This book is smart about theater --- but it's genius about life

books:


	• Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up Patricia Ryan Madson Harmony/Bell Tower, 2005 - 160 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

changed my life

the ideas in this book are simple yet effective and extremely powerful, for those who are looking happiness and adventure in life read this book and observe the world through a new pair of eyes

Layers of Wisdom

Each time I revisit this book, I learn something new. Layer upon layer of wisdom peel back to reveal promise for the presence and practice of improvisation in life.

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This book is smart about theater --- but it's genius about life

You're looking for something you can't quite name, the answer to a question you can't quite articulate.

Something else shows up.

It's on a different subject altogether.

And yet, for no apparent reason, it tells you what you needed to know.

"Improv Wisdom" is like that. I have no interest in improvisational theater. I doubt you do. But if you step back just a bit --- if you look at your life like a play that you improvise at almost every moment --- these 148 pages offer more in the way of genuine self-help advice than anything Dr. Phil can direct you to.

"Don't prepare, just show up." That's the book's subtitle and its message. Its radical message, because we have been so trained to plan and script and PowerPoint that the last thing to occur to us is just to dive in and make it up as we go along.

Patricia Ryan Madson, a professor emerta at Stanford University, used to be just like us. She had a career path. She did things that were "good" for advancement. She won awards. She got her dream teaching job.

Then her life fell apart. Her teaching "lacked intellectual distinction." She didn't get tenure.

How could this be? She'd been a good girl, she'd done everything right. Except, perhaps, one thing: She'd never done anything for its own sake, never taken a detour for the fun of it, never showed she was different from all the middle-level talents who grind out second-tier careers.

Patricia Ryan Madson got the message. She took up drumming, just because. Spent summers dancing and traveling. Studied Eastern religion. And, two years later, was asked to head Stanford's undergraduate acting program. She spent the rest of her career there, winning the university's highest teaching prize --- though she might say the crowning achievement of her decades in Palo Alto was the founding of a theatrical group, the Stanford Improvisers.

Improvising, she emphasizes, has "nothing to do with wit, glibness or comic ability." It is simply about saying "yes" to what is in front of you. And, therefore, you can learn how to do it --- how to listen, plan just enough, follow the plan but not religiously, and then trust yourself to get to a good place through improvisation.

It all starts with "yes." Are you prepared? No? Worry not. You're fine. Indeed, spend a day without planning --- see if it ends badly. Nervous about being out on a limb? Good! The only time you should really feel confident is after you've succeeded. Worried that you won't succeed? Lower the bar. Mistakes? They're often "results that we had not planned."

Along the way, Madson offers advice that seems to have nothing to do with theater or life. "Make a point of thanking people for thankless jobs." Write a thank-you note every day. Be a guardian angel to one person. Why? So you can be more awake, more attentive, more in the stream of life.

Since I finished this book, I've been living more with two hands, open ears and a relaxed mouth. I may not be making immediate progress on a long piece of writing, but I sure am taking more notes and writing more random paragraphs. I'm noticing who listens and who doesn't, and seeing how the people who don't hear what's actually said are blocking their own progress. And I'm feeling more pain --- other people radiate it, and maybe I do too --- but also experiencing more joy. In a word: I'm more alive.

This book alerted me to a better way just when I needed to hear it.

Maybe it's also the right time for you to get interested in improvisational theater.

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This is the only book I need.

I have been carrying this small book everywhere I go for over a year now. I open it to any old page, and there I discover exactly what I need to read right then, right at that time and place. Is this magical? Perhaps.
It seems, though, that every sentence Patricia Madson writes is a psychological landmine: read it, and it trips a kind of explosion in one's mind. Is this book about acting? I would say that it is, in that acting on a stage is not so different from fretting and strutting upon the stage of life(did I just totally mash that Shakespeare reference? Oh, well.) What has been most useful to me so far is her comments on traversing the rocky road of life with the attitude that one might try approaching the inevitable rough parts of life in an improvisational manner: the open mind invites new experience instead of building a wall of anxiety against it. Actor and teacher Madson has certainly developed a wisdom that she communicates in a deceptively simple style, and I find every dip into the pages of IMPROV: WISDOM an expansion of my own thoughts about my spiritual journey, my work in psychotherapy, and my interest in performing. I would recommend this book to anyone who is bored with life, individuals who always open Door #1 and may find some surprises behind Doors # 2,3,4,5,6.....; writers, actors, therapists, politicians, professors, religious leaders, and everyone else, really.

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