Susan Messing - 6/4/07 - Part 3

JF: Do you think that’s in conflict with the idea of being in the moment?


SM: That is being in the moment. Being in the moment is smelling, touching, tasting now. What else is being in the moment? You know what I mean? Do something. Wash dishes in real life and I don’t give a shit. Wash them onstage and it’s fascinating. You can’t make a discovery unless you do something. Otherwise it’s a tiresome invention. When you’re onstage, let’s say I’m staring at myself in the reflection of the plate that I’m washing. I might discover that I’m a vain little bitch. I discover how good my face lift looks. I’m also probably going to end up putting them down to my boobs and deciding what next operation I’m going to have. You will also find me beaming at myself in a spoon. I’m going to look for more opportunities to rape whatever I’ve discovered, and rape my friend and rape my world and myself. Exploit doesn’t work anymore.


JF: Yeah, you have to go bigger.


SM: Well, onstage try it on. Offstage get some therapy. I think it really comes down to people being afraid to fuck it up, and I’m saying you can’t fuck it up. It’s impossible to fuck it up. There are ways to get off better. You can touch my knee for 14 hours. It’s never going to be my clit. I’m going to say ‘Hey, if you go over here you might get back on the joy ride and cum.’ Ever almost cum and your mom calls? You’re like ‘Uch, I’ve got to start all over again.’


JF: Right.


SM: Josh is like ‘Uh, no, but …yeah …ok.’ It just doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. You see, I’m not going to do it anymore if it doesn’t bring me joy. I’m not going to teach it if people don’t get why it’s joyful. That’s my responsibility: to bring in joy every single time.
Group mind, we act like it’s such an ethereal gift. You hear of group mind, right?


JF: Yeah.


SM: Yeah, how do you achieve it?


JF: Uh, …trust.


SM: Really? How about this? Match each other’s fucking energy! I don’t care if you trust him or not. Get over yourself. [laughs] You just match each other’s energy. If you’re the kind of person who likes to sit back and slowly figure things out while everyone else is doing something, then fucking rise to the occasion asshole and pick up your energy. If you’re a person like me who’s a little too pushy, I’ve got to relax my crack and join the predominant energy. That’s being on the same page. Then all the sudden we’re on the same page, and you know what I discover? I trust them.


JF: How do you decide what the predominant energy is? Can simply be observed? Or is it whoever is in the minority doesn’t have the predominant energy?


SM: I know what you’re saying about that. Well, this is it. There’s got to be a central, middle energy for that. Like I said, people who are too pushy need to relax. People who are always being tentative and quite need to pull it up. This is a personal responsibility. I can’t manipulate people’s spines. Everyone has to be responsible for saying ‘fuck.’ I’m not saying you have to give up what makes you beautiful and relaxed and all that good stuff, and I don’t think a high energy person should have to give that up for themselves. But like I said a leader can be a follower, and a follower can be a leader easily. It really is just changing up your energy. When you turn around and realize that everybody is doing what we’re doing, it’s an awesome feeling, isn’t it? We judge ourselves more harshly than anybody else, but then when we paralyze ourselves we’re screwed. That’s a self-paralysis. Frankly, there’s bad table manners in improv, but I can teach people escapes and defenses from that. And frankly, if I’m getting off, I don’t care about someone’s bad table manners. I remember women used to say in Chicago, but they don’t anymore ‘Women follow the rules, and men just play.’ Well, who’s getting off? The playful ones. You realize that it’s because they don’t care about being right or wrong. They don’t can about looking stupid.


JF: Do you think that’s [changed]?


SM: Sure. Yeah, women in Chicago are very grounded now. They don’t blame men for their misfortune. I do a show now called ‘Messing with a Friend’ and the one rule I have is ‘If you don’t have fun, you’re the asshole.’ So that means [laughs] you will find me backstage before the show curled up in a little fetal ball going ‘Oh no, I’m going to be the asshole. The asshole’s my fucking role in my show. Oh my God, I’m going to be the asshole.’ Then my desire to create supersedes whatever weirdness I have to go through in order to create, then the joy ride starts.


JF: How do you balance that desire to have fun or be free onstage with doing work that you consider to be artistic, or artistically valuable?


SM: I think they’re one in the same. You put it onstage and people judge it. I got a review from Chris Jones a couple weeks ago that blew my wad. He put some absolute, esoteric, delightful …I can’t even remember the adjectives that he used to describe me. I’ve got a pre-paid commission for this man to write my obit. It’s redunk. Because you put it onstage, people judge it. People come up to me and ask me about the sociological and economic and political ramifications of Coed Prison Sluts. I would say ‘Did ya laugh?’ I think that when you put it onstage it gets judge. I think that’s when it becomes art. I think art begins when you express yourself and maybe somebody watches it. I guess I could make up art in my bathtub too. I don’t think there’s a balance there. If we decide that we’re always artists, instead of we’re just jacking off on a stage and running, everything will come back together if we trust everything comes back together. Then it will be pretty.

It’s interesting I also teach at DePaul University, Loyola University, and University of Chicago and actors don’t care if it looks stupid. It seems like half of improvising recently is talking people into improvising. ‘There’s no pee in the baby pool. Come right in.’ But people also use improv for different reasons. Not everybody wants to be an improviser. A lot of people want to get along with people better. A lot of people want to come out of their shell. A lot of people want to work in a corporate environment. I don’t think you have to be talented even to be an improviser. I think you have to learn cooperation. Talent I can always pull up in a class. Talent I think in improv comes from self-permission. If there are things that feel funky, like your body feels self-conscious, go to a fucking movement class, or it’s time to take that way gay yoga class. There’s always a cure for that. There’s always something that will put you back in the proactive seat.


JF: How important do you think acting training is to being a good improviser?


SM: Well, I was going to say my actors are willing to do absolutely anything at 9:40 in the morning. My improvisers have to be prodded into it. I do believe that actors do have a better idea of stage picture and taking care of their bodies at the top of the scene and all that good stuff, but I find them to be humorless little people with a perfection problem. [laughs] And they have an attitude problem that can be really hard to get through sometimes. Sometimes they’re wonderful at scene work. I’ve heard people say ‘Oh, he’s such an asshole, but he’s such a good actor.’ I’m thinking ‘That don’t fly with me.’ I’m going to deal with the people who are easiest to get along with. I don’t have time to fuck around with that noise. In class, I have all the patience in the in the world, but in directing I don’t. If you’re a diva, you don’t last long in improv.


JF: You directed Second City shows.


SM: I directed Tour Co. for about a year. That was one of the few jobs I ever quit.


JF: Oh really?


SM: It was more babysitting and the dramedy of the day. It wasn’t pursuing joy. I think a lot of the actors were jaded. There was a lot of entitlement. There was a lot of fussing. I understand when you tour around the country and maybe you feel you’re not getting recognized by your theater, which they really do recognize, but it’s also part of your training. When I was on Main Stage at Second City, it felt like my Phd. in comedy. The Annoyance felt like my Masters and iO felt like my Bachelors. We have to understand that if we do something onstage and later feel crappy that those are growing pains, and be patient with ourselves. They’re pains, but we’re growing. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s only when someone stops you, like Keith Johnstone, and says ‘No, that’s not good enough. Do it over again.’ I’ve seen him do that. I end up going ‘Wait. I thought that every suggestion was great and that we can make flowers out of shit. That’s how I was taught.’ To hear that it’s not good enough means that there’s something better. I always thought that anything could be turned into art and beauty.


JF: When you were at Second City did you ever re-improvise scenes?


SM: Yeah, you have to understand through during my time at Second City I was censored. Like Rich Talarico said ‘They hired you because you were Susan Messing, then told you not to be.’ I think they worried about the fact that I was uncensored and that I’d be a loose cannon on Main Stage. I didn’t worry about that. They put this condition on my being hired that there was a possibility I couldn’t go… They were worried that I would go ‘blue.’ I wasn’t, but they were. In the first show, I didn’t.

What would happen was you would come into the rehearsal, and you could come in with written shit if you wanted. Mostly someone would come in with an idea, and not a very fleshed out idea either. We would improvise it. If we liked it, we would improvise it more and throw it in the set. If we didn’t like it, we’d probably promptly drop it or maybe Mick would see a gem in it that we could left-brain it somewhere else. That second time blues though, re-improvising something, is not always fun. It feels kind of creepy, but you have to do it sometimes. Then finally you beat it out and set it and the script naturally grows out of that, or you sit down and write something funny which I think is more difficult to do.


JF: I was reading something and it mentioned how important Del Close thought improv being a ‘theater of the heart’ was. Do you think that’s prevalent in the improv community or do you think people just do it more for comedy?


SM: I think that sometimes theories sound beautiful, but sometimes the reality is a little more difficult to pursue. But isn’t that a great goal? It really is. I really believe that we have to honor each other and take care of each other no matter where we play, no matter who we play with. The minute you come onstage with judgment is the minute you’re fucked before you start. Self-judgment like I said is the worst, but judgment of our peers is unconscionable. That’s where teamwork comes in, and that’s why it’s so difficult for some people to become a good team player, and that’s when I invite them to become just an actor.

My whole struggle my whole life is to become a good team player. That’s not easy for me. We all have our own agendas. I love that it’s difficult for me. I love that this is the kind of art where the day I stop growing is the day I start dying. You can’t rest on your petty little laurels at this stage of the game. I’ve been improvising over 19 years now and now I’m not going to stop. What? Stop growing? Did the earth stop?

In my evolution or de-evolution as it were, my life experiences change up who I am and how I play. Because if I go back to some tiresome piece of shit I did, trying to be funny, the audience will sense that. This is the thing: the only way to heighten something funny is to say something funnier. I love truth in comedy. I do. I also like changing up status. I love changing up everything. Comedy is a great learning tool. It really is for everybody.


JF: In your opinion, what makes a good initiation and how do you initiate typically?


SM: I guess I initiate with a person in a world and see what happens. I never initiate with plot with nothing else, because if I initiate with plot and my friend beats me to the chase, I’ve got nothing other than Susan Messing standing onstage in defense. [laughs] Because you’re thinking in your head ‘What about my idea?’ That’s why if somebody initiates I can always respond as a human being, even if I take care of myself in the first 3 seconds of the scene. Say I jut out my hips and I look defiant. Well, you can stick me anywhere. I can be your bride. I can be your lawyer. I can be anything. So, I just put a person in a world and see what happens. Or I do something at the top of the scene at the top of the scene and see how I feel about it. Or, if I have jack shit for myself, I match my friend’s energy and we’re already protected.

There was a time I think Emily Wilson once sat down in a chair and kind of straddled it. I had nothing, so I sat in a chair and straddled it as well. My show is that I’m totally inspired by other people’s body positions, like freeze tag where you have to be inspired by that. Emily sat down and said ‘Momma, I have to talk to you.’ I said ‘Sure honey, I can talk to you, but you’re going to have to put 25 cents in the machine. Mommy’s working now.’ Because it reminded me of that bad Madonna video from the 80’s, where she’s dancing for the man. So, she got to have a momma daughter talk with me while momma was in a spoog filled room. [laughs] That gets me off. I love specificity. I totally kills ambiguity.


JF: Why do you think there are so few great improv troupes?


SM: I don’t know why. I think there are so many improv troupes in Chicago that I assume there’s bound to be a good chunk of mediocrity. I’m trying to think about this. I think everybody deserves that time to grow and to be willing to fail. A lot of people have a lot going on. It’s one of several things that they do, so maybe they don’t have the time and energy to it. It’s a luxury. I don’t want to say that their work ethic is any worse of better than anything else. I don’t know how many improv troupes there are in New York, and that you go ‘Oh, that one’s a great one and that one’s not.’ I would assume that it’s their willingness to invest in each other. Maybe other people just don’t have the time or energy to do that. Just because people aren’t that great now doesn’t mean they can’t be in the future. I think anybody can be wonderful. If I can do this, anybody can.


JF: How have you seen improv change over the years?


SM: I just think a lot more people. I think that everybody thinks that they’re creating new forms. They’ve become a bit more sophisticated. It’s certainly more accepted as an art form on its own. It’s reaching far more people. It’s not just people going ‘Is that that thing that you do on ‘Whose Line is it Anyway?’’ People don’t ask as many stupid questions. [laughs] Obviously, if they’re taking me into their theater programs to teach their students, the academics are taking it more seriously, which makes me happy because I think I would have been a much better actor sooner had I taken improv in college.


JF: What advice would you have for improvisers starting out now?


SM: For what?


JF: In general. To be successful in this.


SM: Be yourself. Celebrate that you got up today. Enjoy sharing time with other people. Enjoy that people are honoring your choices, and think you’re great until you tell me you’re not. People are their own worse enemy in improv. It’s not that bully on your team, although the bully should go away. [laughs] Go away. There’s no time for that.


JF: Do you have any advice for people who are 8 years into improv or something like that?


SM: They’re losing their minds. Get a life. For a while. Because improv is not going away. After 11 years of improvising, the last thing I wanted to do was mime a cup of coffee. I wanted to make a cup of coffee. And that break gave me enough life-experience again to recommit to the art. Sometimes people fell like they’ve fallen down the rabbit hole with improv, like ‘Oh my God, this is the most amazing thing.’ They make their whole life around this art. And I’m saying it’s your life that will support your art, and your art will support your life. You’ve got to find a balance.


JF: Do you have anything that you would like to say to the improv community that we didn’t get out?


SM: Where? Who is? [laughs] Who is disseminating this information?


JF: Right now I’m posting them on the improvresourcecenter.com.


SM: Oh dear God. Forward that to me. I’ll be bored with myself. [laughs] What was the question?


JF: [laughs] Do you have anything that you would like to say to the improv community that we didn’t get out?


SM: Yeah, thank you for being part of the community. I hope you have a wonderful time, and I look forward to meeting you.