Welcome to Part 1 of our interview with Patricia Ryan Madson, author of Improv Wisdom.
We’re proud to present an interview with Patricia Ryan Madson, author of Improv Wisdom. Madson was senior lecturer in the drama department at Stanford University for nearly 30 years. She uses improv to teach her students to connect with one another, to be more spontaneous, and to have more fun.
Improv Wisdom is a philosophy book that teaches the principles of improvisation as guidance for a life of adventure and meaning.
You can learn more about Patricia and her book at improvwisdom.com
We met in Carbondale, Illinois at Mary Lou’s Diner, a local landmark known for its biscuits and gravy. Patricia was in town to give a lecture about improv to Southern Illinois University. I was there to perform with the FuseBox Ensemble in the 2nd Annual So. Ill Improv Festival.
Carbondale also happens to be the town where I grew up.
In this first episode, Madson tells how she got into improvisation, and what it has meant for her as a teacher and as a person.
Please excuse the background noise — lots of people were eating biscuits that day.
Interview
John Sexton: I’ve just got a few questions here and actually a few ideas that I’d like to talk to you about later on.
Patricia Ryan Madson: Ok.
JS: The first one is just, how did you get into improv? How did you discover it and how did it come into your life?
PRM: Out of necessity. In 1977 I came to Stanford University to head the undergraduate acting program. I’d been teaching acting for almost 15 years at that point, so I had a long history of teaching actors to work on scripts.
I guess in those years, there were always some kind of games that I would use as actor training. And… it must have been 1974 or something like that, I was in Chicago at an educational theatre conference and I took a workshop from Viola Spolin.
My Lord! I didn’t know who she was, but I thought that was fun. So I guess I was introduced to improv in the days when Spolin was alive and teaching. But I didn’t pay too much attention to it.
On Problem Solving with Improv
When I came to Stanford and started running the acting program there, I discovered that my actors, really smart kids — bright and brilliant — were good at following a script, or if I said, ‘do this’ they would do that. But when I said, “What do you think?,” they would flounder and they didn’t know what to do, because they were used to looking for the right answer.
So I realized that I had to find a way to somehow shake up this fixed modality of learning. I had to find a way to help these really smart students hear their own voice, to listen to what they think or feel.
At that time I was studying Tai Chi with a man named Al-Huang, whose family home is Carbondale. He’s actually world famous as a Tai Chi master — he and his wife Suzanne. I came to Carbondale 25 years ago to practice Tai Chi at a place called the Allerton House.
So while I was at Stanford I was studying Tai Chi, and at one of these Tai Chi workshops my teacher Al-Huang invited this man Keith Johnstone to come and do improv games along with Tai Chi. Well this just knocked me out. Johnstone’s whole sort of philosophical hit on the world, and his book “Impro,” was exactly what I needed to change my life.
On Saying Yes
I was tired in a way, in the theatre, of the model of conflict. Because a lot of drama training is about learning how to… how to do combat, if you will, as an actor with another actor.
JS: Emotional combat.
PRM: Yeah, emotional combat. I want this and you want that. Lots of the theatre games were about trying to persuade someone to do something else, and there’s a lot of ego in all of that. So Johnstone offered this model of agreement, of saying yes, and it was like he breathed life in to my body because, as a teacher, there was something wrong with teaching people to say “no” more creatively.
So his philosophical model of “saying yes” and supporting one another came to me in the mid eighties, eighty-two, eighty-four. So I read his book and went and worked with him a couple of times. I went to Calgary to study with him.
And I still didn’t know anything about improv performance — or care really very much about it, to be perfectly honest — and that’s true to this day. I’m less interested in the theatrical realization of improv, theatre groups that are doing this and that. Although I go to a lot of shows, I’m not interested in performing myself. And I’m a terrible trainer of people who want to perform for an audience.
What I’m better at is what I started learning at that point, which is a way of approaching things — anything — which tapped into your capacity to listen and respond right now.
So Johnstone’s improv theories were coming to me at the same time I was studying Zen and eastern philosophy and a lot of philosophical ideas that were about living in the now and mindfulness and a lot of the stuff that’s pretty current and in fashion these days.
So the juxtaposition of eastern philosophy and Johnstone’s improv ideas were feeding me intellectually and practically, and they got translated right into the classroom at Stanford. And the more I did these things and made up stuff, the more my students opened up, and softened up, and laughed, and listened to one another did all the things I wanted them to do.
So it was paying off big time and solving the problem which started this whole thing, which was students who didn’t know how to respond, how to be spontaneous.
Wrap-up
Voice Over: That’s it for the first episode of our interview with Patricia Ryan Madson, but there’s much more to come.
Next time we’ll hear about how teaching improv to her acting students led Patricia to create the Stanford Improvisers, as well as some wonderful opportunities for adult improv education with Stanford’s continuing studies program.
You’ll also finally get to hear us chow down on Mary Lou’s delicious biscuits and gravy.
Remember to check FBXtheatre.com for articles, interviews, video sketches and more. And don’t forget to check out improvwisdom.com for more information about Patricia Ryan Madson and her book.
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