THE MIRROR - an improvisation format for two professionals and up to 100 amateurs. Designed by David Shepherd.

 

THE MIRROR 

 an improvisation format for two professionals and up to 100 amateurs

Designed by David Shepherd (Compass/Improv Olympic) 1974

The Mirror is advertised as a place where you create a show simply by sitting in front of a mirror.  To do this we use no written material, no satirical distortion, no symbolic magnification. The experiences we explore each night are shared experiences - common to most of those present.

When people arrive at the theatre, the first thing they see is their names and themes on a program, that's been printed only minutes before.  Next they see their reflections - in glass or Mylar.  In the improvisations that follow they see their own life - mirrored first by professional players and then by their peers in the audience.

If management can afford a videotape recorder and projector, the spectator can even have the experience of seeing a full-size mirror-image of himself.

David Shepherd - Armonk, N.Y. 1974

Gathering a relevant body of themes and an audience:

A performance of The Mirror starts hours before curtain time - when apprentices pick up suggestions for the show from restaurants, hotels and offices around the theatre. These suggestions have been written on place mats and table tents designed to involve people in choosing the content of the show.

Door prizes or cash awards are offered to those willing to play out a suggestion.  Consequently we get fewer challenges and spoofs, and more thoughtful themes.  On the back of the place mat are printed creative games that can be played over supper to isolate a theme. (Naturally these place mats can be taken home to remind potential customers of our address, and to stimulate word-of-mouth.)

The apprentices who pick up suggestions do not do it routinely.  They find out if the person who's made the suggestion plans to come to the show.  If so, they sit for a minute at his table to see if he's willing or able to direct the action - or play into it.  They prepare the customer for what will happen so that The Mirror can reflect the maximum creativity of the group that will come together at show time.

The apprentice is in face a talent scout searching for people who can illuminate roles, and roles that can illuminate people.

Preparing scenario card decks:

Information gathered by apprentices is woven by the professional staff of The Mirror into scenarios.  The flood of themes is channeled under recurrent stories.  These stories can be expressed in the same "master" scenarios, for instance: "Boy meets girl," "Boy loses girl," "Boy gets girl back again."

The professional players also choose a few sound and lighting effects that can enrich the scenario.  They know that the oldest scenario is bound to come out differently every time it's done because critical details will shift.  The lovers will have different jobs, different ages, different origins.  Their story will be played out by different players against different activities or backgrounds.

Each event in the scenario is stated on a card large enough so everyone in the audience can read it under a spotlight during the blackout.  A complete scenario might include a dozen cards, arranged in a time sequence.  It's the audience that chooses where to start in the sequence and how fast to go through it.

Each improvised scene is kept short and is framed by blackouts.  Each theme can be explored in about fifteen minutes.  A show consists of about three themes - plus the warmups that prepare audience members to direct and play into improvisations.

The role of the professional:

Professional players are limited to one man and one woman - in order to assure the audience of opportunities to intervene in many ways.  The professionals promise the amateurs in advance that no one will be forced to play,  but everyone will be asked to vote on which theme to explore first, and on whom to cast.

First: a few minutes of warmups.  Next: two pools of volunteers emerge - one of directors and one of players.  The second pool is spotlighted so that the audience can at all times see its cast options.  At any moment it can vote to replace a player, and some scenes may be done several times with several casts - until the audience is satisfied.

Naturally, if no one volunteers to play, the two professionals will play out the whole scenario by themselves - snatching hand props and costume pieces to double as the various characters called for.  But this never happens.

The audience soon finds itself adding sound effects and off-stage voices to enrich the action.  Directors in the directing pool stop action and change a factor - such as the emotion or activity of a character.  And from the acting pool real people provide real alternative to the strict limitation of one professional actor and one professional actress.

By the end of the evening these pro's have usually left the stage to direct, or have limited their roles to "one-liners" or silent "cross overs."  The Mirror has happened: by simply sitting in front of the stage, the audience has created its own show.

Prizes:

Part of each night's income is retained to reward volunteer players.  These prizes are not intended to make for a TV game show competition.  They are offered to promote audiences, to validate audience talent, to enlarge the pool of volunteers and to decrease the gap between the amateur and the professional.

From David Shepherd's IBM electric typewriter, 1974.

Michael Golding is a writer, director and improv teacher. He is a founding member of the Improv Olympics and the Canadian Improv Games.  Michael created the Insight Theatre Company for Planned Parenthood, Ottawa and the Comic Strip Improv Group in New York.  He co-produced and wrote the documentary "David Shepherd: A Lifetime of Improvisational Theatre" (available on YouTube) and his book, "Listen Harder," is available on Amazon.  Michael is a faculty member at Compton College in Los Angeles, where he works with traditional and at-risk students. He holds a BFA degree in drama from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and an MA degree in education theatre from NYU's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development. He can be contacted at migaluch@yahoo.com.

COMPASS: The Living Newspaper by David Shepherd

 A constant in David Shepherd's improv career was periodically revisiting his groundbreaking format, COMPASS (a "people's theatre," co-created with Paul Sills in 1955) and attempting to update it with the collaboration of improvisers who were in his orbit at that time.

David continued conducting COMPASS workshops in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Ottawa, Boston, St. Louis and Chicago, well into his late eighties. These workshops focused on creating scenarios and rehearsing the Living Newspaper, the curtain raiser for COMPASS where newspaper and magazine articles were brought to life as players segued back and forth between narration, character dialogue, pantomime and tableau.

In 2002, David wrote this description of the Living Newspaper for Stephen Sim, the Artistic Director of the Winnipeg If....Improv Festival and co-founder of The Improv Company.

COMPASS: THE LIVING NEWSPAPER for Stephen Sim

The 1955 Chicago COMPASS was supposedly a sociopolitical statement in the environment of Senator Joe McCarthy. At that time, the University of Chicago had just passed through the leadership of a radical humanist - John Maynard Hutchins. And people were ready to drive great distances to hear what could be heard no place else. Nowadays expletives and derision (of this president or that premier) are not going to draw radicals and rebels to your theatre. So what do you do?

At COMPASS we set out to SHOW THE AUDIENCE WHAT IT WAS READING. "This is the Chicago Defender," we said. "This is its ethnic self image and this is its pretension to be unprejudiced." This is the Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Argosy, the New Yorker, The Ring, Sports Illustrated, Journal of Lifetime Living.

The Compass Players (1955), Severn Darden, Larry Arrick, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, Rose Arrick, Barbara Harris.

Our Living Newspaper came before our scenario play, which came before audience suggestions. The Living Newspaper was short, pithy, conceptual, sarcastic, surprising.

What were some components?

    Shelley Berman did an advertisement for treasure diving. He pantomimed swimming underwater while reciting the ad in a froggy voice. The pretense of discovering doubloons under one's local pond was ridiculous. 

    Mike Nichols flopped his bony arm over a louvre and read New Yorker copy for a million dollar Tiffany bracelet.

    Two commentators (Mike Nichols and Andrew Duncan) describe each round of a boxing match in the style of Sports Illustrated and then the Ring. The fighters appeared alternately as brutes and carefully trained strategists.

    Andrew Duncan measured Barbara Harris' dress in the salon of Christian Dior - miming a photo from the Daily News. I played Dior and read the article in the style of story theatre, speaking of myself in the third person.

In all these scenes we pretended to know exactly what the point was and why we were making it. We assumed that the audience knew what we were saying, and most of the time they did. The university produced thousands of smart, curious people who didn't happen to want to get up on stage. Some frequent flyers did get back stage to join the company and take short roles.

As for a political tinge, Second City was more overt than we were. In fact several people in COMPASS objected to political slants, and when I got them to do a scenario about the Black List in radio, it lacked COMPASS joy.

However, LIVING NEWSPAPER COULD NOT BE ACCUSED OF DISTORTION because the very words of the periodicals were there in print in our hands as we played.

TODAY 2002, most news is on TV. Players satirize weathermen. A good visual is the TV spot - shot at home or in the office. War scenes and home disasters can be adapted for stage performance. A few sound effects on audio tape will make these locations seem more real.

 

Michael Golding is an improv teacher, writer and director who participated in the evolution of the Improv Olympics, the Canadian Improv Games, and created the Insight Theatre Company for Planned Parenthood, Ottawa. He is currently a faculty member at Compton College working with at-risk teens and traditional students. Michael was the artistic director of the Comic Strip Improv Group in New York City and co-produced and wrote the documentary "David Shepherd: A Lifetime of Improvisational Theatre." His book, "Listen Harder," a collection of essays, curriculum and memorabilia on improvisation and educational theatre is available on Amazon.