The Living Room: A Description

This description was shamelessly stolen from http://www.improvisation.ws/mb/showthread.php?t=4692&goto=nextoldest, a March 2002 post to the Improv Resource Center (http://www.improvresourcecenter.com.

From Stonekulhan:

When my group did a long run of it at Improv Olympic we pretty closely followed this format:

We set up our chairs in a horseshoe-type shape. We opened the show by geting a topic from the audience. We'd start our discussions based on their suggestion. Eventually someone would break out into the center of the horseshoe and initiate a scene. Anywhere from just one to many scenes could evolve. When a topic was played out, someone that was still in the chairs would initiate the conversation again by verbally taking the focus. Organically a new strain of a topic would emerge, and then more scenes. This would go back and forth, between conversation and scene work. One important thing to note is that conversation got less frequent and scenes got more frequent and faster as the piece went on.

We'd end fast paced, and go to an intermission. After intermission, we'd get a new topic from the audience to get us started.

As with all long form, we definetely brought themes, and scenes back throughout the two acts in our scenework.

Here are some more pointers (we ran this thing for weeks and weeks and learned a lot)-

The more the conversation is REAL...I mean you are REALLY a bunch of friends talking and genuinely engaging each other (not just pretending to give a crap about the stories) the more the audience will be won over. And the better your material for the scenes will be.
We also really tried to create the casual party atmosphere, by eating and drinking beers, wine, soda, snacks, etc. as much as possible.
Use your scenes to HEIGHTEN the conversation topics, not just mearly replay the story you just told in scene format.
Above all, since you do a lot of sitting around it is KEY to make the scenes VERY high energy and fast paced to balance the relaxed nature of the conversational parts.

We had lots of people who came back week after week, because they felt like they knew us based on our stories. The more realistic this is the better (it helped that we were all really friends who hang out).

Hope this helps. Jackie

$Id$