This is one such article about one such show.

Ashley and I both play on a team called The One Four Fives. It’s a narrative musical improv team that has been doing shows in St. Louis (and beyond) since about 2018.

We had a show this past weekend that felt particularly good. It was all of the things I love from a musical improv show. It had things that made me laugh, it had heart, and regarding the narrative, it had a story that was clear.

And for folks out there who have either watched narrative improv or been on a team, narrative improv doesn’t always feel clear.

There have been plenty of narrative shows where I’m standing on the sidelines thinking

“Okay, I know I’m probably supposed to come out in this next scene... I know there is technically a story happening… I have watched all of it so far… I’m thinking really really hard about it… and I still have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do.”

But for some reason this show wasn’t like that. It all kind of felt surprising while we were doing it, but somehow also felt inevitable.

Photo by Maximilian Bungart on Unsplash

To give you a little context:

Our suggestion for a location was “JAZZ CLUB.” We did an opening number painting the picture of it. Then our first scene started in the bathroom between a woman who desperately wanted to audition as a dancer at the club, and her dishwasher friend who was encouraging her to go for it.

She sang what was basically an “I Want” song about her dream of performing onstage and being seen and accepted.

I forget the order that all of this happened. But at some point, somebody walked into the bathroom and established that she was the principal dancer at the club. Then somebody else walked in and announced that he was the vice principal dancer, because apparently we had discovered a very stupid (and fun) pattern where everybody who worked at this jazz club needed to walk into the bathroom.

Next it was the door guy. He’d been around forever, and at some point we learned that he used to be a musician. Great detail. We’re still in the first scene and have zero idea about how that will pay off.

Eventually everybody left except the original two characters and they started talking about the audition. “Was the principal dancer actually holding it? Was there somebody else they hadn’t met yet?”

I hadn’t gone out yet and boy did that feel like a gift.

So, I walked into the bathroom, washed my hands and quickly stablished that I was the person running the auditions. Then I immediately started correcting the aspiring dancer’s posture and being generally strict and unpleasant and German.

We all remarked after the show that it was a longer first scene than we would normally do. It was also, in retrospect, doing a lot of really helpful work.

By the time we left that bathroom, we had:

• An aspiring dancer who desperately wanted something

• The friend who believed in her

• The established star who appeared to be competition

• The old musician who no longer played music

• The mean person controlling access to the stage (me)

None of us really knew what was going to happen from there, but all of these moves constrained the world enough that, I think I can safely speak for all of us, we were feeling inspired right out of the gate. We were immediately leaving breadcrumbs for each other without fully knowing where any of them led.

The principal dancer was a breadcrumb. The door guy having once been a musician was a breadcrumb. My asshole audition guy was a breadcrumb. None of us knew which of those things would become important. We were just putting specifics into the world that anybody else could pick up later.

After watching that first scene (and participating briefly), I immediately had an initiation for a second scene in mind.

I came out to hold auditions, which inspired the principal dancer to appear. I immediately told her I didn’t need to see her audition because, snootily, I’d seen her stuff. Everybody had. She’d been doing it for 25 years and the club needed new life. She was old news.

And, suddenly, I was the antagonist!

It wasn’t some big grand decision on the sidelines that the show needed a capital “A” Antagonist. I just felt it appropriate to place the character within the context of the relationships and information that already existed. A fancy way of saying “yes, and.” Making the obvious choice with those things created story, but I wasn’t writing it.

And I think the word “obvious” is important here. Obvious doesn’t have to mean boring when the context around the choice is specific enough. I wasn’t trying to surprise anybody with a wildcard move, but that didn’t mean there was only one move available to me. I still had a ton of creative freedom. I was simply improvising inside the world we had already made, and out of those choices and their consequences, plot emerged.

And wouldn’t you know it, the show kept doing that.

We discovered that this jazz club didn’t even play jazz anymore. My character had replaced it with ska music played from tracks. PICKITUPPICKITUPPICKITUP.

Later on, the old door guy pulled out his baritone saxophone in an alley and revealed that he was an incredible player. The principal dancer and aspiring dancer, who initially seemed destined to be rivals, eventually found themselves on the same side.

As all of that happened, it felt like there were fewer and fewer possible shows we could be doing. And that was a good thing. I hope this distinction is clear because I think this is one of the real keys to doing narrative improv. Making choices + experiencing consequences = plot. Repeat.

And, to clarify, I don’t mean that the ending became predictable. Nobody knew that everybody would eventually storm the audition together, that the door guy would play his saxophone while everyone danced, or that my character would be so moved by it that he’d abandon his stupid ska tracks. Sorry, Reel Big Fish.

But once it happened, it felt like: Of course.

That feeling, surprising and inevitable, is something I’m increasingly interested in with narrative improv. I even think about it when Ashley and I do monoscene. I even think about it in shows with more scenes, where we’re time-dashing, or world-moving, or second or third-beating. Clarity creates context creates understanding, and then we have something to smash hard against and have a lot of fun.

Narrative and improvisation are asking slightly different things from us. Narrative is concerned what has already happened and accumulates. We care about a choice made 10 minutes ago because it’s impacting what’s happening right now. Improv wants us to be present. We’ve got to listen and respond to what’s happening vs. standing on the sidelines trying to write a perfect show.

“Continue the story” is a hard instruction to really nail. if I'm thinking about that I’m actually on the sidelines thinking about what happens next, what the plot, needs etc.

And then I’m in my head, planning… writing…YUCK. I don’t want to live there. I want to be improvising. Out there in the scene!

And when all my friends are making clear moves, I get to go: “I run this club, I think it’s dying, and this dancer represents everything stale about it.”

That feels simple and playable to me.

Simple and playable means easy, and easy means fun. We accidentally established enough people wanting things in relation to each other that eventually we didn’t have to keep inventing a narrative. The choices we’d already made started exerting pressure on the choices that came next, and all that pressure turned into momentum.

Oh no… I’m referencing back to my physics article… but you get the point.

At the beginning of a show, we can do basically anything. That sounds freeing, but “anything” can actually be kind of a bad scene partner. As we make choices, the possibilities start to narrow.

Obviously, I don’t think the lesson here is that every narrative musical should begin with the entire cast walking into a bathroom… or should it…?

I think I’m more interested in what that early stupid bathroom scene accidentally accomplished, which was giving us a shared world early enough that we could spend the rest of the show living inside it and playing.

I’ve done a lot of intention-setting myself, but I have to be totally honest…

I’ve mostly only gone through the motions.

I caught myself mid-lip service recently, and it got me wondering: who am I performing for when I set a thoughtful intention only to abandon it moments later? I arrived at a disappointing but unsurprising answer. It’s me. I’m who I’m performing for.

It’s true that I’m typically sharing my pre-show intentions with a team or teammate, but they’re not the reason I do it - or pretend to, as it were. I know this because at least half of the time I’m the one gathering everyone around and raising the question of individual intentions.

So for some reason I think it’s something I ought to do, and it’s a box I like to check. But what’s the point? An intention is something you sit with and nourish and carry with you into your show; it informs how you approach the work and shapes your priorities. But I tend to share as though I’m getting something off my chest.

It turns out, I’m not setting intentions. I’m offering confessions.

This past weekend Ryan and I put up another No Edit after a 13-week hiatus from the show. In the meantime, we’ve been performing with teams at the Improv Shop and bringing shorter Touch Baseball shows to festivals, so we’ve been getting regular reps throughout the summer. But coming back to a longer, more ambitious project after a full quarter felt like pressure. So I asked Ryan earlier in the week if he was rolling around any intentions before the big show. Of course he did, and of course he was incredibly thoughtful, and of course he asked the question of me in return.

What I didn’t realize until well after the show was over was that the intentions I set were the same notes I’d given myself 3 months ago - the same disappointments I carried offstage from our last performance.

And I suppose it makes sense to turn those disappointments into goals or objectives, but in order to do that you have to reframe disappointments into actual opportunities. And boy oh boy, that’s a whole other ballgame.

So in an effort to be more intentional about setting my intentions for shows, I’ve laid out what I see as the necessary steps for turning “stuff I do wrong” into “opportunities to improve” Because criticizing myself and then determining to just “do better” isn’t a useful path forward.

Setting Intentions for Your Next Improv Show in Five (mostly) Easy Steps

1. Reflect on your last show. Be critical.
   You will anyway, so might as well plan for it. It feels impossible to be neutral about our own art, so go ahead and wallow in coulda, shoulda, woulda.

2. Quit being critical.
   Seriously, quit. Set a timer, and when the clock hits zero, move on from the notes and the self loathing. It seems obvious, but making the decision not to dwell is easier said than done. It’s great to be able to look at your show dispassionately, but you can only stay detached for so long. If the critic’s eye is the only one we turn on our art, your relationship to it will sour very quickly. And what’s even worse, your ability to critique your improv won’t turn into anything useful. In fact, it might get you more in your head and start to set you back. Because knowing what went wrong is only half the battle; your next task is figuring out what it looks like for things to go right.
   

3. Run diagnostics and turn notes into opportunities.
   Take a look at what didn’t feel great and interrogate why. It’s another obvious step, but there’s value in being deliberate here. This step is a tactical one, and it helps me move into an opportunity mindset. In other words, I have to see what’s lacking in my show as something with a solution, NOT as a character flaw.
   
   It’s possible you’re a more emotionally regulated person than I am (lucky you), but if you’re anything like me, it helps to actively reframe critical notes into exciting possibilities.

   
   Pro Tip: This is where a coach really comes in handy. They can give candid feedback and take the pressure of being impartial off your shoulders. Improv is hard, so it’s smart to ask for help.

   Now maybe your scene’s logic was muddy. Why? It’s not because you’re bad at playing logically or because you’re an illogical person (with nothing to offer anyone who’s kidding herself about all this improv stuff…see step 2). It’s more likely you missed some key information or never specified your base reality. The why takes us from a disappointing feeling to an acute opportunity, from high-stakes to hope. And that takes us to step 4:
   

4. Pick something actionable to focus on the next time.
   Once we’ve established why the something that felt hard was hard in the first place, we can find tactics - i.e. behaviors - to get us moving in a more desirable direction.
   
   Why are behaviors important? At the end of the day, your intentions are just goals for next time. So make them small, actionable, and achievable!
   
   ”Getting good” doesn’t set anyone up for success. Establishing relationships early in the scene is hella doable, especially if you go into the show giving it special, intentional attention.
   
   Now there’s rarely a silver bullet that will course correct every scene work snag you run into, so it’s likely you’ll have a number of whys and a number of strategies on your list to try. Still, pick one. M a y b e two. More than anything, don’t try to do it all. Actionable goals tackled one hundred at a time set us up for more failure than success.

5. Celebrate what you’re doing well.
   Step 5 is the most important of all. No joke. While this step doesn’t necessarily help set an intention, it does give you the space to be intentional. If I’m going to perform with a goal in mind, I have to give myself permission to focus on it. Ryan likes to say that we don’t rise to the occasion, we fall to the level of our training. But that becomes an awfully painful fall if what we’ve practiced is questioning and criticizing ourselves.

   Maybe muddy logic has me thinking that I should invest more energy into clearer, more specific base reality. But if I’m also worried that I won’t be able to sustain my emotional point of view or supply realistic object work, my attention will be divided, and I simply won’t have as much energy to invest. In other words, I have to have confidence in what I know and trust my background software to do its thing.
   
   Practicing positivity makes that difference.

   ---

I like having a 5-step plan, but if I was going to add a sixth it would be this: trust your scene partner. Maybe it goes without saying, but a scene’s success doesn’t rest solely on your shoulders. If I could control for every potential outcome then maybe I could claim that distinction, but improv isn’t about control. It’s about playing with people who have your back despite not being in control. When I trust my teammates to accept my imperfections, then I can take the space to work on them.

Of course, trust doesn’t just fall out of the sky or happen because my brain knows I need it, so this should be an actionable goal, too.

I’ve written a bit about that here as a potential starting point. Ryan wrote even more (and even more eloquently) about it here. But every relationship is different, so it might take some trial and error. Either way, take that time; it’s worth it. Trusting a teammate like Ryan has made it so much easier for me to board up the doors to the confessional. Why? Because I know he’s not there to absolve me, and he doesn’t make me feel like I ought to repent.

And that’s what you deserve, too - teammates that let you fail, space to try, and time to grow. Of all the intentions we could set, maybe that should be at the top of our list. So go nourish those places and relationships, and then every so often go practice what you’ve learned on stage.

We both felt good about it, and there were a couple of moves in particular I want to zoom into to examine why I think they “worked.”

Both Ashley and I have written extensively about “making things matter,” and we’ll often come up with example scenes to illustrate points clearly.

The trouble with example scenes is that they’re usually written backwards.

We already know the thing matters. We invent the perfect unusual detail or emotional discovery, then construct a scene around it to demonstrate how an improviser might recognize and heighten it.

But that’s not how an actual improv scene works.

When something first appears, we genuinely don’t know if it’s a good idea or if it’s going to become important. We definitely don’t know that eight minutes from now it’s going to provide some incredibly satisfying payoff.

We just have a… thing.

And I’m increasingly interested in what we do after we have the thing.

Because I don’t think the content of what Ashley and I discovered during this particular show is actually all that important in terms of teaching. In retrospect, I can tell you the story and make it sound like we stumbled into this wonderfully constructed narrative.

But we didn’t know that while we were doing it.

We just started… pointing at things.

Not literally.

We pointed with pauses. We pointed with long looks. We pointed by taking an extra second to react before responding. We pointed by allowing something that just happened to land and occupy the scene for a moment before introducing the next thing.

We check in with each other (and the audience) by giving certain moments more space than the moments around them.

And I think that space matters as much as the content between it.

Call this pace. Call this tempo.

But be wary of conflating this with the advice we’re sometimes given to “slow down.” That can be a fine note and one I’ve given (and received) in the past, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about here. I’m saying that you can play as quickly or as slowly as you want and still point at things to make “space” in your show.

Even the fastest tempos have space between the notes, and some notes are held longer than others. The duration of a note—and the space surrounding it—helps us understand the notes around it and establishes rhythm.

Think of the famous opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:

Bum bum bum BUUUUUUM.

Bum bum bum BUUUUUUM.

Imagine if every note received exactly the same amount of time.

Bum bum bum bum. Bum bum bum bum.

It’s technically the same sequence of notes, but in the real version, that held note points to itself.

This one. Stay here.

And because Beethoven stays there, we do too.

I think we can do the same thing in improv.

During our set at Countdown, Ashley and I found ourselves playing an older married couple living in a big, grand, Gothic castle. Between us was a long dining table that stretched nearly the entire width of the stage. And hanging above the midpoint of that table was a giant painted portrait of my dead father, keeping watch over the room.

We’d established that when my father was alive, he sat at one end of the table and my mother sat at the other. That was simply how things were done. And even though he was dead, I was still deeply committed to keeping them that way. Ashley, meanwhile, wanted me to come over and eat with her on her side of the table. I was horrified by the idea. Crossing the midpoint meant passing directly underneath my father’s portrait and, more importantly, violating the rules he’d left behind.

Eventually, Ashley convinced me to do it.

So I crossed the midpoint of the table.

And immediately tripped and spilled my dinner all over the floor.

Now, I could have tripped, quickly picked myself up, and moved on. But instead, I looked down at the food. And took a beat.

Then I slowly tilted my head up toward the portrait of my father. And took another beat.

My eyes got wide. I looked horrified. Ashley saw that I was horrified. The audience saw that I was horrified. None of this took all that long (3 or 4 seconds total probably).

At the time, I didn’t know that the trip was going to become an important part of some larger story. But once it happened, I gave myself, Ashley, and the audience a little bit of time to look at it.

First: the food. Then: my father. Then: my reaction to my father.

And in doing so, we all got to arrive at the same conclusion together:

Oh. His father did this. Or, at least, he thinks his father did this.

Suddenly the thing we had established a few moments earlier (dead father, his imposing portrait, this stupid terror I had about crossing an imaginary line underneath it) had more weight.

And instead of explaining all of that, I just pointed at it. And to reinforce my pointing, Ashley pointed at it too by pausing and letting the moment land.

The important thing, though, is that I wasn’t pointing at it because I already knew where it was going. I was pointing at it to see if it might go somewhere. And I think that “pointing” is especially important in improv because, of course, none of this stuff was actually there.

In my brain, I know exactly where I’ve decided that portrait is hanging and what his face looks like when I stare up at it. But just because something is clear to me doesn’t mean I’ve made it clear to the audience.

Because we’ve established all of this information through our base reality (the table, the portrait, the place settings, the silverware, the food, etc.) we’ve given the audience a lot to keep track of. And… they can’t actually see any of it.

So part of our job is showing them what, among all of that information, they should be paying attention to at any given moment.

The table is there. The food is there. My father is there. But once I spill the food and look up at the portrait, suddenly:

Bum bum bum BUUUUUUUM.

This one. Stay here.

And if we’re playing clearly and paying close enough attention to each other, I don’t need to look at Ashley and actually say, “My God. I crossed the midpoint of the table against my father’s wishes and now his ghost has punished me by making me spill my dinner!”

Sure, that makes the idea clear, but it would also do all of the audience’s work for them. Boring.

Instead, those moments where I’m pointing give all of us time to put the pieces together. The audience is using them, Ashley is using them, and I’m using them too.

For a few seconds, I’m just asking everyone in the room to look at the same thing.

In improv, a thing happens, and we immediately say another thing. Then our scene partner says another thing. Then we add another detail. Then something else happens. Ad nauseam. But sometimes the most useful thing you can do after something happens is to make sure everyone saw the thing happen.

A big ass neon sign with casino bells going off in the background saying:

“THIS IS IMPORTANT. LOOK AT THIS.”

Later in the scene, it happened again. At one point, I slipped in the food I’d spilled and blamed Ashley for colluding with my dead father against me. Eventually, we made up, and I finally sat down to eat with her.

Then I started choking.

Ashley jumped up and gave me the Heimlich maneuver, and I spat a mouthful of potatoes directly onto the portrait of my dead father. Again, I stopped. I looked up at the portrait. And I let myself be horrified by what I had just done. By this point, though, we had already taught the audience how to read that look.

So when the potatoes hit his face, we didn’t need to establish any of that again. We just needed to point.

There’s a version of this scene where we make all the exact same moves and none of it feels particularly significant. It’s just a series of things that happened.

I hope it’s been helpful to describe the scene and what happened to make the connections, but I want to be clear that I don’t think the content itself is what created the payoff. It was the attention we gave that content along the way that allowed it to become something more.

And I think that distinction is important because it’s very easy to look at a scene in retrospect and assign some kind of inherent value to the ideas that “worked.”

Sure, the portrait, spilled food, and potatoes all “worked.” But we didn’t know any of that when those things first appeared. We didn’t keep pointing at those things because we knew they were important. Pointing at them was part of how they became important.

And this is where I want to return to the idea of “creating space” and remind you that this works at any rate of play. Go fast! Go slow! Have a scene with 400 ideas in it!

But every once in a while, hold the note.

Give yourself, your scene partners, and the audience a second to see what just happened and put the pieces together. Maybe in that second, you’ll discover something more than you would have if you’d immediately moved on.

We spend a lot of time in improv expanding, creating, heightening. Making things bigger. Making everything more more more.

I’m not saying we should stop doing that. But I am saying that once you’ve made something, make sure you give everyone a chance to see it.

You won’t always need another thing. Sometimes you’ll just need to point at the thing you already have and decide that it’s worth exploring.

As improvisers, actors, clowns, or theater kids our first encounter with mirroring probably involved standing across from another person and attempting to match their movements as closely as possible.

It’s an important exercises because “doing as someone else does” takes a lot more effort and restraint than we might initially think. It requires active noticing and extreme attention to detail. Plus, it’s kind of embarrassing, which is an important hill to climb as early in our performance careers as possible.

But maybe most importantly, it demands we follow without hesitation all while quieting the voice in our head screaming to be in charge or to editorialize. A good mirroring drill should help us practice handing control over to someone else without mistaking that for passivity. Mirroring takes effort; if we don’t focus and really try, we get sloppy. Not to mention that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that people are infinite wells of detail, which reframes the exercise from “all I get to do is what my partner does…” to “look at all I’m being tasked with doing!”

But mirroring isn’t just a drill. It’s a tool we reach for onstage all the time when players need to glom or adopt shared points of view. Group scenes, group games, scenes featuring peas in a pod, and tag runs relying on repetition all benefit from players seamlessly choosing to “do as someone else does.”

But lately I’ve been thinking about mirroring during scenes in which the POVs are not identical. Someone is angry, someone else is sad, conflict is escalating. And all I want to see is more mirroring.

But it’s not mirroring in the traditional sense so let’s call it FUNHOUSE MIRRORING instead.

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Some totally real shows that I didn’t make up for this article and hope to produce someday:

• “Improvised Avengers: Endgame… The Musical”

• “Knife Fight: Improv with REAL Knives”

• “Improvised Muppet General Hospital”

• “Even Hotter Vampires Than You Can Imagine Doing Improv”

I think they’re all pretty good. Hopefully, at this point you’re thinking, “Wow. Yes. One ticket to Hot Vampire show please.”

And a good hook is great. But when it comes to producing a show, this is only one type of value.

1. Marketing value, baby. (GETS ATTENTION)

I’ve got a clever enough idea articulated in such a way that puts butts in seats. AKA: the HOOK. Good marketing value opens doors and creates opportunities. A great hook on a festival submission can mean the difference between acceptance and rejection.

A catchy concept that practically designs a poster for you (paging hot vampires again) will snag attention in For You pages much more easily than something with less sizzle.

However, there’s also…

2. Audience value, baby. (EARNS TRUST)

(I don’t know I guess I’m sticking with the “baby” thing for now?)

Audience value is how likely someone is to come back, or recommend your show to a friend. Does the execution keep the promise of the show, and is the show… good?

We need both. And if you are producing a show, it’s important to identify these as two related, but distinct challenges.

1. How do I get someone to buy a ticket?

2. How do I make them want to come back?

A clever hook or premise is often the answer to Problem 1. It only answers Problem 2 if the show delivers.

Your hook has a half-life. It’s incredibly valuable right up to the point of the lights fading. Once the show starts, the value of your premise goes down, and the value of your scene work goes up.

Every show's premise eventually becomes normal. Great formats continue generating interesting improvisation long after that happens. The novelty wears off, but the format sticks around.

Which got me thinking...

If audience value is what keeps people coming back, what kinds of show formats tend to create it? I don’t know if there’s one perfect recipe, but I have noticed that my favorite formats tend to have a few things in common. They...

1. Change how you improvise

2. Create fun improvisational problems to solve

3. Reward mastery

You might notice that none of these have anything to do with marketing. That's because audiences don't really experience your hook. They experience what that specific show allows you to create.

I can illustrate all of these things with one show that does it better than most:

The Improvised Shakespeare Company.

If you’re not familiar with Improvised Shakespeare, I highly recommend seeing it if you can. Pulling this description directly from their website:

Based on one audience suggestion (a title of a show that has never been written), The Improvised Shakespeare Company® creates a fully improvised Shakespearean masterpiece right before your eyes. Nothing has been planned out, rehearsed, or written. All of the dialogue is said for the first time, the characters are created as you watch, and if ever you're wondering where the story is going...so are they! You've never seen the Bard like this before!

I’ve seen them half a dozen times and their show is never disappointing.

If we apply our criteria above, we’re doing some serious box checking.

Their format absolutely changes their behavior. First, they attempt to do the entire show in iambic pentameter. And even in the moments they don’t get it perfect, the attempt is still extremely entertaining.

Second, the subject matter, the characters, and the plots all typically revolve around big Shakespearian story archetypes: love, loss, war, betrayal, etc. What’s fun about archetypes is that you can find infinite variations in just a handful, which makes shows feel accessible and human but without feeling same-y every time.

The show provides interesting constraints in this way, and creates those fun improvisational challenges. Because even if they get a suggestion of something that feels un-Shakespearian at face-value, they will still be channeling “robot cowboys” through the lens of The Bard.

Lastly, this is a show that absolutely rewards mastery. Sure, the clarity of the show name and the open frilly shirts and pantaloons do some lifting on the front end. But the show delivers.

The rhymes. The stakes. The twists. Shakespeare tells BIG stories and if the scene work wasn’t up to snuff, it wouldn’t be as celebrated as it is.

The task they’ve set out for themselves seems almost impossible–to improvise language and plot reminiscent of one of the most celebrated writers in human history. And it’s so clear they’ve worked their asses off to do it.

Ok, enough glazing those folks. Back to how this applies to the rest of us mortals.

If you’re producing a show, some of the first questions might be:

1. What sounds fun?

2. What are we trying to get out of it / what is the show trying to accomplish?

3. Is the format conducive to that outcome?

Ashley and I do a monoscene because we like depth. That’s the kind of improvisation that excites us. If there was another show format that did that as well, we’d probably do that. But the monoscene gets us where we want to go.

And admittedly, our team struggles with “the hook” of it all. I know there are festivals and opportunities we miss out on because we aren’t hot vampires (yet). It’s harder for us to clip out shows for social media, because often the thing that makes people laugh or cry was several minutes in the making.

Every format comes with tradeoffs. Some are easier to market than they are to perform. Others are harder to explain, but people fall in love with them once they experience them.

The question is what those tradeoffs are buying you. Better marketing? Or better improv?

All you can really do is answer some of those questions for yourself and continue to find what you’re excited to do. Lean into things that are challenging. Experiment. Adapt. Try again.

The best formats shouldn’t force you to choose between having something awesome on a poster, and something that feels fun and fulfilling in the moment. A good hook should create better improv.

So, we’ve got the cowl. We’ve got the fangs. We can’t see ourselves in the mirror, but we know we look hot.

Now, what are we going to do with it?

Let’s dive in.

- this one’s for you!

First things first, we need to define some terms.

A walk-on is a scene work mechanic in which a player enters and introduces an additional character in a scene that has already begun.

A walk-off occurs before the scene’s final edit when the player who executed a walk-on exits.

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As mechanics go, walk-ons are about as simple as they come, and you know what that means! They can make scenes really tricky for players who mistake their being simple for their being easy.

Walk-ons raise a lot of questions, including but not limited to the following:

• Will my teammates be annoyed if I walk on?

• Will my teammates understand my idea?

• Did I just miss my chance to walk on?

As with all things in improv, walk-ons aren’t constrained by rules that define correct or incorrect execution. In an art form that can technically make anything work, they ask improvisers to use their discretion. So the questions above make a lot of sense, but they don’t necessarily help build the confidence we need to make a confident and helpful walk-on happen.

I prefer these questions:

• Would this scene benefit from additional characters?

• How precisely would it benefit from that addition?

This is a very short and very non-exhaustive list, but it gets at the heart of what an improviser needs to know to execute the most informed (i.e. fun) walk-on possible. So let’s take them one at a time.

Would this scene benefit from additional characters?

It might seem obvious, but we have to ask ourselves if rushing into a scene will actually do the scene any good.

But you’re thinking, Duh, Ashley, I want to do good improv…so I’m obviously not going to do something that I think isn’t good…

Fair. But “good” - and for whom - comes in all shapes and sizes. Walk-ons require us to put ourselves out there and put a big ole spotlight on our artistic choices. That takes a particularly high degree of confidence (good!), which runs parallel to high degrees of ego (not so good…).

The real question is not whether I have confidence in my idea (sitting in my head on the sidelines) but whether I have confidence in the scene (happening in front of me on stage).

Ego tells me to prioritize my own creations - and reputation - over and above the effort of the team. It’s natural, and it happens to all of us, so it’s not something to beat ourselves up over. But it is something to develop awareness around because when you have a split second to act, it’s incredibly easy to confuse controlling, diverting, or interrupting a scene with supporting a scene.

When I ask myself if a scene would benefit from additional characters, I’m really asking a more fundamental question:

What’s the best way I can participate in the good work my friends are already doing?

In other words, I have to believe in the scene that’s unfolding before me - believe that it’s good - to really support it. Once I do that, my decision making becomes a lot easier because I won’t be replacing their work with my own. I’ll be collaborating on the project they’ve already begun.

And while it might seem that I’m focused on the semantics, the posture we have on the sidelines makes a huge difference. We’re taught that the moves we make ought to be “helpful.” But let’s think about that for a moment. It’s a great and supportive instinct to build, but without a little interrogation it can also lead us to subconsciously judge our teammates in an effort to assess whether or not they need us. The truth of the matter is that we all need each other all the time; that’s what being a team means. But there’s a major difference between helping collaboratively and helping charitably.

And sure, sometimes we see our teammates struggling, and they genuinely need our intervention. But I’d argue that the principle remains the same, and perhaps applies even more, for scenes that feel difficult.

My job as an improviser is to say “Yes!” not, “Step aside, I’ll take it from here.”

So how will I know if a scene would benefit from additional characters to justify a walk-on? In short, I’ll know if I know what my teammates’ project is. Just because two people on stage reference another character doesn’t mean that character needs to make an appearance. If they’ve established a pattern that I recognize and could help heighten with a walk-on, I’m getting in there. But if they’re deeply focused on building a two-person dynamic, I may recognize that where they need me most is on the sidelines.

How precisely would it benefit from that addition?

Now that I’ve identified the project my teammates have started in their scene, and I have confidence in the fact that they need me no matter what, my next task is to determine exactly how they need me. We have some options:

• don’t walk on

• walk on

• walk on and walk off

Great! But how do we know which is the right move?

Well…it just depends.

I know! It sucks not to know for sure, but every scene/form/piece is different and calls for something unique to its situation.

Ultimately, when I consider walking on, walking off, or none of the above, I’m really weighing what that choice would accomplish and whether or not that’s in alignment with the project of the scene.

Remember: it’s not really about what I should do - it’s about what the scene is doing.

Here’s an example:

Two players have established a scene. They are kids, and they broke something valuable in the living room. They’re panicking and trying to fix it.

The fun of the scene is seeing how much worse these kids make the situation in their panicked attempts to fix it.

So what do you do to participate in the fun? Based on what your friend shave established so far, you want to find ways to make it worse, to raise the stakes, and to increase the panic.

Here’s another non-exhaustive list of options:

1. You don’t walk on. You DO provide sound effects to heighten the kids’ destruction.

   1. This is such an underrated move because there is SO much that can be done from the sidelines to yes, and a scene in simple, specific ways. Even standing, listening, and waiting can be the right choice if it means you’re able to edit at the absolute best moment.

2. You walk on. You enter as another sibling, friend, cousin, etc. and recognize/ heighten the gravity of the situation (“Mom is going to be home any minute!!”). You join them in their panic.

   1. One of the best ways to support the project of a scene is to glom onto, or mirror, the established POV. While you could walk on as an older sibling and just act annoyed that the mess is standing between you and your video games, this move wouldn’t offer a simple, strong “yes” to the established fun. It provides options which, splits the energy we can give to any single project in half.

   2. If you established an alternative POV, you could still say “yes” to the overall thrust of the scene, though it might take a bit more work and group mind. In this case you may walk on as that older sibling and in your frustration run off to tell a parent, heightening the panic of the original players.

3. You walk on and off again. You play dad who his ignorant of the disaster and, poking your head in the door, establish how valuable the broken item is (“You kids aren’t touching my big work award, right? It’s made of crystal…basically one of a kind. It’s the single best thing I’ve ever done!”). Having raised the stakes, you exit and leave the original two players to panic and carry on.

   1. If panic is at the center of the scene’s fun, walking on as a parent and remaining wouldn’t help that fun continue. It might eventually make sense to see the consequences - i.e. a reaction from mom or dad - but the basic game is enough to heighten and drive continued discovery. We don’t want a walk-on to make us abandon that pattern too soon.

So while the project of the scene might be specific and finite, the options are truly endless. Your choice may also be impacted by the demands of a specific form or limitations on time. Either way, the constraints are helpful guardrails when you have to rely on your discretion to make clear, efficient moves. Lean in to those constraints, and keep it simple.

Of course, improvisers rarely have time to run through a complex decision matrix from the sidelines. In order to take advantage of the present moment (here one moment and very literally gone the next), answering questions like these needs to happen fast. That means players have to develop some intuition, learn to trust themselves and their teammates, and swap hesitation for decisive, inspired action - even if that action is remaining on the sidelines.

It’s easier said than done, but I do have recommendations.

First, practice, practice, practice. It’s obvious, I know, but we’re not done…
Then, ideally with the help of a coach, discuss.

It doesn’t do you or your team any good to hope for ideal conditions and plan for perfect execution. Have a messy practice instead (or two or twelve…). When you know it’s going to be imperfect, it’s easier to overcome your hesitation, which gives you and your team a lot more to discuss when the scene ends. Having attempted some entrances and exits you can start to figure out what worked, what was unclear, what made it difficult for your teammates to say “yes,” and what felt inspired and supportive from top to bottom. Walk-ons require boldness, and experimenting with walk-ons is no different. Make big mistakes because that’s how you learn big lessons.

It also takes time to get inside your teammates’ heads, understand how they think, and intuit what they need. Take. the. time. After all, a walk-on is just another strategy for saying yes, and; it’s designed to be supportive, so it’s important to know what giving and receiving support in the context of the group dynamic feels like. Strong group mind takes a simple mechanic like a walk-on and renders it absolute magic in the hands of a truly in-sync team.

Second, watch improv shows.

I can’t stress enough how much seeing other players execute mechanics like these can help your progress. Improv isn’t math; it just isn’t enough to know the principles and rely on a set of rules. Because every scene is unique, the application changes every. single. time. And the more you watch, the more you’re exposed to successful (and unsuccessful) applications of the mechanics, the more you develop instincts for how to play. Plus, you can likely watch a lot more improv than you can practice. So drink it in, and learn from everyone.

If you have more tips and tricks about how to execute walk-ons/offs, leave them in the comments! Big thanks to for getting the conversation started…let’s keep it going!

My brain runs on them.

When I teach, I’m constantly looking for metaphors that make abstract ideas easier to grasp. We understand new ideas by relating them to old ones, and a good metaphor gives us something concrete to hold onto while we chew on something more complicated.

I’ve been noodling on this one for the past few days, and it’ll probably break eventually. But for now, I hope you find it useful.

For this article, we’re going to think of scene work as a ball sitting at the top of a hill…

This ball is POTENTIAL ENERGY and represents BASE REALITY.

• Who we are

• Where we are

• Our relationship

This base reality ball stores the possibility for our scene. And every specific contributes to that possibility. As we establish who we are, where we are, our relationship, and all the other fun little things that make up our shared reality, we’re shaping both the ball itself and the hill it will eventually roll down.

But nothing is moving yet.

We’re simply creating the conditions that will make future actions meaningful.

But not all specifics contribute equally.

Example: I establish that we’re surgeons. And you say we’re in a Wendy’s. And I say we’re ghosts. And you say we’re in medieval England…

We have lots of specifics, but they’re not necessarily working together. Each new detail forces both the players and the audience to throw away the mental model they were just starting to build.

But if…

Example: I establish that we’re surgeons. And you say we’re in an operating room. And I say we’re operating on our dad. And you say it’s heart surgery.

Suddenly each detail is reinforcing the last. The choices themselves aren’t particularly funny or dramatic on their own, but they do start to build something coherent.

Every specific should give us a better sense of how this world behaves once it's in motion. Every coherent detail reduces ambiguity. As the audience watches, they're quietly constructing a mental model of that world alongside us. We want that model to make sense.

And little by little, both you and your audience understand the emotional physics of your universe. We don't necessarily know exactly what will happen next, but we have clearer and clearer ideas about what could happen.

MOTION/KINETIC ENERGY is our SCENE WORK (us pushing the ball).

Scene work is simply action and reaction. And reaction is point of view and emotion made visible. Every reaction changes the scene and becomes part of a new base reality. Our new base reality gives us something new to react to, and so on and so forth.

This is the process of discovery.

The hill continues to evolve once the ball starts rolling. Every reaction reshapes the terrain, changing what becomes emotionally possible next.

Base reality creates possibility. Point of view interprets possibility. Emotion determines significance. Action and reaction make it all visible… which creates an updated base reality. Repeat.

The more coherent those pieces become, the more coherent the scene becomes.

Good improv is often more inevitable than it is surprising. I don’t think audiences watch improv because it’s “random,” “unpredictable,” or because “anything can happen.” I think they're enamored by watching coherence emerge from uncertainty.

If a scene is going well, both the players and the audience develop intuition about the world they're experiencing. We start to understand how this world behaves.

We won’t be able to predict it exactly from moment to moment, but once a player says that next line of dialogue or takes that next action, the feeling should be:

“Of course that’s what they’d say. Of course that’s what they’d do.”

These emotional physics are why a character like Ron Swanson can simply stand in a health food store and scowl, and it makes us laugh. We know this character and his world well enough to understand exactly why that environment would provoke that reaction. It’s not surprising, it’s inevitable!

And we want to discover scenes that feel inevitable. Every coherent detail of base reality matters. Every reaction matters. And scenes feel the best when we’re not inventing random information, but discovering details that are connected, and building toward something specific.

Maybe you’re thinking “cute metaphor, but what do I do with all of this?”

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Everything’s off the dome!

You never know what’s going to happen!

You’re coming up with ideas really fast!

You have to bounce off of other people

And they’re not wrong…at least not entirely. The marquee might read “comedy,” but improv shows promise drama - impressive displays of quick-thinking by performers lacking a safety net. So naturally it has a reputation for being a wild, anything-goes, expect-the-unexpected kind of art form.

Practitioners know better.

Improv theaters sell tickets on the back of surprising, off-the-cuff fun, but improvisers do their best work when shock and surprise aren’t the priority. We don’t practice saying the craziest thing we can think of; we practice listening and saying yes. We don’t practice spontaneity; we practice spontaneous collaboration. The most delightfully surprising shows are the ones when players forgo originality for agreement and make real-time cooperation look easy. Audiences, dazzled by a show that has never been seen before and will never be seen again, are none the wiser.

In a perfect world, anyway…

The hardest parts about improv are the parts that a general audience hardly notice and rarely praise. When was the last time a lay person gushed over your impressive listening skills?

But the pressure to impress your audience is real, so let’s be honest; we don’t get on stage without thinking about an audience’s admiration at least a little bit. The more Touch Baseball travels - Seattle, Chicago, Tampa, and Omaha are next on the calendar - the more I hope we’re showing audiences something they haven’t seen before. Because it would be such a shame - such an embarrassment! - to travel so far just to do something derivative.

And when you can’t blame the show on a script, it’s extraordinarily easy to give your energy to giving audiences what they paid to see: funny, shocking, wholly original content.

But that’s a trap.

So I’m here to say it: originality is way, WAY overrated. And it’s not really your job.

Case in point: the Armando.

I’ve been teaching an 8-week workshop on The Armando, which is a great challenge for our improvisers. The course spends a considerable amount of time covering different ways of pulling material from the monologue, be it the entire premise, a specific character, the world, a theme, or even a single word. The Improv Shop’s approach is organic, so monologue-inspired and/or premise-driven play can feel like an especially demanding mental obstacle course.

The great thing about the Armando is that tons of content is served up on a platter (a real treat if you’re typically starting from a single word suggestion); the difficulty is having the discipline to be inspired by, rather than just re-enact the story.

So the form asks players to thread the needle between taking material from the monologue and discovering the unexpected fun with your fellow improvisers.

Revisiting the Armando has reminded me how pressure to do something “original” limits how much we invest in the rest of the team which in turn limits the discoveries we make and the fun we can have. Consider what the form is offering and asking. First, you spend 5 or 10 or even more minutes hearing from a monologist. They tell a true story - not something invented, something experienced. They give you story and setting and character. They provide a tone and point at themes. They draw reactions from the audience.

The monologue is key to the Armando’s identity, which is designed to be referential. It’s not arbitrary or a way to kill time; it’s asking you to play with the monologue, directly and deliberately. After all, half the fun is seeing how improvisers refer back and play with the monologist’s story, so it’s critical to engage with that source material intentionally. And heightening the narrative premise isn’t your only option; there are a ton of ways to engage with the source material (see all those pulls I mention above), but vaguely gesturing back at the monologue - in an effort to introduce something new - is not one of them.

Yet, players still put pressure on themselves to offer up “originality” rather than connect to the monologue specifically. Why? Because we’re afraid that it’s lazy or it’s cheating to improvise with something you’ve already seen and heard; we’re afraid we have to earn our right to be on stage which means being memorable on our own terms.

Or maybe it’s because listening is really, extremely, freaking hard.

Either way, using the monologue in sharp, clear ways is "yes, and” on a macro level. It’s choosing to be inspired by someone else’s contributions and trusting that there is more to discover. It’s spontaneous collaboration, not unbridled originality, and it takes a ton of discipline.

And whatever your form, isn’t that what the improv asks us to do? Not to be unique but to be agreeable…and then discover the unexpected in the process.

So let’s reframe how a general audience experiences improv by peeling back the layers a bit. Because what they see might seem like flashy tricks, but there’s so much more at work under the surface.

Everything’s off the dome!
But you know that everything is inspired by your teammates.

You never know what’s going to happen!
But you know that you’re going to say and be told yes…so something’s always bound to happen.

You’re coming up with ideas really fast!
But you know that you’re listening really fast to ideas that were already there.

You have to bounce off of other people!
But you know that the real skill is tying yourself to other people’s ideas.

At the end of the day, improv is a truly subversive art form. After all, it gives us permission to radically share - share ideas, and laughs, and labor, and stage time, and risk, and success. It’s an art form that celebrates what we’re capable of when we work together and how truly unexpected results are a product of collaboration, not ego.

I hope it’s a nice reminder, for the next time you go on stage, that you don’t need to worry yourself with being original or funny. You will be! You’ll say yes, your teammates will say yes, and surprising, fun things will undoubtedly happen. And I hope you get your flowers! You deserve to be told you’re funny and smart and quick and original…along with everything else a grateful audience can throw your way. But I hope it’s also reassuring to remember that the real magic will be the parts they couldn’t even see.

For example, if the suggestion is “pier,” students might be:

• Ocean waves lapping

• Sea Lions barking

• Distant foghorns

• Tourists chattering

• Amusement park music

Or a seagull cawing.

After a beach soundscape, I had a student say something along the lines of:

“I wanted to be a seagull, but I can’t do a seagull ‘CAW!’. Then someone else made that noise a few minutes later, and they did it so much better than I could have.”

And yeah, the person who did it later did a great job–an eerily good seagull impression.

But just for fun I asked that first student to try it, and she shouted “CAW!” in a high-pitched voice. Everyone laughed and started giving her thumbs ups, so I asked them if that student had made that noise, would they have understood? And everyone raised their hand!

The barrier for participation for this student was a pitch-perfect seagull impression. “If I can’t do this exactly right, I might as well stay quiet.”

And that is a high bar to overcome. There are lots of spaces where perfect is the expectation, even though it’s impossible.

You ever quit something because you weren’t good at it right away?

You ever worked at a job where making a single mistake could put your whole career at risk?

That stuff gets in our bodies. It gets in our brains. And it conditions us to show up that way to everything, regardless of the stakes. Because once it’s ingrained that deeply, our bodies can’t tell the difference between trying not to piss our boss off, and stepping out into a dumb scene with a bold idea.

There’s also a very real fear of putting yourself out there and making a move that others might not understand. A lot of brain power (probably from middle school onward) is devoted to assimilation. We don’t want to stand out too much to avoid getting picked on, rejected, singled out, etc.

And that process either puts us on an island where we feel alone, or dulled down enough to be “accepted,” but still feeling alone. Neither of those options is great.

The best (but riskiest) option is to put ourselves out there. That requires trusting ourselves a little more than maybe we’re comfortable with, and trusting the people around us a little more too. Both take practice. Both require letting go.

And an overwhelming majority of the time, folks are going to pick up on what you’re putting down. In the right circumstances, your teammates are excited to support you. They’re curious about you. And whether your move is communicated perfectly (again, high bar) or comes out a little sideways, it doesn’t really matter all that much.

We can’t control the quality of every move. Our brains are too unreliable to be witty and sharp and funny and a perfect seagull 100% of the time. Those aren’t really decisions. They’re impulses. Sure, sometimes we get lucky and say exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment. And sometimes our ideas come out messy or incomplete.

But that doesn’t make them unworthy of sharing.

Your teammates can ask questions. They can connect dots. They can build on something rough around the edges.

They can do a lot more with your imperfect contribution than they can with your silence.

We can’t judge improvisation by the quality of our individual inputs. And the stakes can’t be as high as “perfection in every moment.” It’s too paralyzing!

It’s better to focus on choices. Making a bold initiation is a choice. Choosing to trust our teammates is a choice. Offering an idea before we’ve had time to polish it into something perfect is a choice. Those are things we can actually influence, and they’re a much better place to spend our energy than trying to guarantee perfection before we open our mouths.

You may be reading this and thinking to yourself “Ryan, but you don’t know me. I’m really weird!” But the weird, specific things about you are the good stuff. Your specificity is not what separates you from other people, it’s what connects you to them.

The guilty pleasure movie you’re afraid to share is secretly someone else’s too. That obscure ice cream combo you love and think you’ll be judged for? Someone you know also loves it.

If our bar for participation is the most perfect, composed, and “palatable” version of ourselves, we’re not really playing. We’re staying on the sidelines. We’re being safe. We’re being quiet. We’re spending all our bandwidth curating ourselves, when we could be connecting with each other.

The room doesn’t need a perfect seagull impression. It just needs someone willing to caw.

And this is hard for a ton of reasons. First of all, emoting is vulnerable. Improv asks you to perform without the safety nets of a script or rehearsal, so you’re already putting your neck out even before taking big emotional swings. Not to mention emotional reactions make the choices of your teammates really matter, which shifts control from you to them.

In short, fear makes emotions an especially hard hurdle for improvisers to jump.

And for the longest time, I chalked that fear up to the emotional act - to channeling something and having the boldness to embody it. So much of the risk we’re trying to navigate on stage is the judgment of our peers and observers, and nothing invites an audience’s judgment like over-the-top, hit-the-people-in-the-back-row emoting. And for many people that’s almost certainly part of it.

But only part of it.

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Feelings of low-grade sadness have followed me since I can remember, so even when something big happens I’ve got a compartment large enough to house nearly anything without it spilling over. If big sadness is a virus, depression is the antibody my body produces to dull it before it becomes tears.

If any of my readers are therapists, you are not allowed to think any more deeply about what this says about me.

But when I’m moved by something, the tears come fast. Those moments are sneaky. There’s zero prep time. Something hits me in the chest, and for a moment I can’t breathe.

Ashley and I went to New York this past weekend for the Del Close Marathon (there’s a lot more to say about this in a future article).

DCM is enormous. Six stages running simultaneously around the clock. So many teams from so many places that unless you’re famous, no one knows who you are, and only a handful of people will see your show.

And at festivals, there’s always something in the back of my mind, not calculating exactly, just a quiet background hum. Of course we do fests for fun, but also because we also want to make improv our “career.”

So I think: “Are we representing ourselves well? Are we doing our best to keep this thing we love alive? Is there someone here who thinks what we’re doing is good and might want to see it again?”

At DCM, that hum went quiet. Because of the sprawling, overwhelming nature of the festival, there was no action available. There was nothing to tend to. And that made room for everything else to get louder.

Slow puttering through museums. The Puerto Rican Day parade. The first World Cup matches. Dozens of languages floating by. People wrapped in their flags, dancing to the music they love with the people they love.

Walking back to the hotel through an hour of what I can only describe as borderline dangerous joy after the Knicks won the finals: strangers spilling out of bars, horns, flags, people grabbing each other, the whole city briefly becoming one room.

Many of these celebrations I could never fully understand but could completely feel.

And I cried. More than once.

I have given the last half decade of my life to this art form. Teaching it, performing it, coaching it, running a theater that exists because of it. There is not a single day where improv is not somewhere in my mind. Shows start to blend together. You look inward for what inspires you, and what you find are other improv shows and to-do lists–the snake eating its own tail.

This article was on my to-do list. But until this morning I didn’t know what to write about. I started thinking tactics, lessons, teaching. But everything felt forced.

I sat at the airport and started to think back on the trip, and that felt easier. I thought about how many times I got emotional and then started asking myself, “why?”.

“Why did you cry so much, idiot?”

Again, if you’re a therapist, I invite you to breeze past that.

And I think, upon reflection, it came down to “presence.” Not as some rote tool to be used for an artistic outcome, but as a thing that I can only know that I was in hindsight. And what a luxury to realize the value in retrospect so I didn’t waste the precious present mining it for #content and #outcomes.

That would be a different article–one that strips every authentic moment for parts and feeds a machine that eats only the proof you exist.

But this is not that.

It’s about a person walking around a city with nowhere to be and nothing to tend to, open in a way I usually don’t have the bandwidth to be. It’s about a person who forgot, for a few days, to be anywhere other than where I was.

I know experiences like that will make me a better artist. Seeking them out will make you one too. And that's fine. But it's not everything. The experience was enough–it doesn't need to become anything else to have mattered.

Today we’re revisiting the 5-Line scene because, as an exercise in fundamentals, it does a lot of good stuff…but it’s not a silver bullet.

I know this because Ryan and I practice 5-Line Scenes all the time. It’s a great way to get the juices flowing, and it’s a remarkably easy drill to run - in the car, at the airport, over text, in a bar - to squeeze in a bit of practice or warm up before a performance.

But eventually the exercise did its job; it made those first choices easier and then it made them second nature. Which left us looking for ways to level up and wishing we could targeting other important skills. I also noticed how 5-Line Scenes helped players during classes and coaching sessions…and what its limitations were as improvisers progressed into more advanced scene work.

So today I’m introducing 3 Variations on 5-Line Scenes, designed to help players target point of view, emoting, natural dialogue, and escalation - all in the drill-able little 5-Line package we’ve come to know and love.

That’s right - it’s an exercise post, everybody!

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While we agree on a lot of things when it comes to improv, we still have our own individual experiences and lenses.

We debate (kindly-ish) different vocabulary. We trade metaphors to try to make concepts more accessible to each other and our students. We tweak exercises constantly. We talk on the phone almost daily about what worked or didn’t in this or that show, and what we learned from classes we taught that week.

Last week she wrote an article that you should check out if you haven’t already. It covered how we got to creating “No Edit.” It gracefully tied in our return to the climbing gym (thank god), but mostly it was a vulnerable examination of what she’s working on right now.

And what surprised me most was that for as much as we talk, it was helpful for me to see her goals laid out clearly in her own words.

It made me want to reflect and examine my own feelings on our last show and get what I’m working on out of my brain.

From Ashley’s article:

At our last No Edit show, Ryan and I set an intention: have some freaking fun. I’m proud to report that we really did have a good time! It felt light and silly and dynamic. We laid on the floor, and we built an elaborate environment demanding absurd object work, and we both broke several times. Mission accomplished!

I’m happy to report that this is also how I felt about the show. Good start. She continues:

But I still came offstage harboring little disappointments with a list of notes in my head. It wasn’t a perfect show or, at least, it didn’t live up to my definitions of “our best.”

I also felt the same way. Hooray–we were both just a little disappointed!

Instead of rehashing her whole article (I couldn’t write it as well if I tried), I’m only going to focus on one move, and what I want to try differently next time.

To quickly catch you up on what happened in the show: We were college roommates putting the final touches on a giant Beetlejuice-esque miniature town. We had been working on it for months and was our beloved entry into a competition we deeply wanted to win. In the final hours we realized that my character had forgotten to put a dog park in, and there was no way we’d get a good score if there wasn’t one.

My character begins scouting the periphery of the model for a place to put the dog park so I didn’t have to lean over the table. But then I say something like:

“Worst case scenario I can always strap into the harness and hover over the town to put it somewhere in the middle.”

Then I gesture to the invisible crane holding up the invisible harness that is hovering over the invisible table. And Ashley says:

Are you sure you don’t want to just strap in now?

To which I reply:

No. Not right now. But I can later if we really need it.

I watched the playback and we both break, because the fact that we have a harness that can hold a grown adult in our dorm room is really dumb and fun.

But that’s the moment I want to zoom into.

I know why I said “no.” In a longer monoscene, I like having a little something in my pocket for later. Call it what you want:

Planting seeds. Chekov’s Harness.

But in retrospect, I don’t think I was planting. I think I was hedging. I was trying to keep control.

Fun aside: Ashley read this before I published it and insisted I mention her competing theory. She assumed part of why I said no was that I’d realized a floating harness in a dorm room doesn’t make physical sense. Like, it’s just the two of us up there so it would be physically impossible to accomplish. And I’m being 100% honest when I say that never crossed my mind. To me it was just like: yeah, we’ll figure it out. Which is funny, because apparently I was perfectly willing to try to float in mid-air, but not willing to surrender control of where the scene was headed.

And I keep imagining what would’ve happened if I’d said yes.

Maybe the harness breaks.

Maybe I collapse into the model and destroy months of work.

And maybe our characters suddenly have to confront the thing underneath the project instead of the project itself. And that, for me, is where more interesting stuff lives.

Ashley touched on it a little bit in her article, but there’s a level of depth we seek in our shows. Especially in No Edit, because we have the extra time, we get an opportunity to mine and explore two people who feel deeply real. And I think in this case, me hedging my bets denied us that opportunity.

Coulda woulda shoulda. I know.

I tell my students all the time not to spend too much post-show energy lamenting all the choices they didn’t make.

And here I am lamenting.

Don’t get me wrong, the show was a blast. But that missing element, I think, was on the other side of me letting go of control.

We’ve done a lot of 18-25 minute monoscenes at this point, and I feel pretty comfortable in that rhythm.

But I tell you what, once we start crossing that 35-minute mark, my body feels that new territory. Cue my inner monologue. “What do you mean 10 more minutes? What do we do? Where do we go? How the hell do we sustain this and keep it interesting?”

And all the way back in the first minutes of the show, I have started planning for that feeling of unease 40-minutes later.

And I don’t want to play that way.

I want to know that I don’t have to plan. I want to prove to myself that we can figure it out if we do happen to find ourselves 40-minutes in with nothing to save us.

And because I can see that parallel version of our last show so clearly, it’s evident that this habit could be holding me/us back. I want to plant a seed early if that’s an active choice that I’m making. But I don’t want it to be a reflex that kicks up out of fear.

So, that’s what I want to work on.

I trust Ashley. I trust myself. And I trust what we do when we put our brains together on stage. I’m still going to be nervous crossing into the territory of those upper minutes. But I’m not going to let that fear burrow habits into me that make me play small.

I want to trust that if the harness breaks, we’ll figure out what happens next.

But I still came offstage harboring little disappointments with a list of notes in my head. It wasn’t a perfect show or, at least, it didn’t live up to my definitions of “our best.” So I started reflecting on how I define success in an art form like improv and interrogating not just what I know as an improviser, but what I practice. But to get into it, we need some context.

No Edit is Touch Baseball’s latest improv project, and it’s our most ambitious to date. In a nutshell, it’s an improvised play and a character study across 3 acts. No Edit is presented as a “new works” series during which the audience watches “a brand new play” performed by two actors. Andy - our coach, Artistic Director, friend, and all-around improv guru - hosts the show. He introduces himself as the director of the play and collects several words from the audience to build the play’s title. When lights come up, Ryan and I have found our “places” and the show begins.

We start with the play itself: a 35-40 minute monoscene. After intermission, lights come up on the actors in their dressing room debriefing the show immediately after bows. Eventually Andy interrupts with notes and ushers us “back out on stage” for a talkback with the audience. The show ends after we take several questions and do a bit of improv with people in the house (if you’d like a deeper dive into the show format, you can listen to an audio episode about a recent No Edit here).

No Edit was an idea born from the things Ryan and I love: grounded monoscenes aimed at depth, the craft of acting, emotional honesty, dramatic irony, and the weird posturing required of everyone who’s ever been on stage. We love getting to peel back the layers of performance - as characters in a play, as actors confronting vulnerability, as professionals answering to an audience. And we were delighted to discover that there is a tremendous amount of comedy in receiving realtime notes and questions on a show we just made up.

It was also designed to be a challenge. Touch Baseball has been doing 20-ish minute scenes consistently for 5 years, and we needed to push our limits and figure out how to expand on the form that had become a bit of a signature. We knew right away that we had to try sustaining longer monoscene, so we built a show around that.

And a surprising number of people came to watch. We were so grateful and - I think I speak for both of us - so so nervous. Worried even. I hadn’t felt such dread since performing my first Harold with my student team back when I was taking classes. Like before, I genuinely wondered if we’d crash and burn. And in some ways that’s a great place to be because before even walking out on stage I knew we’d met one of our first goals, even if accidentally.

Challenge ourselves - check.

The difference between then and now is that I spend more time teaching and coaching than I do actually improvising. So I have loads more vocabulary for identifying the flaws in my work today than I did years ago. And boy was I putting that vocabulary to use. It turns out that spending twice as long in an improv scene does demand different skills or, at the very least, some new muscle memory (shocker, I know).

Ryan and I have a penchant for grounded, emotional play. And that’s useful in a monoscene which needs enough depth and logic to be truly sustainable. Some might describe this as realism; we lean into the humanity of our characters often over and above their absurdity ( which can be fantastically fun to play but famously difficult to sustain). Ryan, referring to our audiences, will often tell me he wants to “take their heads off,” and he doesn’t mean with laughter. For Touch Baseball, making the audience care about (gasp over, empathize with, cry because of…) the characters is as satisfying as getting laughs. But that style also runs the risk of dipping into melodrama - something manufactured and unearned.

And this isn’t a dig at dramatic improv. My very favorite shows somehow manage to accomplish both. Through comedy, truth…through truth, comedy.

So we put No Edit on the books. Our first show was light but sweet - about a couple determining whether or not they were going to have a baby. Our second was much more morose - a young, optimistic man living with his angry uncle as they grapple with the terminal illness of the mother/sister connecting them. Our third show tried to thread the needle between saccharine and dour - a roommate trying to remind his friend that there are things worth living for after heartbreak.

To be clear (and so Ryan doesn’t kill me), there was a lot of be proud of in these improvised “plays.” But with each show we found ourselves thinking really hard and trying even harder, which made the first act feel weighty. I loved the idea of creating something really sophisticated, but the show felt big, the stakes felt high, and halfway through each show I felt like I was doing it wrong.

And in some ways, I was. I’d forgotten that grounded comedy is the outcome of taking every moment - especially the funny ones - seriously. It’s not something I could craft in advance or shoehorn last minute. It’s not what I do…it’s what I get if I stay present and honest. If I have my eyes on a particular type of story - on an ending - then I’m robbing myself of discovery.

And at about the 30 minute mark, I’d lose the stamina to keep digging and be surprised. Despite what I know and what I teach, I’d start plotting and planning and emotional truth would get more and more…dishonest.

Which brings me to our latest No Edit show and the intention we set for ourselves at the top. But first…a quick detour.

Today, for the first time in months (MANY months), Ryan and I went climbing. I introduced him to indoor rock climbing - something I’ve dabbled in since college - at about the same time we decided to become an improv team, and it’s been a nice ritual ever since. But this past year has been busy and tough, and I took a really long break. Or, rather, I didn’t prioritize it, and it fell out my routine more or less by happenstance.

Today we went back. It was my idea, but you wouldn’t have been able to tell if you’d been eavesdropping on us at the gym.

I groaned. “This is gonna suck”

I whined. “My god I’m out of shape. I don’t even think I can start at my usual grade.”

I self-flagellated. “This is what I get for not making the time.”

But Ryan stopped me as I tied in for my first climb. “Hey. We do this because it’s fun, and it’s good for us. We’re going to be gentle with ourselves.”

I didn’t really think about what he’d said until I’d schlepped halfway up the wall, completely dissatisfied with my form.

Oh my god, it’s improv.

I was rusty and frustrated. I knew what I’d been capable of before, but I was confronting what I was capable of today. I was catching myself in the process of doing a thing I genuinely love (the only workout that has ever made me feel strong) and bemoaning the fact that I wasn’t done.

I won’t belabor the metaphor, but improv puts me in much the same position. It can feel different from day to day, and I’m not always at my best. And when I try something new or more challenging, I get frustrated that I’m still in process.

But what’s the goal here? Get so strong that climbing has nothing to offer me? Become so wildly smart and hilarious that I “beat” improv like a video game? No, duh, of course not.

After all, improv is the artistic process, so being in process IS the goal. It doesn’t have a perfectible product to offer; it doesn’t exist to be static. When did I forget that and start giving myself permission to stop having fun? I think I’ve been so fixated on what “I know I should be doing” - on what I hoped people would remember when it was all over - that I failed to realize what I’ve been practicing: wishing I was better. Meanwhile, all that time, I could have been practicing the discipline and trust and joy of improv, which is so much more rewarding.

Which is exactly why we entered into our fourth No Edit show with the goal to play and enjoy ourselves. And we did. And the process was not perfect, but I worked some muscles that were out of shape, and I wasn’t anxious to “get it over with.” What I was doing was building and sabotaging and rebuilding a very elaborate city model - complete with operational dams and electric grid - with my college roommate. And, coincidentally, my real life best friend. How lucky am I?

And hey, I still noticed that the base reality was shallow and the reasons we cared so much about our project lacked depth. But despite all that, I was glad to be there. Success.

Our next show is over 2 months away, which is a lot of time to wring my hands and look up at the wall and worry about falling. But even now, I’m in process. Challenging ourselves will make us better improvisers on stage. But the discipline I’ve worked on most is the one I need when I come off stage.

This is fun. This is good for me. I will be gentle with myself.

I have heard those three words so many times in my improv career. And I don’t know what it says about me that I take thems as fightin’ words (not really, but also maybe).

I love organic. I’m over the moon about it. Not just the performance aspect, but as a teaching tool.

The posture it takes to do a good organic is something akin to cranking every sensory input to 11. Ego death, in a way. Every participant is an antenna alchemizing attention, presence, and reaction into something the group and audience can collectively perceive.

In the moment, we all agree that everything is important. Everything is usable. And everything is pointing us to understanding that already exists, but we have yet to arrive at.

Organic is “yes, and” before context hardens it into scene work. Think glowing molten iron (creative potential) pulled from a furnace, not yet pounded into a precise scenic sword by the swinging hammer of context (base reality, character, emotion, etc.).

All of this flowery language aside, I understand why people do not like it. When you’ve only participated in a bad version of something, you’re going to hate it. Especially when a teacher or coach can’t quite articulate what it’s trying to accomplish or how to get you there.

When I first took classes, I didn’t get it either. I was moving and writhing around, yelling, and running out of breath, all before someone swept us to the sides and we started scenes with what felt like zero material to inspire us. It wasn’t until I started teaching that I was able to understand and articulate what I thought the challenges were and what it’s asking from us.

Organic is not weird for weird’s sake (sorry post-modern theatre kids). It’s not supposed to be indecipherable, esoteric performance art for the sake of itself. For as soft as it feels, there is a method to the madness. So let’s break it down step by step, as a process:

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And sometimes those exercises even ask improvisers to leverage emotion in the service of a logical dynamic between characters. They’re foundational, yet…advanced.

Banal Initiation, BIG Reaction comes to mind.

No matter how experienced an improviser you are, it’s a tremendous amount to focus on, which is why I often invite players to forgo dialogue - at least at first. It’s my way of trying to make the exercise easier. If we abandon a verbal response then we can, theoretically, free up some bandwidth to really isolate and prioritize an emotional one.

Sound coaching, right? Right??

But I find that, for many improvisers, dropping the dialogue doesn’t actually reduce their burden; it poses an additional challenge. It’s like putting a weighted vest on someone already trying to run an obstacle course.

Here’s how it usually goes:

I’ll tell players not to worry about responding with dialogue. If they want, just react. I’m very benevolent.

The player responds with more dialogue than emotion.

I’ll tell them to try again and, this time, to make a point of reacting without words. Just focus on the emotion and offering up a reaction. You’re welcome.

The player responds immediately with even more dialogue.

For a long time I chalked this phenomenon up to emotions being vulnerable. Language provides a nice stopgap when a player is still psyching themselves up to make a big, embodied, emotional move, which is why dialogue sometimes has the unintended effect of diluting our emotional reaction. And to be fair, I do think this is true. In the face of uncertainty (and let’s be real, all the risks of improv), our brains would sometimes rather explain than be present to what’s happening.

So my coaching notes on this exercise have largely focused on facing the fear and embracing the emotion. Don’t talk yourself out of your reaction! I’d say. Weep, scream, stamp your feet!

It should have helped. Go, GO GO! REACT!

It often didn't.

It turns out I was giving the wrong directions. Or, maybe more generously, incomplete directions.

When players immediately offered up lengthy responses in lieu of simple emotion, I’d notice a pattern of dialogue that lacked authentic feeling, that felt manufactured, that was overly complicated. So I cut out the dialogue. In my mind, we were rushing to explain rather than to feel.

After all, great line delivery - comedic or otherwise - needs great pacing.

But my mistake came in asking players to eschew dialogue so they could hurry up and emote. Don’t speak! Quick, pick an emotion! Let’s see it!

Ultimately I was drilling the practice of swapping one rushed response for another.

But then it dawned on me: maybe rushing isn’t the answer.

If we think honestly about everything leading up to an emotional reaction, the list gets long, and every step along the way takes time. And I don’t mean just mean time in the service of dramatic effect. I mean real, actual, fundamental-dimension-of-physics kind of time.

The sound of my scene partner’s dialogue traveling across stage takes time.

Listening takes time.

Processing information takes time.

Feeling hurt, euphoria, sadness, rage, fear takes time.

Scrunching up my face/hands/shoulders to communicate that feeling…takes time.

And sure, it might not be much time, but it’s still there, ticking along nonetheless. There is a huge difference between “fast” and “instantaneous,” despite what my Instant Pot would try to lead me to believe.

Yet I’d make the same mistake with emotions that my improv students would make with dialogue: hurrying the process and overlooking key steps to the detriment of the scene.

My intention was always to help players develop instincts to offer emotional reactions to their scene partners. Like I said before, emotions are vulnerable, and we’ll do all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid looking silly or weak. So of course I’d see players hesitating to emote. If it was easy we wouldn’t need practice.

But we can’t practice emoting without feeling. And we can’t practice feeling without processing. And we can’t practice processing without listening.

In other words, we can’t time travel through the scene. We have to be present to every moment - even the ones when we just stand still and fall silent for all that stuff we normally take for granted.

And that’s the real skill here - confidently taking the time without wasting it on distractions like panic. If that feels difficult, you aren’t alone. In my experience, players are almost allergic to slowing down because time passing in silence gives doubt an opportunity to creep in. If I’m not doing something, it must be because I don’t know what to do…and I can’t let the audience see that…so I better get busy quick! So players inevitably babble or pace or - even worse - deny or ignore their scene partner.

The truth is, you’re already busy. You’re listening and looking at your fellow players and taking a few precious seconds for your brain to process whatever discovery you just made so that you can start to feel it in your body.

As a coach, I’m learning how to draw attention to those moments and give them their due. For newer improvisers, listening and processing (and all the rest) in front of an audience takes more time and energy. So I try not to rush it.

With any luck, practice will make the time shorter. Or maybe practice will just make it more fun. If we learn to enjoy the process - rather than rush through it - we can use the time to go as fast or as slow as the scene demands. And we can really only discern that when we’re truly in the moment, which is when improv usually feels its best. Because there’s nothing better than leaving a scene and realizing that, given more time, you could have stayed and played all day - that it was all over far too soon.

8-Count Shakedown. Bippity Bippity Bop. Sound and Motion Circle. There are hundreds of warmups that get our brains and bodies ready. They help with mechanics, posture, energy, etc., and prepare us for the “real” work.

But the real work starts with the way we warm up.

I’m going to use the “5 Things” warmup and a recent class experience as an example.

If you’ve never played it, it’s simple. One person turns to someone next to them and asks for five of something. Could be five planets. Could be five things in your trunk. Could be five made-up golf terms. Doesn’t matter.

The group puts their fists into the center, ready to count along. After each answer, everyone shouts “YES!”

Even if the category is planets and someone says “Chardonnay,” the response is still “YES!” We’re not worried about correctness.

After five, we clap and say, “That’s 5 Things!” Then it passes to the next person.

There are variations on the game too. Sometimes people do seven instead of five. Sometimes groups shout the number instead of “YES!”

I prefer “YES!” because the numbers feel neutral to me. And “YES!” isn’t neutral. It tells the person listing that whatever they just said is amazing, and we’re going to support the hell out of it no matter what.

On the surface, it’s a silly game. Easy to write off as “this helps people think on the spot.” Which it does, but that’s not all it does.

This game trains posture. Confidence. Support. Forward motion.

It gently pulls participants out of a right and wrong binary. It’s asking them, over and over again, to offer something without judging it first. To let go of the idea that their contribution needs to be correct in order to be accepted.

And, especially for a newer improviser, that shift means a lot.

Once that pressure lifts, they start to play differently. And not just in warmups.

In a recent class, we warmed up with “5 Things,” and it went great. The group has been together for a bit, so there’s already a lot of trust in the room. People weren’t as precious with their ideas. Things moved along nicely.

Some time later, we began working on the core lesson for the day which was multi-person scenes. How do we have multiple people on stage and make sure the scene stays on the rails? Not always an easy task for even experienced improvisers.

To work on it, we started with a two-person scene, and had one or two people on the sidelines watching for opportunities to enter. They could either “glom” onto an existing point of view (mirror it, match it, heighten it), or come in as a force that pushes one of the existing points of view further.

The scene unfolding was between two characters that were running an antique scam. One character was clearly the ringleader, setting out their junk wares at a huge markup, happy and eager to prey on ignorant victims. The other character was extremely nervous about getting caught.

The first walk-on was great. They picked up an object and asked, “Oh wow, is this authentic?” The ringleader affirmed it without hesitation and named a price, $5,000. All while the nervous partner started to unravel, whispering panic under their breath: “I can’t do this. We’re going to get caught.” The transaction finishes with one person thrilled and the other quietly spiraling.

Then, our second walk on comes in with a fantastic line:

“Hello, what a lovely antique lamp. I am a professional lampist.”

Really good.

The nervous player starts quietly hyperventilating while the ringleader stays cool, convinced they can still pass off their scam.

Then, the “lampist” announced that they would be doing a series of tests to determine the lamp’s authenticity. A visual inspection began to take place while, in an aside, the nervous character begged the ringleader to just come clean.

The lampist began to scratch and lick the lamp. The nervous character’s emotion became more and more frantic until we edited out at the height of tension for the sake of time.

And lo, we’re finally arriving at the whole point of this article.

In debriefing the exercise, the improviser who played the “lampist” shared that a split second after announcing their intention to run tests on the lamp, they panicked.

“I thought about scratching and then licking the lamp. But I wasn’t sure if that’s how a professional lampist would run this test. Then, I did it anyway.”

“YES!” (callback)

Because when you’re in a scene, playing a possibly made-up profession in new and unfamiliar circumstances, there isn’t really a right or wrong answer. There’s just the question: what would this person do?

And that’s the moment all of that silly “5 Things” warmup work starts to show up.

As an instinct. As a willingness to stop judging your answer before you say it. And as a quiet trust that the first thing that comes to mind is usable if you treat it like it matters.

This is where phrases like “playing to the top of your intelligence” actually start to mean something. Not in the sense that you need to think of the clever and funny (right) thing, but just that you take your own choices seriously and treat the stakes as real. You commit, even if it feels a little uncertain on the way out.

Instead of judging or hiding or self-editing, you scratch it. You lick it. And now you are a professional lampist.

You play bigger. You take more risks. And you don’t chalk it up to “I just got lucky and thought of something good.” Nope. That choice was weeks and months of warmups and quiet confidence building in the making.

Finally, you offer something, and the group responds the only way it knows how:

“YES!”

• scenes that involve a lot of talking

• scenes that are emotionally middling

• scenes where players don’t know what to do next or just seem to lose steam

• scenes that get overcomplicated

So I started side-coaching with all of this in mind. But running scenes is tiring (yeah, I said it). Plus, a lot of practice time would be spent fixing these problems rather than pinpointing the cause and training ourselves to avoid them in the first place.

Finally, players with limited practice time love getting reps…which meant I needed a drill.

Enter the 5-Line Scene.

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When Touch Baseball went to the Omaha Comedy Festival in 2025, we were lucky enough to meet and perform with the enormously talented and incredibly kind Suzi Barrett. Suzi is a big deal. Her improv credits include Boom Chicago, Asssscat Improv (UCB), Ben Schwartz & Friends…the list goes on.

We fan girled a tad.

But Suzi isn’t just an improv star; she’s a real, bonafide improv nerd. So we geeked out about the art form and the improv theory that lights up our brains every time we play or teach.

And after several conversations and dumb bits, Suzi mentioned (casually) that she hosts a podcast about improv.

(She neglected to mention that the Yes, Also podcast features guests like TJ Jagadowski and Rachel Bloom and Will Hines and Ben Schwartz and Susan Messing…but she didn’t have to because we knew the podcast and were already fans.)

And then she asked if we’d want to be on it.

We freaked out quietly and privately, and then we played it really cool and said, “yeah, that could be fun.”

And it was.

She’s truly a gem, an amazing interviewer, and you can tell how much she loves the art form with every single episode.

You can listen to our episode and more of Yes, Also here.

You can also support the pod and get TONS of bonus content by subscribing to Yes, Also - Second Beats. We can’t recommend Suzi’s work enough!

We’ll be back to regularly scheduled posts next week, but today we’re celebrating! Thanks for reading and following along. We hope you enjoy the episode.