The Happy Place: What Robin Williams Means to an Improvisor

By: Aaron Alexander

Robin Williams

The shock came and the sadness lingered. The tributes have all been written, read and shared. The issues have been debated back and forth by people with wildly varying levels of basis for comment. And now, people, broadly speaking, are moving on.

But I know that from now on, every time I step on stage, I’ll remember Robin Williams.

I’m lucky enough to perform improvised comedy, which puts me in a similar relationship to Robin as to Argentinian striker Lionel Messi - we play the same game, same rules, same tools, but only one of us can make you re-evaluate the limits of human potential while doing it.

On the other hand, I reckon scoring a goal gives me the same joy as it does Messi (if not more, as he actually does it with presumably monotonous regularity). And I think I know just a little of the feeling Robin Williams had when he was in the Happy Place: on stage, with a live audience, in free flow, riding waves of laughter.

All of us who improv live for moments in the Happy Place, where you’re in tune with each other and the audience, and a creative chain reaction can occur.  While we live for it, on stage Robin Williams just lived in it. He had a direct connection, an all access pass, he could see the matrix, hear the music of the spheres and conduct it from an inflatable throne in his bouncy castle in the kingdom of fools.  And he will always rule there, like a trickster god of ancient mythology.

If you watch his early work – and you must –  alongside how funny he is, you’ll notice one other thing: how much he loves the audience. He wants to connect with them as individuals, share a moment, push their buttons, do whatever it takes to tickle their fancy. In his 1978 Live at the Roxy special he arrives on stage through the audience and within minutes he’s back among them, literally climbing the walls to get to more of them. They are his material.

One of the basic principles of improv is to say ‘yes’ to everything that comes your way. Take any offer as inspiration, and build on it. Robin Williams had a boundless capacity for saying ‘yes’ to inspiration. And he could find it almost anywhere – a light fixture, an audience member’s hair, a piece of set, an awkward body position – any offer could spark a character, a voice, a line. And the speed…everyone talks about it. To work at that speed there’s simply no room for fear or self-doubt.

And most importantly, he’s so transparently, blissfully happy in those moments. Yes, I know, cocaine and so on, but that’s not what I see in his performance (even if that’s what he felt he needed to get there in those days). I see joy. And it’s his generosity with his joy that lifts us up. His is not a comedy of cynicism, the stand-up with biting observations puncturing complacency. His is the inner child given absolute permission to run free in a world of infinite possibility. Part Genie, part Peter Pan.

That joy in play, in free creation, I don’t believe it ever left him. He worked with the famous Second City improv company before he was famous. Years later, a global superstar, he could turn up backstage at a Second City gig to perform – not solo, but sharing the stage and scenes, generously, with young improvisors. You don’t do that unless, purely and simply, you Love the Work.

As we all know now, there was a darkness inside him as well. On one hand it may have given him the power to deliver dramatic performances that stunned the world with their weight and raw intensity. No one expected Mork to win an Oscar. On the other hand, it was a darkness powerful enough to overwhelm the light within him. But while we must learn from the sorrow and the tragedy, that should not be the legacy of a man who spent his life spreading happiness across the globe.

We all have our memories of Robin Williams. To those of us who are driven to walk on stage with no script and no safety net, he will simply always be the master. We’ll try to squeeze and channel just a few drops of the creative quicksilver that ran in his veins. We’ll hope that maybe one day in a scene we’ll hear his voice in our heads, Obi Wan-style, saying “Go for it. Climb up there. Do that voice. Don’t think, go with it. Just say ‘yes’, goddammit!”

I’ll always be grateful that he walked among us, that he made us laugh, and cry, and love him.

He was the Greatest of All Time.

Vale, magister ludi.

Aaron Alexander was scheduled to write a DOTW blog post about The Improvisors Go to the Movies (7pm SUNDAYS, August 10 to October 5), but following the tragic passing of Robin Williams, no other subject for a blog about comedy improvisiation seemed appropriate.

www.circa.co.nz

Fun for actors and audiences: My First Time

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"I love this play" - A view from inside Mauritius

By: Aaron Alexander

Generally speaking, play scripts are hard to read. With nothing but dialogue and the odd stage direction it takes a lot of work to conjure up an image of the drama in your mind. Without the descriptive prose you’d get in a novel it’s easy to lose track of characters, their attitudes and motivations from scene to scene.

Not so Mauritius.

Theresa Rebeck’s script was a genuine page-turner, far and away the most entertaining play I’ve ever sat down and read. Her writing is lean, smart, surprising and funny. Most of all, it’s the work of a committed storyteller. She strikes me as a playwright who knows it is a priviledge to have the audience’s attention for two hours and wants to reward them with an engaging tale that keeps them guessing till the very last moment.

She’s created five flawed individuals who, just like in real life, do things that make you like them, loathe them and pity them, sometimes all at once. All of them have shadowy pasts; a history of bad choices leaving secret scars. As the playwright says, with people, as with stamps, it’s the errors that make them interesting, and valuable.

Aaron Alexander as Philip

For us, as a cast and crew, the chance to build a show on this foundation has made coming to work a joy. On day one I was delighted to discover that the other actors had all found the script equally ‘unputdownable’ and were excited to get stuck in. Leading the enterprise was Ross Jolly, and we could not have been in better hands. It’s been my good fortune to work with Ross on a number of occasions and I’ve learned that the thing he cares about most as a director is the audience – what are they discovering in this scene, this moment, this line? His finely honed instinct for timing, placement and guiding the audience’s focus was a perfect match for Theresa Rebeck’s storytelling priority.

We five actors had a great time rehearsing this show. We discovered we’d been given characters who at first seemed simple almost to the point of being ‘types’, (the Nerd, the Gangster, the Conman, the Innocent, the Prude), but who quickly revealed a much subtler humanity. As the audience discovers through the course of the play, there is far more to these people than meets the eye. Theresa’s dialogue has all the sharpness of her TV background, and when we really got going it fair crackled along. Now, with the addition of the Circa audience, whose listening, laughing and rapt, bright-eyed attention lifts us to new heights, we are a deeply satisfied bunch.

I have the pleasure of sharing the stage with a phenomenally talented group of actors. Each night I get to be inexcusably rude to the charming but dangerous Danielle Mason, tremble at the approach of a fearsome Jeff Thomas, marvel at the energy and loquaciousness of Andrew Foster and be transported by the tragicomic tightrope walk of Lyndee-Jane Rutherford.

(left to right) Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, Aaron Alexander, Andrew Foster and Danielle Mason

Our stage manager, Mr. Eric Gardiner, is the steady hand on the tiller of the waka during the season, not to mention the strong back behind the revolving set. Eric volunteered for the task of pushing the set around half a dozen times a night when it became clear days before opening night that our electric motor was not up to the task. Mechanical horsepower is no match for a stout English yeoman with a pair of gloves and an “I’ll do it m’self” attitude. Eric’s silent, invisible efforts that result in the gliding revolution of the set epitomises, I think, the huge amounts of unseen work that goes in to bringing you a stage production like Mauritius.

Personally, I’m very proud of what we’ve brought together in this production. It’s one of those ‘perfect storm’ scenarios where all the creative and technical elements (electric motor excepted) have fit together beautifully. The feedback from our audiences so far has been fantastic and, believe me, we can sense how much they’ve been enjoying it from the stage. I can feel the audience being drawn towards us and onto the edge of their seats in the climactic final act, and hear their gasps of surprise at every twist, turn and doublecross.

After opening night I sent a message to Theresa Rebeck through her website, not really expecting a reply. To my surprise and delight she sent a lovely note back, expressing how glad she was to hear from us in New Zealand. She finished very simply by saying:

‘I love this play.’

The fact that the writer has such unabashed affection for her script speaks volumes.

I hope you will come down to Circa and join us for an evening of thrills, laughs and rampant, no-holds-barred philately. I reckon you’ll come out feeling, like all of us from Theresa Rebeck on down, that Mauritius is a play that’s easy to love, and hard to forget.

Mauritius is on at Circa until 24 July. To book your tickets, please call 04-801-7992 or go online at www.circa.co.nz.