"In an industry where the actor is not always valued, it was wonderful to come away from a community where the objective seemed to be to make the actor the most valued we could be."
- M. Anderson, Seattle, WA

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Yeah, I know it's over-reaching. I know Woodstock hosted a few hundred thousand people and we totaled about forty. I know Woodstock is an event for the history books and what happened a couple hundred miles north of Woodstock this past July isn't in the same league of import.

But. As was true at Woodstock, the organizers of the Summer Improv Retreat near Lake Placid threw together a group of people on a hunch, and what happened when they arrived turned out to be exciting beyond anybody's expectations.

So call it our own private Woodstock.

The idea was Kristine Niven's. Very simply, she wanted to spend a week in the country studying with four teachers. She figured there might be enough other people who wanted to do it in order to cover expenses. Since all four of the people she wanted to work with to some degree are engaged in improvisational work, the project was named the Summer Improv Retreat.

It helped that one of the teachers who committed was Gary Austin. After a stint as an actor with the Committee, California's legendary troupe of the Sixties, in the early Seventies Gary founded a troupe of his own with people he had trained. That company, the Groundlings, is still going strong in Los Angeles. After several years running it, he left to explore other aspects of improvisation. Kristine first saw him in action during one of his workshops in New York.

She also got a commitment from Michael Gellman. When I first met him, Michael was in the mainstage company of Second City. Since then, he has graduated to being one of the company's resident directors and teachers. As I write this, he is working with the Toronto company on a new edition of their show.

Kristine also invited Carol Fox Prescott, an acting teacher based in New York approaching scene study and performance technique from a philosophical perspective Kristine felt was consistent with Gary and Michael.

And I signed on, too. Having written a book about Second City called Something Wonderful Right Away, she figured I would provide background on the history of improv. If Gary and Michael could point the way to where improvisation is going, I felt I could paint a pretty good picture of where it has been as well as proposing how it can be applied to scriptwriting.

I must admit to being skeptical that Kristine could attract a sufficient number of students to the Adirondacks. I underestimated her. Between people who had already studied with one or more of the four of us, and others who heard about it and just decided to take the plunge, thirty-eight people made the trek to the High Peaks Base Camp.

Kristine's idea was that the students would be divided into smaller groups and each day would work with three of the four teachers in periods of two and a half hours each. The schedule was organized so that the teachers could sit in on each other's workshops as well.

Gary concentrated on character work. He often began by having students imitate someone else's walk. As they walked, he would side-coach -- drawing voices out of them, suggesting topics for rants, changing the characters' ages, genders, nationalities. When something clicked, he would send other actors onstage to create contexts in which these newly-found characters could be challenged. Gary has an uncanny sense of what to toss out when. Within a matter of minutes, a vague impulse would become a rough sketch, and over the days that followed, the rough sketch would aquire definition, specificity, humanity.

Michael was most interested in approaching the work through structural aspects. His goal was to move the students to the point at which they could improvise a complete one-act play. By the end of the week, he had successfully achieved this goal with most of the students. Sometimes, a character discovered in Gary's workshop popped up among the dramatis personnae in a piece improvised in Michael's workshop.

My contribution to the process was to suggest how discoveries made in Gary and Michael's workshops could be developed into scripted pieces. As I have written elsewhere, I have become convinced that playwriting is an extension of the actor's craft. Certainly, my own work as a writer improved when I started applying what I'd learned from the Second City gang to building plays and screenplays. I've also developed a group improvisational game called "Six Lines" which helps generate an enormous amount of raw plot in a short period of time.

Carol's work acted as a kind of stimulus for the students, helping them get away from inhibiting intellectualizations and making them more able to (pardon the jargon) be in the moment. Working with Michael Moriarty, she absorbed the importance of learning how to use one's breath to support and phrase performance. Beginning with these exercises, she moved the groups into non-verbal improvisations, setting up human dioramas of behavior in various environments using nonsense syllables. I will always remember the six actors who spontaneously created a hair-rising ride on a roller coaster, jointly sensing when the car they were in would hit a dip or an abrupt turn.

Evenings were set aside for events for the whole community. The first night, Monday, I sketched in the historical background of improvisation, illustrating some of the points with rare recordings I've collected during my research. That brilliant improviser Severn Darden died a few weeks back. I am happy to say that he made new fans when I played his "Metaphysics Lecture" to a group that had never heard of him.

After this, Gary, Michael and I shared something of our experiences with Del Close, the improv master who had performed with and/or directed the Compass, the Second City and the Committee, invented the "Harold," and had a hand in training all three of us as well as Gilda Radner, John Belushi, John Candy, and a generation of other Second City players.

Tuesday night was devoted to a video of the Committee in action, after which there was much discussion of the relationship between the social movements of the Sixties and the material that company created. Having worked with most of the people in the video, Gary was able to augment our understanding of the dynamics between the performers.

The third night began with the group under Gary's direction improvising absurd and frequently raunchy poetry. Michael followed this by supervising a mass improvisation. The set-up is too elaborate to explain, but the upshot was that by the end we all found ourselves in the middle of a science fiction scenario in which we jointly and spontaneously created an involved ritual using invented language for a new civilization.

Thursday night, some of the students took over and presented a mock documentary they had surreptitiously put together throughout the week, spoofing the foibles of the community we had so swiftly become. After that, the gang began to socialize and sample the local beers in the lodge's bar. I headed to my room to do a little work.

Then I heard a guitar. I looked out onto the lodge's front porch. There was Gary, singing and playing with one of the students. Gradually, most of the students and the rest of the teachers gathered on the porch and an extraordinary ad hoc group concert began. Several of the gang also knew their way around the guitar and played original songs; others were encouraged to get up and sing a capella. I was knocked out by the quality of many of the voices. This went on until late in the night.

The formal end of the conference was scheduled for Friday afternoon. At a group wrap-up meeting, we reviewed our time together. Kristine's purpose had been accomplished -- everybody had acquired new improvisational skills. We had also formed a family of friends and collaborators. Instantly the cry came up for plans for a reunion session next summer.

As the meeting broke, I mentioned to Michael that I thought we had the makings of a good company here. He shook his head soberly and said, "No, three." At that point, I realized that, except for the Second City and Committee recordings, this group had entertained itself entirely on its own resources for five straight days. Pretty cool.

It was time for Kristine and the four teachers to evaluate the week. Certainly we will try to organize a reunion retreat, but other ideas began to percolate. It looks as if we're going to put together another one in mid-January in Carmel, California (can Clint Eastwood improvise?), and we may also do one next May in Seattle. There was also some discussion of offering a version of this in New York around the time of spring break when drama students swarm into the city to see shows in the evenings. And we're investigating the possibility of hooking up with a university to offer the retreat for college credit.

So, yeah, though I didn't have the luck to wallow in the mud to the accompaniment of Jimi Hendrix back in 1972, I think this week I did have a taste of what Woodstock must have been like. A group of people who arrived as mostly strangers had one long party and learned a few things besides.

Those interested in further developments should get in touch through Kristine Niven. Address: 250 W. 90th St., #15G, NYC, NY, 10024. Phone number: 212-875-1857. Or send E-mail to ArtNewDir@aol.com. As happy a week as it was, I think it was just the beginning.