When an ape with a sustained top speed of 10 miles per hour somehow loses control of a vehicle traveling six times as fast, there will be traffic. People in cars will have to stop until the disaster can be moved to the side of the road. Even with the obstruction out of the way, it will be distracting. After a tow-truck or flat-bed hauls off the ruined air-conditioned death-trap, congestion will continue to reign. The jerky, imperfect, starting and stopping, passes from driver to driver to driver. This has been much studied by the poor sods that have been tasked with making roads perform in impossible ways. They’ve concluded that the knot of slowness moves like a wave. It seems that traffic is catching.

Sometimes we crash on stage. A moment of inattention, someone moved faster or slower than everyone around them, two people tried to move into the same lane at the same time...

Skilled or inspired players can quickly adapt and exploit these knots with deft detours and clever car-pooling, but every player can recall one or two painfully public pile-ups. Some of the habits that keep us on the road are truly universal and obvious, and others are so contextual as to be irrelevant outside of a single scene, set, or off-stage interaction.

Irrelevant except… our responses to something specific can propagate across time like a wave of traffic. Long after the issue has been cleared up, players will slow down simply because they see everyone else slowing down.

I don’t know what problem caused the phrase, “Hey, you [so-and-sos], get in here!” to become an acceptable way to initiate group games, but I do know that the obstruction has long since been cleared. For anyone with the good fortune of having never encountered this abdication of creativity, it looks like this:

At some point in the set, Player Z wants to initiate a group game filled with [so-and-sos], be they chefs, doctors, rams, forks... Instead of using an interesting way to communicate that everyone in the scene is a chef, doctor, ram, fork… Player Z uses a stock phrase in an otherwise entirely unscripted performance: “Hey, you [chefs/doctors/rams/forks], get in here!” Note: “Hey” may be replaced with “All right” or, when the spirit takes the player… “OK”.

During your first brush with a [so-and-sos] initiation, it may only stand out as clunky and lazy exposition.

The second time, the phrase you’ve just heard repeated verbatim, in what was presented as an improvised show, throbs for explanation.

The third time… What?! Come on! How long have you been doing this?! It isn’t even a good phrase, it’s crude exposition, treats everyone in the house like a moron… and you’ve used it before so it isn’t even improvised! Hey you [so-and-sos]? Get outta’ here…

Why not:

If anyone from table 7 orders a steak, make sure it’s on the rare side… Someone has been using my tongue depressors… and then putting them back wet. The only way to know for sure who is best is by slamming our heads into each other… We’re tired of the saladers getting first dibs while the main-coursers are forced to wait!

There! You’ve plugged your premise, clearly and unambiguously.

The seminal snarl that led otherwise fully improvising players to adopt [so-and-sos] no longer exists. This extended complaint may someday be read as amusingly quaint and dated, just as we can now chuckle at playing prescribed short-form games between beats of a Harold.

Ad hoc responses, on every level, become standardized until no one even thinks about it. We call our ensembles teams and our instructors coaches because some early pioneers framed our art as a competition to pull and hold an audience. We ask for a suggestion in order to prove that we are, indeed, making it up on the spot. We charge less per head for our professional, customized performances than tickets to pubescent, off-the-shelf productions of a play in the public domain.

How long are we willing to let someone else’s driving slow us down?

A wave in a pond differs from the clumping of cars in that the ripple dampens and dissipates until the surface is once again flat. Drivers sustain traffic simply by responding to what is directly in front of them, maintaining the behaviors that keep a roadway clogged. Stop and go, stop and go, stop and go.

The wave is amoral; the way we affect each other needn’t bear on the qualities of the effects. Conscientious and inspired work reaches through our communities as surely as the hasty kludges, moving players and ensembles, theaters and communities long after we’ve left that stretch of road.

If we’re thoughtful about what we do, momentary insights can outlast a scene.

When we treat our art like a commute, we’ll always be at the mercy of history.