[MUD-Dev] roleplaying

[Matt Mihaly]

I was watching the movie "My Dinner With Andre" for the umpteenth
time last night, and watched/listened to one bit that struck me as
relevant to the discussion we're having on roleplaying. I don't mean
to present it as any sort of authoritative statement. I just thought
it was interesting, and thought some of you might think so too.

Briefly, 95% of the movie is Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory having
dinner and talking about Andre's travels and the theater, and trying
to grasp onto the "real", etc. They're more or less playing
themselves, and I'm not sure how much is true. Anyway, Andre Gregory
(in the movie at least) is a sometime critically successful theatre
director. He got frustrated, feeling like he had nothing to say,
nothing to teach, and so went to the forests of Poland to work with
the Polish theater director Krytofski (I have just murdered the
spelling of that name I'm afraid.)

One of the experiments they did was called a "bee hive". It involved
a bunch of people going into a room. Then, whatever happens, that's
a bee hive. Here's the passage from the movie,

"What we do is just sit there and wait for someone to have an
impulse to do something. Now, in a way, that's something like
theatrical improvisation. You know, if you were a director, working
on a play by Chekov, you might have the actors playing the son, the
mother, or the uncle sit around in a room doing a made-up scene that
isn't in the play....and then everyone would improvise, saying and
doing what their character might say or do in that
circumstance. Except that in this type of improvisation, the kind we
did in Poland, the theme is oneself. So, you follow the same law of
improvisation, which is that you do whatever the impulse of the
character tels you to do, but in this case, you're the character, so
there's no imaginary situation to hide behind and there's no other
person to hide behind. What you're doing, in fact, is asking the
same questions that Stanislofsky (probably mis-spelled that too)
said the actor should constantly ask himself as a character: 'Who am
I?' 'Why am I here?' 'Where do I come from?' 'And where am I
going?'"

Anyway, it goes on some, but that's the core. Just thought it'd be
interesting.

--matt





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