What Exactly is a Relationship Anyway?

Establish a relationship. Ever heard that before? Every improv teacher says that, and they’re right. But what does it mean?

Here’s the thing…if you call your scene partner “Mom”, you’ve labeled a relationship, but I’m not so sure you’ve established one. We often label our partner up top to get the relationship out of the way, but does this really fill the bill? Sure it helps, at least you now know who you are to each other, and sometimes it can lead to interesting things when it’s unexpected. (Stop flirting with my boyfriend, Mom!) But labeling where you fit on the family tree doesn’t establish a relationship. There are as many mother-child relationships as there are mothers and children. The possibilities for the dynamic between a mother and child are infinite, and it’s important to realize that the dynamic between the two characters is more important than the label. Every member of the audience has a specific frame of reference for a mother-child relationship, and it might not mirror yours, and it might not mirror your characters, and it might be completely irrelevant to what the scene is about.

We’re taught to know each other in a scene, and that’s a helpful idea for beginners, but it isn’t really necessary. (If you’ve ever talked improv with me over a beer, you know that I’m not big on rules.) If you put any two people together, they immediately have a relationship. Sometimes the relationship can be defined easily…mother-child, brothers, best friends, blah, blah, blah, boring, boring, boring. Sometimes that relationship is a little more difficult to label, such as "the two guys whose wives are best friends and they’ve been thrown together on a beach vacation but they’ve never met and one guy awkwardly walked in on the other one’s wife in the shower just before they were introduced and is trying to avoid talking about it." (Hmmm, that sounds like a fun scene. Too bad we have to know each other; I guess I won’t ever get to play it.) Truth be told, I have a relationship with over six billion people right now. Most of those relationships can be labeled as “complete strangers”, but it’s a relationship none the less.

It comes down to this: feel free to label your scene partner with a relationship at the top of scene, but don’t think for a minute your work is done. The relationship evolves as the scene progresses and is never the same in any two moments in time. Regardless of whether we have known each other all of our lives or we just met, as long as we are affected by each others words and actions in a truthful and meaningful way, we will have a compelling scene that the audience will enjoy.

Now get out there and make stuff up.