Where science, politics and improv theater collide

**Brian Lehrer** (0:05)
From WNYC, I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my Daily Politics Podcast.
It's Wednesday, June 10th.
The United States' relationship with science is under strain on two fronts. The share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive impact on society. Well, that share has fallen 16 percentage points since before the coronavirus outbreak, from 73 percent saying mostly positive impact in 2019 down to 57 percent in 2023, that according to the Pew Research Center. Same time, federal science funding has faced an unprecedented political assault and that's continuing. The exact numbers are complicated to pin down, but here are some stats from a Nature article from January this year. Over the course of 2025, more than 7,800 National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants were canceled or suspended. And the Trump administration proposed historic cuts of 35 percent to non-defense research and development in its fiscal year 2026 budget request. One program right here in our backyard in the New York area is aiming to tackle the erosion of trust in our scientific institutions in a creative and unconventional way. The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University is a program that uses improv theater training to help scientists talk to the rest of us. The center, founded by MASH star Alan Alda more than 15 years ago, has now trained more than 35,000 researchers worldwide with clients ranging from Stanford to NASA to AstraZeneca. And joining us now is its director, Laura Lindenfeld. Hey Laura, welcome to WNYC.

**Laura Lindenfeld** (1:57)
Hi Brian, so pleased to be here with you today.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:00)
All right Laura, what was the insight that made Alan Alda say, wait, these scientists need improv training?

**Laura Lindenfeld** (2:08)
It's such a great concept, isn't it? Alan did Scientific American Frontiers. For 11 years he served as host. We have some really fun footage of that that we sometimes show in our workshops. It occurred to him as he was interviewing scientists, just how naturally they would talk with them. I mean, who wouldn't? He's so wonderful and kind. He had this thought one day, there was a person he was interviewing, and when she could make eye contact with him, everything was going great, and then suddenly it's like the white lab coat went back on, she froze, looked at the camera, and the connection dropped. Then he got the connection back, and then it happened again, and he thought, oh man, what's going to happen if I'm not here to pull these stories out of people? He had the idea that improvisational theater, which was the only training he actually had as an actor, might help.
Alan, in his inimitable style, went around to a bunch of universities in the greater New York City metro area and said, how would you like for me to try improv with your scientists? And Stony Brook said yes and that's how it got started.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:20)
Can you walk us through one sample exercise? What does it look like in the room? What are the scientists actually doing in an improv session that's supposed to help their science communication and related to what skill it's supposed to build?

**Laura Lindenfeld** (3:36)
Yeah. So the way that our team works is they really build. I'm going to describe to you just a couple of pieces of what is an eight-hour training experience, because the sequences build. It's kind of like going to the gym where you're like, today I'm going to work my biceps, and tomorrow I'm going to work on my legs. If you want your whole body to function together, you got to work all those muscles together. So we isolate some of these competencies through exercises, like helping people really connect through eye contact and body language.
Then what's at the core of these exercises is imagining what the other person that you're trying to connect with may be feeling or thinking, so you can ground yourself as much as humanly possible in their perspectives. So we'll do an exercise like a classic mirror exercise, where if you and I were sitting across from each other, we'd hold our hands up and try to move together such that people couldn't tell who's leading and who's following, and you really get that sense of connection. That's one example of an exercise. We do others where I love this exercise. It's called rant, where you rant to your partner. We do a lot of work in partners, so we're never putting you really up on stage to perform. It's about communicating with people in your life, in your world, and practicing that with a partner, where you might talk about something that really makes you angry, and your partner then has to debrief that, and share what the value is underlying that. So there's two rules to improv. We talked about the first one, yes and. The second one is really, really important as well, and it may even be a little bit harder. It's called make your partner look good.