By Ethan Nahté
John Puddington and Scotty Jenkins will be conducting an improvisational class at the Mena Mountain Resort from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Saturday, September 28, in the Grand Illusion Theatre. The classes are for adults and ninth-12th students.
They’ll break into groups and work in different areas. The single-day event is free to attend and is for beginners and veterans of the stage.
Jenkins said, “We’re not really going to break for lunch. and it is six hours long, so we encourage them to bring a drink, a sandwich, a snack or something they can consume during their downtime while they’re watching.
Mena Mountain Resort is located at 2817 Highway 71 North, Mena. For more information, call
479-394-3110.
Puddington said “The improv class may morph into something semi-permanent, depending on the people who attend.”
Jenkins said, “The whole premise is to get people excited about theater and improvisation. We’ll give a situation to one person and give another situation to another person.”
Puddington added, “Could be any number of things that effects one situation.”
“You’re going to break up with your partner,” Jenkins said, “and the other one you tell there’s no way you can ever stay in this relationship.”
“Do you let you let the two do their thing?” Puddington asked. “They’re breaking up. One wants to one doesn’t. Then you send in a third-party. That third-party wants them to break up because they find [Person One] very attractive, interesting and all that. That person is going to be, ‘How do I get them to break up.’ That goes on for a bit then you throw in a [Person] Four. That’s someone who doesn’t want them to break up because they think they’re a perfect couple. And maybe that person is interested in [Person] 3.
“You just throw these out and you say do what you can with it.
Critical critiques may occur throughout the performance.
“It depends,” Puddington said. “If it’s boring, you break in early and throw in something — another problem. If it’s interesting, let them go on until it gets boring. Then you discuss it. It is important to have a character. I want you to be somebody else besides who you are… with different qualities. Then you talk to them about it afterward.”
Puddington stated some will question what this has to do with a scripted show. His response is an example of questions in developing a character. “What did you have for breakfast this morning? And there will be crickets [ no response]. How can you play someone when you don’t even know what they had for breakfast? The idea is to make people think.
“There are games that you could play, because the physical and the mental, getting them to work together. A concern should always be the character: Who are you playing? What do you believe? What’s your religion? They’ll think for a minute, and they’ll say, ‘I’m a Satanist…’ or whatever they say. It’s this situation where you want them to stay togethe. Just make them think.”
“I’m sure we’re going to give an introduction speech,” Jenkins said. “We’ll cover were looking for and what we’re going to do, but I think most of it is going to be hands-on interaction with all the other people.”
“The idea should be, I think, we give as little as possible. We ask questions,” Puddington said.
Every skill level is invited
They encourage everyone, even those who may be shy or feel they are not comfortable with improv.
“Just try it,” Puddington said. “Nobody’s going to judge you. Come on down and see what happens.”
“There’s no script in life,” Jenkins added. “When they talk to their peers or whatever situation they have in life, they act differently. They react to that situation by saying their response. This is all that we are doing is trying to get people to understand that if they’re afraid of acting, they act everyday all day long. They act different with their parents, with their friends, with their boss, the pharmacist. Us sitting here talking — we haven’t scripted this, but we’re communicating in the characters we are at this moment.”
Puddington said, “Get two people, or three or eight, who have been in a play together. You say ‘What happens in Act 1, right at the top?’ and they tell you, but they don’t remember all of the lines. You tell them to get up and do Act 1 from the beginning, but you have to improvise. What we want is mainly the character and an understanding for all of the audience members what happened in Act 1.
“For example, we decided to start World War III. We decided this is a good thing to do. They get up and do it. When they drive out and don’t have anything else to say, you stop it, and you discuss it. Did they have a character? What was that character? Did they do they get to the point? Did it make you feel tickled because it’s a comedy? Did it make you feel frightened because it’s World War III? What did they accomplish? What did they not accomplish? What could they have done better?”
Jenkins said, “My interpretation of it is do you know what the idea of the scene consists of? Tell us about that in your character’s words.”
Any acting school will have an improv class. Even schools such as The Second City, where many actors from Saturday Night Live have attended, go through improv. It’s the nature of the business.
Jenkins and Puddington are scheduled to attend theater classes at Mena High School on Friday, Sept. 27.
“We’re going to give them little teasers of having to do short little sequences and stuff in the three different classes,” Jenkins said. “We’ll be talking and working with those kids for the 55 minutes we have for the class period. And hopefully that will spur more interest and have them come out on Saturday because it’s fresh on their mind.”
“That was fun, and it makes me want to experience other things,” Puddington said from a student’s point of view.
Diversity
The improv class is actually a continuation of the series of acting workshops they conducted along with Time Hesse at the Mena Mountain Resort last autumn.
“We hope to do more if we have the response,” Jenkins said. “We want everybody in the area to know that this is a benefit to the community for the education of the actors. It’s going to resound in the Ouachita Little Theatre and the dinner theaters. Better actors.”
“The more people we have to choose from the more plays. We’re widening our universe,” Puddington said.
As with the acting workshops, the instructors will be talent scouting for potential usage in upcoming productions.
“We’d like to be able to be able to employee, if I can use that word, people who are not retired,” Puddington said, referencing diversity and adding to the regular stable of actors in the community. “We’ve got Denni [Longoria], Scotty and me,” Puddington said with a laugh.
For those few actors who are not retired, examples are members of the Moe family, Mike and Julie, and their twin daughters Angel and Tia.
“Mike is a good example,” Puddington said. “That helps a lot and that’s an age group we want to cultivate. It gives us an opportunity to do more shows.”
Having more diversity in age and acting styles also opens the doors for a wider variety of plays and plots that have characters with diverse ages, such as a a parent and child, student and teacher, grandparent and grandchild, etc. It would also have the potential to draw in a wider diversity of audience.
“We saw that with our last show,” Jenkins said of “No Opera at the Op’ry House Tonight” play they performed in July. “The friends of the twinkies (Moe twins), they were coming to all of the shows. One of their friends came like three times.
“We want to touch on the melodrama, too, because that’s something we feel we’re going to continue every year.”
Puddington added, “The audience response to that, although a limited size — but I think it was a limited size because people are unfamiliar with it — but the response we got from that was terrific. This is something that would’ve appealed to grammar school to our age.”
“We hope to make this a jumping off [point] in the theater community,” Jenkins said. “I’d like to stress that point. Tim [Hesse] and I did workshops years ago with the OLT and we had response. Mostly, it was people who were familiar with the OLT, but we’re just trying to spread the word that we’re here and we want to help ourselves, as well as the community.”
“We’d love to be able to do a wide range of shows,” Puddington said, “including ‘Henry V’ but we could no more get a cast for ‘Henry V…’ Forget Shakespeare. A good example, ‘The Man Who Came to Dinner.’ That show requires something like 17 actors. Out of those actors, zero are the ‘Second Spear Carrier on the Left.’ They all have pretty good roles. Some of them are onstage and then off, but while they were on, they’re doing something more than as a walk-on piece. It’s a really wonderful play. Can’t do it. I wouldn’t want to direct it and have one person taking five parts. I don’t think I would want to be in it. If we were to do something like that, I would want to the ability to do a show I could genuinely be proud of.
“It would be a suitable experience for someone who doesn’t want to be an actor but who would get a big kick out of doing the show. His kids and wife could come see it. It would be a wonderful and profitable experience for all kinds of people because it is fun. And, what the hell? I mean, when you’re doing it for nothing… if ain’t fun, then what’s the point?” Puddington emphasized.
“I like smaller parts, being the guy that comes on stage and ‘bam!’ then they go off,” Jenkins said. “I like that.” much like character actors we all know and love from our favorite visual mediums. “They’re my idols, the people who can go and transform. I feel good when during a scene, or before or after, you get the audience response and you say, ‘that worked.'”
Puddington said, “When you take someone new to the operation, and you take them and show them ways that takes it from the two-dimensional to the three, and you see it click — as a director — that’s the injection. You see that light in their eyes as well, which is very, very gratifying when it finally hits them.”
“As a director, you like to have those people essentially because you know what they’re capable of and what you can get out of them,” Jenkins said.
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