Object lessons

One of the ways improvisers can develop their scene is to conjure up objects and aspects of the space they inhabit. It’s something easy to neglect, our mind on other things; some good, like responding authentically to our scene partner, and some less so (planning ahead, searching for a killer line). On stage, faced with a flesh and blood scene partner, it can seem a distraction to start attending to things that flatly aren’t there, and once manifested involve attention to keep them there, make the intangible tangible.

Still, there are good reasons to attend to the physical world, which is why teachers of all stripes recommend it. It establishes a scenic picture, allowing the action to extend beyond talking heads. It draws the bodies of the players into action, which can quell anxiety and allows decisions to proceed from the gut. It can help reinforce the sense of normal, a sense of the world’s stable state or base reality. And narrative can be enriched by playing with space, and especially with objects.

https://freerangestock.com/photos/81658/office-supply-illustrations.html
https://freerangestock.com/photos/81658/office-supply-illustrations.html

The main reason for this is that objects are natural vehicles for meaning. This is especially true in improv, due to a strange quirk of the fact that objects take some effort to bring into the scene. Whereas a film set may be practically saturated with props to create a mood, the improv scene contains limited numbers of objects, and this very rarity makes it easy for audiences to find them significant. We’re sitting in an old study; why of all possible things have you named this ivory letter-opener, if it isn’t going to be important? Already, an expectation is set, a la Chekov’s gun.

Besides this, objects are sticky; it’s easy to attach things to them, from history (“this was plundered by my grandfather from a mansion during the easter uprising”) to function (“it makes a very clean cut when used, unmistakeable”) to personal impact (“I always find a little impulse to stab something when I hold it”). All those things can naturally accrue to an object, like a series of tags, firstly because it is a visualisable thing, and second because this is entirely familiar from real life. People do talk about objects, remember their history, use them, care about them.

In the letter-opener example, I’ve presented some explicit verbal offers to latch meaning onto an object. But you don’t need to take such an intentional route. Like it or not, objects gather meaning at their own pace. To illustrate this I will use the episode “Bostogne” from the HBO series Band of Brothers. (Spoilers for a 24-year old mid-season TV episode!) It presents the travails of the paratroopers in Easy Company as it tries to survive its forested defensive position, low on supplies in the brutal winter conditions of December 1944.

It does this by following the exploits of a medic, Eugene. From the off, he asks questions as he passes between foxholes and forays to other battalions: who has bandages? Can I take your morphine syrettes? Do you have any scissors?

The questions make sense, as without these supplies he can’t do his job and people will die. And the answers are unexceptional, sometimes revealing a bit of characterisation (the flicker of anxiety from a lieutenant before giving up his morphine: what if I get hit?) but generally amounting to sure, sorry can’t help you, try over there. Not hard to achieve in an improv scene, just respond obviously and authentically without worrying overly about the ‘best’ or ‘right’ thing to say.

What works is simply that the objects are kept in the mix: Eugene keeps asking the questions as he encounters other soldiers, which undergirds the story with simple themes: scarcity, sharing, care for physical bodies, tough decisions. Periodically we see Eugene treat someone – just doing his normal job, stemming a wound, applying morphine – and these encounters matter more because we know that he doesn’t have a self-refreshing medikit, like a class in an FPS game, but had to hustle, be single minded, even annoying, to provide that care. He finally finds and snatches some tiny sewing scissors from a pissed-off paratrooper, and when we see how they are just barely effective in removing uniform to identify a wound, the moment affects us more.

A major plotline to the episode involves a relationship that develops between Eugene and a nurse, Renee, who works an aid station in a church behind the front line. Both are healers struggling under the level of trauma and death they are facing every hour, and in a quiet moment she shares chocolate with him (a rare luxury) and also releases her hair from the distinctive bandana she wears. The chocolate is ultimately offered to Babe, another medic, distraught after a particularly harrowing event. This softens Babe’s view of Eugene, having earlier seen him as aloof, but an increasingly burnt out Eugene accidentally tramples his hand trying to deal with another injury, leaving him gashed.

In the climax of the episode, the company commander, recognising Eugene’s increasing burnout, orders him to take some downtime in the village around the aid camp. He arrives to find it bombed with the church in ruins, with Renee’s bandana amongst the carnage. The episode ends with his return to Babe’s foxhole, where he notices the wounded hand, and is told that he inflicted it. He fumbles in his pockets for a bandage, draws out the bandana. For a long moment, he looks at it, and then tears it to use to dress the wound. The climax reinforces the themes explored in the story using an object to hypercharge the sense of care, scarcity, and sacrifice.

Obviously, this is an award-winning scripted story, a Steven Spielberg jam no less, so we aren’t asking that all objects are used so deftly – foregrounded the right number of times and then shelved for a satisfying period of time before they are returned to for maximum impact. But the general point is that the objects afford possibilities. Have chocolate in the mix. Have bandages in the mix. Have a meaningful object in the mix. Then maybe we find moments where they matter.

Of course, putting this in action can do with some practice. At the forthcoming Improv Cooperative narrative course, we’ll make space for using space, and have plenty of time for object lessons.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/intro-to-narrative-improv-tickets-1123044790199


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