The Hunt for Spontaneity and Trust at Boom Chicago

Boom Chicago is an English-language improvisational theater in Amsterdam, which stages a variety of unscripted shows on various topics and genres. Their regular 10:30pm Saturday night show, “Shot of Improv,” is a 75-minute short-form show, consisting of discrete games and scenes. Many of these games use some thematic or formal constraint as the means to create a scene: one is likely to see a scene inspired by a word suggested by an audience member, a scene in a chosen literary genre, or a scene entirely in rhyme. “Shot of Improv” was ostensibly built around this conceit, even going so far as to encourage audience participation with the offer free alcohol. Yet these and other conventions of improvisational theater were at points employed nominally in a way which actually seemed to prohibit engagement with genuine moments of spontaneity and connection. Furthermore, the show had a consistent pattern of invoking “taboo” content in scenes, including racial and gender stereotypes, homophobia, and disability. While it is not primo facie inappropriate to engage with or explore these topics on stage, the technical performance choices during the show made it very difficult to distinguish between offensive speech on the part of the character or the improvisor.

Every improv show operates at two narrative levels simultaneously. One story is about the characters onstage and the situations in which they find themselves. The other story is about the improvisors discovering those characters and stories in real time. Improvisation trades in this dual-storiedness: the experience of the show both as the onstage product—the games and scenes performed—and the shared discovery of what that product is. The audience and improvisors share in this discovery, which creates a relationship of trust between the two parties. This relationship is unique in every show, deepened by the shared knowledge that whatever happens onstage will be ephemeral.

Improvisation need not be comedic, but it has a reputation as comedy which informs audience expectations. Even theaters that specifically choose not to bill themselves as “Improv Comedy” attract audiences that anticipate a comedic show. This is not a necessary dimension of the form, but it is a quality of the current state of the craft which improvisors have the power to affirm or subvert as the story requires.

Managing the audience’s expectations is a part of the second meta-theatrical narrative of each improv show. If a show moves out of the realm of comedy and into more dramatic or serious thematic territory, the improvisors have the power to draw the audience alongside them, building on the energy and trust to explore new content and form. This is not the only way to engage with audiences, nor is it necessarily the “right” one. But ignoring the expectations of and relationship with the audience and failing to attend to it destroys the second narrative. This is particularly the case when material journeys into not only thematically dark, but potentially hurtful or offensive territory.

In scripted theater and performance, the audience understands and assumes that thought has been put into every word spoken. A long process of editing has preceded the product, and so the audience assumes intentionality behind each staging choice and line of dialogue. However, in improvised theater, the entire conceit is that no content has been prepared. This inability to edit or self-edit blurs the line between the story within the show and the story of the show’s creation, a blur that has the potential to become dangerous when the characters onstage are addressing sensitive topics such as race or disability. If no attempt is made to establish the scene and characters, then it becomes difficult to determine whether a hateful or ignorant line of dialogue is being spoken by the character or by the improvisor.

There are many sides and dimensions to the debate of what, if any, content is “off-limits” in art and in comedy. I don’t know that there is a clear, universal line. Whether something is “offensive” is a function of the material it deals with as well as the delivery, contextual world-building and characterization, and the audience relationship.

And, when there is no effort at all being taken to establish characters or scenes, then the first narrative disappears altogether. When characters are unnamed, locations are never established, and hands are obliviously waved through mimed “space object” props without justification, it is difficult for scenes to be created or worlds to be established onstage. When this happens, the first narrative dissipates and only the second one remains: the narrative in which a group of performers manipulate the procedure and rhetoric of improv to justify their own gratuitous engagement with offensive content.

Asking for audience volunteers and suggestions is a practice commonly used in improvisational theater around the world. This serves several purposes within a show. Using a suggestion as the basis of a scene reinforces to the audience that everything is being made up on the spot. It is a conventional offering meant to build a relationship of trust between audience and performers. Boom Chicago used the tool of audience engagement to show that they were performing live, but did so in a way which in fact further damaged their relationships with the audience. In one game, for instance, the improvisors asked for an audience member to volunteer his phone without explaining that their game would require his personal texts to be read aloud. This lack of transparency fostered a relationship in which the audience members felt uncomfortably put on the spot and disrespected by several of the players onstage.

At another point, an audience member was brought onstage for a game in which two teams of improvisors presented her with pick-up lines. Each two-person team was required to construct these lines one word at a time, with each member alternately adding a word. This is a common constraint used in improvisation, one that led one group to make incoherent, rambling declarations of love and the other to make short, lewd come-ons. When asked to judge between the two, she consistently chose the first team’s shabby run-on sentences because she did not like the overtly sexual content of the second team’s offerings. Over the course of the game, the first team realized that she disliked more explicit lines and tried to make her feel more comfortable even though it resulted in less pithy pick-up lines. Meanwhile, the second team responded to her and the audience’s uncomfortable laughter by doubling down. Although she giggled throughout, her firm but polite refusal to award points to them suggested serious discomfort with their behavior.

This inattention to audience experience and response made it hard for the audience to trust in the improvisors, inadvertently accomplishing the opposite of what that these participatory moments set out to do.

Audience input also aids the improvisors by acting as a constraint system. Suggestions have the potential to function as thematic constraints which inspire the content of scenes — say, a scene that starts from the word “ice,” “crayon,” or “turtle”— or can provide a formal constraint such as a genre in which a scene is performed or a letter which cannot be in any words spoken onstage. The joy in experiencing these scenes arises not only from the dramatic quality of the scene that is performed, but also from the experience of watching the improvisors negotiate that constraint.

One popular game, for instance, uses an audience volunteer’s cell phone as a constraint. The improvisors are tasked with performing a scene in which one character’s dialogue is entirely restricted to texts in a conversation on that phone. It is the job of the other improvisors to justify this dialogue in the context of the scene, supporting their partner and together creating a new story which playfully re-contextualizes the original conversation. It toys with a linguistic constraint system in order to create a scene that is both an experiment in form and (hopefully) a narrative in its own right.

The Boom Chicago ensemble employed the tool of suggestion nominally, but in practice warped the notion of constraint in order to attempt to justify the content they presented onstage. The suggestions that the improvisors accepted from the audience were ones which lent themselves to scenes with more sensitive or offensive themes. The show format, “Shot of Improv,” offered a free shot glass of beer to audience members whose suggestions they chose; this choice was used to further reinforce and even condition suggestions which engaged in those themes.

The suggestions, rather than being used as formal and thematic constraints from which to experiment and create new stories, were manipulated in order to justify engaging in gratuitously controversial content. In doing so, the responsibility to engage in these themes in way that was not ignorantly or intentionally hateful was offloaded onto the audience members who were the providers of these suggestions.

Even when the suggestions were emotionally neutral, the scenes immediately traversed into this territory: the suggestion “crayons” began with a delightful moment in which both improvisors immediately turned to each other holding space object crayon drawings. The first announced, “I drew you a picture, daddy!” It was clear in the initial moment that the second improvisor had also been expecting to play a child presenting his drawing, but he immediately adjusted to be the other character’s father while still justifying his action, announcing, “Thank you, son! I’ve drawn you one as well!” This was a true spontaneous discovery of a caring but specific relationship— one which was immediately destroyed by the son’s condescending declaration that his father must have drawn him a crayon picture because was mentally disabled. This line was delivered not “in character” as the son but as an improvisor ignoring the established world of the scene in order to shock the audience. The scene quickly devolved into the father bumbling about the space as a cruel, compassionless caricature. This moment reinforced that it was Boom Chicago’s active intention to pursue this type of thematic content. Essentially, Boom Chicago deliberately solicited suggestions that they knew would have the capacity to lead to shocking scenes or lines, thereby using the trappings of constraint in order to avoid actually engaging with any creative constraints at all.

It would not be fair to evaluate the show without taking into account its own ambitions. “Shot of Improv” did not aim to be a dramatic or otherwise non-comedic show. It was not trying to tell meaningful extended stories or even short ones. Its goal was to make its audience laugh. And, throughout the show, much of the audience did laugh, though this laughter primarily came from the shock and discomfort of what was being said and done onstage. This pursuit of laughter led to the sidelining of organic moments in which audience suggestions or other improvisors’ choices were not shocking in and of themselves but disarming because of their honesty or specificity. The beginning of the crayons scene and a scene in which the suggestion of performing an opera forced the improvisors to commit emotionally to the events of their scene. In these fleeting moments, the improvisors were visibly caught off-guard  and more genuinely responsive to each other because of it, if only briefly.