I, You, We
A good shortcut to knowing, caring, and saying is to make the scene about the people in the scene.
A good shortcut to knowing, caring, and saying is to make the scene about the people in the scene. A common error for newer improvisers is when two characters spend the whole scene talking about a third character who isn’t there.
A good shortcut to knowing, caring, and saying is to make the scene about the people in the scene. A common error for newer improvisers is when two characters spend the whole scene talking about a third character who isn’t there. The spouse, the boss, the crazy friend. It feels natural, but a scene can’t really get started until the people in it talk to each other about each other. In real life, we rarely talk to each other about each other. We’re scared to do it, or it feels rude. But for our improv scenes, we have to get comfortable speaking directly. A good exercise to practice this is to do two-person scenes in which each person must start their lines with “I,” “you,” or “we.” Do this until you feel the scene has found a game. Making a scene about the characters we can see generally makes the scene more powerful. Here’s a scene between Chris Kula and Billy Merritt.
Chris enters as a customer in line at a counter, looking up over a cashier at a menu. Billy enters to be the cashier. He adopts a stern face and stares intently at Chris. Chris: Hmmm, I’m not sure what to get. Billy: Look at me. Chris: What? No, I… Billy: Don’t look up there. Look at me. I will help you. Look right at me. That subtle bit, just saying “look right at me,” was enough to get the audience laughing. Now the actors still had work to do to determine what the scene was about. Chris: No, I just am not sure what… Billy: You want to see The Revenant? The Revenant was a real movie out at the time. Chris: I’m not sure. I saw an ad for it and it didn’t really grab me. Billy: All we have here is The Revenant. I got rid of the other movies. The game of this scene is a movie theater that has only one movie. But Billy’s “look at me” gave the whole scene a menacing tone, and gave them something to unpack about a person in the scene right away