The Performing Playwright

In the fully improvised work, the performers write the play as it goes. At any given moment, the improviser might be playwright and actor both. This dual consciousness is in some ways similar to the actor's position that Brecht envisions when detailing the Alienation Effect (Organum #42). The Brechtian actor splits between inhabiting the character in the diegesis of the play (inviting audience members to immerse themselves in the story) and stepping outside of character to interrupt (inviting a similarly distanced and critical vantage point from audience members). So too the improviser is split. Here the division is between the improvising actor playing the character and the improvising "playwright" who is necessarily outside of the diegesis of the play, concerned with second order issues like plot, scene edits, reincorporation, etc. As is the case with the Alienation Effect, the improviser's split has the effect of resituating the audience (detailed in the passage that follows Spectator with Agency).

In group improvisation, "performing playwrights" work in concert, authoring dialogue and plot, determining appropriate scene endings ("edits"), developing the narrative in a collaborative process. There is no single writer; authorship is distributed across all members of the troupe. Returning to the parallel between human-computer interactivity and improvisation, we might consider the improvising performer as analogous to the computer user. One could argue that a single computer user also "writes" a script through his or her choices, even if Janet Murray believes that interactors are too constrained to be considered authors (152-3). One distinction is clear, however. In the human-computer realm, one of the authors is absent: the programmer or "procedural author" who has developed the stage on which the human interactor performs. Where the smallest unit of meaning in human-computer interaction is a single user, theatrical improvisation usually fails to reduce to the solo performer. The analogous role to the computer user in the improvised play is the actor/player who composes scenarios interactively with other players, thereby creating the story collaboratively. The user function is distributed.

When alternative theater maker and theorist Richard Schechner writes about human-computer interaction, he says, "ultimately, the most interesting part of gaming—any kind of gaming—is the narration created by the players, not the figures or characters. Actors are always more interesting than characters" (Wardrip-Fruin 196). In this assertion, he calls attention to the human user on the narrative stage of the computer game in the present moment. Frost and Yarrow make a similar argument about improvisational theater, stressing the primacy of the person in action: "The improvisatory mode foregrounds the dramatic (the creative and performative moment) as opposed to the narrative: its continuity is that of the creating subject, not of a pre-existent social or aesthetic model" (181). If it is indeed the "creating subject" in the spontaneous process of creation that is central, then certainly the improvisation spectator's role is quite different from that of a conventional theater audience engaged in watching well-rehearsed performances. The presence of the "performing playwright" is a defining marker of improvisation, inviting audience members to both engage with the narrative as well as with the process of telling the tale "on the fly." When this happens, the audience member becomes involved with the distributed authorship of the performance.

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