An Improv Exercise You Can Do Alone: 5 Things, With Three Harder Variations

Great actors work on the craft every day. That’s easy to say about memorizing and voice, and hard to say about improv, because improv usually needs a partner. Here’s one you can do alone, in the car, in the shower, in line at the store, and three ways to make it harder once the first version is easy.

The 5 Things exercise

Give yourself a topic. Quickly name five things related to it. Birthday party: food, kids, presents, drinks, bouncy house. That’s it. A few rounds a day and the muscle that has to produce an idea on demand gets noticeably stronger inside a week. But if you’re like most actors who want to be great, that’s not enough weight on the bar. So here are the plates.

Variation 1: the logical move

Instead of five random things, picture the first one and let each answer come from what you see. Birthday party: cake, icing, candles, flame, making a wish. Cake came from the party; everything after came from looking at the cake. Actors miss great moves that are sitting right in front of them because they never stopped to see the room they’re in. Visualizing the environment is how you ground yourself in the reality of a scene, and this drill trains it.

Variation 2: the bold move, A to C

Start logical, then make one giant shift. Birthday party: cake, icing, candles, flame, making a wish, Robin Williams. Robin Williams looks random. He isn’t; he came from a tactic called A to C. A connects to the topic. B connects to A but moves away from the topic. C connects only to B. Making a wish is A. A genie is B, connected to the wish, unconnected to the party. Robin Williams is C, and the audience feels the leap without seeing the ladder. Most of us play it safe with our choices. A bold choice that’s secretly connected to the scene is the most refreshing thing you can put on a stage.

Variation 3: if this is true, what else is true?

The last one teaches you to land a bold move instead of leaving it hanging. Birthday party: cake, icing, candles, flame, making a wish, Robin Williams, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Abe Lincoln. We connected Robin Williams back to the party by asking one question: if a beloved figure who has passed is at this party, what else is true? Who else is here? Now the bold move is the premise of the scene instead of a non sequitur.

Improv is a wonderful art form, and when an improviser doesn’t know what to do with a bold move, the scene ends up in a place we call crazy town, and no audience wants to go there. This question is the road back. It’s also, not coincidentally, the question I use in every other part of life when something unexpected lands: if this is true, what else is true?

There you go. One exercise, three variations, no partner required. Do it until the fifth thing arrives as fast as the first, and then come find some people to do it with.