If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?

by Alan Alda

  The second half was much scarier.

  Before the intermission, I would ask the audience to give us words or headlines from the news. Then we’d take this list of minimal prompts backstage, and for fifteen furious minutes we’d toss ideas back and forth.

  “They gave us the word taxes,” I might say to Honey Shepherd (who went on, decades later, to play Carmela’s mother on The Sopranos). “How about if you do your Nice Old Lady being audited for her tax return?” Her character was sweet, reasonable, and totally antiwar.

  When she got out on stage, if the tax auditor asked her why she hadn’t paid her taxes, Honey’s Nice Old Lady could be relied on to say something like “I don’t want to buy a bomb.” Which would lead to a tangled, logically illogical dialogue.

  As we brainstormed the most minimal of premises for sketches, we had no idea what we would actually do or say. We didn’t know where a sketch would go or how it would end. Whoever was offstage during a scene would have their hand on the light switch, and when something funny happened that sounded like a concluding moment, they’d flip the switch and we’d have the punctuation of a blackout.

  In an improvised press conference, I would take on the persona of President John Kennedy, answering questions from journalists in the audience who had asked the same questions of the real John Kennedy in the same hotel that morning. His answers to their questions hadn’t made it into the newspapers yet, so I was flying completely blind.

  It was easy to worry that we would fail and flame out in front of the audience.

  As opening night approached, we felt a thrill that must be like the thrill that runs through a person’s tingling body just before he jumps off a bridge.

  As scary as this kind of improvising was, there was excitement in not knowing what we would suddenly be doing during a show. It was exhilarating, but we were limited by two things: We had to be funny, and we had little or no training in improv. We were relying mainly on sheer guts.

  A year or two later, though, I was introduced to a completely different form of improvising.

  I was invited to join a workshop conducted by Paul Sills, who had founded Second City, the phenomenally successful improv company. We met twice a week on the Second City stage in downtown New York City. It was the same stage where skilled comedy improvisers would perform nightly, but in these sessions Paul introduced us to a completely different kind of work.

  His mother, Viola Spolin, had done groundbreaking work in creating a kind of improvisation training that was rigorous and exacting, and that slowly built in actors the ability to connect with one another spontaneously. Comedy was not the objective. Cleverness and joke making were forbidden. Something else, something much more fundamental to theater, was being explored: a kind of relating that could lead to deeper, more affecting performances.

  At each session, Paul would open Viola Spolin’s book, Improvisation for the Theater, and lead us through games and exercises that little by little transformed us. The games connected each of us to the other players in a dynamic way. What one player did was immediately sensed and responded to by the other player. And that, in turn, created a spontaneous response in the first player. It was true relating and responsive listening, which, I’ve come to realize, is necessary on the stage and in life as well.

  After six months, I felt that these improv sessions had changed me both as an actor and as a person.

  But here I was now in this interview about solar panels, and it wasn’t working. I was talking to a scientist who could give me the knowledge I craved—and I wasn’t listening.

  Why? I had spent my whole life on the stage listening to the other actors. Or trying to. But it seemed to be something I constantly had to relearn.

  When I started out as an actor, I had the vague awareness that listening had something to do with relating to the other person, although relating was a word with a mysterious ring to it. I heard it often from directors and had seen it repeatedly in books by the Russian acting gurus—Stanislavski, Boleslavski, and one or two other avskis. But I was still hazy about what relating actually entailed. It obviously had to do with making some kind of contact with another person. I drew the natural conclusion that it meant putting myself in the other person’s face. So when I was asked to relate more, I would tilt over in their general direction, in the manner of an errant telephone pole. But this wasn’t actually relating; it was just leaning over. If the director asked for even more relating, I would slump my shoulders and position my nose even closer to the other actor’s. I would be hunched over like the ape in the evolution cartoon, just before he straightens up and walks like a human. It didn’t make directors sigh in admiration.

  Once, a long time ago, Mike Nichols was directing Barbara Harris and me in a rehearsal for the Broadway musical The Apple Tree. He asked us both several times to relate better—although he seemed to be looking more in my direction than in hers. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. “You kids think relating is the icing on the cake,” he said. “It isn’t. It’s the cake.”

  So, what is it? What’s relating? What’s the cake? It took me years to be able to put it roughly into words.

  It’s being so aware of the other person that, even if you have your back to them, you’re observing them. It’s letting everything about them affect you; not just their words, but also their tone of voice, their body language, even subtle things like where they’re standing in the room or how they occupy a chair. Relating is letting all that seep into you and have an effect on how you respond to the other person.

  RESPONSIVE LISTENING

  There’s a body of scientific literature on responsive listening, but I came to understand it in a personal way through my work. In acting, this kind of relating is fundamental. You don’t say your next line simply because it’s in the script. You say it because the other person has behaved in a way that makes you say it. Relating to them allows them to have an effect on you—to change you, in way. And that’s why you respond the way you do.

  For an actor, it’s the difference between planning how you’re going to behave, which looks like acting, and finding your performance in the other person’s eyes, which makes you respond to one another—and which looks like life.

  But, with all that behind me, here I was supposedly in conversation with the solar panel scientist, and I wasn’t relating to him. Slowly, it was beginning to dawn on me: It’s not just in acting that genuine relating has to take place—real conversation can’t happen if listening is just my waiting for you to finish talking.

  LISTENING AND WILLING TO BE CHANGED

  I so loved this idea—that on the stage the other actor has to be able to affect you if a scene is to take place—that I came to the conclusion that, even in life, unless I’m responding with my whole self—unless, in fact, I’m willing to be changed by you—I’m probably not really listening. But if I do listen—openly, naïvely, and innocently—there’s a chance, possibly the only chance, that a true dialogue and real communication will take place between us.

  This was the first step in understanding what had to take place before doctors (and dentists) could talk with their patients; before people in business could relate to their customers, parents could advise their children, and couples could work together—with far fewer misunderstandings and hard feelings. At first, though, I was concentrating on helping scientists get their story out in the most human-sounding way.

  Once I began to relearn listening as a human interaction, and not just an acting technique, I could go into each interview for Scientific American Frontiers without a set of questions. It wasn’t really an interview anymore. It was a conversation.

  After a while, I saw that I was having trouble talking with them whenever I thought I knew more than I really did about their work. I was boxing in the scientists with questions that were based on false assumptions. I took a bold step and stopped reading the scientists’ research papers before I met with them. I would come in armed only with curiosity and my own natural ignoran
ce. I was learning the value of bringing my ignorance to the surface. The scientists could see exactly how much I already understood, and they could start there.

  Ignorance was my ally as long as it was backed up by curiosity. Ignorance without curiosity is not so good, but with curiosity it was the clear water through which I could see the coins at the bottom of the fountain.

  CONTAGIOUS LISTENING

  It led to a dynamic relationship. The scientists were glad to see that I really wanted to understand their work, and, just as it does in improv games, it had an effect on them and they themselves became more responsive. They could relate to me as a person. They stopped worrying about the camera and about the audience on the other side of the lens. They stopped feeling compelled to speak in highly technical language. Their real humanity came out, because they had someone in conversation with them who insisted on understanding them, no matter how long it took.

  My responsive listening encouraged theirs. It was contagious. They were drawn into a kind of dance, and suddenly we had life happening between us.

  When their tone of voice became warm and intimate and their natural sense of humor came through, the audience was able to see scientists as fellow people, sometimes with very human traits.

  On one show, I was talking with a researcher who had created a surprisingly intelligent robot. Some people worry about robots and I asked him how he’d feel if his machines someday got so good at manufacturing themselves that they decided they didn’t need humans anymore and totally turned against the human race. He thought about it for a long moment and then asked, “Well, would I win the Nobel Prize?”

  I don’t think he’d have made that joke in a straight interview, and it was a delightful moment that candidly touched on the competitive urge that drives much of science.

  Through all of this, we had stumbled into a way of allowing scientists to emerge as themselves, and allowing the audience to see that the people who emerged were warm and engaging. There was a bond between us that the audience could recognize as a common human interaction.

  But then one day I saw how easily that bond can be broken.

  I was in the office of a scientist whom I found fascinating, and we were enjoying that special connection. We were sailing. Even as she talked about the complexities of her work, I felt we were on the same wavelength. We were relating.

  Then she dived just a little deeper into her work and I saw something flicker across her face. I didn’t know what it was, but suddenly it wasn’t about us anymore. She had been reminded, I think, that what she was telling me was just like a lecture she usually gave. This must have been what was happening, because she suddenly turned to the camera, looked right into the lens, and started lecturing it. The tone of her voice went from warm and natural and personal to formal and lecture-hall stilted. Her vocabulary became totally incomprehensible. She was in flat-out lecture mode. And the camera was getting the brunt of it.

  I coaxed her back with some naïve questions. It wasn’t hard to come up with naïve questions, because I really couldn’t understand what she was saying. Slowly, she turned back to me, caught my eye, and was warm again. We were sailing again. This glorious feeling lasted for about forty-five seconds, at which point she couldn’t stand it anymore, turned back to the camera, raised an imaginary lecture stick, and gave the camera a good thrashing.

  This was a rare experience on Scientific American Frontiers. Most of the time, once we locked into conversational contact, our rapport would strengthen and grow. And I don’t at all blame the scientist for our loss of rapport that day. She was vibrant and engaging and gave us a wonderful segment. But I saw how the pull of formality and jargon can yank someone into not relating.

  When the series ended after eleven years on the air, I had the feeling we had accomplished something of value, bringing science to people in a way that was a little more inviting, yet totally accurate. Still, something bothered me. I kept returning in my mind to that scene in the scientist’s office. If I hadn’t doggedly pulled her back from it, she might have stayed in lecture mode.

  I wondered: What if scientists could be helped to shed this magnetic attraction to the cold north pole of jargon? What if they could make a warm connection with their audiences and enjoy the pleasure of a natural, conversational tone, as they had with me? And what if they could do it effortlessly, without someone standing next to them, drawing it out of them?

  As soon as I asked the question, I remembered what had made our conversations so lively: I had gone back to my roots in improvisation. So now the question was, Could scientists become more personal, more available to their audience if they studied improvisation?

  That seemed like a wild idea, but I was convinced from my own experience that improvisation was a powerful tool and it might at least be worth trying.

  So I decided to experiment.

  CHAPTER 2

  Theater Games with Engineers

  The science writer K. C. Cole invited me to have a public conversation with her about science communication at the University of Southern California, where she taught. I told her I wanted to try something, although I didn’t know if it would work. I asked if she could invite about twenty engineering students to join me after our talk for an afternoon of improv.

  I said that each of them should be prepared to speak to the rest of the group about some aspect of their work for two minutes. Then we would improvise for a while, and after that, they would give their talks again. I was hoping for the best, but I had no idea what would happen.

  The students came into a large, empty room looking both game and a little apprehensive. When they first gave their talks, they ranged from fairly lively to rigidly stilted, which was to be expected, since none of them had had any training in communication. Some buried themselves in PowerPoint and most of them drifted effortlessly into jargon. Jargon is all right as long as the people you’re talking to know exactly what you mean, but even though they were all engineering students, they worked in different areas and didn’t share the same technical vocabulary. Even among fellow engineering students, some technical words were verbal roadblocks.

  After their talks, I put them through three hours of basic improvising games and exercises. They found the games fun and not at all scary. Although comedy was not the objective, there was plenty of laughter and the joy of spontaneity. It looked so enjoyable that the young man who had been assigned the job of shooting a video of the session kept abandoning his camera to join the games.

  There are hundreds of those games in Spolin’s book, so for a three-hour session I had to choose just a few.

  At first, I asked them to walk around the room, feeling the space they were walking through as though it were a real substance. “Feel it against your face,” I would call out. “Feel it against your ankles.” They weren’t supposed to be feeling the air as they moved through it. Instead, this was an act of imagination in which they allowed themselves to experience something with their bodies that wasn’t actually there. It was as though space itself could have substance if they just imagined it and let themselves be affected by it.

  Once they had that experience, they could swoop the nonexistent space into shapes and structures—sculptures made of nothing, but that, in their imagination, they could actually see.

  COMMUNICATION AS A GROUP EXPERIENCE

  This group sculpture was the first step toward sharing a moment with another person, the beginning of the ability to relate.

  I asked them to gather into small groups and create something together out of space. They had no idea what shape it would take, and because it was imaginary and created by a group, there was only one way you could see it: by observing closely how the other players were manipulating the space. Little by little, they saw an object emerging that they had brought into existence as a group, and it made them chuckle. No jokes, but still, laughter.

  An exercise like this is the first step in bringing about an awareness that the other person is a crucial partner in relating
. If another player creates a bump in the sculpture, you don’t ignore it; you acknowledge the bump and build on it.

  Communication doesn’t take place because you tell somebody something. It takes place when you observe them closely and track their ability to follow you. Like making a sculpture out of space, communication is a group experience.

  In another game we played that day, someone would start a physical activity, and the others would have to guess what the activity was. They weren’t allowed to simply say what it was, but instead had to demonstrate they knew by joining in.

  Someone got up and started playing an imaginary trombone. As soon as another player realized what was happening, she joined in, playing a cello. Then another player started pounding a set of imaginary timpani, and soon a whole orchestra was playing.

  This led to games that involved talking and listening to one another. Step by step, I was leading the players to a heightened ability to observe one another, to be comfortable in one another’s presence, and to relate in a personal way.

  The question was, when these engineering students gave their talks again, would they relate to their audience with anything like the same ease that they had related to one another during the games? Or would they fall back into jargon and lecture mode? The results shocked everyone in the room.