President’s Column
6
gether with more effort and diligence than
Daniel Day Lewis researching a role. Each
of these types is the embodiment of trial
stage fright.
How we overcome this trial stage fright
is by learning how to role play. We may
not give the public the Perry Mason moments, but if we can understand that we
play a part in the performance of trial, we
can shape this role to fit who we are and
what serves our clients best.
This leads me to my own history of speaking in front of others. Apart from a few disastrous early efforts, my public performing career began in college when I joined
a comedy improv troupe. I was a freshman who had few friends and wanted more
than anything to belong to a group. Others
might have joined a fraternity; I happened
to see a flyer about improv. So I auditioned,
and it turned out that they needed an awkward white guy who couldn’t sing, and for
the next eight years of my life, improv was
an essential part of my life.
I consider improv to be one of the most
important parts of my pre-law school legal education because of what it taught
me about how to be a lawyer. By its nature
improv is unscripted. If you have watched
Who’s Line is it Anyway? you have some
sense of improv. It is unscripted theater
where performers, through their interactions, build a scene, take it through a beginning, middle, and end, and hopefully
make it entertaining. It is theater without
a net.
To make this work, you have to have a
number of strictures governing the scene,
you get a few variables from the audience
that help define the action, but then you
and another person must go out on stage
and entertain the audience with a memorable and funny exchange. The reason such
activities do not collapse under their own
weight and in fact entertain are because of
the rules and preparation in place.
The first rule of improv is “Yes, and ...”
Usually, an improv scene will start with a
performer coming out and miming an activity, setting things up. Then the second person enters and gives a suggestion through
dialogue. The trick is that first person has
to accept what the second person brings.
This can be very frustrating. But once you
learn to work and trust each other, it becomes easy. The lesson is that you must accept what has been given to you and take
it. These are your resources, use them and
build on them.
The second rule of improv is “practice.”
Trust in your other performers, familiarity and dexterity in beginning, sustaining,
and ending scenes only come with practice. When I was doing improv, we rehearsed twice a week for several hours. We
rehearsed whether we had a show or not.
That way if we had to do a scene involving
letters of the alphabet or acting in a particular genre, we had tried out ideas on each
other, and what the audience saw was polished concepts—funny accents or characters that had been work-shopped, relationships with other performers that had been
developed.
The third rule of improv is to “be aware
of the space.” You are almost never on
stage alone and what has happened up to
this point matters. If you join a scene where
the others have been acting out a group
therapy session for people who just cannot
understand the popularity of Taylor Swift,
you need to incorporate the dialogue and
information that your fellow performers
have laid out and the characters they have
created. You need to bring a character or
offer that will stimulate those established
characters and be true to the moment. You
need to be aware of what space has been
created and what the facts of the scene are
and what will further the story.
The fourth rule of improv is “never waste
the audience’s time.” As you can imagine
it is very easy to be self-indulgent in improv, to extend a scene because you think
you can come up with three more funny
lines or because you are enjoying the moment. After college when I was a member
of a professional troupe in Boston, this was
extremely important. We charged people
$15 to see a show. If we did not entertain
them, we heard about it, and our reputation and livelihood depended on getting
people to come back or recommend us to
their friends. If a scene was not getting a
good response, it needed to end, and we
needed to start a scene that did work. We
needed to make jokes and dialogue that
held interest to the audience.
Each of these four rules of improv are exactly the rules of good trial advocacy performance. We must be ready for “yes and”
moments. When a witness says something
unexpected, we must be ready to respond
and react and exploit the opportunity. We
must practice. Too many times I have seen
peers struggle with basic trial procedure,
forgetting to lay a foundation for a point
or to admit a piece of evidence. This is just
a matter of practicing the skills. We must
be aware of the trial space. This means
coming to the courthouse before the day
of trial to understand where witnesses will
sit, where exhibits can be stored, to understand the distance between you and the
jury. It means paying attention during trial
to what is happening—to watch jurors’ reactions and have a sense of the pacing and
flow of the trial. We must keep the jury,
our audience in mind. We forget that we
are storytellers and something of entertainers when we try a case. If we cannot keep
the jury’s attention or keep them with us as
we explore the case, how can we expect a
verdict in our favor?
THE VERMONT BAR JOURNAL • SPRING 2015
Now I know a number of you probably
came into the legal profession and the skill
of performance in other ways. There are
many paths to performance—speech and
debate, journalism, natural extroversion, or
being a sociopath who has memorized the
acceptable responses necessary to mimic
emotions. I only proffer this