Improv scenes, and improv plays don’t need to be overloaded with too many ideas. Too many ideas can make things overcomplicated and hard to follow. But how many ideas are too many? And how can you tell? Let’s examine this and figure out what is the right balance.
If you’re performing in short form improv, either improv games or just one off scenes you should avoid putting in too many ideas. This is for the sake of both the audience and of the performers in the scene. Too many ideas is going to be too much for the audience to keep track of.
Just think, if you’re in an improv game you will probably have practiced the game many times before you perform it in front of an audience. You’ll know the rules and individual quirks of how the game can be played. The audience however may not know it. As a very minimum, your audience have to keep in mind the rules of the game you are playing to get the full enjoyment out of watching your scene.
Add on top of this that the audience will probably have given a suggestion of what the scenario is in the first place. So now the audience are trying to remember the rules and what your scenario is. Just think, it’s improv. There are no sets, props or costumes to act as a reminder to the context of your scenario an the story you are attempting to create. They have to keep it all in their mind’s eye.
To add to this confusion is that if you are in a short form show where each performer may have played ten or twenty characters in one evening and they all look and probably sound like you, you have a real battle to keep the audience’s attention before you’ve said your first line.
And so now you want to add in all of your own ideas?
Imagine the audience suggest your scenario is that you work in a bank. This is going to be a short form scene, and maybe you add a common improv game rule on top such as the players can only speak in questions or you may periodically change the genre of the scene. Now the performers in the scene start throwing more ideas at the idea. From working in a bank it’s decided that the scene will actually be about robbing a bank. But the next player adds to this that the bank is on a space ship. And the third players decides that they’re about to give birth and that the baby is half alien and the space ship bank is actually a front for the alien invasion…
Sounds pretty cool right? Inventive with lots of possibilities of where you could take it. However, I’d say this is an example of overloading the scene. Remember that I said the audience suggested ‘you work in a bank’. You may have the bank element in here, but what the audience asked for has become a minor detail in a much bigger plot about aliens and robberies. The audience may enjoy it if they can follow all the details, but even if they do it’s still the case that on some level the audience will feel that you didn’t really fulfil the promise you made them which was to make up a scene about people working in a bank.
I’m not saying that you should limit your creativity or that you should do less inventive scenes, but it comes back to that old Spider-Man saying ‘with great power comes great responsibility.’ By having too many ideas in a short form scene it will limit how much each one can be explored and will ultimately mean that none of the ideas are exploited as well as they could be. So, you want to spice up the scene set in a bank? Maybe have the bank robbery, or have the bank set on another planet. To do both may be overloading it.
But what if you’re not doing a short form game, and in fact you’re doing a longform improvised play? That give you loads more breathing room for extra ideas right? Yes and no.
Of course if you’re doing an improvised play that lasts thirty, or sixty minutes, or even longer you will need more ideas than just there are people working in a bank. And if you want to add in that the bank is on Mars and that the aliens are planning the space bank heist of the century then go for it. But once again with great power comes great responsibility. If you throw all of these ideas and more into the first five minutes of the long format improvisation the question will be of where do you take things from here? If what I described with your opening scene, what do you do to follow things up? How can you keep adding things at this rate without it quickly becoming a mess of too many ideas?
Instead it could be that the scenario I have laid out has enough meat on the bone to stretch out across the entire improvised play or musical. Even if you did start with the bank heist as the first scene you could then go back in time and show the build up of the characters to learn how they got to this position in the first place. Long form shows give performers the opportunity to explore characters in greater detail ands work on the relationships between the characters and build up a scenario.
For a long form show you’ll want to make sure that you’re not overloading things so that your audience get lost in too many details. You especially don’t want to risk that the performers don’t get lost in too many details as when this happens it can be easy to start contradicting each other and screwing up continuity. If you start to do this the audience will have no chance of following things and you’ll find yourself in the difficult position of trying to trying to untangle the mess of the story and put it back together as something that can make sense.
My advice would be to use the first few minutes or so to establish the main themes and characters that will be featured and then focus on developing these. You can still bring in new elements and characters, but do this in ways that will continue to embellish the original plot rather than replace it.
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