THE PRACTICAL JOY OF IMPROVISATION

AN INTERVIEW WITH ACTOR ANDREW FOSTER

What makes you a good musician or painter or actor is what makes you a good cook. It’s about YOU as a person. The way you interact with whatever materials you’re making art with.

— Andrew Foster

Happy New Year! I can’t wait for another awesome year of Substack. Thanks for your support, you are amazing and I love writing for you. Very soon I will be adding podcasts of these articles to this site, and I am pretty excited about it!

I am always on the hunt for actors and directors who use improvisation not for comedy but as preparation for straight acting. It is surprisingly hard to find an improv class that is not aimed at making people laugh.

As I prepared to teach on the Directors' Workshop A WAVE IN THE OCEAN recently, I watched the short film MEMORY FOAM (2019) directed by Paloma Schneiderman. It features two great performances by Alison Bruce and Andrew Foster, playing a couple of empty-nesters who are buying a new double bed.

Here's the film for you (Password: MEF2019). Paloma was…