Storybox Part 3: Story Story

(If you haven’t yet read Storybox Part 1, it is available HERE and Storybox Part 2 is available HERE.)

It is important for you to understand, before we get too far into our 5 hour workshop that culminated in two performances of Jonathan Pitts' Storybox, that we were not actually preparing for a full production of the show. When Storybox is directed for a full run and a full time slot it is roughly a ninety minute show. Storybox's tag line is "Within Every Story Is Another Story" and in 5 intense hours we were really only learning how to tell the one story and perform for roughly 25 minutes.

Now I can't detail out for you everything that happened during this workshop (which kills me because every moment was savory) because you would be reading about 20 installments, the magic would be ripped away from your next viewing of the show and and Jonathan Pitts would be disrespected by me putting a blueprint for his creation out for any old hack to try without permission (notice I say "try.") I will however take you through some of the highlights from the structured opening through our performance that night.

Story Story - The opening of the show that I hint at in the beginning of Storybox Part 1 is called "Story Story." Jonathan, in no uncertain terms, told us that the opening of the show is the most important part of the show. Everything about the show stems from "Story Story." The opening itself is a tribute to an improv game of the same name by guru Paul Sills of Second City fame.

The Breath - Jonathan lined us up across the stage, each of us with a cloth draped around our necks and the sticks cupped in our palms like canes. He explained that it all starts with a group breath. He chuckled as he gently disarmed all of us with his charm... "Who is this guy making us practice breathing?" He joked, "I have a masters degree!" and after a big laugh from the group "I have done 500 shows!"

It took us a bit of time to get on the same page about the breath and the opening but after we felt the true power of us all breathing and speaking together as one, we were ready to move forward and conquer foreign lands together. I believe that the practice we did working together in pairs, balancing and working with the sticks, combined with the breath work locked us all in together as a cast. I still feel pretty strongly about the guys in the cast to this day, and I really only got to spend what amounts to a full day with them. Pretty powerful stuff is Storybox.

Character Invocations - Because the entire cast is a group of Storytellers even if they are also characters, it is really important that everyone be involved when creating the characters. They belong to the group and not to the actor. The Character Invocation was our opportunity to endow highly detailed specifics onto a single character and flesh them out before they even say their first line. I love this group approach to character creation and the cast took to it immediately and really made it work.

Playing scenes as Storytellers - Jonathan said it was vital for the lead character in the show to step out and be the storyteller at some point in the show so that they didn't end up feeling like they were trapped in their choices or being conducted in their scene-work. He wanted to make sure that at all times during the show

Musical Instruments - The last real piece of the show we added in was musical instruments. Which for a few of us was like dangling a bone in front of a puppy. Available to us as we performed was a wide selection of percussion and wind instruments... My favorite was the Melodica.

House of Daggers - We learned an awesome warmup game a few minutes before hitting the stage called "House of Daggers." The group lines up almost like a marriage dance and one person runs between the two lines while they all moved their hands like daggers back and forth. Of course when the person gets to a dagger, it avoids them by inches... The end effect is a feeling of being Indiana Jones for a moment and successfully making it through peril. Lots of fun. Will definitely use this in my workshops in future.

Fingertip Flight is another warmup game I learned that night. One person stands in the middle of the circle, closes their eyes and crosses their arms across their chest. Then, silently and all at the same time the group rushes to the center and with just their fingertips, lifts the person up into the air. Naturally everyone wanted to do this more than once. The end effect is of a mashup of flying and "stiff as a board, light as a feather."

The Shows were great. I was more partial to our the first night when we still had Topping Haggerty and George Akers but both nights were improv heaven. Pat Young became the lead character and portrayed a young woman in an upper-class lifestyle in New York who had no connection with her emotions and focused only on work. Through a series of amazingly touching and funny scenes we took her through a gauntlet of emotional upheaval until, in the final scene, her heart did a 180 and she connected to both her emotions and her family.

The performance on night two was also a lot of fun and had Keith Habersberger playing the lead character. This one was a lot more complex because the chracter started out very positive and nice and through a series of events, almost has his optimism ripped from his grasp by the very people in his life that he previously inspired. Really great serio-comic piece. And a great end to the whole process.

Obviously reading a one paragraph description of the show isn't the same as watching it, so I would highly suggest that you seek it out and watch it for yourself.

UPDATE: Jonathan Pitts will be teaching Storybox in Atlanta for Jackpie in the coming months. Check out Jackpie.com/play for details!