The House That Del Built

The Intellectual Musings of an Improv Wonk.

Tag-Outs and Walk-Ons: an Alternate View

I’ve had three different discussions about the purpose of tag-outs and walk-ons this week alone, one with a current improv student, two others with experienced performers. In each conversation, the same questions and concerns came up, and I realized that this major stumbling block in the execution of tag-outs and walk-ons that kept coming up was worth addressing in a thoughtful way.

What was the common denominator in all three discussions? In every case, the person talking with me about the tag-out or walk-on he or she had done in class or rehearsal or a show presented his or her move as a “save.” In other words, “The scene wasn’t really going anywhere,” or “The scene had lost momentum,” or “They were dying out there, “ so the improviser in question hopped on stage hoping to salvage what was left of the scene.

Now, I’m not saying that a perfectly executed infusion of energy or information can’t “save” a scene, but I was surprised that the general perception among all of these different people seemed to be that “saving a scene” was the primary reason for a tag-out or walk-on. Because, more often than not, if two players are drilling a scene into the ground (for whatever reason—lack of energy, confusion or lack of agreement on basic details of character or relationship, etc.), it’s usually pretty damn hard for one person to join or replace one of them and somehow fix those inherent problems. In fact, more often, those problems can be magnified as attention is drawn to the scene through the addition of personnel, information, and length. What a scene like this needs—and I know this is one of the hardest things for us as improvisers to believe—is usually a strong and merciful edit. I know, I know…they didn’t get to a “high point,” a laugh line, a great third example of what’s funny about the scene. But guess what? They’re probably never going to. And even if they do, if it’s on the back of a lackluster scene, the payoff probably won’t be worth the time you waited for it. And the players in the scene probably know all this as well as you do watching it in the wings and want out of it as much as you want it to end.  

So how about instead of seeing a tag-out run or walk-on as a save, we see it as an assist? The “save mentality” is going to get you stuck into a lot of tag-out runs or walk-ons you’ve got no business being in. But the “assist mentality” will have you making decisions that make good scenes great, and that propel the scene—and with it the whole show—forward with purpose and energy.

So, if we’re not using a tag-out to save a bad scene, when should it be used to “assist” a good scene?  A really good example is in the case where a premise in the scene is stronger than the relationship between the two characters. In other words the thing that’s most funny about the scene (the narrative, the location, a particular way the dialogue is delivered) isn’t something that’s reliant on a depth of relationship between the two characters for its humor. A common place this occurs in a second beat scene of a Harold, if one of the players purposely initiates with a strong premise carried from the first beat rather than a strong sense of relationship. There’s a good chance he’s not wrong in doing this—sometimes a great premise beats out a good relationship, especially later in a show if the premise from the first beat was the funniest thing about a scene (a really peculiar character can sometimes be more fun to follow than generating another scene with a similar relationship dynamic, for example), or feels more on target with the direction the show is heading thematically. In these cases, because the premise is dominant rather than the relationship, you do the scene and the people in it a favor by following and heightening that premise rather than waiting for a depth of relationship that will never come between these two characters—you give the scene what it wants. And in this sort of case, the players in the scene actually need you to execute that heightening, because it’s something that can often only occur from outside of the context that was established by the initiation—the guy who messed up his homework in the first beat ends up messing up the big presentation to the big clients in the second beat initiation, which probably means he messes up the Inaugural Address, and finally he screws up when the Angel Gabriel asks him the question that will get him into Heaven. If you feel like you’ve seen something like that tag-out run before, you probably have. It’s pretty standard, and pretty successful, too, but it requires a scenic shift that can only come from successive new contexts that raise the stakes to ten.  And these can’t be initiated from inside (at least not without it looking completely forced).

Does that scene where the guy screwed up the big presentation need “saving”? Hell no. It needs an astute performer to recognize this very clear and specific (and well executed) joke, and to provide a path to heightening this joke through to its natural conclusion. In fact, if you get really good at noticing this sort of initiation, the question of whether to tag out or not is embedded in the initiation itself. The player who came out as the boss to tell the guy he screwed up probably made it clear that this premise—and not some deeper sense of what their boss-employee relationship was all about—was what he was leading with. So when you make the move, it’s almost as though it was part of the scene to begin with, not an add-on or a fix-up.

Again, does that mean that two good performers who find themselves in a scene initiated this way can’t make a strong scene out of it if they don’t get tagged out? Of course not. Because those performers know how to dig down and find the hook in the relationship that’ll give the scene legs. It’s sorta like in scripted theatre (you remember when you used to do that, right?) when your line is supposed to be interrupted and the director tells you to come up with at least two sentences of what it seems your character would have said were he not interrupted. This technique serves two purposes. One, of course, it means that you’re not left looking like an idiot if the other guy forgets to interrupt. But two, it means that you’re saying your line with a sense of purpose, a sense of an objective and a goal, even if you’ll get cut off before you get there.  So, yeah, it’s the initiator’s job to have more in his back pocket to be able to keep the scene going if he needs to, but it’s your job off stage to read the cues and know when to “interrupt”.

What about walk-ons? Well, two of the three conversations I had that inspired this post were with people who were chatting with me about walk-ons they’d done in the middle of scenes that weren’t going well to start with, and that they were hoping to perk up with their additional information or detail. But for these performers—and we’ve all been this person before—the second they walked on, they wished they hadn’t. There’s a sense of heaviness that descends on an unsuccessful walk-on, like you’ve made things worse, rather than better.

So what’s an “assist” walk-on? Well, you know when a scene could benefit from it when the scene itself is so close to being great that all it needs is that tiny little detail or scene paint or relationship-booster—something that the players in the scene either haven’t thought of or, more likely, simply can’t seem to provide for themselves. And it’s not something you have to rush in to establish in a panic because “Oh, God! This scene is dying!” It’s more like a sense that the time for this information to have been established has just lapsed, and the people in the scene don’t quite seem like they’re going to be able to get it out without a little outside push. Was the scene going to fail without you? Probably not completely. And it’s definitely not going to be a train wreck. But maybe it’s just got a bit too much drag, and it’ll get to that heighten a little more directly and clearly with the information you’re providing.

Maybe the players in the scene have established that they’re a couple with an unhappy marriage, but now they’re stuck at an impasse simply going over and over the same individual arguments, so you enter as their child to both force them together and add another complication to their unhappiness. Maybe it’s a perfectly decent but sorta uneventful date scene, and you’re the waiter who asks, “Are you guys ready for dessert?” as you wink to the guy to indicate that you’ve put the engagement ring he gave you into a piece of chocolate cake. When you execute a great assist walk-on, you should feel confident leaving it knowing you’ve left it better than you found it, but that you haven’t thrown the people already in the scene for a total loop. The scene doesn’t get distracted or confused or thrown off the rails by your move. In fact, I like to think of the best assist walk-ons as just quietly and unassumingly coming up and placing little guard rails on the sides of a scene so that it stays on track and is able to use all its energy to build forward momentum.

Figuring out when the scene needs that walk-on assist and when it was going to get there without you is probably more of an art than a science. For example, I’ve had plenty of shows where, after the fact, I’ve pointed out a walk-on move I did to add clarity and the people in the scene have told me they were just about to clarify the very thing I walked-on to establish (side note: as player coach, I have to give notes to the whole team, and that includes myself). And hearing that is a good note for me as a support player. But I’ll also take that redundancy over a lack of clarity any day—and I feel good about the group mind of my team knowing that we were on the same page about what the scene needed. Finding that sweet spot of knowing when the scene will get there without the assist and when it could use a push has a lot to do with how long the team has been together and how well they know each other’s style of play, which means that, in the end, all this comes down to…

Yup. Rehearsal. Because while there are as many examples of great executions of these as there are poor ones, the broader categories into which they fall are surprisingly clear when executed. And, like all skills, they can be broken down and analyzed and categorized off stage and in rehearsal, but in the end, it’s about feeling when you’ve done it right and chasing that feeling—training your intuition to seek that sweet spot so that the right move becomes automatic, and you’re freed up to do what you do best: play.

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