Keith Johnstone (1933-2023)

 

[When I read the New York Times obituary of Keith Johnstone, identified as the “Champion of Improvisational Theater,” in the issue of 17 April (Section D [“Business”/“Sports”]), I couldn’t remember having ever heard of him.  I looked in the indexes of all my acting, theater history, improvisation, and theater games books, and found only a couple of passing mentions. 

[I was curious, after reading about him in the obit. So I looked him up online.  His Wikipedia article is very skimpy and isn’t very informative, so I Googled him.  There were few hits as, it seems, he left very few digital footprints.  Indeed, the Times report of his death is perhaps the most inclusive summary of his life and accomplishments, so I’m running it here.]

“KEITH JOHNSTONE, 90, WHO CHAMPIONED ‘TRUTH ON THE STAGE’ VIA IMPROVISATION”

by Neil Genzlinger

The theatrical games and performance techniques Mr. Johnstone developed became a familiar part of the acting arsenal.

Early in what became a career in theater, Keith Johnstone was commissioned to write a play for a new company in England and studied up for the job by watching the troupe’s actors rehearse someone else’s play. What stood out to him was not the rehearsal techniques, but the fact that he found the sessions boring — “until the actors broke for coffee or stagehands began moving sets around the stage.”

“It was only at these times that there seemed to be moments of truth on the stage,” he told The Calgary Herald many years later, in 1982. “When they resumed acting, the performers abandoned their kinetic dance and entered separate glass cages.”

That realization helped fuel Mr. Johnstone’s determination that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity, and from emphasizing the quest for truth over the mastery of actorly techniques.

He spent the rest of his career preaching the gospel of improvisation, developing games, exercises and live shows that were the opposite of tightly scripted theater. His 1979 book, “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater, and the Loose Moose Theater Company, which he created in 1977 after relocating to Canada, became an institution in Calgary.

Mr. Johnstone died on March 11 in Calgary. He was 90.

Theresa Robbins Dudeck, his literary executor and the author of “Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography” (2013), confirmed the death.

Mr. Johnstone didn’t invent improv, and he wasn’t alone in promoting the technique; the actress and educator Viola Spolin published “Improvisation for the Theater” in 1963, and troupes like the Second City in Chicago, founded in 1959, were also working the territory. But his contributions were considerable. Among Mr. Johnstone’s liveliest innovations was Theatresports, an idea he began to develop in England when he and some colleagues at the Royal Court Theater took notice of the liveliness of audiences at professional wrestling matches.

“Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison,” he wrote in an essay about Theatresports, “probably because once an event is categorized as ‘cultural,’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”

So he began honing a sort of competitive event in which teams of improvisers would try to outdo each other, with audience howling and booing encouraged and judges rating the efforts.

“The judges award points by holding up cards that range from one to five,” he wrote in another book, “Impro for Storytellers” (1999). “Five means excellent, one means bad, and a honk from a rescue horn means ‘kindly leave the stage.’”

He introduced Theatresports once he had relocated to Canada, and the concept caught on; variations of the games were soon being performed all over the world.

“If the performance has gone well,” he wrote, “you’ll feel that you’ve been watching a bunch of good-natured people who are wonderfully cooperative, and who aren’t afraid to fail. It’s therapeutic to be in such company, and to yell and cheer, and perhaps even volunteer to improvise with them. With luck you’ll feel as if you’ve been at a wonderful party; great parties don’t depend on the amount of alcohol, but on positive interactions.”

Donald Keith Johnstone was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in Brixham, on England’s southwestern coast, to Richard and Linda (Carter) Johnstone. When he was 9 or so, he decided to stop taking things at face value.

“I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true,” he wrote in his 1979 book. “This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it anymore. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out.”

He trained as a teacher at St. Luke’s College in Exeter and began teaching at a primary school in South London. When he won a prize in a short-story contest, the English Stage Company, a new troupe based at the Royal Court, invited him to write a play for it, which he did: “Brixham Regatta,” which Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph thought was, for a 25-year-old novice, “a creditable — and ambitious — first play.” More important, he joined a writers’ group at the Royal Court and found himself leading improvisational exercises for the group.

He spent 10 years at the Royal Court, leading classes and workshops, screening scripts and producing plays. In July 1959 Mr. Johnstone and William Gaskill produced a largely improvised one-night show called “Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp,” featuring Black actors ad-libbing scenes about an infamous 1959 massacre of detainees by British troops in Kenya. Alan Brien, reviewing the performance in The Spectator, was not on board with the concept, saying that it “shows the Royal Court in its most militant, inept, radical, ambitious and pretentious mood.”

“‘Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp’ was neither good rhetoric nor good theater,” Mr. Brien wrote. “But if it sent the audience home to study the facts, it will have been worthwhile. And if it sent the producers home reconvinced that acting discipline and writing economy are the heart of drama, then it will also have been worth while.”

It did not “reconvince” Mr. Johnstone of that. He continued to develop his improvisation exercises and in the mid-1960s formed an improvisational troupe, the Theater Machine, which performed all over England as well as abroad.

In 1972 Mr. Johnstone was offered a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Calgary in Alberta. He ended up staying at the university for 23 years, taking emeritus status in 1995.

An early performance by his Loose Moose company, in 1977, was a version of “Robinson Crusoe” that, from Louis B. Hobson’s enthusiastic review in The Calgary Albertan, sounds as if it came close to replicating that professional-wrestling excitement Mr. Johnstone had longed for.

“The audience, which is seated in a semicircle, becomes everything from shark-infested waters to offstage spirit voices,” he wrote. “It is a stormy, noisy sea that surrounds Crusoe’s island, and one that never calms down for the play’s 40 minutes.”

Mr. Johnstone’s marriage to Ingrid Von Darl ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by a son from that marriage, Benjamin; a son from another relationship, Dan; and a grandson.

Mr. Johnstone’s books and methods have been used in high school classrooms and drama clubs, professional acting workshops and anyplace else where creativity needs to be unlocked and spontaneity encouraged. A passage in his 1979 book describes what set him on the improvisational path.

“I began to think of children not as immature adults,” he wrote, “but of adults as atrophied children.”

[Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the New York Times Obituaries desk.  Previously he was a television, film, and theater reviewer.]

*  *  *  *

[After I read Johnstone’s obituary and tried to look him up on the ’Net, I e-mailed my friend Kirk Woodward, known to ROTters as a prolific contributor to this blog, and he told me he had the same response to Johnstone’s name as I had: absence of recognition.  Except, Kirk discovered that he owned the man’s principal book, Impro.  You’ll read about that below because Kirk generously offered to (re)read the book and report on it.]

 

IMPRO
by Kirk Woodward 

When I saw the New York Times obituary of Keith Johnstone (1933-2023), my reaction was that I had never heard of him. There are many people, of course, of whom I haven’t heard, and who haven’t heard of me either for that matter, but in this case my ignorance turned out to be embarrassing, because I’ve worked in the field often called Creative Dramatics – exercises and games using theatrical techniques – for decades. (I will continue to use that term for this article. [See Kirk’s Rick On Theater post on the subject on 30 September 2013; also my own contribution to the topic, two parts of a post also called “Creative Dramatics,” with subtitles “Creating A Play,” 9 September 2009, and “Games,” 12 September 2009.])

Johnstone was British. The only British practitioner of Creative Dramatics I knew much about was Brian Way (1923-2006; Development through Drama, 1998, Humanities Press), who greatly influenced the way I taught the subject, as I’ve written about elsewhere in this blog [in the author’s above-referenced post]. If I had known about Johnstone along the way, I wouldn’t have changed my basic approach, but it would have been greatly enriched.

And then, looking on my bookshelves, I found that I actually own Johnstone’s best-known book, Impro (1979, Eyre Methuen, London; now published 2023 by Routledge). It must have belonged to my wife Pat, because I didn’t remember having read it. Having now made up for lost time, I can testify that it’s well worth the effort. Simply put, it’s detailed and occasionally technical; but Johnstone is a live wire, and his outlook is fun.

Reading reviews of Impro on Amazon, one is struck by a certain note of caution about the book, along with admiration. I think the reason for this caution is that Impro is not generally a “how to” book. It contains many specifics, but more at the forefront is Johnstone’s overall outlook.

By contrast, probably the most widely read book on the subject, Improvisation for the Theater (Northwestern University Press, 1999 [3rd ed.]) by Viola Spolin (1906-1994), is essentially a recipe book – a pinch of this, a sprinkling of that, mix well. She presents her exercises step by step, and they’re all, as it were, product tested. This is not a criticism; her book is popular for good reason.

However, if I had picked up Impro sometime along the way and glanced at it (I’m fairly certain now that I did and forgot about it), the reason I wouldn’t have gone further with it is that it wasn’t a book of recipes, and that was what I was looking for (and to an extent still am).

Johnstone is not primarily interested in telling people how to do Creative Dramatics. He is primarily interested in helping people become the kind of people who can do Creative Dramatics – almost instinctively.

Impro draws frequently from the countercultural ideals of the ’60’s and ’70’s, emphasizing the relative importance of the individual over society, of minimally structured education for children, and of valuing the marginalized (for example, the mentally ill) for the perspectives they bring to everyday life.

If these notions seem dated, that doesn’t mean they don’t have value today. It’s snobbery to assume that only our own decade offers anything worthwhile. Johnstone proposes:

The states I try to take students through involve the realization (1) that we struggle against our imaginations, especially when we try to be imaginative; (2) that we are not responsible for the content of our imaginations; and (3) that we are not, as we are taught to think, our ‘personalities’, but that the imagination is our true self.

Impro is divided into five chapters over 200 pages. In the first chapter Johnstone tells how school, in particular, did everything it could to drain his imagination out of him – “all my teachers cared about was whether I was a winner.”

He describes how he retrieved his powers of imagination through an imaginative teacher, through his own habit of “reversing every statement to see if the opposite was true,” and through doing his best to work with as little idea as possible of the “right way to do things.”

He first went into teaching, and found himself at odds with the typically authoritarian administrators of the schools of the time. He learned about himself, he says, that “I wouldn’t [do] work for people I didn’t like.”

As he moved into theater, he had a related thought: “The more I understood  how things ought to be done, the more boring my productions were.” He found himself particularly uninterested in discussion during rehearsals – better just to try it out, he felt, whatever it is.

I’ve always directed plays as if I was a totally ignorant about directing; I simply approach each problem on a basis of common sense and try to find the most obvious solutions available.

The second chapter his book is titled “Status,” an element that he sees as crucial to improvisation, to acting, and most definitely to living. It’s a thorough and sometimes technical chapter, and it’s by far the best I’ve read on the subject.

One takeaway from this chapter for me is the extent to which every interaction among people – with the emphasis on “every” – is a series of status transactions, with higher and lower status switching sometimes moment by moment between the participants. He explains in detail how this works, and for me his explanations are revelatory. He also applies them to theater, with great insight:

The pauses [in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, 1906-1989, a play first produced in 1953 in French and 1955 in Englsh] are part of the pattern of dominance and submission. Godot earns its reputation as a boring play only when directors try to make it ‘significant,’ and ignore the status implications.

I would have thought that “Spontaneity,” the subject of the next chapter of Impro, would have come first in sequence because it’s so central to Johnstone’s life and practice, but I see that he considers “status” as even more foundational – status, after all, hugely determines the extent to which one can be spontaneous, since status is often a synonym for intimidation. The heavier the hand of status, the heavier it falls on the imagination.

But Johnstone is not pessimistic. “It’s possible to turn unimaginative people into imaginative people at a moment’s notice,” he says, although “You have to be a very stubborn person to remain an artist in this culture.”

The next chapter, titled “Narrative Skills,” contains some breathtaking insights for improvisors, actors, and writers, most of them having to do with allowing the creative process to work, without worrying about the product. This idea makes sense if, as Johnstone says, “The improvisor has to be like a man walking backwards. He sees where he has been, but he pays no attention to the future.”

The enemy is fear – “The student hesitates not because he doesn’t have an idea, but to conceal the inappropriate ones that appear uninvited. . . . Unless you can continually wipe your ideas out of your mind you’re paralyzed.” To get past these obstacles, Johnstone describes a number of approaches, one of which is so brilliant that it left me gasping. He tells the student:

‘Suppose I think of [a story], and you tell me what it is.’ At once she relaxes, and it’s obvious how tense she was. ‘I’ve thought of one,’ I say, ‘but I’ll only answer “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe.”’ She likes this idea and agrees, having no idea that I’m planning to say ‘Yes’ to any question that ends in a vowel, ‘No’ to any question that ends in a consonant, and ‘Maybe’ to any question that ends with the letter ‘Y.’

The result is that the student invents an entire story out of her own imagination, with no idea at all that she’s doing it. Because the leader’s responses have nothing to do with the content, the story is the student’s own.

“A game can stare you in the face for years before you ‘see’ it,” Johnstone says, and that’s certainly been my experience with Creative Dramatics, an activity in which you never learn everything, or I don’t, anyway. That particular exercise knocked me out.

The “Narrative Skills” chapter is the closest in the book to the “recipe” approach mentioned above, and it contains wonderful insights. For example: “I used to ask the audience for titles first, and I usually combined two titles to make one.” This idea revitalizes the familiar approach of asking audiences for suggestions – combine two or more into one proposal.

And: the improvisor “shouldn’t really think of making up stories, but of interrupting routines.” As soon as an improviser grasps that idea – and it shouldn’t take long – then they will never be at a loss for an idea in a scene if they can grasp the familiar activity the other person is proposing, and send it off in a new direction.

The fourth chapter, “Masks and Trance,” for me brings back the ’70’s with a rush, and I won’t try to describe it, but the title points to its content, and I recommend it for those interested in advanced work.  (See also Rick’s post on ROT, “The Magic of Masks,” 17 September 2011, which touches on some of the same issues.)

Impro proposes an answer to a question that has puzzled me for a long time. We teach and facilitate Creative Dramatics in order to move the students from point A to point B or, if things go well, further, possibly to point E or F on a good day. Why? Once people are (as I laid out my goals for my own work) confident, competent, and creative – what’s the purpose, what’s the aim?

Johnstone’s answer is that people are their imaginations, and that little that’s useful happens unless the imagination is first unlocked. He believes that if a person’s imagination is working freely, then whatever is important will come out – not because the person wants it to (they may very well not), but because it has to, once the imagination is freed. Johnstone says:

My decision was that content should be ignored. This wasn’t a conclusion I wished to reach, because it contradicted my political thinking. I hadn’t realized that every play makes a political statement . . ., I tell improvisers to follow the rules and see what happens, and not to feel in any way responsible for the material that emerges. If you improvise spontaneously in front of an audience you have to accept that your innermost self will be revealed.

Imagination, then, for Johnstone is not a path to a value, but the value itself. Is this so? Johnstone would say, “Don’t discuss it – try it, do it. Find out for yourself.” For me, if art is a continuing study of who we are, then Johnstone certainly provides a significant piece of the puzzle.

[On 10 January 2017, I posted a report on Will Hines’s book, How to be the Greatest Improviser on Earth (Pretty Great Publishing Co., 2016), which is related to Johnstone’s field.  Hines worked with improvisational comedy companies like the Compass Players, Second City, Chicago City Limits, The Committee, ImprovOlympic (iO), the Groundlings, and the Upright Citizens Brigade and has taught improvisation as a form of performance.

[Readers who are interested in Johnstone’s use of improvisation in theater or Hines’s techniques of comic improvisation should check out my report and then perhaps read Hines’s book as a kind of companion to Impro.  I also suggest reading Viola Spolin’s seminal text, Improvisation for the Theatre, mentioned above.] 

'Help!'

by Kirk Woodward

[The article below, Kirk Woodward’s examination of the Beatles’ 1965 movie Help!, will be my friend’s 100th solo contribution to Rick On Theater (plus one collaboration with me).  Of those previous 99 posts, some of which were multipart contributions, six have been about the Beatles or one of its former members. 

[I’ve been a fan of the Beatles since I first heard them on the radio when I was a high school student in Europe in the early ’60s.  (“She Loves Me” was released in the U.K. at the end of August 1963, just as I was about to start school outside Geneva.  We listened to rock ’n’ roll on BBC radio, Radio Luxembourg, and pirate radio.)  But my enthusiasm pales before Kirk’s loyalty.  In addition to that, Kirk knows music, which I don’t, so he applies that to his fandom as well. 

[Furthermore, as a longtime theater student, with experience as an actor, director, and playwright—as well as a composer and lyricist—Kirk has a perspective on the Beatles’ film output that’s, if not unique, then at least rare.  The proof is below.  If you don’t know Help!, the group’s second film, Kirk’s discussion will make you want to see it.  If you do know it, it’ll change your appreciation of it. 

[You know what the Beatles said: “Now I find I've changed my mind and opened up the doors.”  (Yeah, I know that’s not what they really meant.  But it’s what I mean!)]

In the late 1960’s, some of us studying at Washington and Lee University were fortunate to spend some days in London on summer theater trips organized by the school’s drama professor, Lee (really Leonel) Kahn.

Lee had connections with the British theater world and arranged to bring in as lecturers a number of young and exciting professionals from England, some of whom would go on to careers of success and importance, like the playwrights and screenwriters Christopher Hampton (now Sir Christopher, b. 1946) and David Mercer (1928-1980).

Our lecturers introduced us to the most exciting elements of British theater of the time. From London I wrote my mother:

Something else which came out in a lecture this morning is that the Beatles have had an important influence on one kind of British theater. The line goes:

”Goon Show” (Spike Mulligan, Peter Sellers, etc.)
                                     V

Beatles (sense of humor, the looseness of their stage shows and their strong relation to the audience)

                                    V

Street theater, small-group theater, improvisations (akin to off-off-Broadway)

I would modify some of what I wrote my mother: the Beatles’ stage shows were “loose” only in the sense that they never seemed “canned” – there was always a personally spontaneous element in their appearances. And I should have mentioned that their influence spilled into many areas besides theater, in particular, music (of course), fashion, and, our topic here, film.

I have written about the Beatles several times for this blog. In this article I am writing about their second film, Help!, a film that has influenced theater and other arts as well.

Help! was filmed and released in 1965. It followed the Beatles’ brilliant and wildly successful first film, A Hard Day’s Night (1964). Both films were directed by the American expatriate Richard Lester (b. 1932), who began his career by directing advertisements and who developed a style of filmmaking involving a quick pace, rapid and unexpected shifts between shots, and humor that often verged on the surreal.

Both A Hard Day’s Night and Help! exhibit these traits, but they are very different films. A Hard Day’s Night is a black and white film. Focusing on an imagined day or so in the lives of the four Beatles, it is concise, with a script written by Alun Owen (1925-1994) filmed on an extremely tight budget, wasting no space.

Help!, a year later, had, as Richard Lester has said, a somewhat larger budget, and was shot in color, with an expansive script written by Mark Behm (1925-2007), otherwise best known for his delightful screenplay of the mystery film Charade (1963). Behm’s script for Help! was given touches of dialogue and plot by Charles Wood (1932-2020), about whom I will say more below.

In contrast to the very England-bound A Hard Day’s Night, Help! takes place in England, the Alps, back in England again, and finally in the Bahamas. Critical opinion tends to consider A Hard Day’s Night a masterpiece, and Help! nowhere near as successful.

I consider this ranking, if I may use the word, baloney. The films are different in significant ways, and I admire A Hard Day’s Night, but I love Help! I seldom feel the need to watch A Hard Day’s Night, but Help! is one of my favorite movies.

Why? For starters, it has the Beatles in it, and although that fact by itself may not justify enthusiasm (as it does not quite, sadly, for Magical Mystery Tour, their self-made film of 1968), it certainly contributes.

In A Hard Day’s Night, as Richard Lester explains in a video introduction to the film, the focus is the public lives of the Beatles; the logical next step would have been a film about their private lives, but, Lester says, at that time their private lives were rated “X.”

The agreed-on answer was to let the Beatles be the center of an experience that revolved around them, hence the film’s plot: members of an Eastern cult worship with a daily sacrifice, but the mandatory sacrificial ring has disappeared – it has ended up on Ringo’s finger, and it won’t come off, despite the best efforts of the cult, as well as two renegade British scientists who want it for their own purposes. Ringo’s life is in danger as long as he wears the ring.

That’s the plot. Right up front it must be said that the film could not possibly be made today, certainly not in the way it exists now, with English actors playing Indian members of a religion seen as murderous and barbaric (supposedly based on Thugs, an alleged murderous gang that terrorized India for decades). A viewer today has a lot of ignoring to do. Whether or not to, of course, is an individual decision.

In any case, the plot is outlandish and absurd, and rendered completely non-realistic by Richard Lester’s directorial style. In an essay in the 2007 video release of Help!, the director Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) writes that Lester

had an extraordinary sense of pace and motion, in the editing and in the movement of the people onscreen. . . . Most of all, it was the freedom, the feeling that the structure of the picture could bend and twist to accommodate the spirit of youth. . .  that you could play with form and structure and break as many rules as you wanted as long as you had a strong emotional core – this was what Lester gave us. . . .  You were let in on the joke, and that made it even funnier.

 The supporting actors are all wonderful. Lester tended to work with a core group of actors, particularly Victor Spinetti (1929-2012) and Roy Kinnear (1934-1988), who were thoroughly familiar with his comic style. Leo McKern (1920-2002) and Eleanor Bron (b. 1938) as the high priest of the cult and his ambiguous henchwoman respectively, are superb.

What about the Beatles? As themselves they are wonderful, of course – they’re the Beatles. One cannot help watching them; they are energetic and entertaining and yet they have an odd reserve about them – they’re keeping something private. All the songs they wrote for the film remain classics; they were practically exploding as songwriters at this period, with “Yesterday” one of the songs on the British album of Help! (but not used in the movie). Not bad.

As for their acting, it presents an interesting study in movie performing. Ringo, who shone as an actor in A Hard Day’s Night, continues to charm and amuse. John and George, who are not showcased as much as Ringo, succeed by underplaying everything. They are both delightfully deadpan.

Paul’s performance is a different matter. In general, underacting is the best approach to acting in film, and overacting the worst. I don’t know in what order the scenes of Help! were shot, but in the earlier part of the movie Paul makes “facial expressions” and basically tries too hard. The good news is that he calms down as the film goes on, and is fine by halfway or so through the movie.

In general, the Beatles are the more or less relaxed center of the turmoil of Help!, and there is plenty of turmoil. Topics presented and satirized in the movie include: war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion, all of it accompanied by heavy doses of violence involving knives, poison gas, tanks, lasers, and savage man-eating animals.

This is a film about a rock band? This is comedy? Well, yes, or perhaps more accurately it is farce, which, as Eric Bentley writes in The Life of the Drama (1964), is “generally the fantasy of innocence surrounded by malevolence.” Richard Lester’s style, as I have described it here, is a farce style – which is not to say that it is frivolous.

In fact, in choosing Charles Wood to work on the script of the film, Lester chose a writer particularly fascinated by war and its effects. Wood wrote frequently about military life and action, and notably went on to write the screenplay for How I Won the War (1967), a surreal antiwar film that featured John Lennon as a soldier who, along with many others, is killed.

The scene in Help! where the Beatles record on Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge, in particular shows Wood’s influence, with the modern British Army providing a protective ring of tanks around the Beatles, while the enemy, in World War I garb with a mixture of weapons, waits for sappers to dig under the recording area and set off deadly explosives. There is a battle, which leads to a retreat and apparently ends tragically. . . .

Among the other subjects treated extensively in the film, organized religion takes a particularly strong beating, including a scene in which Clang, the High Priest, treats an Anglican minister to a long string of ecclesiastical platitudes, and a scene in which Ringo mutters, “It’s a different religion from ours. I think.”

Richard Lester told the press when the film was released, “You’ll find nothing new about Help!. There’s not one bit of insight into a social phenomenon of our times.” Except, of course, for the phenomena of war, the justice system, the military, science, British technology, government, the police, and religion!

All this points to one of the ways the film was influential. Help! demonstrated on a large and widely viewed platform that the illusion of realism in movies was not a requirement for addressing serious issues in film.

They could be presented fancifully, comically, bizarrely – there were few limits, as long as they were handled with the appropriate style, and Lester knew what that style could be. Help! opened a large door to new kinds of expression of opinion.

And others went through that door, as two examples will illustrate. One is that the film, and Magical Mystery Tour which followed it (although not terribly successfully), showed the way for what was shortly to become the Monty Python troupe (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin), in terms of the use of quick cuts, topic changes, and bizarre juxtapositions.

An example comes toward the center of Help!, when a title card announces an intermission, followed by a short scene of the Beatles in the forest, with one of them appearing to bounce another like a ball. . . followed by a card announcing the second part, a short scene between two Indian women, one the recently saved human sacrifice and the other her clearly English mother . . . followed by another title card, and the resumption of the movie.

Some of Lester’s stylistic effects were the result of necessity; although he had a bigger budget for Help!, it wasn’t extravagant. He had to make the most of what he had. Some of the shots in the film probably would have been reshot under other circumstances. But in the environment he created, they didn’t matter.  He led the audience to accept whatever he did.

If one is going to take the kind of risks that Lester takes, it helps to have talent. One example that stands out for me is that while filming on the mountain slopes of Switzerland, it was difficult to find spaces where crowds weren’t surrounding the Beatles, and one of those spaces had telephone poles with wires across it.

Lester solved the problem by superimposing musical notes from “Ticket to Ride,” the song being played that moment, on the wires, as though the wires were staves in a music score. That’s creativity; that’s talent.

When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, Lester decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song. Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. (The Monkees, whose TV show first aired in 1966, took the hint immediately.)

Countless videos since Help! have taken off from what Lester developed in part out of necessity. When putting together film of the Beatles playing together, he decided not to care whether or not they made logical sense. For example, in the song “You’re Going to Lose That Girl,” Ringo is seen playing the drums, and, in one shot, the bongos, although logically that couldn’t happen in one runthrough of the song.

I wonder if what I’ve been saying gives the impression that the Beatles didn’t have much to do with the influence of Help!. Clearly that is not so. The Beatles made it happen, they cooperated with it, they were in the middle of it, and their sense of humor is the inspiration for it. They were personalities, and those personalities lent themselves to experimentation.

In fact, the biggest problem the Beatles had in filming Help! is that they had already made one movie, and they hated to repeat anything they had already done. As a result they spent a lot of filming time stoned, they were casual about learning lines, and they never got around to making a third major movie; they just couldn’t be bothered.

But not wanting to repeat themselves– wanting continually to take a fresh approach – is the essence of what Richard Lester did, and what A Hard Day’s Night and Help! do. The Beatles brought a conscious search for newness into the world of popular art, including film – and theater. I would claim, among other early results of this approach, “rock musicals” such as Hair (1967), and groups like the Firesign Theatre (1966 on), who, using a radio drama format, performed on stage extensively, and frequently invoked the Beatles – an influence acknowledged by both Firesign and Python members.

Here is one personal example of the latter. George Harrison, in particular, seems to have thought of the Monty Python troupe as the logical successor to the Beatles. In a recent comment in this blog, Rick, commenting on a play I wrote about theater superstitions, said:

The play, which Kirk wrote late in 2019, long before I even thought of this post, reminds me of a Monty Python sketch! I can actually hear the Pythons doing it. (Kirk and I are both fans of the Pythons, and he agreed that ‘That Scottish Play’ “is definitely like a Python sketch!” – though he’s “not sure I consciously had that in mind” when he composed it.)  [See “Ghosts, Curses, & Charms: Theater Superstitions – Part 1” (14 August 2020), Comment dated 6 September 2020.]

There – a direct line from my recent play, through the Pythons, to the Beatles. That’s influence. When I wrote my mother, I was correct – I had no idea at the time how correct –that “improvisations” were one way the Beatles had influenced theater, and those improvisations helped spawn the Pythons.

That’s just one example of their influence. I am certainly not saying that they invented the performance world we experience today – for example, improvisation existed long before the Beatles; so did theater for that matter. But they made possible multiple new approaches in the performance arts, and to this day we enjoy the benefits.

[I was on the same trip to London in the summer of 1969 that Kirk took.  (Kirk and I were classmates at W&L and we both worked with Lee Kahn.)  The program was housed in a dormitory of the University of London and along with the shows we saw, we had, as Kirk reports, meetings with and lectures from a number of theater figures, both pros and academics, at the dorm.  At one of those sessions, a talk by playwright Christopher Hampton, an incident centering on John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger drew me up short.

[Hampton, a resident dramatist at the Royal Court Theatre whose play The Philanthropist was about to open at the theater as I remember, came to speak to us about the rise of the contemporary theater (or something like that—I forget the actual topic after 51 years). In his discussion, Hampton mentioned that an important influence in his artistic development was the original production of Look Back in Anger in 1956, which he'd seen when he was 10.  I quickly did the math and figured out that Hampton—born in January 1946—is the same age as I am.  (I’m almost exactly 11 months younger than Hampton.)

[I was immediately depressed because here he was, a produced playwright of some renown already and here I was, sitting, as it were, at his feet, having accomplished nothing so far in my life.  He's gone on to write several important plays, including Total Eclipse (1967) and Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1985), and a batch of screenplays and opera librettos, while I have gone on . . . to continue to do nothing of significance—with the possible exception, says Kirk graciously, of starting Rick On Theater; but that’s only a late development.  Ah, well . . . such are the inequities of life!

[Kirk has a special attachment—critical, to be sure—to Help!  I have one to A Hard Day’s Night, but it’s visceral.  It’s also more to the title song than to the whole film and is connected to a very specific memory. 

[The movie was released in Europe, where I was living at the time, in July 1964, less than a year before I took a trip to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union over spring vacation with a group from my school in Geneva.  (The French title is Quatre garçons dans le vent, literally “Four boys in the wind,” but its idiomatic sense is “Four boys in fashion” or, more colloquially, “Four hip guys.”  The German title, incidentally, is simply Yeah Yeah Yeah.) 

[The songs from the film were in all our heads, and one of our group, a boy from a really wealthy family, had brought along an electric guitar and a complete portable amp system (which we had set up in the train compartment for our cross-continental journey from Geneva to Warsaw).  I’m sure he played the soundtrack and we sang that song over and over on that long train voyage. 

[Skipping ahead a couple of days, we were in the Soviet Union and on a flight from Moscow to Leningrad when I remembered something vital: our adult chaperone was supposed to have arranged to pick up my visa for Hungary from the Hungarian embassy in Moscow! 

[The Hungarians had refused to issue me a visa through the embassy in Bern the way all my schoolmates had gotten theirs—I carried a diplomatic passport and visas for Western diplomats had to be issued by the foreign ministry in Budapest—so I was supposed to pick it up in Moscow.  But the faculty leader had forgotten and so had I (I was all of 18 at the time), and we were en route to Leningrad. 

[When we couldn’t get the visa at the Hungarian consulate in Leningrad or, next, in Kiev, we had to arrange for me to fly over Hungary and meet the group in Vienna.  So they all took off by train to Budapest and I waited in Kiev for a plane to Vienna the next day. 

[Alone and without rubles except what I needed to get through the day, I had to kill time somehow.  So I wandered around the city—I spoke a little Russian but no Ukrainian—and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” to myself over and over. 

[I was a little relieved to get to Vienna—Austria was a relatively free country and I spoke German by then, so I could get around and talk to people—but I still had almost no cash until the group arrived in town some hours after I did.  So I walked and sang “A Hard Day’s Night” some more! 

[To this day, I can’t hear that song—which, like most Beatles tunes, I still love—without flashing back to that spring trip 55 years ago to Warsaw, Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, and Vienna . . . but not Budapest; I never got there.]

Perspectives on Science

[I’m no scientist.  I even stopped being any good at it in school when we hit physics in my junior year.  But it’s always fascinated me—especially when it comes to things like new discoveries and using the techniques of the arts and humanities to teach or communicate science.  People who ignore or even disparage science are another interest of mine—I don’t get how even moderately educated people can take that attitude.  So the two recent articles below, one from the Washington Post and the other from the New York Times, caught my attention.  So I downloaded them saved them for use on ROT, and now’s a good opportunity to share them with the blog’s readers.] 

“WHY AMERICANS ARE SO DUBIOUS ABOUT SCIENCE”

by Joel Achenbach

[The article below first appeared in the “Outlook” section of the  Washington Post of 15 February 2015.]

The Post’s Joel Achenbach says the evidence often conflicts with our experience

There’s a scene in Stanley Kubrick’s comic masterpiece “Dr. Strangelove” in which Jack D. Ripper, an American general who’s gone rogue and ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, unspools his paranoid worldview — and the explanation for why he drinks “only distilled water, or rainwater, and only pure grain alcohol” — to Lionel Mandrake, a dizzy-with-anxiety group captain in the Royal Air Force.

Ripper: “Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?”

Mandrake: “Ah, yes, I have heard of that, Jack. Yes, yes.”

Ripper: “Well, do you know what it is?”

Mandrake: “No. No, I don’t know what it is, no.”

Ripper: “Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?”

The movie came out in 1964, by which time the health benefits of fluoridation had been thoroughly established and anti-fluoridation conspiracy theories could be the stuff of comedy. Yet half a century later, fluoridation continues to incite fear and paranoia. In 2013, citizens in Portland, Ore., one of only a few major American cities that don’t fluoridate, blocked a plan by local officials to do so. Opponents didn’t like the idea of the government adding “chemicals” to their water. They claimed that fluoride could be harmful to human health.

Actually fluoride is a natural mineral that, in the weak concentrations used in public drinking-water systems, hardens tooth enamel and prevents tooth decay — a cheap and safe way to improve dental health for everyone, rich or poor, conscientious brushers or not. That’s the scientific and medical consensus.

To which some people in Portland, echoing anti-fluoridation activists around the world, reply: We don’t believe you.

We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.

Science doubt has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movie “Interstellar,” set in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding, school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked.

In a sense this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable and rich in rewards — but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

We’re asked to accept, for example, that it’s safe to eat food containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) because, the experts point out, there’s no evidence that it isn’t and no reason to believe that altering genes precisely in a lab is more dangerous than altering them wholesale through traditional breeding. But to some people, the very idea of transferring genes between species conjures up mad scientists running amok — and so, two centuries after Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein,” they talk about Frankenfood.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne super-plague? The scientific consensus says that’s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there’s zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But Google “airborne Ebola” and you’ll enter a dystopia where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us all.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle, that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing and sometimes hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense — because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later, Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people.

Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions — what researchers call our naive beliefs. A study by Andrew Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals and that the Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) and whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive).

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They nest in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it’s no longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend’s cancer — and we pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many unnecessary surgeries. Or we hear about a cluster of cancer cases in a town with a hazardous-waste dump, and we assume that pollution caused the cancers. Of course, just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not random. Yet we have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. They, too, are vulnerable to confirmation bias — the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once the results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them — and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or an absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

That provisional quality of science is another thing a lot of people have trouble with. To some climate-change skeptics, for example, the fact that a few scientists in the 1970s were worried (quite reasonably, it seemed at the time) about the possibility of a coming ice age is enough to discredit what is now the consensus of the world’s scientists: The planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause since the mid-20th century.

It’s clear that organizations funded in part by the fossil-fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics. The news media gives abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses. Not so. The (boring) truth is that science usually advances incrementally, through the steady accretion of data and insights gathered by many people over many years. So it has with the consensus on climate change. That’s not about to go poof with the next thermometer reading.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why so many people reject the scientific consensus on global warming.

The “science communication problem,” as it’s blandly called by the scientists who study it, has yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe — and why they so often don’t accept the expert consensus. It’s not that they can’t grasp it, according to Dan Kahan of Yale University. In one study he asked 1,540 Americans, a representative sample, to rate the threat of climate change on a scale of zero to 10. Then he correlated that with the subjects’ science literacy. He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views — at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce their worldviews.

Americans fall into two basic camps, Kahan says. Those with a more “egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change. In contrast, people with a “hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to — some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

In the United States, climate change has become a litmus test that identifies you as belonging to one or the other of these two antagonistic tribes. When we argue about it, Kahan says, we’re actually arguing about who we are, what our crowd is. We’re thinking: People like us believe this. People like that do not believe this.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science.”

Meanwhile the Internet makes it easier than ever for science doubters to find their own information and experts. Gone are the days when a small number of powerful institutions — elite universities, encyclopedias and major news organizations — served as gatekeepers of scientific information. The Internet has democratized it, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, the Web has also made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to penetrate the bubble? How to convert science skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help. Liz Neeley, who helps train scientists to be better communicators at an organization called Compass, says people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values. She has personal experience with this. Her father is a climate-change skeptic and gets most of his information on the issue from conservative media. In exasperation she finally confronted him: “Do you believe them or me?” She told him she believes the scientists who research climate change and knows many of them personally. “If you think I’m wrong,” she said, “then you’re telling me that you don’t trust me.” Her father’s stance on the issue softened. But it wasn’t the facts that did it.

If you’re a rationalist, there’s something a little dispiriting about all this. In Kahan’s descriptions of how we decide what to believe, what we decide sometimes sounds almost incidental. Those of us in the science-communication business are as tribal as anyone else, he told me. We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community. When I mentioned to Kahan that I fully accept evolution, he said: “Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

Maybe — except that evolution is real. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines save lives. Being right does matter — and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences, as seen in recent weeks with the measles outbreak that began in California. The people who believe that vaccines cause autism — often well educated and affluent, by the way — are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since a prestigious British medical journal, the Lancet, published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)

In the climate debate, the consequences of doubt are likely to be global and enduring. Climate-change skeptics in the United States have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming. They haven’t had to win the debate on the merits; they’ve merely had to fog the room enough to keep laws governing greenhouse gas emissions from being enacted.

Some environmental activists want scientists to emerge from their ivory towers and get more involved in the policy battles. Any scientist going that route needs to do so carefully, says Liz Neeley. “That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,” she says. In the debate over climate change, the central allegation of the skeptics is that the science saying it’s real and a serious threat is politically tinged, driven by environmental activism and not hard data. That’s not true, and it slanders honest scientists. But the claim becomes more likely to be seen as plausible if scientists go beyond their professional expertise and begin advocating specific policies.

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else — but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

[Joel Achenbach is a science reporter at the Washington Post. A version of this essay appears on the cover of National Geographic’s March 2015 issue.]

*  *  *  *

“NEW STAGE OF PROGRESS IN SCIENCE”

by Kenneth Chang

[This report was originally published in “Science Times” of the New York Times on 3 March 2015.]

STONY BROOK, N.Y. — Martha Furie stormed into the room and huffily sat down in a chair.

“Well, you know, I’ve been working really hard, studying Lyme disease,” she said, her voice tinged with disdain, to the woman sitting in the next chair. “It’s been a long process. It’s hard to talk about it.”

The other woman, Bernadette Holdener, was somewhat befuddled. ”How does it make you feel?” she asked.

“Lyme disease?” Dr. Furie sneered. “It can have all sorts of bad things.”

The two were participating in an improvisational acting exercise a couple of Fridays ago [20 February]. But they are not aspiring actresses or comedians. Dr. Furie is a professor of pathology at Stony Brook University [State University of New York at Stony Brook], Dr. Holdener a professor of biochemistry and cell biology.

“Anyone have any inkling what is going on?” asked one of the instructors for the session — Alan Alda, the actor who played Hawkeye in the television series “M*A*S*H” more than three decades ago.

The exercise, called “Who am I?,” challenges one of the participants — Dr. Furie, in this case — to convey an unstated relationship with another, and everyone else must try to deduce the relationship. “She sounded very angry,” Dr. Holdener said.

People guessed variously that Dr. Furie was a Lyme researcher who had contracted the disease, that she just been denied tenure and was venting to the head of her department, that she was expressing passive-aggressive anger toward her spouse.

“You’re so close,” Mr. Alda said.

Dr. Furie explained that Dr. Holdener “was my long-lost sister who stole my husband away.” The other participants laughed at the convoluted, unlikely setup.

Mr. Alda said that Dr. Furie, focusing on her role as a wronged sister, intently observed her audience — Dr. Holdener — and the effect of her words. “What I find interesting about this is you’re suddenly talking about your work in a way you’ve never talked about it before,” Mr. Alda said.

The idea of teaching improv to scientists came from Mr. Alda, now a visiting professor. The objective is not to make them funny, but to help them talk about science to people who are not scientists. The exercises encourage them to pay attention to the audience’s reaction and adjust. “Not jokes, not cleverness,” Mr. Alda said. “It’s the contact with the other person.”

Mr. Alda has long held a deep interest in science. In the 1990s, he collaborated on “QED,” a play about the physicist Richard Feynman, with Mr. Alda playing Dr. Feynman.

He also hosted 11 seasons of the PBS program “Scientific American Frontiers.” In interviews with hundreds of scientists, he found that he could draw out engaging explanations. ”I didn’t go in with a list of questions,” Mr. Alda said during a public lecture at Stony Brook the night before the workshop. “I just listened to what they had to say and asked them questions that would help me understand what their work was.”

But he recalled one scientist who would switch from conversing with Mr. Alda to lecturing to the camera. “And immediately, the tone of her voice changed,” Mr. Alda said. “Her vocabulary changed. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”

Mr. Alda started suggesting to university presidents that they teach scientists how to present their research to the public.

No one expressed interest until 2007, when Mr. Alda visited Stony Brook and met Shirley Strum Kenny, then the university’s president. “I thought, here’s my chance, I’ll go into my pitch,” Mr. Alda said. “I said, ‘What do you think? Do you think both could be taught at the same time so you can graduate accomplished scientists who are also accomplished communicators?’ And she was interested.”

The next year, he tested his improv idea at the University of Southern California on 20 graduate engineering students. The students first talked briefly about their work. “It was O.K.,” Mr. Alda said.

Then came three hours of improvisational acting exercises. At the end, the students talked about their work again. “The difference was striking,” Mr. Alda said. “They came to life, and I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ ”

Stony Brook established the Center for Communicating Science in 2009 as part of its journalism school. In addition to classes, the center started the Flame Challenge, a contest seeking compelling explanations of seemingly simple phenomena. The first year, the question was “What is a flame?” Mr. Alda asked his teacher this when he was 11, and the answer — “oxidation” — was his first experience with confusing scientific jargon. This year, the question is “What is sleep?” The winners will be named at the World Science Festival in New York in May.

In 2013, the Stony Brook program was officially named the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science.

Howard Schneider, the dean of the journalism school, said science departments were initially skeptical, with many thinking improv would be a distraction.

That has changed. Two graduate programs now require students to take the center’s classes. All medical school students receive 10 hours of training.

“This is a big cultural shift,” Mr. Schneider said. In addition, four organizations — Dartmouth College, the University of Vermont, the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Jersey and the American Chemical Society — have become affiliates of the center. Other universities, inspired by Stony Brook, are considering setting up similar programs.

The ability to describe science effectively could prove key to winning research financing in the future. Last year, Stony Brook ran a competition among its younger scientists for a $200,000 prize. The four finalists, who were coached at the Alan Alda Center, pitched to a panel of distinguished scientists. The winner was Laurie T. Krug, a professor of molecular genetics and microbiology, who proposed studying herpes viruses associated with cancer and using nanoparticles to deliver molecules that act as scissors to cut up viral DNA.

The recent workshop was for about 40 members of the Stony Brook faculty. For the improv sessions, the group with Mr. Alda threw around imaginary balls of varying weights, mirrored one another’s movements, tried to explain a smartphone to a time traveler from the past, and talked of cherished photographs while holding up a blank white folder. In the afternoon, they broke into smaller groups to talk about how to distill and describe their own research.

Dr. Furie, who directs the graduate program in genetics, said she had started the day unsure the center’s offerings were a good use of time for her graduate students.

“Now, I’m convinced,” she said. And she got to play the role of the wronged sister.

“That was crazy,” Dr. Furie said. “I’m actually not a person who puts myself out there. I can’t believe I did that.”

[Kenneth Chang is a science reporter for the New York Times, covering chemistry, geology, solid state physics, nanotechnology, Pluto, plague and other scientific miscellany. He attended the science writing program at University of California at Santa Cruz. He worked at The Los Angeles Times, the Greenwich Time in Connecticut, The Newark Star-Ledger and ABCNEWS.com prior to joining the Times in 2000.]