Improvise Like a Playwright: The Improv Exercise That Wakes Up a Scripted Scene

There’s no faster way through fear than walking on stage without a script. There’s also no better way to find out whether you’ve been listening. This is the exercise we use in masterclass to do both at once, and to fix the thing that goes wrong most often in scripted scenes: the actor knows the lines so well that the character stops being surprised by them.

Why dramatic actors are often great in improv

We teach script and improv on separate nights, and the actors who do both get better at each faster than the ones who pick a side. I love the Meisner work as a tool for teaching people, actors or not, to listen to the subtext under the words instead of the words alone. But there’s a mistake a lot of improv teachers make, and it’s to oversimplify acting until the words don’t matter. They matter. The plays that have won Tonys and Pulitzers over the last fifty years earned them, and they deserve our respect. At the same time, any scripted scene done well has something spontaneous in it, because the character doesn’t know what’s about to happen. The actor is memorized. The character is improvising.

What we work toward at the studio is the improvised play: one suggestion from the audience, and a whole play built from it. The exercise below is how we teach scripted actors to bring that back to the page.

The exercise: improvise like a playwright

1. Grab a great play. One of the greats: Neil Simon, Edward Albee, John Patrick Shanley, Arthur Miller. Pick a two person scene.
2. Do a cold read. Two actors on stage in front of the class, reading it for the first time. Ask them to breathe, project, connect, and above everything else, highlight the writing. Tell them the playwright is the star of this exercise and their only job is to breathe life into the words. These reads are often startlingly good, because the pressure to be good has been lifted off the actor.
3. Analyze the script. Talk with the actors about which moments stood out from the writing and why. What moves did the writer make to surprise us? Where did the scene turn?
4. Improvise as the playwright. Same two actors, no script. Tell them to connect first, then dig into their own creativity for monologues, non-verbal reactions and non sequiturs, the way a writer would. They are not playing the scene. They are writing one, out loud, in the style of the person they just read.
5. Go back to the script. Now the rehearsed scene, and the only instruction is to carry the spontaneous feeling of the improvisation onto the page. Same words. Different room.

What usually happens in step five is that the scene gets slower, quieter and stranger, and everyone watching leans in, because the actors are finally hearing each other say the lines instead of waiting to say their own. That’s the whole point of improv for a scripted actor: it isn’t a different skill. It’s the same one, with the safety net removed long enough to remember what listening feels like.

Try it with a partner and a play you love. Then bring the play to class and let someone watch.