Trust the Room

And then, silence. Not quiet, because in quiet, you still hear things; the wind, birds chirping, the highway miles away. You hear things in the quiet. The quiet makes you hyper-focused on sounds. In silence, there are no sounds. Nothing.

“Silence was deafening” is a phrase I’ve heard before, and it’s one that my years in the theater have taught me to recognize. There is nothing like a deafening silence, especially when you’re doing comedy. That’s what makes creating a comedy so difficult.

I recall a time when I was doing the play “Is He Dead?” and the other actors and I were trying to work out a bit. Now, a bit, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a self-contained unit of material centered on a single funny premise, theme, or story. It typically includes a setup, multiple punchlines, and related “tags” (additional quick punchlines), functioning as a building block for a longer routine. The bit we were working on involved an empty casket that supposedly contained a dear friend, but was actually just part of a trick we were playing on another character. Now, when you start a bit, you start with nothing. Perhaps you know the props you’re working with, but really, all you have is a piece of dialogue and the feeling that something has to happen here. So there we were, five actors, a casket, and nothing else. We came up with ideas, and those ideas evolved over rehearsal. By the time we got to final dress, we were tired, and we hated every single thing we did. Lucky for us, we had a very smart director, Chuck Morey, who didn’t let us get despondent. The problem? We had been playing this bit to empty rooms and people who had seen it over and over. Because of that, it was easy to lose confidence in the work we’d done and turn to changing everything. Again, a wise director kept us in check.

We knew in our hearts the bit was funny. It was mathematical, and we were all good comedic actors, so we understood the need for precision, energy, and playing the bit moment to moment. We knew it intellectually, but a good bit isn’t intellectual; it’s physical. The action is physical, and the response, when done right, is as well. The audience gets hit with the bit. The bit lands on them. And if it lands right, the response is laughter. A special kind of laughter where the audience is taken by surprise, and their laughter floods out of them in great waves that we, the actors, feel almost physically hitting us. There are very few feelings as good as doing a bit well and having the audience just explode. It is wonderful, and yet, it is terrifying. Wonderful because there is nothing that heals like laughter. During that particular show, no matter how I was feeling before curtain, when I stepped on stage with that cast, the joy of performing was ignited, and we all cruised through the show. Wonderful.

Terrifying? Yes. Imagine working hard in a rehearsal hall, constructing a great bit, working and sweating to hit the precision, the timing, and physical needs all down to math, everyone doing their part to the very best of their abilities, and then, you put it in front of an audience and … silence. That deafening silence we mentioned at the top of this piece. That happens. And there is nothing so gut-wrenching as getting it wrong. Being off by a fraction and the laugh just slipping by, out the window, and you’re left on stage with four minutes of bit left to do, and you can already feel the audience has checked out. There is not much to be done. You stay the course, do the work you rehearsed, and hope it’s just a sleepy audience who just had a big dinner and a bottle of wine and they’re just not with you this time. Okay, that’s one night, but if it happens again, then you have to drag the bit back into the room and rework it. Find what went wrong, why the laughs weren’t coming, and how to make it work. That’s what previews are for: to rework and fix what the audience told us wasn’t working. Okay, it’s a drag and a bummer and a bit deflating, but you need the show to be as good as possible, so back into the room to rebuild. That’s just part of the job, and we’ve all experienced it. Usually, you come up with something that works, and when you drop it on the audience and they laugh, the relief is indescribable. After the audience laughs, you can set and settle into the bit, add things, remove things, and hear the audience catch something; that becomes part of the bit for the run. It all works out, but it’s not as easy as it seems.

I was thinking about this today as I got an email with a photo from that show, and I recalled the work we put in to make not just the show, but that bit in particular, work. Thankfully, it landed perfectly, and we didn’t have to go back into the rehearsal room and make it work. We were able to do this because we had faith in what we were doing and because we had a solid comedic director who didn’t allow us to doubt ourselves and who trusted the work we had done. Still, there is that moment before there is an audience when you wonder, is any of this funny? Will any of this work? Are we all going to be standing onstage with omelet stations on our faces? In situations like that one, you have to have trust. Trust in the work you’ve done, in the serving of the play, and in the director who won’t allow you to doubt and question every single step of the way. But, most of all, you trust history. We’d all been there before, creating a bit out of nowhere, trusting that we knew what we were doing and allowing the bit to have its breadth. Trust your history, commit to the bit, and then you have to allow the risk of putting it out there to be worth it; you have to trust the past and not throw away everything because the empty room is no longer laughing.

“We just want a website,” I recall a client saying in a meeting. He was responding to the amount of depth ThoughtLab puts into a website before we even start on design. They had heard of us and knew we were top of the field in web design, but they didn’t want all the “bells and whistles,” as they called all the time and research that goes into creating a website that converts. They wanted it quick and cheap. At one point, someone on their team said, “You know, with AI we can knock this out in less than a day.” At which point we said, yes, yes, you can. And that client went on its way. Later, we looked at the website AI had knocked out in a day, and you know what, it looked good. It did. It looked like a website. But it didn’t do anything. I mean, aside from lacking animation or good storytelling, the site didn’t do anything. It didn’t solve the problems people might be coming to the site to get answers about. It certainly didn’t hold our attention, and it did nothing to convert. It looked like a website, as almost every single website looks when it’s slapped together. It looks fine, but looks are only a sliver of the overall spectrum when we’re talking about websites.

It isn’t really about websites. It’s about anything you’re building before you know if it’ll work: a campaign, a launch, a pitch, a first draft of a new offer. There’s always a version of it you could get fast, and it will look like the thing you meant to make. The question is never whether the fast version looks fine. It’s whether you’ll know what to do the moment it goes quiet.

I think about that client sometimes, and I think about that silent room.

When a bit died in previews, it was never a mystery for long. We knew our blocking, we knew our timing, we’d sweated over every beat of it, so when it didn’t land, we had somewhere to look. That’s also how we knew the difference between a bad night and a real problem: one quiet room might just be a quiet room, but we’d know our own choices well enough to see it if the same beat kept dying twice. That’s when we went back into the room, took the bit apart, found the half-second we were late on the turn, and rebuilt it. That’s not failure. That’s the job. The room exists so you have somewhere to go once you actually know something’s wrong.

The AI website never had a room. It had a prompt. It looked like a website the way a stand-in looks like an actor until you ask it to do something under pressure, and when it didn’t convert, there was nothing to rework, because nothing had been decided on purpose in the first place. You can’t drag a website back into rehearsal if it was never in rehearsal. You can only start over, and starting over from a prompt gets you exactly what you got the first time.

That’s what “trust the process” actually means, and it’s not a slogan. It means doing the work by hand long enough that you’d recognize your own choices if they failed, so that when the room goes quiet, you have something to go back to. A shortcut doesn’t just risk a worse result. It risks a result you couldn’t explain if someone asked you why it didn’t work. And in this business, someone always asks.

We still stepped on that stage every night, not knowing for certain the bit would land. That never goes away, and it shouldn’t. The day you’re certain is the day you’ve stopped listening to the room. But we walked out there with history behind us: reps, choices, a director who wouldn’t let us panic and rebuild from scratch just because one house was cold. That history is the only thing that makes the risk worth taking.

You can commission a website in a day. You can’t commission that.

Takeaway

The worry never fully goes away, and it isn’t supposed to. Every time you build something new, a campaign, a launch, a pitch, a first draft,  there’s a version of that silent house waiting for you, the one where you don’t know yet if it’ll land. That’s not a sign that something’s wrong. That’s just the room before the audience gets there.

What decides how that moment goes isn’t whether you’re nervous. It’s whether you know the thing you built well enough to fix it if it doesn’t land, or whether all you have is a result you can’t explain. One of those gives you somewhere to go. The other leaves you standing on stage with four minutes left and nothing but hope.

Trust the process. But build one worth trusting.