Going For It - Careful Your Boundaries Aren’t Actually Your Barriers.

It’s no secret that GOING FOR IT can help you when improvising. Del Close, perhaps the most famous figure in improv, wasn’t known to council timidity. In fact he once reminded his improv actors what he expected of them, when directing a show at The Committee Theatre, by painting in big letters FOLLOW THE FEAR on the back wall.

So you could see it from stage and be reminded which way is North. 

The PIT Theatre in NYC followed suit, permanently and prominently positioning the words on the wall behind their audience at one of their theaters. I remember being inspired by those words the first time I noticed them from their stage. Thousands of other performers must have had a similar experience and although the catchphrase hasn’t broken into the wider zeitgeist as a morsel of improv wisdom as Yes And… has, most serious improvisers are aware of the mantra and its power.

If that advice sounds a bit scary to you, it may be due to the heavy dose of Del Close theatricality it has been packaged in. The same wisdom is apparent in one of Martin de Maat’s famous quotes, “The fun is always on the other side of a yes.” 

Both adages, though they feel very different, offer the same advice: When onstage, don’t be timid, don’t demure, go for it.

What if “I’m so excited to try skydiving with you,” was the first line in a scene? Tear open that plane door, grab your partner’s hand and jump out.

What if in a group scene one of your teammates says you’ve invented a new dance? Don’t wait, start dancing in a brand new way to demonstrate.

This clown is going for it!

Or any challenge in a scene that frightens you, any moment that you can sense would feel safer if you said No to it instead of Yes. Generally speaking you will be on better ground if you follow your fear and discover the fun by saying yes to that moment and embracing it.

Are there limits? Of course. You should never take risks that physically endanger yourself or another and you should be cautious about diving into material that might trigger your scene partner, your audience or yourself - to a degree.

Ah, I wish the trigger warning stuff was always as clearcut as the physical safety stuff. I’m so 100% sure I’m right that you shouldn’t FOLLOW THE FEAR if your scene partner initiates a scene with “Lets juggle these switchblades,” and then produces actual knives for you to juggle. But it is trickier when it comes to setting boundaries for yourself, for a team you may be on or for a community. How do you know that in an effort to remain emotionally safe you don’t doom your improv to become emotionally stunted?

How do you know those safety boundaries aren’t your barriers, the things holding you back, in disguise?

When I got to college to study theater I had a lot of hang ups. I was a generally liberal guy, but I had been raised in the Church and I had limiting feelings about sex, morality, drug use, a litany of subjects that felt taboo to me and I was hesitant to explore material that fell into those categories. If I hadn’t pushed past my comfort zone I would have never developed into the performer and person I became.

I'm happy, even proud, I didn't choose that path.

Sometimes, I’m sure, I overdid it. Performances when I took things too far. This would lead to self reflection and intelligent decisions about what limits I wanted to set for myself and my art.

I wonder if many young performers aren’t overdoing things in a different direction these days.

Maybe a decade or so ago emotional safety came to improv theaters. Suddenly the advice to FOLLOW THE FEAR was drowned out by exhortations that we protect everyone’s feelings. The idea of setting boundaries became popular and suddenly classes, teams and practice groups began every session checking in with each other to see if any boundaries might have changed since last Wednesday.

Effectiveness aside (it isn’t at all clear that asking others not to do scenes about blue elephants will result in less blue elephant scenes in an art form all about blurting out whatever is on your mind), I’m not saying boundaries in improv are bad. Only that they do present a danger to your growth as an artist if you mistake a hang up for a necessary protection.

As far as I know there is no data on this. I’m writing this based on a hunch born of personal experience. I’d like to share a story.

I remember watching a team performing on a Harold Night six years ago. It was a newer team on the stage and it wasn’t going well. Looking around the audience I saw faces alternate between deep boredom and painful winces (after misfired jokes).

It was bad. Surely not the worst set I had ever seen or performed in, for that matter. But bad. Very, very, very bad. It was leaving a mark.

And then magically, maybe 16 minutes in, the team hit an oasis. 

An older performer initiated a scene. She was different from most of her teammates, partially because of her age, but mostly because of her life, which she had spent working on a farm not that far outside of the city. She was used to things they weren’t and she was something of a character to boot.

Anyway, she initiates this scene on a farm where she’s talking to her scene partner about farm stuff and punctuating that conversation by intermittently shooting imaginary offstage ducks with a mimed shotgun. Every time she would shoot a duck she would screw up her face and a little twisted warble would escape her lips. 

The audience loved it. A LOT! The laughter grew with every murdered duck until there were howls.

And then the scene ended and the set went back to being awful. Which is, you know, good for development and very normal for younger Harold teams and all part of growing as an improviser. 

“Eh, they should have gone back and done a second beat of that duck scene,” I thought, “That was found money,” but it was a good training show for them nonetheless.

When it was over and I went backstage I found the green room locked. Through the door I could hear panicked voices and some crying. I retreated thinking I would say to this team just what I wrote in the last few paragraphs when they came out.  

Don’t feel bad! Bad shows are just part of growth.

Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Then an hour passed, and a quick walk by the door told me they were still crying!

“Oh no,” I thought. “This is too much. We put them on a Harold team too soon (a real fear for any promising performer is that they be challenged too much, too fast), they weren’t ready and now they are paying the price for the theater’s mistake.”

Come to find out, they weren’t crying because the show was bad. 

They were sad about the imaginary ducks.

One team member had a boundary I learned. This individual was a vegetarian and for this reason teammates were asked to not create scenes in which animals were hurt, or had died, or were featured as food in scenes set at say a restaurant or kitchen… 

This same performer had no issue going to the nearby pub that served actual dead animals after performances and was a big fan of Marvel movies. In particular she loved the recently released Infinity War, which featured the skewering of humans (okay androids) with pikes, the emotional onscreen deaths of many beloved characters and the offscreen deaths of half of all living things, including half of all the imaginary ducks across the entire universe!

These gave her no pause. It was only during improv when the death of imaginary ducks troubled her. And I can’t help but think that our theater coaxed her into this self limitation with our emphasis on setting boundaries.

This was one instance of many when I watched performers needlessly erect barriers to their own growth in a laudable effort to stay safe at a small theater in a small city. What might be happening at larger theaters across the country?

I’ll give you another brief, more recent example of when I think boundaries may be hurting performers who set them.

In preparation for an online improv practice I decided to work on what I thought were the students' weaknesses. I wasn’t 100% sure but I thought there would be only two people in attendance. It turned out I was right.

One, I knew, spoke too much and often steamrolled his scene partners. The other spoke too little and I thought I often saw her swallow ideas she had rather than share them. Too bad, because her ideas were often very funny.

I chose a few different exercises to address these tendencies. One was a status oriented exercise. I would simply run scenes and ask each of them to play characters of different status on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being the lowest status they could imagine and 10 being the highest.

My plan was to have the guy who spoke too much play increasingly lower status characters until he got to 1 and to do the opposite with the woman who spoke too little. It wasn’t a great exercise or anything and other exercises I tried worked better. One place my exercise failed spectacularly was when I asked the female student to play a status above a 6.

She refused.

I asked why and she said she viewed high status in society as bad and didn’t want to encourage the behavior. 

I think that’s a boundary that only hurts the improviser who sets it and helps no one. Long before there was improv there were people who operated cruelly using their high status to injure, insult and marginalize others. Such behavior is not even remotely a consequence of improv comedy shows, classes or exercises.

A sad clown putting away his squirty flower and whoopee cushion for the last time. His boundaries say no more!

The result is this hilarious person has cut herself off from half of the types of characters she might play. I don’t think that keeps her safe as boundaries are intended to. I think that impairs her studies.

There you go, two examples of how boundaries can get in our way when we should be going for it instead.

It is obvious that you shouldn’t feel compelled to do scenes at a funeral just after the death of a loved one or to do scenes that touch on past experienced trauma. But if we can handle a subject in our day to day life we should be able to handle it onstage too. Or if our reason for setting a boundary comes from magical thinking (ie maybe Donald Trump will change his personality if I don’t play high handed snobs in improv scenes) we should consider removing it.

After all, Martin wasn’t wrong when he said all the fun is on the other side of a Yes. If you say No to a moment you are left standing where there is no fun. We owe it to ourselves as artists to make our art as joyous and dynamic as it might be.

If you are an artist wondering if all your boundaries are necessary I encourage you to examine them as I have examined some of my excesses onstage and to cull the wheat from the chaff.