Agree or Die. [Improvisational Christianity #4]

January 18, 2012 By Joe Boyd 6 Comments

Improv is play – simple pretending. Think of what works best when kids are at play.

Here are three examples of how little children tend to play together:

Example 1:

Girl: I’m a Princess!

Boy: No, you’re a Wizard!

Girl: No, I’m a Princess. You’re a Prince.

Boy: You’re ugly and stupid!

Girl leaves weeping.

Example 2:

Girl: I’m a Princess!

Boy: Ok, I’m A Wizard.

Girl: No. You’re a Prince. You have blonde hair and green eyes and you live in a castle and you have white horse and…

Girl won’t shut up. The boy grows bored (and annoyed.) He leaves.

Example 3:

Girl: I’m a Princess!

Boy: Yep, and I’m a Wizard!

Girl: Are you a good Wizard?

Boy: Yes, and I’m here to warn you of something terrible.

Girl: Oh no! Quick, come in my castle. It’s over here.

Boy: Ok, but hurry.

They play like this for hours, telling an impossible story, laughing together and becoming friends.

If you have spent time with kids lately, you’ve probably seen a real-life version of each of the three above scenarios. An underlying premise behind improvisation is, not only that play is important, but that there is a better way to play. A certain style of play is more mutually fun and meaningful. This style of play (Example 3) is centered in the concept of Agreement.

Rule #3 – Agree and Accept.

(Late to the discussion? Learn about Rule #1 and Rule #2.)

When I teach kids (or adults) to improvise, this is the biggest stumbling block. Non-agreement is the easiest way to spot an amateur improviser. Here’s an example of a typical scene with two adult students during a first level improv class:

Guy: W’sap?

Girl: Nothing.

Guy: You come here to get your fake ID?

Girl: No. I don’t need a fake ID.

Guy: Yes you do. You called me and told me.

Girl: I don’t even know you, how could I call you?

Oh the agony of bad play! Put me out of my misery… fast.

The above scene tells me that I am dealing with two insecure actors, afraid to trust one another.

Here’s an example of how two professionals might play the same scene:

Guy: Psst. Jenny. Over here. I got your fake ID. (He waves it above his head.)

Girl: Put it away! The cops will see you. (She looks around and walks to him, whispering.) They’re all over the place.

Guy: Uh, yeah. It’s a police station. You got the payment?

Girl: Yes, $20 of Chick-fil-a gift cards, just like your text said…

You get the point. There are some rules at play we haven’t discussed yet in this short scene, like heightening, raising the stakes, etc. But this scene works because there is agreement. The first scene lacks agreement so it, professionally speaking, sucks.

You have to agree and accept to be a good improviser.

The second you don’t agree, you weaken the story and fail your partner. We call this saying Yes.

Yes is always the right answer in improv.

Saying Yes means that we are constantly affirming the reality that we are creating together. If my partner tells me that I’m a doctor, then I’m a doctor. End of story. I can be any kind of doctor I want to be until one of us specifies, but I am a doctor:

You: Doctor, we have a problem!

Me: Ok, nurse. I’m ready to do brain surgery right this time.

OR

You: Doctor, we have a problem!

Me: Please, my friends just call me Dre. Let’s just get this track down.

Here is a BAD choice:

You: Doctor, we have a problem!

Me: No we don’t it’s all under control.

Or an even worse response –

You: Doctor, we have a problem!

Me: I’m not a doctor, I’m a blind cowboy.

You can’t play with anyone until you agree with them!

As improvisers, we agree. Because it is the best way to play.

Agreement does not mean that we agree that the other person is right.

It means that we agree that what is happening is really happening. We agree on reality.

We may completely disagree what our scene partner does, but it doesn’t matter. To deny the reality of our pretend world makes it vanish into awkward meaninglessness.

There are at least four reasons why people don’t agree in improv (and life):

1. Hidden Agendas.

This is the biggest reason younger improvisers have for disagreeing. An actor will think before the scene starts something like, “I’m gonna be Tarzan.” Then he walks on stage and his partner leads with, “Doctor, we have a problem.” The amateur will instinctively say, “No.” Because he thinks he is Tarzan. But only he knows he thinks that. His partner made him a doctor, so he’s a doctor. The reality we live in is mutually created moment by moment. Nobody except all of us is allowed to be the writer the story.

2. Self-absorption.

If you don’t hear your partner, you can’t agree with her. If you don’t watch your partner, you can’t tell a story together. Your partner matters more than you do in any scene. You can’t play without her. The more fun she has, the longer you get to play together and the better story you tell. In short, it’s never about you. You only exist to serve the story and the other storytellers.

3. Fear.

Unfortunately, we tend to say “no” when we don’t know what else to do. People are watching. Our partner may be struggling. So we take over, ignore everything we have created together and try to save face. It never works. You will look desperate. Better to agree and fail together, then disagree and die alone.

4. Pimping.

The best improvisational comedians aren’t trying to be funny. They are trying to be in the present and tell a story. Funny comes from being real. In every scene, there is always the opportunity to tell a cheap joke at the expense of your partner. (We call this pimping for obvious reasons.) You can pimp your partner by selling them out to get a cheap laugh. And the audience will laugh. Once. But you killed the scene before it started…and you damaged the trust of your partner because you were selfish.

This thinking has gone way beyond a hobby or a job for me. Agreement is my life philosophy. It doesn’t mean that I have to agree with everyone’s opinions. Lots of people are wrong about lots of things.

But it does mean that I have to agree to reality.

Especially in matters concerning God, Jesus and the faith.

For instance, my denominational heritage (Christian/Church of Christ) tends to interpret most all of the Bible “literally.” Let’s take a less controversial story like Jonah. I now think it is clearly allegory. I was taught growing up that if I think that way, I am “on a slippery slope” to heresy. At some point, through study and contemplation, it just screamed out to me that the reality is that parts of the Bible are meant to be allegorical. Do I really think some guy was physically in the belly of a fish for several days – not only surviving, but writing and memorizing Hebrew poetry?

No. I don’t believe that actually happened. The point is that I had to overcome my hidden agenda, self-absorption, and fear to see the reality that was there all along. I was also pimping the book of Jonah – selling it out for a quick and easy interpretation. Now I am free to play with a brilliant piece of literature.

I see a lot of issues boiling up in and around the church that are divisive. Some of them have yet to reach their climax. It’s not going to be pretty when they do. What I see, often on both sides of any given hot button topic, is a lot of hidden agendas, self-absorption, fear and ruthlessness. This makes honest discussion (let alone unity) impossible. Until we can agree on what is actually going on in the world, we can’t work (or play) together. We can’t agree until we shed our agendas, egos and fears. That’s hard to do. It means vulnerability. It means, not just that I might not get my way, but that I certainly will not get my way.

But we could find our way together.

That’s what an improvisational Christianity looks like to me.

Are you ready to say Yes to reality?

Even if it paralyzes you with fear?

Even if it takes away your power?

Even if it is the harder road?

I had planned on sharing my list of the“realities” that I think we are ignoring. But I would love to hear yours instead. I’d also love to see if we can practice respecting each other’s concept of reality within these very comments.

How long can we play together before defaulting to the age-old time-tested Christian practice of the “No” we call excommunication? It will be an interesting experiment to find out. (I was excommunicated again just yesterday on my friend Kurt’s blog - but not by Kurt.)

What do you think? What is the reality we are currently living in? How do we get past our agendas, egos, fears and comfortability to joyfully play together again in the world we all share?

@JoeBoyd blogs daily at www.joeboydblog.com.

 

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Shirley Jones, Marlon Brando and God. [Improvisational Christianity]

January 3, 2012 By Joe Boyd 5 Comments

Warning: Name-dropping ahead!

I had the pleasure this summer to work opposite Shirley Jones. Shirley won the Academy Award for her role in Elmer Gantry in 1960. She may be better known these days as Mrs. Partridge, but she was a certified top-of-the-A-list movie star 50 years ago. We did a scene together in our latest romantic comedy, A Strange Brand of Happy. Brad Wise, the director, asked us to simply improvise a conversation to see what might happen. Brad knows that I am an improv guy and tends to give me a lot of freedom as an actor. We did the scene. And Shirley did great. But I will never forget what she said to me after the take.

“That was fun,” she whispered.

I agreed.

“I’ve never done that before,” she sheepishly admitted.

“Never done what?” I asked.

“Improvised on camera,” she said. “I was never allowed to before today.”

She is 77. (An amazingly gorgeous 77.)

This was her 90th screen credit as an actor.

I was stunned.

How could that be true? She had never been allowed to improvise? Ever?

The actual scene being shot. That's my back...Shirley's face.

I reflected later on her words:

“It was fun…I’ve never been allowed to do that before.”

Those are powerful words. At the end of the four-week shoot, Shirley told Brad that her experience on our little movie was the most rewarding professional experience of her life.

Umm. Did I mention that she has an Oscar!?. That couldn’t be true. Could it?

It made me start to wonder how many people of faith have never been allowed to improvise….have never had enough freedom to have fun…have never felt the out-on-the-edge high that comes with making life up with someone else in an unknown moment.

Here is a scene from On the Waterfront (1954) with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. It is one of the most famous improvisations in the history of film.  About 45 seconds in Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove. The director should have called cut at that point. But he didn’t. So Brando kept going. The following 90 seconds or so were completely improvised.  It resulted in a brilliantly real scene, a very famously funny line (“the crickets make me nervous”) and three Academy Awards.

One for Brando.

One for Saint.

And one for the silent director, Elia Kazan.

In my opinion, he may have won Best Director for what he did not do. He didn’t say “cut” when every other director in 1954 would have. He allowed them to keep going.

Check it out for yourself. What do you notice changing after the glove drops? Does it feel more real? More true?

YouTube Preview Image

So let’s play some metaphoric aerobics for half a second.

Where are we yelling “cut” too quickly in life? Are we accepting the dropped gloves in our lives or allowing them to shut everything down? Or, like Shirley, what amazingly fun and brilliant moments are we not allowing people to have as we stubbornly worship the pre-scripted future?

An Improvisational Christianity learns to pick up the glove and keep going. The Improvisational Christian finds God after the moment everyone else yells, “Cut!”

I’ll be back Friday discussing the third rule of improv – and the most important one: Agree and Accept.

@JoeBoyd blogs daily at www.joeboydblog.com.

*photo courtesy Russ Beckner

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Is God Fun? [Improvisational Christianity #3]

December 30, 2011 By Joe Boyd 1 Comment

This is the third post in my exploration of Improvisational Christianity. You may want to catch up by reading the first two posts:

1. Improvisational Christianity: I Hope You Like Me

2. Saturday Night Live, Modernity and Stories

The first rule of improv we looked at last week was “Tell a Story.” This week we look at the second rule I learned as an improviser:

Rule #2 – Everyone Plays.

Deeply embedded in this rule is that improvisation is supposed to be fun and communal.

So is life.

My friend Missy was diagnosed with cancer. Her life wasn’t fun. It was scary and painful and uncertain. She was given serious medical advice to find a hobby that could serve as a distraction from her illness.

Just like I wandered broken into the Second City in Las Vegas, Missy wandered sick into the SAK Comedy Lab in Orlando for her first improv class. The first thing she was told there was that this is “an ok place to fail.” Missy broke down in thankful tears knowing that she needed that more than anything else in the world. She needed a safe place to have fun again.

Missy recovered from cancer. (Twice actually.) But she never recovered from improv. She teaches it in Cincinnati and coaches a local troupe that I play with called The Q City Players.

Did you happen to notice all the “playing” in that last sentence alone?

I said that I “play” with The Q City “Players.” This is something you should know about improvisers. We are so serious about play that the word itself is never far from our lips. When we perform, we call it “playing games.” When we invite someone to do a show we say, “Do you want to come play with us?” If it sounds like the way little kids talk, it should. We’ve rediscovered child-like secrets that we lost long ago – that people were born to play, and to play in a community where it is ok to fail. Everyone Plays.

Just so you know this isn’t just right-brained bohemian hippie crazy talk. There is serious science behind it. Psychiatrist and adult play expert Dr. Stuart Brown said the following during at interview for his book, Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul:

“It is that we, as homo sapiens, are fundamentally equipped for and need to play actively throughout our lifespan by nature’s design. While most social mammals have a life cycle that involves dominance and submissiveness (as in Chimpanzee troops or wolf packs) with play diminishing significantly as adulthood arrives, we retain the biology associated with youthfulness despite still dying of old age! By this I mean that our overall long period of childhood dependency, which is dominated by the need for play, does not end with our reaching adulthood. Our adult biology remains unique among all creatures, and our capacity for flexibility, novelty and exploration persists. If we suppress this natural design, the consequences are dire. The play-less adult becomes stereotyped, inflexible, humorless, lives without irony, loses the capacity for optimism, and generally is quicker to react to stress with violence or depression than the adult whose play life persists. In a world of major continuous change (and we are certainly facing big changes economically now) playful humans who can roll with the punches and innovate through their play-inspired imaginations will better survive. Our playful natures have arrived at this place through the trial and error of millions of years of evolution, and we need to honor our design to play.”

It makes one wonder if part of the God-image in us, that which makes us eikons reflecting his glory unlike anything else in all of creation has something to do with God’s (and our) playfulness.

An improvisational Christianity would have to be playful. The God of an Improvisational Christianity would have to have capacity for fun. So here is the question that I ask with a little uncertain trepidation:

Is the God of the Bible playful?

The short answer is yes…and no. God comes off very seriously and often perturbed in the Bible. Perhaps for this reason, most Christians I know are overly serious (and perturbed) people. Having fun in my specific evangelical heritage was, at best, a necessary distraction. At worst it was a damnable sin. (If the fun involved alcohol, dancing or a 12-sided D&D die, for instance.)

However, there is also a strange unqualifiable mirth, perhaps even a mischievousness, to the God reflected in the Scriptures. (Talking donkeys, floating axe-heads, prostitutes always saving the day, really old women constantly getting knocked up by their husbands, etc.)

G.K. Chesterton was either one of the smartest men who ever lived or such a masterful wordsmith that he comes off as such. What he says at the end of his masterpiece Orthodoxy has stuck with me for years:

“Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because (God) never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

Chesterton takes the time-tested iconic image of the white-bearded-grandfather God and replaces him with  the eight-year-old-mischievious-boy-holding-a-muddy-horny-toad God.  A God who is younger than us would know how to really play. Maybe Chesterton’s Younger God is exactly what we all need after a few millenia of Grandpa God.

It all makes me think that the most urgently serious question to ask might be this:

Is the God we inherited playful enough to be considered seriously?

Are Christians having enough fun to be taken seriously with our claim to have good news? Are our Christian communities known for our scandalous mirth? Is my God fun?

My concern is that all of us our deceived. What if we are actually still simple seven-year old kids who want to play with our friends? But we now suddenly find ourselves trapped in aging bodies with monthly mortgages, unused business cards and cut-rate auto insurance.

This concern, along with my initial reading Orthodoxy ten years ago, lead me to write a fairy tale under that very premise. If you want it, you can find Between Two Kingdoms on Amazon. If you don’t want to pay for it, I’m sure it is pirated somewhere on the interweb.

I’ll end this post with one more Chesterton quote. It happens to be the same quote that begins my fairy tale.

Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

We need to believe in dragons again.

So we can have fun beating them together.

Here’s to an emerging expression of Christianity where everyone plays, it’s ok to fail, and really old ladies still get knocked up by their husbands.

@JoeBoyd blogs daily at www.joeboydblog.com

Follow Joe’s friend Missy at @HotShotPR

Filed Under: Culture, emerging church, Theology Tagged With: , , , , , 1 Comment

Saturday Night Live, Modernity and Stories

December 16, 2011 By Joe Boyd 3 Comments

My life changed forever the day I wandered into an abandoned dance studio just west of the Las Vegas Strip on a Wednesday afternoon. It was my first professional improvisational comedy class at The Second City. I had no idea that my life was about to shift so dramatically.

I had always been fascinated with improv and sketch comedy. As a kid, I used to sneak out of my room at 12:30 a.m. on Sunday mornings to catch the last thirty minutes of Saturday Night Live. In high school I watched a short-lived TV show of improv games taped at The Groundlings theater in LA. (I had no clue that I would be on that same stage about 15 years later.) I discovered Whose Line Is It Anyway? when I was about 14. I was amazed. It felt like magic. I could not believe that these guys were just making stuff up. This was the British version that aired on some-probably-defunct early 1990’s cable station.

You know how it so trendy to say that the British version of The Office is better than the American version? That what I was saying in high school about Whose Line, but my friends had seen neither version. So I never actually got to have the argument.

As an adult I became particularly obsessed the theory of sketch comedy, specifically with the history of SNL. As a pastor, my church services at times felt more like a comedy club than a church. I just couldn’t help it.

But church work was killing me. It wasn’t fun except for those few moments when I turned it into a show. And I knew that church as a show wasn’t church at all. I was so depressed that one Christmas my wife gave me the gift of improv classes at The Second City, generally regarded as the preeminate place to study improv. They had recently started a show and a school in Las Vegas. Her thinking was that maybe my interest of comedy could turn into a hobby. Neither of us knew it would turn into much more.

My first improv teachers have found recent success. Jason Sudeikis is a current SNL cast member and emerging movie star, Kay Cannon is an Emmy-winning writer on 30 Rock and Joe Kelly is a talented writer/producer on How I Met Your Mother. At the time they were just people my same age who had devoted their lives to comedy the same way I had devoted mine to church planting. I was late to their party, but I was on-my-knees grateful to find them. At The Second City, I felt at home for the first time in my life.

Jason on SNL with Kristen Wiig

Improv is all about making stuff up – there are no scripts or agendas. It is play. To make this scriptless world work, there are rules. For some reason, that surprised me. Many people think that improvisation is about doing whatever you want, but it is actually a quite contained discipline of doing the right thing however you want.

I’ll be discussing some of the common rules of improv over my next seven posts here. I want to start with the first thing I was told at The Second City in that dance studio. (It was also the very first thing I was told when I began studying at the afore-mentioned Groundlings Theater in L.A. years later.) The first rule of improv is…

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