The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

Monologue Openings: A Case Study in Developing Theme in a Harold

I’ve talked before about the benefit of having a theme for your long-form show rather than just riffing off of a bunch of information and/or topics. Without restating the entire argument (which you could go read if you’d like), it basically goes like this: generating a conceptual/thematic center for your show in your opening gives you a framework that makes the rest of the show easier to play, and more meaningful to both you and the audience. It’s the difference between doing comedy for a half hour and performing a thirty-minute, one-act comedic play of sorts.

Until now I haven’t broken down the specifics of how an opening would look if it’s generating a theme, and I’d like to do that today, just for one kind of opening with which many of us are familiar: the true-life monologue opening.

This opening usually goes “Get the suggestion, then have three members of the team deliver a truthful monologue inspired by the suggestion.” Most of the times I see this played, each monologue is based on the suggestion itself, to the extent that they are mostly freestanding—they reference the suggestion, but not usually each other.

I’d like to suggest a different model, one that I’ve found in my experience to be more dynamic, more engaging, and deeper in the way it develops content. It goes like this:

You get the suggestion. Let’s say it’s “toaster.” The first monologist, since he is beholden to nothing but the suggestion (remember the Rule of Threes and Freedom, Power, and Responsibility) delivers whatever monologue he so chooses, inspired by toaster. Let’s say he talks about his first apartment, and how excited he was to go to Target to buy his appliances—how it made him feel like a real adult, and what pride he took in his toaster and his coffee pot, etc.

Now it’s Person Two’s turn. But here’s the thing: she could talk about some other toaster-related thought she’s got—even one that came to her head before she heard person one’s monologue. But to me, that’s missing an opportunity to build meaning and connection in the show. Instead of just toggling back to toaster, what if she listened to the content and theme of the first person’s monologue and responded tothat? Maybe she’s got a story about the first time she felt like an adult. Maybe that story doesn’t involve toasters at all—I promise the audience will get the connection, and I also promise that the person who suggested toaster will not feel cheated that he didn’t get his three full monologue’s-worth of “toaster-related content.”

But what Person Two has done is provided a thematic hook for the show—it’s about growing up, or feeling grown up, or not feeling grown up (since a theme means the exploration of a concept in both its negative and positive iteration). And that doesn’t mean you can’t use all of the fun details and information from the monologues to inspire your scenes, but it does mean that your scenes now have the thematic foundation upon which to build.  And there are a million ways to explore the question of growing up, feeling grown up, etc. You’ll only need to pick three in your first beat. Easy peasy.

Person Three? Well, it’s his job to just not screw it up. To tell a third monologue about feeling grown up (or not feeling grown up) to complete the pattern. And here’s the thing: if he doesn’t, it’ll feel out of whack. If he picks up on some smaller detail from one of the monologues rather than the pattern they are building together, you’ll feel the weight of his monologue sort of throw off the set.

Which is why…yup: you need to rehearse this. You need to feel when you’ve nailed it and when you’ve missed the point. You especially need to notice when you’re attuned to your teammate’s monologues and being inspired by them, and when you’re wrapped up in your own awesome story that might fit with the suggestion but not with the pattern your teammates have established. 

I like using this opening as an example of generating theme because it’s so bare-bones: no characters, no environment, no interaction between performers. But you can extrapolate this building of the theme by following the larger pattern of each consecutive move into other openings, too. Scene Paints? Listen to how the first object placed in the room sets a tone, not just a space. The why and how, not just the what. Follow that. Endow the space with a sensibility and a point-of-view. This will generate a theme as well.

Invocations, while I find them a little weird to actually perform as openings, are very naturally made to develop a theme. As you endow the object with loftier and more abstract powers and feelings, you naturally move from the physical to the conceptual. If at first the pencil was “yellow and No.2,” it grows into “the source of communication,” or “window to the soul.” If an invocation of a pencil ends and all you get from it is the idea to start the first scene with someone taking the SAT with a No. 2 pencil—if that’s the extent of what you derived from elevating this object to the level of a deity (as the Invocation is meant to do)—what was the point of all that build-up?

I want audiences to be able to walk away from a Harold I perform not only talking about how funny it was, but also with a sense of cohesion about the piece. Could the audience say, “Oh, yes, that was the ______________ show. It was about ______________.” If they can say that, but the “blank” is “toaster,” you probably sold yourself short, and the audience member who offered the suggestion is leaving the theatre thinking, “If  I’d realized they were going to do an entire show about my suggestion literally, I might have picked something more interesting than a toaster.” But if people are leaving the theatre saying, “That show about growing up—that was really funny,” you’ve done your job on more than one level. And the pleasure that the comedy provides combined with the pleasure of this deeper level of meaning-making makes for a compounded feeling of satisfaction for the audience.  

And what if, even if you think you’ve developed a sense of theme in the Opening, your show ends up going topical (remember the difference between “topic” and “theme”), or you lose the thread of the theme as the scenes progress? Well, that’s okay, too. Because in the end you know how to execute at a basic comedic level: good, grounded, relationship-based scene work, patterns that heighten through the piece, callbacks to the most memorable details and bits. So, in the worst case, you’ll still have a hilarious show; and in the best case, you’ll have a hilarious show that blows minds.

Win-win.

  1. thehousethatdelbuilt posted this