So the summer has finally brought me something creative to work on. For the past 4 days I’ve been rehearsing in Greenville with a company that has been dubbed by its director, Murdock, The Molière Improv Project. That makes us sound really awesome… and with good reason. The company is comprised of past and present members of Improv!able Cause that span from the class of 2006 (Jeb) to the class of 2013 (Caroline). All of us signed on to this project without knowing exactly what to expect aside from the fact that we’re reworking Molière’s The Miser and that we’d be working with some great improvers (some of whom have improved together before and some of whom didn’t officially meet until the first day of rehearsal). The official title of the show is The Miser: Improvised. Word.
Thus far the rehearsals have been fairly focused on character development. Through a character circle exercise, we’ve taken 4 Miser characters from brainstormed traits to physical neutral stance to default gestures indicating things like surprise, love, and the formulation of an idea. One funny occurrence presented itself after we had created the character Harpagon. The members of the company were in a line standing in Harpagon’s neutral stance and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with each member saying a few words at a time to get used to how he would speak. When we tried to think of something else we all knew to recite that wasn’t super repetitive (i.e. Row, Row, Row Your Boat or Mary Had a Little Lamb) or religious (i.e. The Lord’s Prayer or The Apostle’s Creed), we were pretty stumped. That is, until someone suggested the theme song to The Fresh Prince of Belair. Sure enough, we all knew the words. However, it was pretty difficult to be a 60+-year-old man with a hunched back, gnarled hands, and slightly bowed legs while saying the phrase “shooting some b-ball.” I just thought it was an interesting comment on our personalities and society that the only things we could come up with that we all knew were nursery rhymes, prayers, and Fresh Prince.
Last night we put the first scene on its feet. The idea is that we know the outline of what occurs in the established scene and the traits of the characters in it, but the dialog is fairly improvised. We started with one pair of performers, Caroline and Jacob, playing the young lovers Valère and Élise. They first did the scene in gibberish then replayed the scene with improvised lines. The result was very funny. There were some rough patches and things that didn’t get covered that will need to for the sake of the plot, but overall that first scene was very solid. It was very reassuring to see the idea for the project actually take shape and work well. Following the first pair, two other pairs did the same exercise, first Laura-Ann and I then Bryson and Brian. Every time the scene was played, new things were discovered, old bits were reworked, and everyone got big laughs from the rest of the company. After rehearsal, Murdock mentioned to Jacob and I that he was very impressed at everyone’s abilities to play each character especially regardless of gender and may keep each character interchangeable with some way of knowing who is playing which character at any given time.
At any rate, this new and different way of combining performing a play and improvising is beginning to take definite shape. I’m excited to see where it goes from here.
