeah. So you see? What happens is, I don't know how many of you had logic in high school or college if you know about what a syllogism is. Syllogism is a three-sentence logical device. The first two sentences are premises, and the third sentence is the conclusion. All Martians love Ravel. Okay? Reginald is a Martian. Therefore, Reginald loves Ravel. Okay. What I'm suggesting is that we put the premises on the stage and we leave the conclusions to the audience. And this exercise is designed to do just that. Put the premises on the stage and leave the conclusions to the audience. So what I'm going to ask is, I'm going to ask for a couple of hardy volunteers who want to give this a try. Come up with a noun and then just three or four sentences in which you do not use the noun. You're playing a character talking to somebody else and we figure out what the noun must be from the context. There's anybody? There you go. All right. So we have microphones up here. We don't have microphones back there. Plus, we have a camera here so that people can admire. Well, that's... So you get the idea of this, right? I think so. Okay. She waited for me at the door. When I got in, I ignored her because I felt so guilty. And then I turned my coverlet down and she left something to surprise me. Close. Oh. Okay, now I'm going to point something out. You did it all in the past tense. Oh, shit. We're broadcasting. That's probably what the doorbell is. I don't think I was in for that though. Yes, no. Okay, but I know it's not automatic but it's like learning to ride a bicycle. Once you do it, once consciously, you do it forever after it. Okay, cool. Next, somebody else give them a try? Okay, come on up. So I'm getting married in September and I'm excited about that. But I'm only into jewelry. But it's not even being about into jewelry. It's like when you put the thing on, it's you feel constricted. Like, I'm afraid when my mother... I hope my mother doesn't see this, but at one point in her life she got too fat and she couldn't take it off. Okay. And the object is... The corset. Oh yes, it's that final old American tradition, the wedding corset. With this corset I do the... with. All right, anyway. So that's the basic idea. This is a game that I came up with in order to... We've improvised it, but do you see how this is a writing principle? You see how you can use the unspoken to create the circumstances in which the audience leans forward and supplies the unspoken word and that means that they're invested and that they're participating. Does anybody else want to try one? Anyway, I see people go, oh, he's looking at me. No, don't do that. I think I know. Okay, all right. Mr. Sweet, we're really glad you've come today. Her office is right down the hall. She is a veteran of the Gulf War, so I recommend when you come in and don't mention the display, but just bring her attention to it that you admire that sort of work and maybe bring up your marksman experience as well. That might help you with the interviews. I didn't say anything good like, and she's a great lady. It'll be great. Okay, I am stumped. Who got it? I've just heard what she's got. The display. This is about the display. Okay, that's... About the display. Mention something about the marksman. And mention the fact that you're a marksman as well. That might be a good end at the interviews. Okay, I'm trying. Is it the gun that's the object? Yeah, there's a gun. Oh, okay. The display. Okay, see, for a second there, I got lost on Sarah Palin. Sorry. See, then it would have been a helicopter and there would have been deer down. That's right. And blood in the snow. The vision was that behind her desk is a gun display. And she's a marksman. Okay, well, the gun, the gun I didn't... I actually was in my mind, but I thought you were playing an even subtler game on me. But thank you. Yes. You get the idea, right? Yeah. Okay, well, the same thing applies. The idea of the power of the unspoken word applies to something called the power of the unarticulated objective. Okay. What I mean by that is we're so used to in a lot of plays, people just barreling on stage and saying exactly what they want and then the material of the piece is kind of over pretty quickly, isn't it? Because people will say, I want this and the other person will say, great, you've got it or no. And they'll argue a little bit and the scene will be over. But in fact, an awful lot of time, either characters come on stage trying to get what they want without asking for what they want directly or trying to create the circumstances under which they will get what they want or sometimes characters are not conscious of what they want in the same way the writer does. The writer is. You know, characters do sometimes operate out of subconscious objectives. So the idea of this is something called the power of the unarticulated objective. I think if there is anybody in here who is reasonably confident of, I'd love to have a man and a woman who can improvise a little bit. Okay, there you go. If I could... Do you want to take another crack here? Absolutely. Okay, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to set up a situation. I'm going to give you a few concrete pieces of information. And then each of you will go out of the room and I will privately, although I will be sharing it with the camera and with the audience here, what your objective is out of her and what your objective is out of him. All right? Okay, so this is what the situation is going to be. Your brother and sister. Every summer you come to this cottage and join your parents for a week. And this is probably the last summer that's going to happen because dad's kind of failing. All right? You're recently divorced. You're not real thrilled with it. A wedding ring thing. Possibly. Yes, this is the sea world. Part two. Yeah. You do very well in real estate. Okay? You're doing really well in real estate. So, the scene is going to take place in the kitchen of the of the cottage. It's the morning after he's arrived very late. Okay? So I'm going to ask you to go out of the room and to make certain that you can't hear a No. Okay. Here's the thing. The divorce is left to be strapped. Okay? You can make a new start. You have a business opportunity if you can get your hands on 10 grand. You don't have 10 grand. She has 10 grand. You would love it if she could she's not going to give it to you but you know, wouldn't be nice if she could lend it to you. But you're trying to figure out a way of getting her to offer it without asking for it. Now, remember that you don't just go pile driving in on an objective. You have to find out what her frame of mind is in order to figure out what your best route is, right? But that's basically it. You want a loan. You want her to offer you a loan. You don't want to ask her for it. You want her to offer it. He has done something to really piss you off. Okay? You can say it for yourself whatever it is that he's done that you think is really you know. Have you told him what he's done? No, no, no, no. You can decide what he's done. Okay? And what you want is you want an apology from him. Now you don't ask for the apology. Just create the circumstances under which he will volunteer an apology. Does that make sense? Yeah, okay. All right, here we go. So I'm going to suggest that this is Kitchen. It's in the morning. You've just come down. You haven't actually seen each other probably for many months. All right? So this is the first time you've seen each other and here we are. Fireway, let's see what we got. Well I'd offer you some coffee No, I just woke up. You just got here. You look good. You look thin. You look thin. You always use that. That's going to just make up for everything. So are you hungry? Because I made some cupcakes. 9am. I know, but I started making good cupcakes and they're just little baby cupcakes. Since when am I not diabetic? Are you trying to kill me? Just try the cupcakes. They're good, people love them. People really love them. They're good, huh? People have told me that I should sell them. Well you should do something. I want to do something. I want to sell cupcakes. I'm going to sell cupcakes. So cupcakes would be a manual job. You wouldn't have to talk. What are you talking about? I'm just thinking that maybe you should go into something where you don't speak out of turn where you don't blast something that you might have heard and say it inappropriately. I think a job making cupcakes might suit you very well. Good. That's great. As soon as I get the money I'll be making cupcakes. I'm not asking for money. I'm just saying I have to get the money before I can do the cupcakes. Well, you have to prove yourself before you can get the money and you got here so late we were discussing selling the house last night. I don't think we want to bring it up again so I wouldn't hope for money from the house for the cupcakes. If that happens to be what you think. But they're good. Yeah, they're good. Well, I think we got to stale me if it was darned interesting. Thank you. So what do you think she wanted? What were you getting from her that you thought her objective was? That I... What kind of information was she giving you? I'm apparently a bad neglectful brother. What would a bad neglectful brother do? A familial thing. Well, okay. In order to satisfy her what would you have to do? If you're bad neglectful. When you do something bad Apologize. Yes! There you go. They do it all the time. I'm sorry. And you figured out what he was up to pretty quickly. Is objective. Yeah. Sponsorship again. Well, money. Yeah. Do you see how even though they didn't go overtly for their objective that they that they this fueled their behavior? Okay. Thank you very much. So anybody have any questions about any of this so far? Do you want to raise anything about this? What you get when people are pursuing unarticulated objectives is you get subtext. That valuable thing called subtext. It's the stuff that the audience is meant to figure out underneath the actions. Now something interesting happened in the scene which I had not anticipated but I'm delighted that you brought it up. Which is you introduced an object. Cupcakes. And why is this important? Well, this brings us to another game. Something else that Viola pioneered talking about which I've adapted to play writing. Something called negotiating over an object. Okay. What do I mean by that? Let me take you back to grade school. Let me take you back to something that I find most people do. Which was during a science class a teacher brought out a bar magnet. Remember that? Put a piece of cardboard or paper on top of the bar magnet and then dumped iron filings on top of that. Do you remember what happened to the iron filings? They formed sort of almost semicircles around the end of the bar magnet. Now what shape did the filings make? Sort of semicircular shape. Why are they making that shape? Do you remember? No, no, it's a straight magnet. A straight magnet. My mind abilities, I see. Yeah. It's the magnetic field. You cannot see a magnetic field. Magnetic field by definition is invisible. But you can see the effect of a magnetic field on the filings. You can see the shape of the magnetic field through the effect on the iron filings. Now I suggest that in scenes we frequently have the emotional equivalent of a magnetic field. What's going on between the people? And if you use an object correctly on stage you can convey an enormous amount about what's going on between the characters on stage. We had a little incident of this spontaneously scraping off the icing off the cupcake, which was a wonderful detail. So if you introduce an object, an object isn't just there to decorate the set. An object has got a tremendously useful purpose in revealing what's going on politically between the characters on stage. So, for instance, everybody's familiar with the odd couple? Okay, beginning of the third act of the odd couple. Oscar is furious at Felix. Oscar is furious at Felix because Felix has screwed up the sure thing double date with the pigeon sisters, if you remember. And they have not been speaking to each other. And Felix has made a plate of food. Oscar picks up an air freshener which is an object associated with Felix and he goes around the room and goes spraying around the room until finally he sprays Felix's plate of food and he says, there, I hope you like that on your spaghetti. And Felix says, haha, that's not spaghetti, that's linguine. And Oscar picks up the plate, goes to the kitchen door, kicks open the kitchen door, and hurls the plate off stage unseen wall and says, now it's garbage. Felix goes to the door, looks at the mess that's evidently on the wall and says, I'm not cleaning that up. And Oscar says, good. Felix says, I'm not going to touch that. It's just going to harden up there and get all yucky and the roaches will come out. And Oscar says, I kind of like it. And Felix says, you wouldn't touch it, would you? And Oscar says, no. Felix says, I'm cleaning that up. And Oscar says, if you touch one strand of whatever the hell that is, I'll break your head. Okay, notice that nowhere in there do they explicitly articulate how they feel about each other. What happens is that they negotiate over the objects. They deal with the objects. Oscar first takes an object that's associated with Felix, the air freshener, and uses it in a way that is inappropriate for the object. You do not use an air freshener as a garnish on pasta, right? Instantly by using an object for a purpose for which it is not intended it piques the audience's interest. There's a whole TV series that was based on this. I can't say that I ever watched it, but MacGyver was always based on taking objects and using them for unusual purposes, transforming objects. Or the and then you have the destruction of the object, right? The linguine was destroyed. Destroying an object is also always punctuation and it was an index of how angry these people are at each other. But there's another transformation in there which is there was a transformation of the name. Oscar says, I hope you like that on your spaghetti. And Felix says ha ha ha, that's linguine. Why is that line in there? What does it tell us? Yeah. Pristian Smarter. Yes, it's his way of one-upping Oscar by saying I'm more sophisticated than you are about food. And Oscar basically by picking up the plate and throwing it against the wall and saying now it's garbage. He's saying so much for your sophistication that brute force will trump sophistication any time. Right? So that's a fairly short passage and I don't know if Neil Simon thought of it as analytically as I have. Possibly not. But that's an enormous amount of information conveyed through the negotiation over the objects and these guys have not said to each other I'm really really mad at you. We can figure it out through the negotiation over the objects. So this is something related to some of the other games that Viola Spohlin would do which is to set up an object set up a couple of characters and the characters would find out who they are through the way they negotiated over the object. We got some of that in the little scene that we just did with the cupcake using the cupcake. The cupcake became not just a cupcake, it became a symbol of his hopes, right? And her scraping off the top, modifying the cupcake was almost as if she were and also taking a very tiny bite was her way of registering her feelings about his hopes and objectives. And also how much she loves him, because she mentions about me dietetics but she's still willing to give us cupcakes to try. Well, that might be a literary analysis. No, no, I'm saying, here's the interesting thing, though. This is something that I find fascinating is that things that are arrived at spontaneously in improvisation in rehearsal or sometimes in writing where people are not thinking about these meetings at all they get analyzed and they're right even though that they didn't occur to them. If everybody know the on the waterfront, the movie on the waterfront, there's a tremendous scene between Marlon Brando and even Marie Sainte. So it's one long take, it's one of the great scenes in movies. And he's walking along with her and they were rehearsing the scene and he's walking along with her and they're near a swing set, they're past a swing set and she's got these gloves. Remember, she's a Catholic school girl and she's got these gloves? Well, as they were rehearsing it, she dropped the glove and Brando reached down and took the glove and he started doing stuff with it and Laia Kazan, who was the director said, oh, that's great, we have to keep it in. So now if you watch the movie take a look at what happens. She's walking along, she's got the glove, she drops the glove, he reaches down he picks up the glove, he sits down on the swing and instead of giving her the glove back, he starts taking the schmutz off the glove, right? She looks away and as she looks away, he puts the glove on. He's a boxer, he's put this lady's glove on. She turns to see, he's got the glove and he's making these gestures and she's got a she's thinking, how the hell do I get the glove off of him, right? And the whole rest of the scene as they're talking to each other she's trying to figure out how to get the glove off until finally at the end of the scene she gets her courage up and gets the glove off. This is known now it's a famous scene, it's the glove scene. It was not in the text Bud Schulberg did not write it when they did a stage version of it on Broadway it was 8 or 10 years ago they didn't use the glove because it wasn't in the text and they had no right to it. It was something that Brando and Yves-Marie Saint invented and Kazan was smart enough to use. We don't remember a word of the scene. All we do is we watch the glove. Okay, let's do literary analysis. You know, I guarantee you Brando didn't think for a second about what the glove meant. But what are we looking at? We're looking at this guy who's a peluca and he's trying on his feminine side. That's a logical reading. You know, it may he might have laughed in your face if you had said that but still it's a logical way to look at the scene. It certainly creates this tension because on some level there's also a kind of violation of him taking her glove. You know, it's something that's hers and he's putting his hand inside it. For people at home, people in the audience are going, okay. Yeah. I can't remember. But you might find symbolism in that. I don't know. And Brando did this throughout his career. If you watch Brando movies you will see time and again he will yank objects into the scene. Frequently they are not things that were in the original script. There was a scene Have you ever seen it? It's a fairly terrible movie but it's got a great scene and Missouri breaks. Have you ever seen that? It's a western. Brando plays an outlaw. He's a killer. He has killed a man. There's a funeral going on for the man. The man is lying in his coffin and since it's a summer day the coffin is filled with ice. And Brando comes and says, you know, this didn't have to happen. This man didn't have this didn't have to happen. If he hadn't gotten my face here if he hadn't challenged me he would be here with you right now. He'd be sitting up with you and talking with us right now and he reaches in and he grabs the corpse and he starts almost doing a ventriloquist routine with him. And then as he's finished he sort of lets the corpse fall back down into the coffin. He's too thick so he reaches in and he takes a piece of ice, steals a piece of ice from the coffin and walks off with a piece of ice against his tooth. Now this is outrageous. It's also a great scene. You know, and any of you who've seen Last Hango in Paris, all I have to do is say butter, you know, where we are, right? He does this all the time. What was it, the Don Juan de Marcos? Do you remember that one? Was it Johnny Depp and who was it? Do you remember the popcorn? The popcorn in bed with Faye Dunaway? Oh, sure. He loves playing with his food. But take a look at Streetcar. I'm convinced that some of the things that we now accept is in the script of Streetcar are things that he came up with in rehearsal and William said, oh can I use that? Yeah, sure, take it. Stuff like can I have a drag off your cigarette? You remember the second scene, the trunk scene? The trunk scene's got something like 20 objects. You want to have a small picture in the value of objects in playwriting? Take out the scene, too, of Streetcar and write down every object and take a look at how the objects are used and what they tell us about the characters without being forced. So I'm going to bet that somewhere along the line they were playing and Blanche said, can I have a drag off your cigarette instead of taking a cigarette out of his mouth? He says, here, have one of your own. That tells you something. It tells you something about who is this woman who, on brief familiarity will take a cigarette from her brother in Law's mouth and put it into her own mouth and the fact that he's refusing to do that but gives her one of her own. Or do you remember at a certain point, she says, my, you have a fine judicial air and she's got the aerosol or whatever it is but what was the thing that you sprayed of an atomizer and she starts spritzing with him playfully. He knocks it out of her hand. I wouldn't be surprised if they found that in rehearsal. That looks to me like business that could have been found. It's now a permanent part of the play. But as soon as you bring an object into the scene you've got something for people to negotiate over. You can make more vivid the nature of the relationship between the characters. At the end of that scene, do you remember he says, well, where are the papers? If you recall, they've lost Belle Rieve the family's mansion. He says, well, where are the papers? They're in the trunk and she says, everything I have is in the trunk. And so he reaches in and she grabs something. He grabs a package of something. She grabs them back. He says, well, what are those? She says, now that you've touched them I have to burn them. Why? What is the audience thinking? Now that he's touched these letters by touching them, what has he done to the letters? Okay, which makes him what? Yeah, he's filth. Instead of saying you're filth, she says, now that you've touched them I have to burn them and the audience does the work. This is what she thinks about this guy. This is filled with amazing stuff. But it's all by implication. It comes out of the film. I think he probably didn't. But he's using a technique that Spohlen used in teaching theater games, which is creating the relationship between characters through the way they negotiate over objects. So they can either negotiate over an object that says substantially the same, or they can transform the object. Or they can destroy the object. Or they can destroy the object. Or they can destroy the object. One of my favorite scenes in all dramatic literature is from Henry VI part 2. Everybody applauds because everybody knows this play backwards and forwards, right? Give yourself a pleasure. All the history plays are amazing. Henry VI part 2's got maybe the first scene in the great scene that Shakespeare wrote. We think that he wrote it when it was like 22 or 23. It's a great scene. Here's the setup. Margaret is a minor French princess who has been married off to Henry VI. Henry VI has got the sex drive of a flea. She finds herself interested in other people. This triggers a civil war in which one of the local lords, York, rises up against Henry VI. Margaret says to Henry VI, you're useless in a battle. Will you please go sit up under the tree, try not to get caught and she straps on armor and she leads the charge herself. One of her war lords captures York and drags York before her and says to her what do you want me to do with him? She says, stand him on that mole hill over there. Why on a mole hill? What is a mole hill? It is a little elevation. She's mocking his ambition by standing him on the mole hill. She says to him do you want him to be king? Do you want him to be king? If he wants to be king, he should have. Anybody got a piece of paper? So somebody hands her a parchment and she makes a paper crown and she puts it on his head and she says now you look like a king. Doesn't he look like a king? He's got the jaw for it. Don't you think? Yeah, you look like a king. She says you're feeling a little misty, misty, a little upset, a little down. Use my handkerchief to dry thy tears with all. Oh, don't mind the red stuff on the handkerchief. That's the blood of your youngest son. We killed him this morning. It's a great scene. It's a killer scene. So what has Shakespeare done? This 23-year-old upstart. In fact, that's what he was called by one of the contemporary playwrights who saw this scene. They called him the upstart crow because they were envious of how good this scene was. This upstart crow. This Shakespeare, this upstart crow. What did he do? He took an object in both cases. He took objects and compromised them and by compromising them he created a new meaning. It's a crown that is not a crown. A crown that is made of paper is worth nothing. His pretensions to the throne are worth nothing. She's mocking him with the paper crown. It's paper that has been cut into the shape of a good guy. It's an insult. And then, by handing him a napkin which is traditionally a symbol of concern, of sympathy, yes? And she poisons that by informing him that they have murdered his youngest son and that the red of the napkin is the blood of his youngest son. So it compromises that object. It's an extraordinary scene. It's in a really sophisticated scene. Now, please notice that I am avoiding the use of the word symbol. Whenever I'm teaching writing and somebody says, oh, did you notice the symbols? You just cringe. Because a symbol, it seems to me, it's like vitamin enriched bread. It's like meaning that has been injected from without by a pretentious writer. If you have objects that are in there that are organic to the power plays that are going on with the characters as it is, you don't have to look for symbols. The symbols will arise organically out of the action between the characters. You don't have to inject anything. One of the things that drives me crazy about some Eugene O'Neill, okay, he's one of my gods, but every now and then, he just hammers it home. He announces a symbol and then he comes back to it and clangs a gong behind it. The morning becomes a lecture. Everybody talks about, oh, the island's the island. Give it a rest. We can figure this stuff out. That's the thing is, people figure it out. We're fast now. This is television. When I was a kid, TV commercials were, believe it or not, 60 seconds long. They were a minute long. TV commercials now are what, 15 seconds? That's a long TV commercial? And people get it. They get the message. They get the imagery. They put it together. It doesn't all have to be explained. We are thinking, I'm not saying we're thinking more deeply than we used to, but we're thinking faster. And that's one of the things that an audience does, is it comes to conclusions swiftly on the basis of the behavior that's in front of them. So you have, people can negotiate over objects to make vivid the relationships between them. I'm going to volunteer you now for something, all right? Yes, just you. Okay. We're going to do a short scene, and I'm going to give you the lines, and it's the same scene again and again, all right? You're going to say, do you love me, and I'm going to say yes. It's not my best writing, but I'll make the most of it. Sorry. And say it the same way each time. Okay, so just start. Do you love me? Yes. Same text, different meaning, why? What's the difference? But what's happened? Just a space. That's it. It's called negotiation over space. That's all blocking really is, is negotiation over space. My pleasure. Go online, you can see the rest. You can see us talk about you. No, all right, anyway. Okay. Do you love me? Yes. Sorry about you. No, all right, anyway. Anyway, so we can, sometimes when we're writing, we forget that we can prescribe certain spatial things in the script. Negotiating over space is terribly important. There's a point when a Blanche is trying to cross the room, and she tells Stanley to move back, he says, you've got plenty of room. Well, of course, she doesn't. Now, space, we can negotiate over space. Okay, here's version version three. Oh, do you love me? Yes, version four. Do you love me? Yes. Thank you. So what was the difference there? Time. Time. We can negotiate over time. So we can negotiate over space. We can negotiate over time. We can negotiate over light. The quality of light, the intensity of the light. We can negotiate over sound. We can negotiate over temperature. Have you ever worked with somebody whose sense of comfort is 10 degrees off from yours? No. Julie Andrews, a number of years ago, was doing a musical called Victor Victoria on Broadway. And since she was brought up in an England that had no central heating, there was a sense of comfort, what was comfortable for her, and the temperature at which she performed best, at which she sang best, was a good 10 degrees cooler than what was comfortable for the cast. And she apologized to the cast, particularly to the dancers who were racking up injuries from being cold. But this is how she got to hit her eye notes, you know, which is what the audience was paying for. So, we negotiate over, I have this problem with my wife for that matter, which is that I have this tendency to enjoy a sort of cocoon-like feeling when I'm writing. And I'm sitting there having a wonderful time writing away, and she comes in and she says, can't you get some air into this place? It's baking in here. And, you know, so we, you know, turn on fans, and I get quotes. They used to call it England. Now it's hot flashes. I'm sorry. It used to be England with the excuse, oh, it was raised in England. It's hot flashes. Ah, now it's hot flashes. Okay. Well, that makes a difference. So anyway, there we are. We got negotiating over temperature. So you see, all these mediums of negotiation that we have that we frequently don't think about when we're writing. We've got all this stuff, all the stuff that we can pull into play. And Viola's got games that are related to a lot of these things. She has another game which I love called What's Beyond. And the idea is a scene is going on in this room and something is happening outside the room that they never refer to, but it absolutely informs the behavior of the people in the room. Again, it's by implication, right? Why is everybody speaking so quietly here? You know, are they afraid of being discovered? So What's Beyond is another game that she has. It's this idea of creating a reality outside the room. This can also be translated into another game which I love, which is characterizing somebody who is not on stage. Does everybody know Tartuffe, the play Tartuffe Molière? Do you know when Tartuffe enters the play? In five out of five acts, what act he makes his entrance? It's act three. But by the time he comes on he has been thoroughly characterized because of his effect on the politics of the rest of the people in the house. It's the title character. He's the title character and he comes on two-fifths of the way through the play. It's the star part. Hickey comes on when? At the end of act one, is it? If a three act play? It's 90 minutes in. It's a long way in. Also, for that matter that's an iceman cometh for those of you who thought that we were talking about evidence of kisses. The front page? Everybody know the front page? Walter Burns, the SOB editor. Do you know when he comes on and he's the star part? Robert Ryan played him on Broadway. He's the star in the great revival. He's the star part. Do you know where in the three act play Walter Burns arrives in the front page? At the end of the second act he has about 40 minutes worth of action in the play and yet it's the star role. Yet we are totally prepared for who he is by the way people react to his name being mentioned or the prospect of the fact that somebody is talking to him on the other end of a telephone. Characterization is not just what a character does. It is how other people treat the character or how other people react in the presence of the character. There is a game which is closely related to a children's game that Viola used called Who Am I? And the Who Am I game is somebody is brought into a room not knowing who they are. First somebody is taken out of the room and everybody in the room decides who this person is and that person is brought in and then one after another the different actors come up and treat this person in an inappropriate manner. And the person has no idea who they are except from the clues of how they are being treated. If somebody comes in and says the morning mail ma'am it's on a silver platter that's one thing or if somebody comes in and says which is in the corner? Are you going to clean that up? So characters are not just defined by what they do or how they behave they are also defined very largely by how other characters treat them. I'm very vague on this because I haven't seen it in a long time. I think there's a character in HMS Pinafore who is the villain and he's never done anything particularly wrong and he chooses to treat him as a villain. He sort of acknowledges I guess I must be the villain of the piece because every show has got to have a villain and everybody seems to not like me so it must mean that I'm the villain so I must do villainy stuff. It's a wonderful joke on this whole concept. I'm going to pause for breath for a second and also check and see how we're doing in terms of our time. How are we doing in terms of our time? Oh, okay, cool. To find out if there's anything that anybody wants to ask about this either about any of the techniques that I've laid out or about improvisation or about the history, your hand was up first. I would imagine that like the way you talked about the letter injecting from the outside all of these techniques have applied sort of unconsciously now work as well as just being practiced at it. No, no, no, you can apply these techniques consciously. Is it really helpful to take improv classes as actors? Oh, yes. Absolutely. Do you teach something like that? Well, as a matter of fact I do sometimes but actually if you're interested for those of you who are interested in this every summer for like the last 19 years my wife has put together something called the summer improv retreat and we get the guy who founded the Groundlings and we get senior faculty and me and some other people and we take over a hotel usually in the Catskills and we just work for a week doing this stuff and doing scene building. I build to a point where people are able to improvise one act plays. We do an evening of improvised one act plays and we don't have to be comic. People hear improv and they think, oh, instantly it's got to be it's got to be comic. You know why improvisation usually is funny? Because actors are scared to death out there and they want to have affirmation that they're making contact so if they do something with the intention of being funny and they get feedback from the audience with laughter then they're reassured. If you're improvising drama out there how are you going to know if you're landing? Is it catharsis or catharsis? Whatever. Out in the audience. But one of the best scenes I ever saw in one of the workshops that I was doing this must be 15 years ago and yet it's still vivid to me here's the way we do it is I'm teaching the techniques something similar to what we did with the brother sister scene I'm teaching the techniques and then the group is divided up there's one director slash writer for each unit and the director slash writer sets up a relationship some past history and givens and gives each character an unspoken objective and then we're ready to have a scene. Now here's the key thing about an unspoken objective in this thing which is you're more likely to have a workable scene if a deal is possible a deal was possible in this scene what was the deal? Apology for money. Yes, exactly. If he sold his apology. So it's more likely to work if the deal is possible? If a deal is possible it doesn't mean that the deal has to be struck but the audience gets a sense of oh a deal is possible so if you're setting up and this is scene construction too I promise you this is scene construction this relates to how setting up the scene do you feel that as writers it becomes more ingrained in second nature if we were to go out as actors in an improv or to be the writer direction? It becomes you have to act you have to do it let me tell you about this one scene though I was telling you about this is between a 14 year old boy who came to the camp and a guy who was in his 50s who was a professional actor in Philadelphia they'd never met each other before and somebody set up a scene in which the kid lived on a farm with his mother his father had died a year ago and the man is the next door neighbor who lives on the farm next door and this guy has been helping them for the past year a year has passed and now this guy wants the kid's permission to court his mother and it was one of the most beautiful scenes it was like discovering a fine one act play by Hortonfoot the deference that the older man showed the boy the responsibility that the boy felt to act like an adult and to get it right it was an extraordinary scene there were no laughs in it it was improvised, gorgeous scene another scene that was teaching a group of people from the actor's studio and there was another scene in which this woman wakes up I can't remember what the objectives were but here's what the scene turned out to be a woman wakes up she has been at a bar the night before she has gone home with this guy she got drunk and went home with this guy and she was hanging out in a fairly fancy bar so she thought that she was hanging out with somebody with a couple of bucks in his pocket and she discovers that these guys have a friend who has no particular money he's a bus driver and she has just her aim was off and she went on with the bus driver well this guy thought that she was really into him he thought this was the beginning of a real relationship and her thing was just to sort of okay screw that one up she was just sort of shrugging she thought it was something special try to hook a rich guy and got a bus driver well you win some you lose some hey your bus do you take that home with you do you have it parked out back could you give me a lift home great scene wonderful scene so we moved to the point where at the end of the week we put up an evening of these kinds of scenes if you are interested in pursuing this I'll give you my email address and I'll pass the word along to the people who organize this every year my email address is dg as in drama is skilled dg sweet sweet being my last name s-w-e-e-t at a-o-l dot com yes I have a-o-l I'm old so but we do this every summer what's it called the summer it's the summer improv retreat I do this we've been doing this every summer for like the last 19 years the teachers come and experiment with new techniques and people build new characters and new scenes it's great fun do you know the relationship obviously everyone goes oh my glee but there's also that whole bunch of filmmakers who did John C. Riley and then the woman's done your sister sister there used to be called mumblepore Lynn what's her name Shelton I can't tell you the name but Mike Lee who I in fact once met and who's a genius and one of the ruder people I've ever met in my life oh nice to meet you but I'm a huge fan of his but for those of you who don't know Mike Lee, Mike Lee builds movies he doesn't tell his actors the stories of the movies that they're in he improvises with them privately he writes an outline characters that he likes then he takes the best characters that each of these actors have come up with and he writes a story that he keeps to himself he writes an outline and he shoots the movies in order in chronological order and if you see a movie called secrets and lies which was nominated for best picture the stuff that you're seeing in there was shot the day that it was discovered and what they were doing on the day that they were shooting the scenes and the material was developed improvisation the great scene between the mother and daughter Brenda Blethen and I'm forgetting the name of the black Mary Jean Baptiste Mary Jean Baptiste they were both nominated for Oscars for that scene which they built in the morning and shot that afternoon one shot is there a lead time or something anyway there's a lot of ways of building stuff improvisation you had a question she has a question we'll come back to you I have something above my desk it's a quote from Mike Nichols which you probably heard he said every scene every scene has to be a negotiation a fight or a seduction and I thought I saw him do a times talk he said the same thing that's a great way he was one of my he's one of my teachers in my book my book is called Something Wonderful Right Away it's going to be reissued in a year or so from Northwestern University but you can probably find a used copy someplace but Nichols was a big influence on me and has remained a friend in somebody I asked about this stuff he's got one of the great analytic minds in the business but he came to it out of improvising Elaine May would say that if the scene was dying when in doubt seduce because that was always a scene so whenever a scene was dying she would start to seduce because it was always a scene because it was always an objective okay yes you had a question well there are a number of different ways that people do this sometimes you just have and this is as much actor studio as it is second city sometimes people will just you say put aside the script now improvise your way through it using your own words and you will find new material and you'll find new blocking and then assuming actors who will let you do it you can incorporate some of the stuff that you find you had a question it's more of a comment I mean you can do a lot of reading and they could be really boring and then the audience is there and their comments are all in the pot and basically a lot of the issues of the reading are sort of interesting it's like there's no objects no action here's the reason why that becomes a problem this is where this comes I believe that there are three levels of logic that have to obtain at all times during a scene one level of logic is the story that you want to tell what the writer wants to tell and you have to that chain of logic has to be firm you have to be able to have a chain of logic from the perspective of each of the characters the characters must constantly be behaving in a way that is logical for them and that they believe advances their interest and then the third level of logic is what the audience makes of it so if you know exactly what you're doing and if the characters know exactly what they're doing but the audience is clueless the piece doesn't work I was teaching a writing course in Philadelphia at one point and I had a student who was writing a western and there was a scene in this western where this bar fly this sort of drunk in a bar insults the most vicious the most dangerous man in town and gets shot by him, killed and I said okay I'll ask you a couple of questions is the bar fly new to town no no he's been here for years is the dangerous man new to town no no he's been here for years why is the bar fly insulting the guy that he knows is the most dangerous man in town who is liable to kill him oh because I need to have a scene in boot hill next scene I said no no that's your logic I said why is this guy doing something which is not in his interest why is he getting himself killed no then why is he doing it because I need to see in the boot hill you see so he was not thinking from the perspective of his characters you must always at any point be able to look at a script and see how everything any of the characters does from their perspective they think is advancing their own interests they may be wrong but they really think that they're pursuing their objectives at any given time if you ever have a character doing something just because you want something to happen it's going to look hollow and unpersuasive the audience is going to say why is the character doing that oh the writer is pushing the plot forward there's great series and then they have a bad season and it's usually that like oh they needed that to happen so she gave money to the church I'm curious about your process as a writer knowing all you do about this do you not have any kind of outline do you have just a notion of what you're going to write do you do this in rewriting it really depends sometimes I start from improv sometimes I start from something that I've discovered historically and the story is going to be laid out because I've said oh this is an interesting story and the shape of it is my telling the story that I've discovered that I want to tell sometimes I just write something but these techniques are so in my bones now that even when I'm writing to me when I'm writing I am transcribing the characters improvising in my mind and I'm just racing I've actually now gotten to the point where I sometimes do you know about a program called dragon naturally speaking dictation program I sometimes improvise dialogue into the computer playing the parts then I go back and clean it up but some of my best stuff has been just improvising into the computer not being self-conscious just improvising into the computer I'll give you an example of something a number of years ago I was running a workshop I had actors and improvisers in the workshop and we had a room booked for three hours and at the end of two and a half hours we had finished our work we had done everything that people had brought in to work on but we still had a half hour left so it was going to waste a half hour so there were I think there were five of us in the room there were two women and three men in the room and I said okay let me set up a situation just flying by the seat of my pants I said okay here are there are three couples who have known each other for years and every year they take a vacation together and they arrive at the cabin by the lake I like cabins by the lake and only one of the wives hasn't shown up and this guy becomes convinced that his wife is not going to show up and that this is the end of his marriage and the other people who think this is going to be a vacation realize what they're going to do is deal with their friend coping with the end of his marriage so we started it's pretty interesting it seems to work and I think oh there's a play here so I think okay what do I want to do with this I think well I think I would rather write more good parts for women than for men so I'm just going to make it so that it's one of the men who hasn't shown up and I want to do a small cast play so instead of it being three couples it'll be two couples and so I got together with an actress named Beth Lynx who also writes under the name of Arlene Hutton I got together with Beth and my wife who at that point was my girlfriend Christine Niven and I said I set up the circumstances for the first scene this woman her husband is not showing up and she's convinced this is the end of her marriage and what was supposed to be a pleasant week is about to go to hell so we improvised our way through a scene that was based on the beginning of the week the woman realizing her husband isn't going to show up I found five or six really good lines in that including at one point Beth said to me god damn Russ now I have to make the pasta instead of the roast I said okay I don't get it I don't understand she says well a roast you have to time if we knew that Russ was going to be here then I could time it for when he was going to arrive and we could have the roast pasta on the other hand you can whip up it's ready in ten fifteen minutes as soon as she said that to me I said oh that's my objective correlative I said pasta is what you do in an emergency a roast is when you're secure and you have plans and I knew that the play was going to end with her saying tonight I can make the roast it was a gift she gave me she had no idea she was giving me that gift as soon as I heard it I said that's the end of the play tonight I can make the roast I wrote the first scene and then I got together with him again and they gave me great material for the second scene I wrote the second scene I wrote the third scene just sitting on a train one day I knew what that scene was going to be about and the fourth scene I remember there was something that was going on personally where I was very very irritated in my own personal life and there was a scene in which the part that my wife Christine was playing that I was she was saying why why would you consider doing why would you do this thing because my character was contemplating doing something that would disrupt her life considerably and I suddenly exploded and I said because you did the wrong thing what you did was wrong it was not the right thing to do just came roaring out of me I didn't know where it came from but it was obviously something was going on in me personally and everybody in the room went and I thought oh I can use that and it's this explosion out of this guy who thinks that he's utterly irrational this rage that suddenly comes erupting out of him is shocking and I bet I put that into the play about maybe 10 or 12 lines in the play that came out of improv but they informed the rest of the play if you're curious to read it it's a play called with and without there's an acting edition or there's an anthology of my plays called the value of names and other plays including an essay about each of my plays that's in there and there are nine plays in there has an essay about how each of the plays were written where they came from but I've gotten to the point now a couple years ago I was sent sort of an email to a batch of my friends you know I've got a group of friends that occasionally have a thought and I just send it out and I said gee one of the things I've always wanted to do is to get some improvisers and some writers together in a remote place for a week and all we'll do is we'll improvise based on each other's premises and if I improvise something that's based on a premise that you've come up with you record it anything I do is a gift to you you can use in your play similarly anything that you do in response to my premise is a gift to me and somebody on my list said oh I can make that happen and she said we've got a beautiful house in Chatham you've got it for a week would you like five grand you know we can fly some people in and she just out of the blue gave me five grand and I flew in people some of them well known some of them not flew in a couple I know that who were members of the groundlings who co-wrote the book to a sister act and wrote eight years of cheers Stein-Kellner yeah the Stein-Kellners that's right they also came to our summer improv retreat with a couple of their kids yeah if you know those Simpsons Dan Castellonetta and his wife Deb came in a guy named Ron West from Second City it was an actress writer named Catherine Butterfield whose work I knew was a writer and I had a hunch this would work for her and she says I'm not an improviser I said try it turns out she was a terrific improviser and we did this not this last summer but the summer before two plays were finished out of that as well as three 1x some of which are already oh this works and so last summer Deb and Dan and some other improvisers got together and also if you know Deborah I'm suddenly blanking our name Endaze Laffer Deb Laffer I've been hawking on her that she should come the previous summer and she instead went to the O'Neill Center whatever but she came this summer and she had this extraordinary changing way I've written she hadn't acted in years she'd acted in one of my plays 15 years ago but she got up it turns out she's a fabulous improviser and again we have this extraordinary week we've got another invitation to go to chatter next summer so this is going to be an annual thing but we just work for a week we improvise for four hours a day we make certain that the house is in a pretty place so that we've got some place to visit and then at night we have dinner and we write and that's how we spent the week and it's an extraordinary week an extraordinarily productive week so players don't have to start with you at a keyboard they can start in an improv they can start in a suggestion so you have another question when you do your when you wrote things based on improvs with your girlfriend now wife and friends do you sit at the table so that you can record it well sometimes it's that sometimes we just have a good enough mic so that it will pick stuff up when we were improvising in this last summer with that gang we had a place in stonington massachusetts and we had video people brought to their video cameras and people videotaped stuff there was one hilarious scene where Dan Castellanetto was playing a particularly vicious nun who was walking on the back of this priest you know it's very very funny but obviously you know so yeah these days video is so cheap and so easy so sometimes somebody will come up with a piece of blocking or a piece of business that you can use I mean you have to do it with people who are willing to make the gift and who expect to get a gift back so I've been kicking around to actually maybe renting a house and just doing this with a batch of people as a as a money making thing you know people hire me and we'll do it for a week but there's a way of doing this this does for you and it does so all this stuff is about improv and how improv is related to playwriting we've got what like five minutes tops okay we have five minutes anybody want to ask anything else about anything that I've covered here yes my pleasure I have a question have you ever had a reveal to a negotiation that you knew was in the right place then you put the show up in front of an audience and it's too soon or it's too late I guess I'm not quite understanding a reveal to a negotiation I'm trying not to use the word plot point I want to know when you finally get to it did it ever come in the wrong place and you didn't realize that until you saw it not with an audience because I tend to workshop stuff pretty thoroughly before I allow something to go into rehearsal for a final production I think these days it's so expensive to put on a final production and if you haven't workshopped something and tested it out it's for me it's irresponsible not to have a script to be in such good shape that by the time I go into rehearsal for a final production people make jokes about it with me but I rarely change more than half a page when I'm in final rehearsal I just had a show called Court Marshal of Fort Devens and we changed about half a page I found a way to get to something faster that was about it was the same page or on an average I tend to go through such a process of testing stuff because when you're doing the full production and people are spending big money they don't want to sit off to the side while you're rewriting something so I workshop stuff within an inch of its life before I allow it to be produced actors don't want to have to keep learning new lines it drives them nuts they just want to be able to work you can show them the respect of viewing them a text that's going to say substantially the same but you can test it out that's what the workshop system is for so but sure I get things wrong in first drafts all the time that's why they're first drafts Lanford Wilson used to say he didn't know who he was quoting but he said something which I always love which was that the first draft is written by the artist the second by the critic and I do believe that anyway oh yeah going back to your say weekend chat how do you set that up and what is that everybody's coming expecting to give a gift and get a gift so how do you actually organize that you got outlines do you just have a premise sometimes people actually have outlines for plays sometimes people just have an idea for a scene you know I had an idea for a scene about a guy who was marrying into a family that was way wealthier than he was talking to his father in law and the father in law not being shy about letting him know that he was marrying up and that he was going to give him crap about it and so Dan and a guy named Jonathan Stark Jonathan came out of the groundlings and was writer producer of the world according to Jim for a number of years he was a brilliant improviser they just started improvising and I used half of what they said in the script and then I had other ideas and took it in other places but that's all I needed to say to them so you just started with that one idea and that turned into it was tremendous well it's on its way to being the full play that and it's married to a half page from an early Faulkner novel that you wouldn't identify flags in the dust I don't think any Faulkner scholar will recognize it but that's what it's marrying those two elements so anyway I want to thank you you've got my email address if you have questions if you're interested in doing any of this stuff you know the summer improv retreat I'm game to put to put together a week in stoned to Massachusetts if enough people want to throw in money to rent the house and hire me to do it but it's a week how come you don't do it as like a week thing it's too much trouble you think it is it's very hard one of the benefits of going away for a week is there's no distraction the work gets done thank you thank you oh and I