Alias: Signal the shared reality as it currently exists, clearly and without distortion.
This principle operates on two levels that converge in practice:
Signal fidelity — what you transmit matches what is happening in the scene. Your words, tone, body, and timing all say the same thing. When channels contradict each other (saying "I'm fine" through a clenched jaw), the signal distorts and your partner has to decode which channel to trust.
Emotional authenticity — the performer is genuinely engaged, not performing a performance. If you're scared in the scene, the fear lives in your body. If you're acting scared while winking at the audience, you've added a layer of irony that muddies everything. The audience may not consciously name the fake, but they feel the incoherence — trust erodes and the scene loses ground.
Emotional authenticity is the mechanism by which signal fidelity is most reliably achieved. When you're genuinely in it, your channels align automatically.
90% of beginners prioritize novelty over legibility — pirates, aliens, talking parrots. They think "I need to be original." Del Close: "The truth is funny. Honest discovery, observation, and reaction is better than contrived invention."
Honesty expresses itself as specificity. "I'm upset" is a report. "I found a Marriott receipt in your coat for two guests on the night you said you were at your mother's" is truth. The specific detail is what makes the signal clear — it gives your partner an exact thing to react to rather than a vague emotional weather report. Two people doing their taxes isn't a blockbuster — unless the husband is genuinely terrified of the wife's reaction to a receipt he found.
Terry Withers: "You have to be brave, because it is very scary to get in front of an audience, tell them you are going to be funny and then just be honest instead."
A common misreading: "be honest" does not mean your character should always tell the truth. Characters lie constantly in great scenes. The honesty is the performer's — honestly committing to the character's fear, desire, or deception. The husband who says "I don't know anything about a receipt" while his hands shake is a lying character played by an honest performer. The audience reads both layers. Performer honesty is about commitment to the reality; character honesty is optional and often dramatically wrong.
Keith Johnstone reframes this entirely: the problem is not dishonesty but censorship. Performers have been trained to reject their first impulse in favor of something "better." "The more obvious he is, the more original he appears." His version of "be honest" is "stop blocking yourself." The honest response is whatever you were going to do before you decided it wasn't good enough.
Mick Napier would caution that "be honest" as an instruction can itself become a trap — one more rule to self-monitor. His alternative: do something, commit fully, and honesty emerges as a byproduct of total commitment rather than a separate directive.
Be honest isn't a moral instruction. It's a clarity instruction. It raises the signal-to-noise ratio. Honest signals are clear. Clever signals are muddy. Authenticity maintains shared state coherence — it gives other players something solid to react to. Constant irony or wackiness gives your partner nothing to grab onto.