Connect the Dots

It harkens to my long-form days back with my first improv troupe Knock You Socks Off, where the gimmicks of short-form were tiresome and frustrating.  So much of a ‘good’ show was measured by the amount of laughter from an audience and less on the experience of the actors.  Any joke gets old, and by then Quick Wits, Skinny Lincoln’s, and KYSOff had covered every joke possible about Mormons, and the game Accents was as predictable as homing pigeons.

Many of what was dubbed long-from had an opener; a short group game meant to take the audience suggestion and stretch it out, bounce it around, and stir up inspiration.  Connect the Dots was one of those openers that had one individual initiate themselves as an object.  The rest of the group adding to the world around it.   For example: if I was a man waiting for the bus, another person became the bus-stop sign, another the bench, and then another the very late UTA bus. It always eventually got obscure. Then the audience selected their favorite object i.e. the very late bus, that now became the beginning of another long string of surrounding objects; traffic that the bus was stuck in, the drunk driver next to the bus mumbling about how time is relative, the kid in the back of the bus playing out his favorite Keane Reeves moment from the movie Speed.

Like a good conversation, the initial topic branched out to seemingly unrelated things; fear of spiders somehow connected to the new Harrison Ford movie, and the question of how old he actually is these days. Bizarre, I know, but that’s the point. Both audience and actor explore the brewing possibilities of one seemingly simple suggestion.  The more bizarre the connection, the better, and the more significant it becomes, the more audiences dig it.