To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others

by Daniel H. Pink

Here theater offers some instruction on what comes next. For hundreds of years, except for the occasional clown or mime, most stage performances relied on actors reciting memorized lines written by someone else. Indeed, until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain’s office in the United Kingdom had to read and approve every play before it could be performed in the UK—and sent monitors to watch the plays to ensure performers were sticking to the approved text.3 But about fifty years ago, two innovators began to challenge the single-minded reliance on scripts. The first was Viola Spolin, an American who in the 1940s and 1950s developed a set of games—first for children, then for professional actors—centered on improvising characters, speeches, and scenes. In 1963, she wrote a book, Improvisation for the Theater, that encapsulated these exercises and quickly became a mainstay of theater programs. Thanks to her son, Paul Sills, who took up the family trade, her ideas eventually gave rise to the now legendary Second City troupe—whose alumni (from John Belushi to Stephen Colbert to Tina Fey) have shaped American popular entertainment with their mastery of off-script, real-time comedic performance. The second innovator was Keith Johnstone, a Brit who worked for years at London’s Royal Court Theatre. As he grew weary of conventional theater he, too, began devising his own set of looser, less traditional performance techniques. And in 1979 he wrote what many consider the seminal work in the fi...