Theatre is powerful because it works in exact concordance with the way our heads work (not the way reality works). To quote Samuel Johnson (via Harold Bloom in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human): “Imitations produce pain or pleasure not because they are mistaken for realities but because they bring realities to mind.” The truthfulness of the theatre is determined by the audience. Theatre is consensus. And that consensus is a function of characters who speak and act the way characters in our collective head speak and act. In other words: archetypes. Success can only be measured by the ratio of what I (the artist) see, versus what the audience thinks they see. Marcel Duchamp, a great lover of science, suggested this ratio. He said the closer to one-to-one this ratio becomes, the greater the artist. But of course, no one can measure such a ratio.

People don’t remember what happened in life, they remember what they think happened. People don’t see things, they see what they think they see. And they don’t know people, they know what they think they know. To tangle with all that thinking, well, that’s what art is all about. Effective art agitates the certainty that what you know is the truth. Art turns things upside-down and inside-out.

So enough theory. Here’s how I make a solo. I start with a tape recorder and an empty room. I work in a space where I’m completely isolated and no one can overhear me. And I make sure there’s enough room to bounce around. When I’m alone, I can let go and fantasize without self-consciousness. I can improvise freely, become the character and let him loose. Self-consciousness ruins creativity. I turn on the tape recorder, I note the date and the piece I’m working on. Then I start.

Once I get a chunk of improv down, I review the tape and try to find parts I like the sound of. I transcribe these. I keep collections of these transcriptions and revisit them later. Then I select pieces from the transcription that I like, sample them and commit them to memory. I then use these segments as a launch pad for another improv. Then I start the process all over again. The final edited piece of monologue is maybe three minutes long, after hours of improvs.

Good things happen when I do it this way. First of all, when I’m speaking I’m looser with language than when I write. There isn’t as much editorializing going on. Secondly, the arc of the story of the finished monologue (and every monologue has a beginning, middle and an end) is not as predictable. This is the way people talk. They wander, they get interrupted, they think of ancillary ideas as they speak, they listen to the other person and react.