Going Long: The Art of Long-Form Improvisation for Stage and Screen

GOING LONG

GOING LONG

The Art of Long-Form

Improvisation for

Stage and Screen

Jo McGinley

An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of

The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

4501 Forbes Blvd., Ste. 200

Lanham, MD 20706

www.rowman.com

Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

Copyright © 2025 by Jo McGinley

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McGinley, Jo, author.

Title: Going long : the art of long-form improvisation for stage and screen / Jo McGinley.

Description: Essex, Connecticut : Applause, 2025. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024021948 (print) | LCCN 2024021949 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493077939 (paperback) | ISBN 9781493077946 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Improvisation (Acting)

Classification: LCC PN2071.I5 M375 2025 (print) | LCC PN2071.I5 (ebook) | DDC 792.028–dc23/eng/20240606

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024021948

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024021949

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In memory of my beloved student

Jason Murphy

and

in dedication to my husband and improv genius,

Stephen Kearin

Contents

Preface: How I Got Here

Acknowledgments

Part I: The Going Long Mindset

1. The Mental Distance between Short Form and Going Long

2. The Foundational Mindset of Tangible Connection

3. The World of the Play

4. Creating Characters We Care About

5. Creating Scenes That Spark

6. Openings, Middles, and Endings

Part II: The Tangible Must Haves to Be Successful at Going Long

7. Exercises to Find and Develop Second Circle

8. Create the Team That Can Do This Work Together

9. Mindful Awareness to Help the Individual within the Ensemble

Part 3: Genres to Bring This Work to Life

10. Improvising a Three-Act Play in One Location

11. Improvised Television: Nighttime Soap Opera

12. Opposites Attract: Buddy Action Stories

13. Fish-Out-of-Water Improvised Films and Television Shows

In Closing

Index

Preface: How I Got Here

In the early ’90s when I was starting out as a young actor in San Francisco, I found myself looking for tools to use when facing the unknown in auditions. After hearing about the classes offered by Bay Area Theatresports (BATS) Improv, I signed up for a beginning course. I didn’t plan on staying for long, but I enjoyed laughing with everyone in the class, and as people shared their plans to continue, I stayed on.

At first everything was so new I had nothing to compare it to, but at some point, after I moved on to their intermediate classes, it activated something in my nervous system: I became more fearful and tightened up a lot more. When we had all been on our feet playing games together, I had felt free to make mistakes. As soon as we sat down and two people started improvising scenes, suddenly there seemed to be a right way and a wrong way, and getting laughs from the audience for your scene felt like the goal. My teachers never said this; they simply encouraged good acting and heartfelt scenes. However, if the audience was quiet, it didn’t feel like a success.

My only exposure to improv up to that point had been the BBC’s version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? Now I know that is only one brilliant piece of the improv pie, but in 1993 I thought it was everything.

One day I heard fellow students discussing the improv group True Fiction Magazine. This group included many BATS Main Company Members and the man who would later become my husband, Stephen Kearin. I joined my classmates at the show and sat in the audience, mesmerized. The stage lighting and music were moody with platforms and stairs the improvisers could use. The lights dimmed, the music came up, and True Fiction Magazine took the stage. They solicited a suggestion from the audience to inspire what would become two hours of fully improvised interlocking stories, and I was enthralled. The actor-improvisers were good, the characters big yet believable. The improvised lights and music supported everything on the stage. We in the audience laughed a lot, but I was also fully immersed in the theatrical experience. It was like watching a high-wire act. I was tense watching the show but not because I was nervous for them. They seemed fine. They seemed loose, in control, and playful. This is the style of improv that I want to do, I said to myself. I didn’t know how to get that good. It seemed a million miles away, but now I had a direction and a goal.

I started taking private classes focused on improvised scene work and moved toward longer and longer stories. I soon joined Scratch Theatre. Scratch was a group that improvised three styles of stories in one evening. Being thrown into the improv deep end, I forged bonds of friendship that continue to this day. The 1990s were a glorious time to be in San Francisco. I lived in the Marina District in a huge, light-filled studio with the distant sound of foghorns. I booked commercials continuously so I quit my regular job. I was performing and teaching improv all around town.

Work opportunities flowed in, and as 2000 loomed, my husband and I decided to move to Los Angeles. We settled into the delightful Los Feliz area of LA, where you can walk everywhere, including to Griffith Park. It was a great transitional neighborhood as I adjusted to the loss of my life in the Bay Area.

There is a Vedic worldview that identifies three aspects of the evolutionary process: creation, maintenance, and destruction. I was in the creation phase when I said yes to that first improv class at BATS. For years after, as I perfected my craft, booked acting work, and met my husband, I was in a maintenance phase. I didn’t understand that I was heading into a destruction phase when we moved to Los Angeles. I had relocated with a lot of confidence. I had a large cushion of savings and over a dozen commercials running. I would regularly go to the mailbox and return with a stack of residual checks. This easy money had made the move to LA possible. I signed with a new agent and was sure I would book more work soon.

Upon arriving in LA, in the first week, I received a letter saying that my largest commercial campaign was ending. This financial shock, the new experience of being landlocked (the beach seemed a million miles from Los Feliz), and my dad suddenly dying of a brain tumor made my first year in LA rough. I wasn’t doing improv; I was new in town and grieving. During this dark time, my friend Dan O’Connor had an idea. He was the artistic director for a well-known improv company in LA called Los Angeles Theatresports (LATS). He received a job offer in New York and needed someone to run LATS improv school. LATS was in the middle of their own destruction cycle. After years of thriving, things had suddenly shifted. They didn’t have a home base, and before Dan left town, he gave me an email list of students and access to the checking account to book class space. This moment of Sure, I’ll do it began a journey that culminates in the book you have in your hands. I created a school curriculum that appealed to my narrative improv interests. I rented space in Los Feliz, allowing me to walk to work. This small container was to hold the narrative joy and creation that would spill out and connect a global improv community.

I started an ongoing, long-form narrative class on Thursday nights that became a creative laboratory for the exercises and genres contained in this book. This maddening, inspiring, narrative long-form would keep the improv candle burning until, in 2006, a small group of us banded together and transformed LATS into Impro Theatre, the home of narrative improv in Los Angeles.

This moment of change may be precisely where you are now. You love improv and have found improvising scenes challenging and creatively satisfying. I hope you can see good improv wherever you live, but you may want to shift from short-form improv and bring narrative improv to your community.

The narrative direction I am taking you in this book differs from True Fiction Magazine and The Harold. The Harold is a narrative form developed by the San Francisco group The Committee. It is a long-form improv format emphasizing patterns, themes, and group discoveries instead of a traditional plot or story. In contrast, I will introduce you to a three-act structure for an improvised play, film, and even TV show. You will learn several genres and what is required for different kinds of stories to build and captivate an audience. Improvising in specific genres will give you structure that will enable you to be creatively free within that form.

By the time I was several years into teaching my ongoing long-form narrative class, I had drawers of notebooks containing in-depth information on various time periods and exercises I had created for different genres. In addition, I had copious notes on shows detailing what had worked and what didn’t. One thing you should know about me: I love organizing chaos. Give me your most disorganized mess, and watch me go. At some point, I had to gather all the ephemera under one roof so I put together an Improvising Plays and Films notebook for every ensemble member. That was the genesis of this book: a training manual for improvisers ready to shift from short-form improv to long-form narrative improv.

This book contains key information to dive into narrative improv successfully. It will guide you step by step as you shift from short-form scenes to longer narratives. It will illuminate what’s been missing in your current ensemble. It will educate you on behaviors that make you less present and impact others. By the end, you will understand how to shape and shift your mind and body to connect to other performers, under pressure, cocreating a cohesive story. In part 1, you will marinate in the foundational concepts around the mindset needed to do this work. There are exercises for each concept for you and fellow improvisers to try on your feet. Part 2 goes deeper into important practices for maintaining presence under pressure and developing the connection you have with yourself and your ensemble. Part 3 includes templates you can use to create an improvised play, film, or television episode beginning with the rehearsal period and continuing onward to showtime.

This will require all of you: you will need to act, improvise, make up a story, and jump into the unknown with other improvisers to cocreate a one-of-a-kind narrative that will never be told in that way again. My goal for you at the end of this book is for you to teach yourself and others exactly how to build up improv chops to tell longer and longer stories together successfully. The nuts and bolts I give you will make perfect sense to your thinking brain. However, before I give you the tangible tools to cocreate a story on your feet, I will provide you with a foundational mindset to be your own eye of the storm: the palpable presence you’ll depend on in the face of uncertainty by not trying to self-protect or control everything but staying in the moment, using reality as fuel for innovation.

This book gathers almost thirty years of notes and experiments that I know will guide you into this incredible art form. No matter where you live, you can shepherd your improv group or students into improvising a one-of-a-kind narrative. I wish I could be there with you, and this is my best attempt to introduce the building blocks as they make sense to me. This book is an invitation to look at improv through a theatrical lens.

Let’s begin.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful for every person and every improv experience that made this book possible.

Chris Chappell, my editor: You threw me a lifeline when I didn’t know where to turn. I am eternally grateful. Your edits were insightful and spot on. This book wouldn’t be happening without you. Thank you!

Patsy Rodenburg: Reading your book in 2005 and then working with you in 2012 gave me a foundation to experience and teach presence. The world is so lucky to have you and I am eternally grateful for you.

Kathryn Kay, founder of A Writer Within: I treasure our friendship and your insightful edits of this book that helped me get it in shape to pitch it to Chris. You kept me moving forward at your writing retreat in 2019 and all through the pandemic. So grateful for you.

BATS Improv, San Francisco: My first improv home and the introduction to a way of life and my husband. Key inspiration from Carol Hazenfield, Diane Rachel, and Rafe Chase.

Scratch Theatre: Thank you for seeing potential in me and for the invitation to your narrative world. Kristina Robbins, Daphne Brogdon, Dave Dennison, Rob Rodgers, and Kurt Bodden.

Impro Theatre, Main Co., Los Angeles, 2006–2019: You gave me a creative laboratory and a life-long community. Thank you! Stephen Kearin, Dan O’Connor, Edi Patterson, Kelly Holden Bashar, Ryan Smith, Nick Massouh, Kari Coleman, Lisa Fredrickson, Brian Lohmann, Brian Jones, Lauren Lewis, Paul Rogan, Michele Spears, Floyd VanBusKirk, Madi Goff, Mike Rock, Mike McShane, Tracy Burns, and Paul Hungerford.

Nick Massouh: As the dean of Impro Theatre School you made the curriculum even better after I left. You also brought me out of retirement! I thought I was through teaching and you lured me back. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Impro Theatre, School of Narrative Improvisation: Thank you for the creative environment that brought out the best in all of us. What a time we had! Passion Noir, Fosse Cabaret, Twilight Zone UnScripted, The Portal, Nancy Drew UnSolved, ABC Afterschool Special, Improvised Inge, Dorothy Parker, too many to name—thank you, thank you. Jason Murphy, Carla Rosati, Kim Crowe, Glenn Camhi, Jim Babcock, Paul Hungerford, Matthew Pitner, Sara Mountjoy Pepka (Oceans 2 Forever!), Ahsan Butt, Paul Vonasek, Laurie Jones, Nick Clark, Kelly Lohman, Ted Cannon, Leanna Dindal, Eric Carthen, Rebecca Lowman. Jen Reiter, Kirsten Farrell, Alex Caan, Arlo Sanders, Emily Jacobsen, Cory Wyzynski, Jill Hoffman, Paul Marchegiani, Helen Hegarty, Andrew Pearce, Susan Deming, and Cory Rouse.

Carla Rosati and Jorge Narino: Thank you for the years of laughter and encouragement. I am so grateful for you and can’t wait to be old-timers together.

Kathy and Joe Rinaldi and Teresa Bueno: Without your