Improv is Scripted
Improv is scripted. There, I said it. We've hidden the truth from you for too long. Every word is scripted, planned out, tested, and edited. You're just a bunch of suckers for believing us for so long. Haha. The joke's on you.
That's what it sounds like, isn't it?
When an audience member comes up after a really good show, the biggest compliment they can give you comes off almost like an accusation. "That wasn't improvised!" they exclaim. "How much of that did you already know in advance?"
And when you tell them "nothing", their eyes roll a bit with a "sure, sure" kind of response, or their eyes widen incredulously at the possibility that it was crafted out of thin air.
I love that feeling. It makes me giddy. It's a glorious trick we're able to pull on an audience, a grand lie we all tacitly agree to when we say, "nothing".
Because improv is scripted. We just do it really fast. Like, blink-of-an-eye fast. We edit, block, tweak, craft, and deliver our lines through microexpressions, subtle intonations, hyper-listening, emoting truthfully, and collected knowledge of one another.
I know, now this sounds like a bait-and-switch kind of article, but frankly, that's what the audience almost sounds like they're accusing you of, when they say, "so… which parts are scripted?" It's such a tremendous compliment. They were so entertained that they thought, there's no way this was just actors listening, building, and crafting together.
Commedia dell'arte used to do this same sort of thing, but much more explicitly. Stock characters would play off one another in stock scenes with stock bits. If my character stands with his legs shoulder-width apart during the fight scene, it's an invitation for your character to escape my sword thrust by diving between my legs. It's a foundation upon which we build modern improvisation.
We're a bit more subtle than that, these days, and the best improvisors never let you see the nearly imperceptible cues. They never explicitly write them out or catalog them. They rely on the fact that the human brain is a pattern recognition machine, and they simply listen, react, and build. It's a thing of beauty.
There have been moments when my own casts, who I have directed for weeks, manage to pull out a situation or a line delivery that I never saw coming. It utterly thrills me to be surprised like that. It keeps things fresh. Improv comedy can do that, for sure, but that's more rare for me. I've seen thousands of comedic bits, and most of them, after a while, you can see coming. Dramatic improv hits that mark of surprise more often for me.
During the first Dramatic Improv Festival, back in 2019, I had many of those moments. I truly was unsure how much of the show had been scripted, so much so that I kinda wanted to take a "look under the hood" of my favorite shows. I inquired of the casts of more than a couple shows about their process for arriving at their crisply "written" shows. I found myself having a mixture of the "sure, sure" eye-rolling response and the wide-eyed incredulous response. I'm "in the know", but even I was surprised.
I love that feeling, too.
If the audience is accusing you of doing scripted work, then why not just do something scripted?
Simplify things and give them what they think they're getting. Give yourself the chance to hit a moment a dozen different ways till you get it just so. Rewrite. Edit. Why not do that? Hell, I've heard improv urban legends of groups who would work out sketches in advance, practice them, and then put plants in the audience to give suggestions, so they could just pretend it's made up on the spot. Outside of the ethics of it, why not just do that? Or why not just call it a new work or a sketch show and just script it out?
For me, improvising carries with it something that a scripted work cannot match. There is a sense of discovery in improv. You, the actor, are surprised by a moment, rather than manufacturing a sense of surprise through your delivery. You suddenly realize that your character wants to marry (or break up with) his girlfriend. You realize you and your twin sister are more identical than ever (or couldn't be less identical). And the emotions you feel in those moments are raw, felt once, and dealt with. They aren't subtle variations on the same emotions. They lead down an infinite multiverse of options.