Premise vs game

Premise can be confusing when you are a game focused theater.

I get asked all the time if the premise is the game, and the best answer I can give is “kind of.”

The premise is nothing more than the core idea of the scene that you are in. It’s basically just another way of saying the base reality of the scene. But when we start creating comedic premises, I think people get tripped up thinking that they have the game.

This past weekend I got to do a two-man Harold with Jack Reitz. We did a scene where I was playing Satan, and I was trying to sell hell as a vacation destination. Sounds gamey, but I would venture to say that since it wasn’t pointed out that this was unusual to the world we were in, that this was nothing more than our premise. The game became that Satan had Daddy issues and desperately wanted to bond with Jack’s character.

Could Satan selling vacations be the game? Sure! But Jack would have had to respond to me in a way to inform the scene that this isn’t normal. But since he didn’t, the premise is not the game.

I say “kind of” because game isn’t just the unusual thing. It’s the consistent pattern of behaviors in reaction to the unusual thing. So how we are reacting is what defines it as a game or not.

If Jack had responded with “shouldn’t you be in hell?” I would have said that Satan had decided to get more proactive in his pursuit of souls because today’s technology is making it too hard on him to compete since everyone’s attention span is bananas. Then I would have been able to give Jack the hard sell to get him into hell.

But instead, Jack noticed I said something about an absentee father and reacted to that as if that was unusual, and that became our game.

To be honest, premise bores me to tears because it’s too predictable and often moves us away from having honest reactions, plus it often confuses performers as to what they should be focusing on.

The truth is, you should always be focused on each other and invested in what each other are saying and doing. Let the premise exist around you. Maybe it will turn into the game, or maybe you will discover something much more loaded and fun inside of that premise.