Late on a Friday afternoon in the Annoyance Theatre’s grungy brick- lined storefront performance space, Susan Messing is working with a dozen improvisation students on character-development exercises. The next step, she announces, is to develop scenes using similar techniques.
Men, more often than women, make what in improv are called “strong initiations” onstage; they enter a scene with a clearly defined character or physical action that others must follow. Many women find themselves merely reacting to the men onstage, playing roles that depend on the men for definition: fawning wives and mothers, dumb secretaries, whores, sisters, and girlfriends. In a genre where everything is instantaneous, the parts men and women play can reveal certain societal assumptions about sex roles, and also what the actors think about themselves.
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Napier’s improv philosophy is antifear–he belives that improvisers should take situations to dangerous, even obscene extremes. But underneath the theater’s self-styled rebel mentality lie the standard rules of improv, which Napier says apply to all improv troupes, regardless of their stance on performance. Nothing that a performer does and says onstage should be ignored by other performers–everything that happens is fair game for a scene. Denying what somebody suggests onstage is perhaps the greatest improv sin; rejecting somebody’s suggestion for a scene stops it flat.
“I think I survived because I allowed such crap onstage. I remember somebody telling me, ‘Oh, Susan, we wouldn’t trade you for any other girl on our team.’ I thought, ‘Fuck you, I think I’m a fine improviser in my own right.’ I’m not a lady improviser. You know, add titties and you’ve got a lady improviser. I used to be nervous about that. It’s a lot more difficult to separate myself as a woman from this, because when I do it, I automatically screw myself over. I’ve just got to look at it and say, I’m an individual onstage.”
