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Jeff Feazell, a Los Angeles-based improviser, slumped onto the stage looking dejected, forlorn. He was personifying Loneliness at the first-ever Splitopia Improv Show at Westside Comedy Theater in Santa Monica.
Feazell refused to drink a beer with fellow improviser Rich Baker, who was playing a newly divorced guy. Feazell’s Loneliness character sulked around, moped, and refused to leave—as loneliness in real life often does.
Baker, who performs in Mission IMPROVable and Second City, tried to cheer up Feazell’s Loneliness. “Do you have a vision board?” Baker demanded, encouraging Loneliness to think about himself differently, to appreciate his value.
The show was based on my book, Splitopia: Dispatches from Today's Good Divorce and How to Part Well, and co-hosted by Los Angeles Review of Books. I'd just read an excerpt from chapter five, "Friends . . . and Lack Thereof:"
At various points I wondered, could I get too lonely? Was this loneliness dangerous?
I talked about being alone, post-marriage, with a professor from the Midwest sitting next to me on an airplane. He said he was uncomfortable living alone in a big house that made strange noises at night.
“Well, it’s short-term,” I said, trying to be encouraging. “You won’t be alone forever, right?”
“I feel like that’s mean to being alone,” he answered. “Like if Being Alone were a person, it would hurt its feelings to talk about it that way. As if it were something bad, you hoped would end quickly.”
I did think Being Alone was something bad, requiring an exterminator to bomb it, preferably with old-fashioned, highly toxic pesticide long since banned from use in the States. But I hated being mean, even if only to a concept. Mean as in, unappreciative, inattentive to its positive qualities. Would being “nicer” to Being Alone help me handle it better?
This was the hardest chapter for me to write, and the most difficult aspect of my divorce, in many ways. I struggled with loneliness and my shifting friendship circle for the first year and a half of my divorce—at home at night, after my son went to sleep, out on the street unable to find a friend to join me. I wrote and rewrote the chapter over the course of three years. Divorce can shake up your social circle, and a bad marriage preceding it can undermine your appreciation of your own company.
At the improv show, seeing Loneliness come to life as a character gave me, and the rest of the audience, a chance to laugh at our own vulnerability, at the incredible urgency to do something now that loneliness can create.
This show was what’s known as an “Armando” in the improv world; one person reads several sections from a single work, and a team of improvisational actors riffs on the text. The actors have no idea what the reader is going to say, nor do they have time to plan before taking to the stage. It’s sketch comedy in the making, the actors trying to quickly respond to the ideas presented in the reading and to each other. When improv really works, it’s amazing—a feat of instant collaborative thinking that also feels profound and hilarious. The improvisers that night, including not only Feazell and Baker but also Leah Kilpatrick, Holly Brown, Kiki Aldonis and Atul Singh, definitely hit this high many times.
We've all heard the idea that "laughter is the best medicine," and certainly felt our own worries lessen when joking with friends, or watching a comedy on TV. This was part of the impetus behind the show. It also was inspired by the work of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson at the University of Virginia. Fredrickson's "Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions" posits the idea that positive emotions and experiences are important for survival. Laughter and other positive experiences don’t just make us feel good in the moment; they can give us what Fredrickson calls “durable personal resources.” They improve our sleep and creativity, expand our problem-solving skills, help us make and keep social connections, and boost resilience and optimism—resources we can all use more of in divorce. .
Splitopia Improv was also a way to explore the role that creative expression can play when struggling to successfully deal with loss and uncontrollability. I'd recently written a feature for Psychology Today magazine about people who are living for years or even decades with terminal cancer. This new longevity is due to a variety of factors, including early detection and medical advances. But the growing field of psycho-oncology also helps. At Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, for example, cancer patients and caregivers can participate in a meaning-centered psychotherapy program that helps them derive more meaning from their lives, in part by engaging in a creative project or a form of creative expression. This sense of meaning and purpose has been shown to be hugely valuable when it comes to lessening anxiety, improving spiritual well-being, and even being more open to alternative treatments that might be life-saving.
Of course divorce is not cancer, but the research really stuck with me. I’ve been interested in ways that people use creativity to gain a sense of control during divorce, which can feel like a totally chaotic point in life, and see the meaning in their days.
Later in the Splitopia Improv show, Leah Kilpatrick, who hosts AWEme’s Super-Fan Builds, pretended to be sitting on an airplane, conducting a “wellness poll” of fellow passengers. I’d read about my “Airplane Poll:”
I’d just begun conducting my own unscientific survey of the State of Family Today, based on people sitting next to me on airplanes in coach. At the time, my family lived in seven states and one European country, and I flew around a lot to see my relations. Based on my Airplane Poll, three out of four people traveling between midsize cities in the U.S. are touched by divorce—theirs or that of their parents, children, or spouse—pretty much as the Census Bureau reports.
Kilpatrick settled into a chair on stage and became a somewhat nosy airplane passenger good-naturedly needling others to tell her how “well” they felt, on a scale of one to 10, driving them into despair through her endless questioning. I thought this was hilarious, and also a kind of reflection on how those of us facing divorce can be totally absorbed by it.
Getting out on the town—whether for a night of comedy, Zumba, volunteering, listening to music—can help us step back from the struggles of the moment, and remember that there is so much more to life than our divorce or other troubles.
If you'd like to read at a future Splitopia Improv show, write to me at wendy@wendyparis.com.
Read more about using creativity to get through divorce on Splitopia.com:
Nadia Colburn's piece, Writing Your Way Through Divorce.
My piece on playwright Michele Traina's one-woman play, Divorce Diaries.
PT blogger Jeffrey Davis on cultivating The Astonishing Power of Wonder.
