Kitchen Rules
This past summer, Michael Delaney sent me an email decrying the state of improv. That in itself was not unusual (Hello, Delaney!). But in this particular email he outlined what I think is a brilliant way to measure whether someone has become an advanced improviser:
1) A good improviser habitually accepts the offers made to him.
2) A good improviser habitually makes active choices rather than passive ones.
3) A good improviser justifies.
He said these were based directly on “Del Close’s Kitchen Rules.” I had never heard of this, though according to The Funniest One In The Room, it’s actually Elaine May and Ted Flicker who made them during a run of improv shows in St. Louis in 1957. Del became the rules’ most ardent preacher. Elaine and Ted seemed to have called them the Westminster Place Kitchen Rules which sounds funny.
Regardless of where he got them, Delaney’s email rang very true to me. It’s an elegant summary of what goes into compelling scenework.
Accept Offers.
Take the active choice.
Justify.
You can solve a lot of problems in bad scenework by using those mantras, and I think we should all start using them. We already use “Justify” but the other two.
Like any other set of mantras, this is a re-statement of things we know. “Accept Offers” is just “say yes.” And “take the active choice” is a neat summary of things like “have this be the day where the person speaks their mind” or “talk about people who are here in the scene.” And “Justify” is under the “play it real” umbrella.
But I like these three better. Short, direct, imperative. Good mantras are important in a medium taught mostly through oral tradition.
These rules leave out game, but we’re good at game. Or at least, we’re good at analyzing it and parsing it.
Barometers
Some quick ways to analyze whether a scene is following these rules:
For “accept offers” — how do the players respond to accusations and criticism in a scene? Do they take it as a gift? How do they respond to half-hearted offers their partners state in the form of a question? Like when someone goes “wait, are you saying you want to fire me?” Does the other person shrug it off without even considering that?
For “take the active choice” — how often do the players put themselves in the center of the action vs. assignment responsibility to characters not on stage? How often do they try and say that this is their first day, they didn’t know any better, it was a mistake and won’t happen again?
For “Justify” how often do they explain how the action of the scene could actually happen in the real world?
