Craig Cackowski 4/2/06 Part 3
JF: What were some of your favorite scenes that you did at Second City?
CC: Most of my favorite scenes that I wrote involved me just sitting in a chair talking to somebody. [laughs]
JF: This is perfect for you then.
CC: [laughs] It’s good for me, because I’m not the most physical of performers. I’m more verbal. I like to do just two-person, relationship scenes. I had a great scene with Talarico where I was an elderly bus driver, and he was my passenger, and it was the middle of the night. It was kind of this nice slow scene where there were these two old guys alone on a bus, and we just kind of bonded with each other. That’d be a typical Cackowski Second City scene.
I did one with Sue Gillian where we were an Irish couple and she was donating her liver to me. We were fighting with each other the entire time in front of the doctor. At the end, there’s this tender moment where she sits on my lap and I show the first kind of thaw of my cold exterior and the audience can see that we really love each other and we sing this little Irish ballad together. [laughs] It’s nice that at Second City you can do very broad comedy at times. You can do political and social satire, but the stuff I liked to do was just ‘people’ scenes.
JF: So you enjoyed your time at Second City?
CC: Very much. It’s an incredible honor to play on the stages that so many of your heroes have played on. The ETC seats about 180, and the Main Stage about twice that number, about 350, so the first couple of weeks on each stage you’re still kind of shaking a little bit each time you go out there. Eventually, it becomes like any other job. You get used to it. It was good to know that, unlike my early days at Improv Olympic, you don’t have to bring your own audience. It was pretty much sold out every night. [laughs]
Yeah, there’s nothing like having a full house of 350 people laughing. There’s also nothing like 350 sitting in stunned silence. [laughs] You learn a lot either way.
JF: Did Second City get you more focused on writing?
CC: No, I like to concentrate more just on acting. I’ve had a lot of friends who have moved onto writing for SNL or Mad TV or whatever, and I just don’t have the discipline. [laughs] I like to collaborate with other people on stuff. Me, Talarico and Bob Dassie wrote a short together called ‘Jakarta, Boom, Boom’ that played at the Aspen Festival, that was based on our improvs as Dasariski, which is our three man group. So, I can do that kind of stuff.
I moved out here [L.A.] for the whole acting, film and TV thing. I’ve done a few commercials and had some bit parts in sitcoms. Those are my goals for now. But for me doing improv is an end in itself. It’s a life-long commitment for me. Commerce is necessary. It’s good to know that I always feel fulfilled artistically even if I’m not making a cent from [acting]. I always have what I love to do to fall back on.
JF: When did you move to L.A. and had Improv Olympic West started?
CC: Oh yeah. I’ve been out here for nearly three and a half years. This space [6366 Hollywood Blvd.] had maybe been open for about a year when I got here. I think it was kind of an uphill battle for the guys who got it started. Definitely the groundwork had been laid when I got here. I started teaching right away when I got here.
JF: How was it an uphill battle for the people who started it?
CC: Just because of the fact that there was no community, no long-form community, and they were trying to do something different. Groundlings is the established theater here, but they’re another direction entirely. To me, it’s a theater based entirely on getting your 3 characters together for SNL, [laughs] which actually works well for them. Chicago has such a long history [with improv]. The theater-going public is at least familiar with improv even if they don’t go to see it regularly.
Just trying to drum up students and get them interested in doing the work the way we do it, not just trying to be funny, or not just trying to get something on their resume because their agent told them it’d be good to take an improv class [was difficult], but now we have a full-fledged community. It’s not Chicago. It’s L.A., and it’s as different as Chicago is from New York, but we’ve got a great community of students who really care about the work and want to get better at it.
I also teach at the Second City which has also got a great group of students. And with the UCB opening up here, I think is just going to make everything stronger. You’ll see more cross-pollination with people studying at different theaters at the same time, a good healthy competition. A rising tide will raise all boats.
JF: How would you describe your teaching style and what are some things that you emphasize in your teaching?
CC: Good question. …To me, improv all starts with listening, so that’s something that I really stress. You can’t miss anything, so you have to be aware of what’s going on around you. A diatribe that I’ve been going off on recently, particularly in L.A., you walk around and you notice how isolated everyone is. Everyone’s on their Ipod or their cell phone or their Blackberry. In this day and age, the idea of being aware of your surroundings and being aware of the people around you is a dying art. I think it’s got to be all the more impressive when audiences see improvisers doing it on stage. End of diatribe.
Also, just trying to get people to have fun, for it to not be work. People get so hung up on trying to improvise correctly and there’s no such thing. Everyone brings something different to the table that no one else has before. A lot of it is trying to get people to find the perfect improviser within them, to do it in a way that’s unique to them. It’s about getting the student in the right balance of cockiness and humility. Usually people are on one side of the scale or the other. Some people you have to take down a peg. Some people you have to build up and encourage a little more, because their tentative. I usually teach the later levels here, so I usually deal with people who are really in their heads at that point. They’ve had a year of classes. They’ve had different perspectives from different teachers.
Trying to get people to initiate strongly without thinking about it, and trying to get them thinking like the character right away, as opposed to thinking like themselves. You always have a portion of your brain, which is kind of watching the scene. The writer part of you that is doing it. Typically I see people who are too hung up on the writing aspect, or who are too hung up on ‘red flags.’ Every time they start improvising a red flag comes up ‘oh! I asked a question! Oh! We need to find a game! Ohhh, what’s the relationship?’ But the sooner you are into character and are thinking character thoughts, then all you have to do is be that person.
JF: How do you work on getting people out of their heads? Are there specific exercises that you use a lot?
CC: One character generating exercise is to have people come out and change their face, change their spine or change their voice. With change their face, I have two people just look at each other then I say ‘change your face,’ then they’ll go [makes a face]. Suddenly, they’re a character, but their also looking at the other person, so you immediately have an idea of the dynamic between the characters. ‘Woah, I feel scared, and he looks like a Marine, so he must be my Drill Instructor.’ That sort of thought process, and it’s not even as intellectualized as I’m making it sound. It’s just things that you just know right away. The sooner you can create an energy in the scene the easier it is to identify it, so I try to get the warm-up aspect of a scene out of the early moments and try and be in the middle of something from the beginning.
JF: And that’s how you approach your own improv as well, when you need a character? Is that a good initiation to you, come out as a character?
CC: Yeah, and it’s not necessarily like ‘I’m going to pull out my Sea Captain here.’ [laughs] It usually starts physically for me. I’ll alter my spine some way, or have some kind of attitude or energy, even if I have no idea what the scene is going to be, even if I know my partner is going to initiate. Their initiation is filtered through whatever spine I have, then the words will be dictated by that. Rather than me being like ‘what do they want here? What should I do? What would the audience like?’ All that stuff is not helpful to you. I think that’s true whether you’re in a group that’s working kind of fast and furious or whether you’re doing nice, slow patient scenework.
I kind of have two different kind of shows I do. One is Dasariski, that sort of style, which is me, Talarico, and Dassie. We might be in one scene for an hour without changing characters, or locations, or times. Then Cog, which is my Harold group that plays on Sundays, we have as many as 12 people. We do a lot of transformations, a lot of environmental stuff. We try to make it as groupy and trippy as possible. Those are the kind of two polar extremes that I am kind of comfortable in. Either way, I’m trying to come out with a particular energy at the top of the scene.
JF: Do you approach 3 person improv differently than 2 person, or a large group? What advice would you have for people on a three person team?
CC: If I’m doing a 2 or 3 person show, the philosophy is more or less the same: it’s slow, patient scenework, character and relationship driven, with lots of room for discovery. You have to be at marathon pace ...forgoing the little chuckles for the big payoff down the line. The early moments are about laying the groundwork, getting to know the characters through gift-giving and details. The main difference between 2 and 3 is technical. You’re only responsible for 33%, as opposed to 50%. You can exit or chill out a bit in a 3-person show, knowing you’ve got that extra mind contributing to the piece. In a 2-person, there’s no downtime. In larger group pieces, I'm usually thinking more about the big picture than the individual scenes. Those are more about theme and groupmind than smaller moments, though those can certainly occur.
Some things that we’ve learned from doing Dasariski, where our philosophy is to stick to one scene as long as possible, is that a shared experience between the characters is essential. We did one show that was 3 kids waiting at the bus stop for 45 minutes, another where we were 3 guys waiting for our cars at a garage. You notice that these settings create what I would call the ‘captive audience’ phenomenon. Nobody’s going anywhere. There’s no need for plot or conflict. You just get some characters in the same location and have them interact.
In less successful shows we did, we got hung up on plot and brainstorming. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we,’ which basically is a proposal for another scene rather than playing the scene you’re actually in, and problem-solving ‘We’ve got to fix this thing,’ rather than let the problem exist and have the characters deal with it.
It’s easy for a 3-person scene to turn into 2-against-1. You have to be conscious of the scene as 3 2-person relationships that are taking place simultaneously. Person A has a unique relationship with person B, B with C, and C with A. A high level of familiarity and gift-giving is essential. Each character should know everything there is to know about the other characters, that way each improviser can add equally to the specifics of the scene. We do a lot of setting each other up, like ‘Hey, you still coaching that intramural volleyball team?’ Or ‘well, you should know, with your sleepwalking problem.’ The goal is to make the audiences see the character as 3-dimensional characters with established stories and traits, so that the show is just about winding up those characters, letting them go, and seeing how they effect each other.
JF: What kind of things outside of improv have influenced you approach towards improv?
CC: I think the longer I improvise the more I think about it, the more parallels I find to everything in life. You apply the principles of improv to life. Just to give you an example, that face excersize actually came from Malcom Gadwell’s book ‘Blink,’ where he talks about there’s something like 220 different faces that the muscles in the face can produce. There was some experiment where they were mechanically forming the faces and physiologically the emotion was being produced in the body. So, by making an angry face you can actually physically feel angry, even if there isn’t something that’s making you angry. That obviously has an application to improv. It’s better to viscerally feel the scene rather than just intellectually process it. Just by making a face you can already feel like you’re in the middle of something.
I mean, I read a lot. I read the newspaper every day, magazines. The more aware you are of the world [the better]. One thing I miss about Chicago is public transportation, which is a great way to find characters. You can still go to a mall in L.A. and find that. Also, in Cog and the kind of transformational stuff I do I’m very influenced by dream logic, so like Lewis Carroll and M.C. Escher, any trippy cartoon from the 60’s or 70’s where things are bleeding into each other, ‘Waking Life,’ that sort of stuff I love.
JF: Have you ever done a show that’s themed around dream logic or transformational edits?
CC: A show I directed called JTS Brown was constant transformation. Actually, if you go to the Wiki on the ImprovChicago site, I wrote some of the principles for that show on there, probably better than I could explain it to you right now.
It was the sort of thing where even two improvisers already doing a scene could transform into the next scene. If there was a knock at the door, as soon as the door was opened, it would be a new scene. So, just the idea that anything could be a portal into the next scene. Scenes could last for 5 minutes or 5 seconds, knowing that any scene could come back at any time.
JF: That’s kind of what Four Square does, right?
CC: Yeah, those guys were all in JTS Brown, so that’s a direct off-shoot of what we did in that show.
JF: What in your opinion makes good improv?
CC: I just like to see human behavior, but surprising human behavior. I like I said, everybody brings something different to the table, and I like to see things processed through unique minds. I think the great improvisers are both doing and saying things that make you think ‘wow, that’s the perfect thing to do and say,’ and ‘I never would have thought of that,’ and yet it’s perfect at the same time. So, things that are somehow surprising, yet satisfying. They don’t come from nowhere.
JF: How much do you think of ‘the game’ and does it play in your own improv?
CC: I’m constantly aware of trying to create patterns, doing and saying things that have been done and said already in the scene. If anything that is at the power of two in the scene, it’s more important than anything that’s at the power of one. When in doubt, I will do or say something again that I’ve already done, but I’m not thinking of a big overarching game usually. I’m much more likely to do a relationship-driven scene than a premise-driven scene. If a partner lays out a premise-driven scene and it’s abundantly clear to me what the game is, I can play it, but that’s rarely something I’m conscious about creating.
JF: Do you have anything additional that you would like to get out to the improv community that we didn’t get out?
CC: [laughs] I usually have pet things at any given time. One of the things that I’m stressing right now in class is I think what’s happening in a lot of bad scenes is that people initiate things that don’t necessarily demand another person be there. There’s a difference between saying ‘the copier’s broken,’ and ‘Uch! Ted you broke the copier again!’ or ‘Oh, the copier’s broken. Ted work your magic!’ Something that instantly draws your partner into the scene and makes them important to you. I think when people begin scenes and they’re talking about something in the abstract that doesn’t necessarily impact either person, or it impacts one and not the other, obviously you can still find a good scene that way, but it’s harder.
Another thing that’s important to me is routine. What are these characters supposed to be doing? Too many scenes exist in a vacuum where nothing is going on. You need actions to play. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re running all over the stage. An action could be sitting on a park bench, but if you know you’re on a park bench, you know that there’s a paper there. There’s squirrels and pigeons. There’s a drug deal going on over there. There’s teenagers playing Frisbee. You can picture you’re location and just be there. I think time and place is another thing that’s important to me. So, there’s a difference between saying ‘I like waffles,’ and ‘here’s your waffle Ted. Get you a warm-up on your coffee?’ You’re sitting down now, having a waffle. I am a waitress. It’s a small-town diner. All of that is suggested by that initiation. The sooner you can be in a time and place you worry less about the mechanics of improv and game, and more just about being real people in a real place having a real conversation.
And one more thing: reality is relative. Sometimes people hear the directive ‘be real’ and they take it to be ‘be mundane.’ Be real just means treat whatever’s going on as if it’s really going on, whether it’s taking place in an apartment in Los Angeles in 2006, or whether it’s the King of the Mole people talking to the King of the Beavers. As a matter of fact, the sillier the scene is the more integrity you should bring to it, because the funnier it is, the more you believe in it. It’s easy to hold a silly scene at arm’s length, but it’s more important impressive when you treat it like it’s real. So, being real just means believe in what you’re creating. …That’s all I got!JF: Alright, thank you very much.
[Craig kept an in-depth journal about working on the Second City Mainstage that is posted here: http://www.tinafey.net/jeffarticle.htm]
CC: Most of my favorite scenes that I wrote involved me just sitting in a chair talking to somebody. [laughs]
JF: This is perfect for you then.
CC: [laughs] It’s good for me, because I’m not the most physical of performers. I’m more verbal. I like to do just two-person, relationship scenes. I had a great scene with Talarico where I was an elderly bus driver, and he was my passenger, and it was the middle of the night. It was kind of this nice slow scene where there were these two old guys alone on a bus, and we just kind of bonded with each other. That’d be a typical Cackowski Second City scene.
I did one with Sue Gillian where we were an Irish couple and she was donating her liver to me. We were fighting with each other the entire time in front of the doctor. At the end, there’s this tender moment where she sits on my lap and I show the first kind of thaw of my cold exterior and the audience can see that we really love each other and we sing this little Irish ballad together. [laughs] It’s nice that at Second City you can do very broad comedy at times. You can do political and social satire, but the stuff I liked to do was just ‘people’ scenes.
JF: So you enjoyed your time at Second City?
CC: Very much. It’s an incredible honor to play on the stages that so many of your heroes have played on. The ETC seats about 180, and the Main Stage about twice that number, about 350, so the first couple of weeks on each stage you’re still kind of shaking a little bit each time you go out there. Eventually, it becomes like any other job. You get used to it. It was good to know that, unlike my early days at Improv Olympic, you don’t have to bring your own audience. It was pretty much sold out every night. [laughs]
Yeah, there’s nothing like having a full house of 350 people laughing. There’s also nothing like 350 sitting in stunned silence. [laughs] You learn a lot either way.
JF: Did Second City get you more focused on writing?
CC: No, I like to concentrate more just on acting. I’ve had a lot of friends who have moved onto writing for SNL or Mad TV or whatever, and I just don’t have the discipline. [laughs] I like to collaborate with other people on stuff. Me, Talarico and Bob Dassie wrote a short together called ‘Jakarta, Boom, Boom’ that played at the Aspen Festival, that was based on our improvs as Dasariski, which is our three man group. So, I can do that kind of stuff.
I moved out here [L.A.] for the whole acting, film and TV thing. I’ve done a few commercials and had some bit parts in sitcoms. Those are my goals for now. But for me doing improv is an end in itself. It’s a life-long commitment for me. Commerce is necessary. It’s good to know that I always feel fulfilled artistically even if I’m not making a cent from [acting]. I always have what I love to do to fall back on.
JF: When did you move to L.A. and had Improv Olympic West started?
CC: Oh yeah. I’ve been out here for nearly three and a half years. This space [6366 Hollywood Blvd.] had maybe been open for about a year when I got here. I think it was kind of an uphill battle for the guys who got it started. Definitely the groundwork had been laid when I got here. I started teaching right away when I got here.
JF: How was it an uphill battle for the people who started it?
CC: Just because of the fact that there was no community, no long-form community, and they were trying to do something different. Groundlings is the established theater here, but they’re another direction entirely. To me, it’s a theater based entirely on getting your 3 characters together for SNL, [laughs] which actually works well for them. Chicago has such a long history [with improv]. The theater-going public is at least familiar with improv even if they don’t go to see it regularly.
Just trying to drum up students and get them interested in doing the work the way we do it, not just trying to be funny, or not just trying to get something on their resume because their agent told them it’d be good to take an improv class [was difficult], but now we have a full-fledged community. It’s not Chicago. It’s L.A., and it’s as different as Chicago is from New York, but we’ve got a great community of students who really care about the work and want to get better at it.
I also teach at the Second City which has also got a great group of students. And with the UCB opening up here, I think is just going to make everything stronger. You’ll see more cross-pollination with people studying at different theaters at the same time, a good healthy competition. A rising tide will raise all boats.
JF: How would you describe your teaching style and what are some things that you emphasize in your teaching?
CC: Good question. …To me, improv all starts with listening, so that’s something that I really stress. You can’t miss anything, so you have to be aware of what’s going on around you. A diatribe that I’ve been going off on recently, particularly in L.A., you walk around and you notice how isolated everyone is. Everyone’s on their Ipod or their cell phone or their Blackberry. In this day and age, the idea of being aware of your surroundings and being aware of the people around you is a dying art. I think it’s got to be all the more impressive when audiences see improvisers doing it on stage. End of diatribe.
Also, just trying to get people to have fun, for it to not be work. People get so hung up on trying to improvise correctly and there’s no such thing. Everyone brings something different to the table that no one else has before. A lot of it is trying to get people to find the perfect improviser within them, to do it in a way that’s unique to them. It’s about getting the student in the right balance of cockiness and humility. Usually people are on one side of the scale or the other. Some people you have to take down a peg. Some people you have to build up and encourage a little more, because their tentative. I usually teach the later levels here, so I usually deal with people who are really in their heads at that point. They’ve had a year of classes. They’ve had different perspectives from different teachers.
Trying to get people to initiate strongly without thinking about it, and trying to get them thinking like the character right away, as opposed to thinking like themselves. You always have a portion of your brain, which is kind of watching the scene. The writer part of you that is doing it. Typically I see people who are too hung up on the writing aspect, or who are too hung up on ‘red flags.’ Every time they start improvising a red flag comes up ‘oh! I asked a question! Oh! We need to find a game! Ohhh, what’s the relationship?’ But the sooner you are into character and are thinking character thoughts, then all you have to do is be that person.
JF: How do you work on getting people out of their heads? Are there specific exercises that you use a lot?
CC: One character generating exercise is to have people come out and change their face, change their spine or change their voice. With change their face, I have two people just look at each other then I say ‘change your face,’ then they’ll go [makes a face]. Suddenly, they’re a character, but their also looking at the other person, so you immediately have an idea of the dynamic between the characters. ‘Woah, I feel scared, and he looks like a Marine, so he must be my Drill Instructor.’ That sort of thought process, and it’s not even as intellectualized as I’m making it sound. It’s just things that you just know right away. The sooner you can create an energy in the scene the easier it is to identify it, so I try to get the warm-up aspect of a scene out of the early moments and try and be in the middle of something from the beginning.
JF: And that’s how you approach your own improv as well, when you need a character? Is that a good initiation to you, come out as a character?
CC: Yeah, and it’s not necessarily like ‘I’m going to pull out my Sea Captain here.’ [laughs] It usually starts physically for me. I’ll alter my spine some way, or have some kind of attitude or energy, even if I have no idea what the scene is going to be, even if I know my partner is going to initiate. Their initiation is filtered through whatever spine I have, then the words will be dictated by that. Rather than me being like ‘what do they want here? What should I do? What would the audience like?’ All that stuff is not helpful to you. I think that’s true whether you’re in a group that’s working kind of fast and furious or whether you’re doing nice, slow patient scenework.
I kind of have two different kind of shows I do. One is Dasariski, that sort of style, which is me, Talarico, and Dassie. We might be in one scene for an hour without changing characters, or locations, or times. Then Cog, which is my Harold group that plays on Sundays, we have as many as 12 people. We do a lot of transformations, a lot of environmental stuff. We try to make it as groupy and trippy as possible. Those are the kind of two polar extremes that I am kind of comfortable in. Either way, I’m trying to come out with a particular energy at the top of the scene.
JF: Do you approach 3 person improv differently than 2 person, or a large group? What advice would you have for people on a three person team?
CC: If I’m doing a 2 or 3 person show, the philosophy is more or less the same: it’s slow, patient scenework, character and relationship driven, with lots of room for discovery. You have to be at marathon pace ...forgoing the little chuckles for the big payoff down the line. The early moments are about laying the groundwork, getting to know the characters through gift-giving and details. The main difference between 2 and 3 is technical. You’re only responsible for 33%, as opposed to 50%. You can exit or chill out a bit in a 3-person show, knowing you’ve got that extra mind contributing to the piece. In a 2-person, there’s no downtime. In larger group pieces, I'm usually thinking more about the big picture than the individual scenes. Those are more about theme and groupmind than smaller moments, though those can certainly occur.
Some things that we’ve learned from doing Dasariski, where our philosophy is to stick to one scene as long as possible, is that a shared experience between the characters is essential. We did one show that was 3 kids waiting at the bus stop for 45 minutes, another where we were 3 guys waiting for our cars at a garage. You notice that these settings create what I would call the ‘captive audience’ phenomenon. Nobody’s going anywhere. There’s no need for plot or conflict. You just get some characters in the same location and have them interact.
In less successful shows we did, we got hung up on plot and brainstorming. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we,’ which basically is a proposal for another scene rather than playing the scene you’re actually in, and problem-solving ‘We’ve got to fix this thing,’ rather than let the problem exist and have the characters deal with it.
It’s easy for a 3-person scene to turn into 2-against-1. You have to be conscious of the scene as 3 2-person relationships that are taking place simultaneously. Person A has a unique relationship with person B, B with C, and C with A. A high level of familiarity and gift-giving is essential. Each character should know everything there is to know about the other characters, that way each improviser can add equally to the specifics of the scene. We do a lot of setting each other up, like ‘Hey, you still coaching that intramural volleyball team?’ Or ‘well, you should know, with your sleepwalking problem.’ The goal is to make the audiences see the character as 3-dimensional characters with established stories and traits, so that the show is just about winding up those characters, letting them go, and seeing how they effect each other.
JF: What kind of things outside of improv have influenced you approach towards improv?
CC: I think the longer I improvise the more I think about it, the more parallels I find to everything in life. You apply the principles of improv to life. Just to give you an example, that face excersize actually came from Malcom Gadwell’s book ‘Blink,’ where he talks about there’s something like 220 different faces that the muscles in the face can produce. There was some experiment where they were mechanically forming the faces and physiologically the emotion was being produced in the body. So, by making an angry face you can actually physically feel angry, even if there isn’t something that’s making you angry. That obviously has an application to improv. It’s better to viscerally feel the scene rather than just intellectually process it. Just by making a face you can already feel like you’re in the middle of something.
I mean, I read a lot. I read the newspaper every day, magazines. The more aware you are of the world [the better]. One thing I miss about Chicago is public transportation, which is a great way to find characters. You can still go to a mall in L.A. and find that. Also, in Cog and the kind of transformational stuff I do I’m very influenced by dream logic, so like Lewis Carroll and M.C. Escher, any trippy cartoon from the 60’s or 70’s where things are bleeding into each other, ‘Waking Life,’ that sort of stuff I love.
JF: Have you ever done a show that’s themed around dream logic or transformational edits?
CC: A show I directed called JTS Brown was constant transformation. Actually, if you go to the Wiki on the ImprovChicago site, I wrote some of the principles for that show on there, probably better than I could explain it to you right now.
It was the sort of thing where even two improvisers already doing a scene could transform into the next scene. If there was a knock at the door, as soon as the door was opened, it would be a new scene. So, just the idea that anything could be a portal into the next scene. Scenes could last for 5 minutes or 5 seconds, knowing that any scene could come back at any time.
JF: That’s kind of what Four Square does, right?
CC: Yeah, those guys were all in JTS Brown, so that’s a direct off-shoot of what we did in that show.
JF: What in your opinion makes good improv?
CC: I just like to see human behavior, but surprising human behavior. I like I said, everybody brings something different to the table, and I like to see things processed through unique minds. I think the great improvisers are both doing and saying things that make you think ‘wow, that’s the perfect thing to do and say,’ and ‘I never would have thought of that,’ and yet it’s perfect at the same time. So, things that are somehow surprising, yet satisfying. They don’t come from nowhere.
JF: How much do you think of ‘the game’ and does it play in your own improv?
CC: I’m constantly aware of trying to create patterns, doing and saying things that have been done and said already in the scene. If anything that is at the power of two in the scene, it’s more important than anything that’s at the power of one. When in doubt, I will do or say something again that I’ve already done, but I’m not thinking of a big overarching game usually. I’m much more likely to do a relationship-driven scene than a premise-driven scene. If a partner lays out a premise-driven scene and it’s abundantly clear to me what the game is, I can play it, but that’s rarely something I’m conscious about creating.
JF: Do you have anything additional that you would like to get out to the improv community that we didn’t get out?
CC: [laughs] I usually have pet things at any given time. One of the things that I’m stressing right now in class is I think what’s happening in a lot of bad scenes is that people initiate things that don’t necessarily demand another person be there. There’s a difference between saying ‘the copier’s broken,’ and ‘Uch! Ted you broke the copier again!’ or ‘Oh, the copier’s broken. Ted work your magic!’ Something that instantly draws your partner into the scene and makes them important to you. I think when people begin scenes and they’re talking about something in the abstract that doesn’t necessarily impact either person, or it impacts one and not the other, obviously you can still find a good scene that way, but it’s harder.
Another thing that’s important to me is routine. What are these characters supposed to be doing? Too many scenes exist in a vacuum where nothing is going on. You need actions to play. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re running all over the stage. An action could be sitting on a park bench, but if you know you’re on a park bench, you know that there’s a paper there. There’s squirrels and pigeons. There’s a drug deal going on over there. There’s teenagers playing Frisbee. You can picture you’re location and just be there. I think time and place is another thing that’s important to me. So, there’s a difference between saying ‘I like waffles,’ and ‘here’s your waffle Ted. Get you a warm-up on your coffee?’ You’re sitting down now, having a waffle. I am a waitress. It’s a small-town diner. All of that is suggested by that initiation. The sooner you can be in a time and place you worry less about the mechanics of improv and game, and more just about being real people in a real place having a real conversation.
And one more thing: reality is relative. Sometimes people hear the directive ‘be real’ and they take it to be ‘be mundane.’ Be real just means treat whatever’s going on as if it’s really going on, whether it’s taking place in an apartment in Los Angeles in 2006, or whether it’s the King of the Mole people talking to the King of the Beavers. As a matter of fact, the sillier the scene is the more integrity you should bring to it, because the funnier it is, the more you believe in it. It’s easy to hold a silly scene at arm’s length, but it’s more important impressive when you treat it like it’s real. So, being real just means believe in what you’re creating. …That’s all I got!JF: Alright, thank you very much.
[Craig kept an in-depth journal about working on the Second City Mainstage that is posted here: http://www.tinafey.net/jeffarticle.htm]
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