Show on a boat!

Weds 4/17
4/24/08

The Improfessionals are an English speaking impro group based in Paris made up mainly of expatriates. The group I met on Tuesday night for a workshop includes two Americans, a Brit, a Canadian, a German, and a Dane. Just my type of improv group! They hired me for an editing technique workshop, but had such fun with one of the improvised –freeform movement warm-ups that we actually spent about half of the workshop expanding on those exercises.
Then on Wednesday I was scheduled to perform in a show with them. Though I’d never played (or even rehearsed) their format, the team is such a fun, open, trusting group of talented individuals that I never felt anything but part of the team as we were playing. The audience reacted well and seemed to like the whole show which, by the way, was performed on a BOAT! It’s a barge on a quay and is better equipped than most OOB theater spaces in New York City.
Great fun!

(Improv talk ahead)
Luckily we won the audience over early, for there was a single set of scenes which were my worst time on an improv stage in recent memory.
The Improfessionals format is a directed improv. A single player will interact with the audience for a scene or set of scenes and guide the rest of the cast through their paces. In this instance, Caspar requested that the audience provide a location.
Zimbabwe was the response.
Caspar, being the skilled and experienced improviser that he is, asked that the suggestion be made more specific, for we all know that a nation doesn’t really give the players on stage the same sort of gift that a specific, non-geographical location will give.
However, in being more specific, the audience member responded “Harare”.
This show is being performed in English. Caspar the Dane speaks five languages, English and French being two of them.
The audience member was French, I know this because the French do not use the letter “H”. (Or the letter “D” by the way. I spent a week in Paris not teaching Harold, but teaching Arol.)
While I understood that the French audience member had said Harare, because it’s one of the first associations I have with the country Zimbabwe, Caspar thought the man said “An alley”.
An alley in Zimbabwe would be a wonderful place to begin an improv scene. It might even include some political satire, not to mention kids huffing glue.
But this was not to be!
Unfortunately the audience member was fairly insistent that the scene take place in Harare, and repeated his suggestion, much to the chagrin of Caspar, who still believed he was receiving an insistent request for an alley.
This is where I stuck my fat nose in.

--- That’s actually as far as I got on that leg of the journey. I was running down on battery power and it was time to change yet another train. That travel day took a week, but we were rewarded by finally landing in London Town and our wonderful friend Emily. She’s teaching at NYU/London this semester, and her flat has been our home base for this trip. We’ve already crashed here twice on the trip, but this is the first time we’ve been here WITH her. I continue these entries from her living room with floor to ceiling windows and panoramic 13th floor views (yes, much less superstitious than in the U.S.) of Southwark (pronounced “southark”, duh!) London. We can see Big Ben, The London Eye, the smokestacks from the album cover of Pink Floyd’s “Animals” and the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral that you comedy geeks will remember from the closing credits of Benny Hill. It’s now 4/26 and in a few hours we’re off to catch a production of Lear at the reconstructed Globe Theater. I’m very excited.
All right, back to Paris last Wednesday.---

Ok, the audience member had clearly been reading about Zimbabwe in the paper and Caspar didn’t understand the Harare clarification. I am absolutely not criticizing the Improfessionals for not knowing anything about Zimbabwe. I didn’t know anything about Zimbabwe before I was about to meet my new Zim friends in Holland in 2000.
Well, I did meet my now-old friends from Zim in 2000 and subsequently traveled through Zimbabwe after playing and teaching at the Harare festival in aught one.
Therefore I do know something about Zimbabwe, and said so. To help Caspar I hopped on stage and explained that Harare was the capitol of Zimbabwe. In an effort to get the scene finally started, Caspar placed the scene in “The President’s office” in Harare and off we went.
A quick survey of the eyes of the rest of the company showed that none of them knew much about Zimbabwe or the current political turmoil, so I cast myself as Bob Mugabe speaking to a nameless aid in the wake of the recent real-life election.

I’d like to humbly boast that I was able to lead the subsequent series of scenes in a subtle, informative, character driven manner. That I flawlessly shared enough actual information with my teammates that we were easily able to flow into honest, provocative scenic games which rivaled the political satire which the International Clowns improvised in Harare Zimbabwe in the midst of a social and political crisis.
I’d like to be able to boast all of that, but the resulting sequence was clunky, heavy handed, and awkward. Wow.
The rest of the show was great fun. I knew that I was walking into a hellatious idea-driven world of my own head when I began the scene, but also saw no way out of it. There are several old western movies when our hero, usually a white man being initiated into an indigenous tribe, must walk stoically through a gamut of braves attacking him with kicks, punches, clubs and fire. He knows what’s coming and knows that he has no choice but to walk through the gamut. As we began the Zimbabwe scenes, I took that same deep breath that our usually-white initiate hero takes before walking up that path. My only regret was that I felt as though I was dragging the rest of that team through the alley (Harare) of abuse.
If I’d seen any other way, I would have saved them. I swear!
The rest of the show was brilliantly fun, though. And by the end the audience and the Improfessonals had forgiven me for being Mugabe.
Thank the goodness!

On the other hand, I’d far rather run through that metaphorical gauntlet on an improv stage than be actually effected by Mugabe’s ambition and douchebaggery on a day to day basis.
Sigh.