There were maybe thirty people sitting on sofas and chairs in a walk-up apartment in lower Manhattan. Every eye was focused on one person, an attractive young woman, the only one standing, who struggled trying to lift an empty box and then drag herself with each step under its mysterious weight. The performer is Marina Tsaplina, the box represents her diabetes, a condition she has had to come to terms with on a daily, no hourly, basis since her earliest youth. The drama of her presentation was more effective than any written appeal for donations in search of a diabetes cure. There was not a dry eye in the room, and when her own mother approached and embraced her, you could hear sobbing coming from several corners of the apartment.
Denman Wall was kind enough to join me at a recent production of short plays - An Eclecitc Evening of Shorts - put on by NYC nonprofit theater development group, Artistic New Directions. My goal in inviting Denman was to show another member of NYSAE how the issues we discuss, the bullet points on a presentation agenda, can gather to themselves unprecedented impact when they are given dramatic life.
That evening opened with a ten-minute play called “Autograph Table” which the playwright, Nicholas Walker Herbert (directed by Kate German) dedicated “to mentors everywhere.” We talk about mentoring all the time. This short play showed it to us, in its ups and downs and challenges, in a brief dramatic moment that resonated.
The evening ended with my own GPS III: Road to Conflict (directed by Janice Goldberg). In this third short play in my GPS series, technology once again enters the conversation. But more than that, now there are different technologies competing with each other as soon as one of the characters pulls out his cell phone for directions, and the younger technology is embodied by a younger person with younger, “millennial” attitudes, as the conflict we discuss and analyze and try to understand expressed itself before our eyes.
Those of you who attended the NYSAE Technology Summit and Vendor Showcase last month saw me in my emcee role try to lighten the high tech atmosphere by injecting humor. A few weeks earlier, I had seen a humorous 4-minute monologue delivered by my friend and fellow monologist, Carl Kissin. When Carl had a conflict and could not attend the Summit, I donned a white coat and tried my best to impersonate him as a doctor treating an invisible patient suffering from social media withdrawal. It addressed the elephant in the room – how much technology is too much technology and how have our devices rewired our brains. I think it got a few laughs.
This is more than entertainment. Organizations of all kinds would do well to integrate into their curriculum or training regimen classes in improvisation. It’s one thing to have a strategy and a mission statement, but another to be able to improvise successfully when a challenging question or situation arises without abandoning your position. This takes improvisation and it is a learned dramatic skill.