Get out of the submarine!
This is the most impactful note I have ever been given as a creative person. I say creative person and not playwright because when I was given this note I was an improv actor and not yet a writer. I actually wasn’t even an actor yet. I was taking improv classes at the time and in one of the classes we were doing a scene that was set in a submarine. The scene was going nowhere. Those of us in it had no idea what to do with ourselves. Each of us reacted to the smallness of the space inside a submarine, something I learned from watching the movies Das Boot and The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide… they used to make a lot of submarine movies back in the day. Weird.
Anyway, this scene was boring and going nowhere and we improv students had no idea what to do about it. Paul D’Amato, our instructor, let us flail along for a while and then generously brought the scene to an end. What happened? He asked.
None of us knew what to say.
We didn’t know what happened.
We didn’t know what to do.
Paul, with his years of experience and wisdom beyond his age said: Get out of the submarine.
It was so obvious a note I was too stuck inside to see it. Of course. Get out of the submarine. This scene is improv. There are no rules. We can go as far as our imaginations allow.
I immediately replayed the scene in my mind a thousand different ways. All of them much better, funnier, and more interesting. But improv can’t be played in retrospect.
My improv days are way behind me now but that note has never left. I think of this all the time in my writing. Whenever I face that sense of being stuck I ask myself “is this a submarine situation?” Usually what has happened is I’ve unintentionally trapped my characters in a small space and now they’re stuck. However getting them out doesn’t need to be literal. Getting out can manifest in some sort of surprise that moves the scene and elevates the play.
I also think about the submarine with my life, when I have found myself stuck in a situation I don’t want to be in. Am I in a submarine I ask? If so, I make a change…. And change is something my life has never been short of.
Get out of the submarine is what Paul said. He said that one small thing in the basement space of an improv class in Boston, Massachusetts many years ago, and my writing and my life are still impacted to this day. Thank you, Paul.
And now I have a new idea for a play. Three improv comedians hijack a submarine… https://lnkd.in/gzTMcNPy
past: Correspondent at VICE News, Postdoc Research Fellow at Princeton, Visiting Prof at UCLA.
6mothat is some solid advice!