I recently had the pleasure of watching a performance by improv duo DUMMY, also known as Colleen Doyle and Jason Shotts.
They were so, so good. Especially with character and relationship development.
And what was remarkable was how they did this from the minute they got on stage.
In improv, you start by asking for a suggestion to inspire your performance.
Jason asked for someone in the audience who’d never given an improv suggestion to give one. “It’s easy,” Colleen said. “Just say a word.”
Silence.
They waited, looked around.
Eventually, someone—we’ll call her Z—said, “House.”
And then they probed: “Z, did something happen today that made you think of the word ‘house’?”
“We’ve been looking at houses.”
“Find anything you like?”
“No.”
“Have you been looking long?”
“One day.”
(Laughter)
“So today was the first day? Let’s HGTV this. What are your must-haves?” [let’s pretend Ophira knows what terms HGTV uses…]
“A big yard. And this exact neighhorhood.”
“Do you live there now?”
“No.”
“Why that neighborhood?”
“I somehow got into a Facebook group for moms in that neighborhood, and now all my friends are there.”
“So you infiltrated this Facebook group…”
And so on.
With close attention to detail, curiosity, empathy, and humor, Jason and Colleen uncovered a sliver of this woman’s story: She and her husband have two kids. They want a 3-bedroom house, but the kids will share—the two adults will have two of the three rooms to themselves. Their second room will probably be an office. They want to live in this exact neighborhood because of this strange Facebook group affiliation, and, by the way, after Z—the sole outsider—joined this group, they stopped allowing outsiders in.
This material. So human! So deep! So abundant!
What’s all the more impressive to me is how even their choice to have a new suggestion-giver likely contributed to the show. My bet is that it improved two things:
- the prospect of getting good material in the first place: newbies’ suggestions are probably more likely to come from their lives in some way than to be a choice they make simply because they think it would be good on stage; and
- the hilarity: because nervousness in newbies means either undersharing, like when Z didn’t mention it was their very first day looking for homes until asked directly, or oversharing, like when we unexpectedly learned about the planned bedroom distribution between kids and adults.
But those are improv-centric points.
For the rest of us, who want to interview well but not necessarily to turn it into entertainment, there’s a broader lesson here:
With a little bit of attention, curiosity, and empathy, we can learn so much.
Open insightful conversations with simple questions.
Listen to your interviewees’ stories.
Consider: What context or details are you missing?
And then: Ask for them, one at a time.
This Glass Has Water 