The Blocked Improviser

My book club — the same five readers who put Keith Johnstone's Impro through me earlier this month — had read a very different book a few meetings before: Ningen, kono gekiteki naru mono — roughly, "Man, the Dramatic Being" — a 1956 essay by the critic Tsuneari Fukuda on why human beings need drama in their lives. Nobody planned the pairing. But the two books answer each other so precisely that I have not been able to think about one without the other since: a stage manual and a philosophy of life, arriving at the same law from opposite ends.

The law on stage

Johnstone's villain is control. A scene dies, he says, when an actor blocks — rejects what his partner offers because it isn't the scene he had in mind — and it dies just as surely when he strains to be original, because the straining installs a censor between impulse and act. The improvisers worth watching do something that looks like surrender: they accept what they are offered and build on it. The character the audience falls for is the one that emerges from those acceptances — never the one anybody planned. On stage, the self arrives after the acceptance, not before it.

The law off stage

Fukuda's subject is the same disease at the scale of a life. The modern craving, he says, is to become somebody — and it traps people in one of two scripts. Turn inward, and you try to make your own life fully deliberate, every step chosen and justified, until the one thing you cannot schedule — death — exposes the whole project. Turn outward, and you try to make the world hold still instead, which it declines to do. Both are the actor trying to write the play from inside it. Fukuda's alternative is almost scandalously simple: give up the calculation, accept that you are finite and accidental, and take the step anyway — entrust the whole thing to chance, up to and including the thing that will end you. The role you receive that way, he argues, is the only one that was ever going to be yours.

Hamlet, blocked

The bridge between the books is Fukuda's own case study. Hamlet is the patron saint of wanting to become somebody: a prince who may or may not still be a prince, wronged in a way he cannot quite verify, free to become anything precisely because he is no longer securely anything. Read him with Johnstone in hand and the diagnosis is hard to unsee. He is offered a scene — a ghost, a usurper, a duty — and he blocks it, over and over, because he wants better evidence, a cleaner script, a role he has authored rather than the one he has been handed. He goes to meet the ghost alone, staging his own destiny, and then cannot trust the staging because no one else saw it. He is all reflection and no acceptance — a man endlessly rehearsing a part he will not step into. And he becomes Hamlet — acts, finally — only when he stops negotiating the terms and accepts the duel, chance and all. Johnstone's students die the same death in miniature every night on stage, and recover from it the same way.

The same step

So the law seems to hold at both scales. The self is not upstream of action, waiting to be settled before you can move. It shows up inside the step you take before you feel ready — on stage, in a scene you did not choose; in a life, in circumstances you did not choose either. I notice this is the exact opposite of the era's standing advice, which is to decide who you are first — the brand, the positioning, the story — and to act second. Two theatre people, a generation apart, concluded in the other order: accept the scene, take the step, and let whoever you are be discovered in the acting. Neither of them promises it will feel safe. Both point out that the alternative — staying in the wings until the role is guaranteed — is how you end up nobody at all.