The House That Del Built

Theme and the Harold

“Can we get a suggestion from the audience of anything at all?” “Liverwurst” “Thank you, I heard liverwurst.” And so begins another Harold.

But what’s this Harold about? Shoot me in the face if it’s 30 minutes on liverwurst: a kid who doesn’t want to eat it; a lady who makes it at home; two pieces of it talking to each other. Come on. The suggestion is not a mandate for the subject of the show; the suggestion is a catalyst for finding your show. It’s a way to begin as a team with a clean slate, on the same page, without preconceived notions (although, of course, we all have our own preconceived notions about liverwurst). Your opening is not about liverwurst. It’s about what liverwurst inspires in you as a team—maybe it’s the oppression of childhood; maybe, for your team on this particular night, it’s about aversions to things without really knowing much about them; perhaps you end up focusing on the concept of “you never know until you try”. Whatever the theme—and each of the above statements could be the theme of an entire Harold—it anchors your show and gives it focus.

You discover the theme through the group play you do together in the opening (regardless of the style, although I do find that having overly-prescribed openings makes this process harder). So you need to stay in the opening until there’s a sense of consensus around the theme. You can feel the consensus building as people’s moves become more confident and directed toward that theme, in fact, someone might actually even say it outright. But however it’s arrived at, when in locks in you can feel it—it’s like a car shifting into gear.

Okay, but wait…slow down…why do we want (or need) a theme for our Harold in the first place? Is it a rule that Harolds have to have themes? Have you ever seen a great Harold that wasn’t theme-based, Rachel? Good questions, devil’s advocate. Sure, I see interesting and fun shows all the time that go against my assumptions and/or expectations of the form. And of course rules are made to be broken. But I have found both as a performer and, even more so as a coach and director, that theme is the most consistent way to produce an even, coherent, satisfying, and, yes, hilarious show. And really theme is just an extension of the intuitive understanding of the role of patterns in the Harold and how those patterns represent our human desire for order and meaning. The theme basically takes the patterns of the show and places them all under one meaningful heading.

The first arguments for theme are arguments against some less satisfying ways to move through a Harold. Most people who’ve gotten past the basics of their long form training know that you don’t want to do an entire show based off of a literal interpretation of an audience suggestion (the example of three scenes on liverwurst described above). It quickly loses momentum and fun. It’s limiting and literal. And no one needs or wants that. What they want is for you to weave their suggestion into brilliant comedy of your own design.

Nor do you want to do a show that’s just eight people’s free associations off of the suggestion. Because no matter how strong your group mind, the likelihood that these individual associations are going to converge in a coherent and cohesive way is slim. Plus—and this is just a practical reality—trying to keep track of a show that’s on so many different individual wavelengths is just too hard. They all go in different little compartments in your brain without connection or pattern.    

Discovering a theme together in the opening ensures that everyone on the team is participating in the same show. If you just let each person riff off of the suggestion with whatever comes to his or her mind and never find a common theme to anchor the show, what you often end up with is content and relationships in first beat scenes that are so divergent and disconnected that no amount of third beat “Oh! It turns out they all live in the same town!” scenes can bring satisfyingly together.

But beyond just the technical convenience of theme, its greatest power is to define the world of the show. It’s sort of like naming the category of the pattern (which is a tool a lot of coaches already use when they play The Pattern Game in rehearsal. It usually goes something like, “third person names the pattern”). And defining the world of the show gives it parameters and structure. It’s like writing formal poetry instead of free verse. Yes, you are more limited by the rules of a sonnet structure, but the structure also sets you up for kinds of meanings that aren’t possible without it, like the connection between rhyming words, or the twist of the final couplet. In playing a Harold, we’re already choosing to live within a structure, so why not further define the unique character of tonight’s show within that structure? 

Defining your world not only provides stability, but it gives you a safe place to play. Scenes can be wildly different in character, but they always know they’re connected by the theme of the show. We’ve all been in a Harold before where each of the three first beat scenes seem to be taking place in completely different universes (even if they’re all based off of the suggestion), and then we feel like we’re chasing the show down trying to make it make sense for the rest of the half hour. Establishing a theme means that even if scenes diverge, they’re never disconnected. 

Here I want to stop and offer some clarity on what is and what is not a theme. I differentiate between “topics” and “themes” of shows. A “topic” is a concrete noun or phrase, like “liverwurst” or “Disneyworld” or “fighting with your in-laws”. It refers only to itself and can be expressed only through actually interacting with or talking about it. A “theme” is an abstract concept—also often a noun or a phrase—“childhood oppression”, as in my initial example, or “alienation”, “trying to be someone you’re not”, or “cutting things off”. A theme can be applied to a wide range of specific situations, but is recognizable nonetheless. In fact, a theme provides even more freedom to find the unique dynamic of each individual first beat scene than a topic, where you’re constantly looking for the way to connect this very specific noun to your world. 

But a theme is not all-encompassing meta-category. “Life” is too broad to be a theme, as is “feelings”. If you think of the theme placing a boundary around your show, it makes sense that a concept like “life” makes too wide a boundary, whereas “liverwurst” makes the show’s boundary prohibitively small. We could probably try to make a list of all of the possible nouns and phrase-combinations in the English language and determine whether they are sufficiently large and small to be a theme, but I think you get the idea, and, with practice, you build an intuition for that sweet spot.

Explaining the specific “moves” that establish theme in the opening, exploring it in the first beat, and affirming and reinforcing it in the first group game so that your show is set-up to play out the theme is a technical endeavor, and it’s most effectively explored in a workshop or rehearsal. But, just like anything else in improv, there are conventions—ways of conveying information to your scene partner and teammates that cue everyone as to what’s going on, and what comes next, and I’ll take second here to walk you through an example of what I mean: Okay, so you’ve gotten “liverwurst” as your suggestion. The first person walks out and, let’s say, starts a truthful monologue about the smell of liverwurst at his grandma’s house. The next person, instead of going back to square one with an inspiration from the suggestion itself, engages in a pattern game—does he talk about something nostalgic he remembers about his grandmother? Maybe he talks about the time he worked at McDonald’s and he’d go home smelling of fries. In the first case, the theme starts to reveal itself as “nostalgia” while the second seems to be a bit different—“the connection of smell to memory”, perhaps. Like a pattern game, the rest of the team can now jump in and reinforce the pattern and, hence, the theme. And, even if you’re the one guy who doesn’t see the theme, well then you can just be a team player and join the game; don’t worry, you’ll figure it out soon.

How does this translate into the first beat scenes? Well, now, instead of every scene either using the suggestion directly, or some detail from the opening, they’re all riffing on the theme in a unique way, and they do so in a mode of “freedom” (the first scene gets its pick of how to manifest the theme), “power” (the second scene pushes the theme in a direction—maybe it extends the theme out to other senses such as touch or taste, or maybe it presents a negative portrayal of the senses and their connection with memory to contrast with the positive in the first scene), and responsibility (the third scene following the pattern of the first two in order to create a cohesive set of scenes). 

It might look something like this: a couple who returns to the cafe where they first met (“Oh, God, that’s the Sumatra blend. Remember that, honey?”); a mom who obsessively bakes cookies for her kid after school because she wants him to fondly remember his childhood; a chef who has lost his sense of smell and is keeping it a secret for fear of losing his credibility. The scenes can be pretty different, and yet they’re recognizably connected, and the performers and the audience see the connection. In fact, even if you’re not consciously pushing the theme in your scene, it ends up finding its way in, because it’s been embedded in the group mind of the show. By the third scene you’ll start seeing nods of approval and recognition all over the theater as the show takes shape about the theme. And this is something I can say with certainty: when the theme is clearly established in the first third of the show, the rest of the show plays itself.

I mean, of course it doesn’t actually play itself—but it feels like it does. Because of those clear boundaries, there’s a sense of safety and freedom, an intuition about which moves will be most satisfying. The sets are easier to see, the patterns are easier to play. It’s like building a sandbox around a patch of beach—you can literally see the parameters of the space in which you’re playing, even as you see the expanse of all of the possible places you might have played before you chose this nice little square of sand.

And another night you’ll come back to the beach and plop down on a new plot of sand and build a new sandbox. Just not tonight. Tonight you’re in this one—and that’s not only just fine, it’s just right.

Next week: This Sunday I’ll be teaching a workshop at the Women in Comedy Festival on relationships as the foundation of the long form scene. If you’ve got a question about that or anything else, click “Ask” and send it my way and I’ll try to address it in the next post: “Get Real: Playing the Relationship of the Scene.”

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