DO I HAVE TO READ THE INTRODUCTION
Yeah, you should. Right away, it will tell you:
• What you’ll find in the book
• Who can benefit from the book
• How to use the book
• How I developed the Play by Play approach to improvising a full-length play
Besides, you’re already done with the first paragraph, and it starts off with a fun, little hook.
What You’ll Find in the Book
This book will present a step-by-step method for learning how to improvise a complete, full-length play. It will address:
• Cause and Effect story telling
• Raising the dramatic stakes
• The dramatic structure of a play
• How to improvise and remain spontaneous within that dramatic structure
• How to improvise long, Substantial Scenes with strong character objectives and productive Dramatic Conflict
• How to create characters that support the narrative
• How to create settings and environments that serve as catalysts for the action of the play
• How to use symbolism and metaphor to enrich the fabric of the drama
Each section will be accompanied by exercises that immediately allow your group to begin practicing and developing the required skills. The exercises are sequential, each one building on the skills developed in the previous exercise.
Who Can Benefit from the Book?
• Professional and student improvisers who want to improvise a full-length play
• Improvisers who are not yet ready to improvise a full-length play but want to improve upon certain areas such as story-telling, character, environment, or advanced scene work
• College and high-school improvisation and theater teachers who are looking to bring an advanced improvisation curriculum into the classroom
• Playwrights, screenwriters, and television writers who are interested in a unique approach to mastering dramatic structure
• Actors who are interested in exploring the structure of a play from their characters’ points of view
• Directors who are interested in analyzing dramatic structure and character motivation
• Educators of all levels who are interested in an innovative approach to bringing theater and the English-language arts into the classroom
How to Use the Book
It’s best to read the entire book before beginning to experiment with the exercises. Important topics are introduced gradually and returned to several times throughout the book, each time revealing deeper levels of exploration and development. Not until the end of the book will all of the pieces be thoroughly explored and placed in their proper context.
After reading the entire book, start again at the beginning and work through the exercises in the order in which they’re presented. On the basis of the progress of your group, spend as much or as little time on each exercise as required to master it thoroughly. By the end of the book, you’ll be improvising plays.
How I Developed the Play by Play Approach to Improvising a Full-Length Play
Before I started improvising, I had been writing plays for several years. My plays were being produced on the university and off-Broadway level, and I was wrapping up two degrees from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a BFA from its dramatic-writing program and an MFA from its musical-theater program (writing it, not singing it!).
The best book that I had ever read about playwriting was called
Playwriting, How to Write for the Theater by Bernard Grebanier (Harper and Row, 1979). It is still the best book that I have ever read about playwriting, and I highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the theater.
In his book, Mr. Grebanier presents what he calls “the proposition.” The proposition is a formula for constructing the plot of a well-made play. The proposition is so effective because it was created through a descriptive process rather than a prescriptive process. That is, it is not the result of Mr. Grebanier’s personal opinion about what makes a great play. It is the result of a thorough analysis of a vast number of written plays that have proven to be valued by society and loved by audiences over long periods of time. By analyzing the acknowledged masterpieces of the art form, Mr. Grebanier was able to identify their structural commonalities and present it as a formula through the use of his proposition.
The proposition is perfect for playwrights but not entirely useful for improvisers, because it requires you to start in the middle of your story and build the outline of your plot in reverse. My idea was to adapt Mr. Grebanier’s proposition into a tool that would allow improvisers to start improvising a play at the beginning of the story and to spontaneously work their way straight through to the end. Thus creating a map, if you will, of the dramatic landscape that must be crossed in order to reach a satisfying end. And so was born the Play by Play Structural Map, which forms the centerpiece of this book.