u/saceats

Who’s your favorite trumpeter when there’s just 12 bars to tell your story?

I’ve seen a lot of posts over the past several months asking for advice on how to handle other players who do X or do Y. Sometimes the poster is uncomfortable with behavior or frustrated by the other player’s moves. The implication is “how do I stop my scene partner from doing x or doing y.“

If I could give one piece of blanket advice, it’s that you will experience all kinds of players throughout a lifetime of doing improv – short attention span players, always going blue players, players who have three stock characters they always use, touchy feely players, standstill players, players who will walk through the obvious space object table that you were just setting up dinner on! – and one of the best skills you can learn is how to play with all of them and still create successful scenes.

Learning how to play with, and sometimes play around, performers who throw you curveballs is an invaluable skill. Rather than look on difficult scene partners as “ruining the scene,“ or “making it all about them,“ relish those moments and learn from them. What can you do to justify what they just said? How can you get the scene back on track? Or how can you follow the new track that this person has just laid down?

Make yourself a servant of the scene, a searcher for the unusual and the entertaining, and an advocate for the audience.

Here’s a couple strategies. I’ve used over the years to change my thinking on working with “difficult“ partners.

1. If you wanna call out behavior on stage, whether it’s nonsensical or inappropriate or something in between, make it about calling out the character that your partner is playing and not the player themselves.
2. When your partner’s offer is so out of left field that your initial reaction is to reject it, go the opposite direction and over accept it. This might get you to crazy town pretty quickly, but it’s a way to quickly heighten the scene and maybe get that scene to a fun and quick end.
3. If a scene partner contradicts you on stage, go with it, don’t ignore it. Justify it. Does your scene partner suffer from amnesia? Are they face blind? Are they living in an alternate reality or parallel universe? Justify. Justify. Justify.
4. If you have a teacher or director guiding you, talk to them about the performance. If you’re independently working with someone who you find difficult to work with, talk to them frankly, but make most of the comments about yourself rather than about them. “When you did X I was confused for a minute since I didn’t know where you were coming from so I did y.“ “ i’m not super comfortable playing Blue on stage. If you throw a suggestion that’s sexual while while performing, I might redirect that. Just so you know.“

More than anything, try to be a kind and generous performer, and a missionary of funny.

I’d love to hear what other people are doing to help them overcome performances with performers who they find difficult to work with.