Shut Up and Listen!

Yesterday I was asked by a good friend of mine to write about listening in improv. My immediate and somewhat rude joke-response was, "Uh, just shut up?" As unhelpful as those words are, there is actually some truth behind them. So because listening is the most important skill for an actor, improviser, and person to have, I'll go ahead and delve into it a little bit.

In improv, we have the desire to talk constantly. We feel like not speaking is the equivalent of doing nothing. Maybe we're even doing some intense, complicated, object work, but those moves are stage directions that everybody ignores and changes. If you want to contribute to the actual script, you've gotta spew some words from your facehole, right? As you can probably tell from my characterization of those uncontrollable word-farts, I don't agree that they're necessary at all.

Very often, we assume that listening is the same thing as simply hearing. You can talk over someone or have a very rapid conversation with them and hear all of the words they're saying to you. You can probably even understand exactly what they're saying to you. But if you're constantly talking, you're not letting those words affect you. You're not really treating your partner's words like they're the most important thing, because you're not giving them the silence and reverence that they deserve. You're not giving your response the necessary consideration to be worthy of replying to a string of words that just shook you to your core. You can have a whole conversation just hearing somebody and never listening.

Recently, I have noticed that scenes where one of the partners doesn't speak at all, says only one word, or only speaks in gibberish are actually far, far better scenes. The speaker is listening and watching their partner desperately for some clue of what they're trying to communicate. They invest themselves wholly in understanding what their partner is feeling. Their silent/gibberish speaking partner is quiet and doesn't have to spend time thinking about words, so they can spend their time reacting to and being affected by the only real words in the scene. Try one or two of those scenes and observe how it changes your play, watch how quickly it becomes real and emotionally honest instead of wackadoo and schticky.

So, here's my advice:

• Start with silence. 
• Let your partner's words affect and change you. 
• Speak to them only when you actually need to speak. 
• If you don't need to speak, uh, just shut up?