The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

Playing House

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Jill Bernard for the first time. We got breakfast and chatted about life, and a little bit about improv. We talked about the improv rule “don’t deny,” and were both bemused by how the very fact that there has to be such a rule assumes the worst in human nature. I mean, do we really need to have a rule telling people to play nice? As if we have to say something like, “Guys, look, we know you’re going to have a very strong urge to just shit on each other up there. Just, you know…don’t.” It was a fascinating thought, and I sort of played it around in my mind for the rest of the day.

I thought about the concept of denial for so long, I eventually ended up tracing it back to one of its earliest forms in experience. Now, could go all the way back, to the first time a child tests his parents’ authority and control by telling them “no.” But if found myself being drawn to something a little bit later in one’s development—that ubiquitous and proto-performative endeavor: playing house.

 
In terms of child development, “make-believe” play—that is, pretending to be someone you are not, and fully committing to acting as that person, rather than simply dressing up like her—is actually one of the markers of increasing sophistication in a child’s world-view. To move from simple, self-centered tactile play to imaginative, even performative, play, requires high levels of abstraction. Thus, playing house represents a huge developmental leap in a child, but, more importantly, it may also be his first introduction to long-form improvisation.

Now, I don’t know if you have ready access to children the way I do, but watch them play house sometimes. It’s both amazing and incredibly frustrating from an improvisational perspective. It’s amazing to watch the children develop characters with such depth of relationship and backstory (“I’m the mom but I had to go back to graduate school so you have to stay with the babysitter most of the time and it makes you upset”). Of course, many of these stories are projections of the children’s own lives, but not always. I remember walking in to my daughter’s pre-school class one day and being told that she was in the “house corner.” When I went over to get her, she was “on the phone.” “No! No! I told you! No, you can’t have the kids this weekend. See! This is why I divorced you!” she shouted. I don’t know where she got this (TV maybe?), but my husband and I are happily married. At any rate, whatever their source material, they bring it to bear on their play with surprising depth.


But here’s the frustrating part: playing house tends to involve seemingly endless negotiations that often take longer than the play itself. I remember babysitting for a pair of sisters who would spend so much time negotiating their roles (“I’m the mom.” “No, I’m the mom.” “Fine, but then I’m your sixteen-year-old daughter who just got her driver’s license and I have a cute boyfriend.” “Okay, Rachel will be the mom and we’re twins,” etc.) in the game that I would often exasperatedly suggest that they simply play and see what happens. To them, this seemed like madness. How could they possibly begin playing when they weren’t satisfied with their roles?!

 
From this model of playing house as the proto-long-form improv experience, however, we can see how it might make sense to provide a preemptive rule to avoid denial (or, as Jill likes to remind me, said in the positive, to encourage agreement), not because people are inherently mean, but because people are interested in protecting their desire to live out their preferred characters and scenarios and relationships from the time they are very young. And the natural way to negotiate this is through a series of denials and renegotiations.


Joseph Campbell, the 20th century philosopher and mythologist often spoke of “living out the forms” of the universe. He argued that we experience various recurring states of the human condition (some would recognize these by the term “archetype”: the epic hero, the caring mother, the prodigal son, etc.) through personal experience, or make-believe, or vicariously through literature. And that any given time in our lives we’re psychologically drawn to one state or another as it affords us the opportunity to gain understanding or resolution or catharsis.

 
That may be why, for the girls I babysat, the negotiation was as important as the game itself, or, rather, the negotiation was a necessary part of the game. They had to keep revising their characters, and then fitting each other’s characters into the story without giving up their desired attributes, and then revising again until it fit both their needs.


So shouldn’t we expect a performer who is new to improv come to it with the same patterns of behavior with which he approached that first improvisational experience? And really, maybe it is rather counter-intuitive to tell someone that whatever the other person says, does, establishes, etc. is as real and true (and in fact, now more real and true simply because it was said aloud) as anything he might have said, done, or established. Why should that other person’s preferences trump his?


But improv is not just Grown-Up House.


First of all, there’s an audience watching you the whole time. Probably they’ve paid to see you perform. And they’re not particularly interested in you getting what you want as a performer. They want to see comedy. And the way to get to the comedy quickly is to acquiesce to whatever reality is established first. It’s not the time and place for you, the performer, to duke it out with your fellow improviser. Not only are you wasting everybody’s time, you’re completely betraying the audience’s suspension of disbelief. “Hi, sweetie.” “Hi, mom.” “I’m your wife and I think it’s weird when you call me mom.” “Well, it’s weird being married to your mom.” What are you, children?


But, more importantly, long-form improv represents an inherently different model. Rather than two children trying to play out their individual characters side-by-side, the two adult improvisers need to be collaborative, co-creating a universe and the characters that inhabit it as they perform. And in order to maintain the integrity of that universe, the characters have to be created in relationship to each other. And the performers need to be open to that co-creation so that their characters flow out of that creation, rather than being forced on it from without. (In terms of Joseph Campbell’s “forms”, what this means is instead of simply playing the “epic hero,” we play out “hero and mentor” or “hero and villain”; rather than simply “prodigal son” we are “son and father” or “son and mother”.)
 

Since experienced improvisers already see things from this perspective, the idea of denying seems absurd. But many beginning improvisers naturally come to improv with the rules of play they learned as a child. They’re not being mean or trying to put down the other players, they’re just trying to assert their individual identities. For these beginners, the rule “don’t deny” is acknowleding this very real desire, and guiding them through the paradigm shift away from the individual and toward a collaborative whole. Because when we create together, we produce our best, funniest, most fulfilling work. And that’s the best kind of play.

 

  1. thehousethatdelbuilt posted this