This is a “nice” twist on a classic improv short-form game. I’ve put nice in quotation marks as the results can often tend more towards the “naughty” depending on your source material!
The Basics
One brave audience member volunteers their cell phone, unlocks it, and opens up a text thread before giving it to a predetermined improviser (“A”). For the resulting scene, this player may only use lines pulled from that text thread as their dialogue, which their teammates must work to incorporate and justify.
Example
Player A waits offstage with their volunteered phone (likely looking for a promising first line) while two teammates (B and C) begin a scene based on the suggestion of “messy roommate.”
Player B: (vacuuming the floor) “It’s a clear violation of our roommate agreement. You can’t persuade me otherwise…”
Player C: (picking up some carelessly discarded trash) “I’m just saying that if this feels like a trap… we should give him a chance to explain his behavior.”
Player B: (with a loaded look) “He’s never going to date you, you know that, don’t you?”
Player C: “You can be an awful friend, you know that? This has nothing to do with my feelings for…”
The door rattles heralding A’s entrance.
Player B: “I’m not living like this anymore.”
Player A: (reading from the chat thread verbatim) “The next round is on me!”
Player B: (under their breath) “it’s not even lunchtime…”
Player C: “You seem to be in a good mood this morning.”
Player A: (reading) “You’re only young and beautiful once, am I right…?”
The Focus
Guide and savor the madness while trying to add the reader’s peanut butter to the other players’ jelly.
Traps and Tips
1.) For the setup. Make sure the audience member fully understands the ask before giving up their phone. The scene will feel icky if the volunteer isn’t in on the joke. Depending on your venue and content guidelines, you might need to work to get a “suitable for work” text thread. If in doubt, be explicit with the audience in terms of the game and its needs. I’ve seen players find it useful to ask for a specific group message thread or similar (rather than freely moving between any and all conversations) as this gives the volunteer a little say in what they are willing to divulge. Group threads can also have the benefit of offering multiple voices to choose from, which often proves advantageous.
2.) For the scene start. The current wisdom in my improv circles is to have (generally) two players begin the scene without their phone-bound teammate. By doing so, you can provide some unobstructed CROW and given circumstances, setting the “norm” or platform before Player A enters with likely mayhem. In addition to getting the scene rolling and building the world, you can also establish the missing player’s general deal or energy as they’ll have a difficult time concisely doing this while only using text dialogue. As noted above, giving the reader 10 or 20 seconds to scan the potentials of their borrowed phone can also set them up for greater playfulness and success.
3.) For the non-readers. The heavy lifting of this scene really rests on these improvisers’ shoulders (even though it might look otherwise to the audience). Share focus with great deliberateness. This game is a relative of Columns, Hesitation Speech, and Papers where random offers are strategically woven into the action (usually with the express intention of disrupting it or adding surprise). While the phone reader might thrive and easily add their voice at will, they’ll usually benefit from some good old-fashioned focus gives and lead ins. Narrow questions can become needlessly cumbersome if overused: “What should we have for dinner?” Consider more open-ended handoffs instead: “What do you have to say for yourself?” The game loses steam if you repeatedly make Player A scroll endlessly for a phrase that is vaguely appropriate. And avoid the cop out of coding the trader as “crazy.”
4.) For the reader. You’ll want to be generous with your fellow players as well. Bombarding them with a string of non sequiturs without leaving sufficient room for nuanced justifications will likely suffocate the story (and tempt your teammates to just dismiss you as “crazy”). You’ll rarely find the perfect response so happily settle for the first thing you find that’s vaguely in the ballpark. As you don’t have much flexibility with your language, make sure you are also making strong staging, emotional, and subtextual offers. I’ve standardized my spelling in the above example, but fewer and fewer of us text with the same attention to detail that we’d give a more formal piece of writing. Shorthand and misspellings can add another level of fun.
In Performance
Actor’s Nightmare provides an old-world iteration of this dynamic with one significant distinction (other than the level of technology). In the current updated version under consideration, the reading player will generally scroll around and randomly choose helpful (or not so helpful) dialogue as it presents itself. In Nightmare, the conceit is that the reading player is providing the “correct” dialogue; for this reason, they should stick to providing one character’s dialogue in its original written sequence.
Cheers, David Charles.
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