I Need A…
I Need a... is an audience suggestion technique in which the host or performer calls out for audience input by announcing the type of suggestion needed: "I need a profession!" or "I need a relationship!" The technique structures audience interaction and ensures performers receive useful, specific material rather than random responses. As a teaching exercise, it trains students to identify what type of information would most serve a scene and to ask for it specifically rather than accepting whatever is offered.
Structure
The Technique
The host addresses the audience directly and names the category of suggestion desired: "I need a location," "I need an activity," "I need a relationship between two people." The category should be specific enough that the audience understands what is useful, broad enough that multiple valid answers exist.
Taking the Suggestion
The host listens to the audience's responses and selects one -- often the first clear and usable answer, sometimes the one that generates the most energy or specificity. The host confirms the suggestion aloud and thanks the audience.
As an Exercise
In the exercise form, students practice identifying the type of suggestion that would most serve the next moment of a scene: what kind of information is missing, what type of material would generate the most scene richness, and how to ask for it clearly without leading the audience toward a specific answer.
Practice
Students stop a scene at a natural moment and practice naming what they would need from an audience if this were a performance. The group discusses what type of information would serve the scene best and why.
Conclusion
The exercise ends when students have developed fluency with the relationship between scene needs and suggestion types.
How to Teach It
Objectives
I Need a... trains the skill of identifying what a scene needs from outside material and asking for it specifically, rather than accepting whatever the audience offers and retrofitting the scene around it.
How to Explain It
"Before you ask for a suggestion, know what you need. A location? A relationship? An activity? An emotion? If you ask 'give me something,' you'll get random noise. If you ask 'give me a profession that involves travel,' you'll get something you can use."
Scaffolding
Begin with common suggestion types -- location, relationship, profession, emotion -- before asking students to invent new categories that serve specific scene needs. The common types give students a vocabulary; practice inventing new categories develops real fluency.
Common Pitfalls
Students sometimes ask leading questions that tell the audience the answer they want: "Give me a location -- like a restaurant or a kitchen." The coaching note is that a leading question is not a suggestion -- it is the performer choosing and asking the audience to confirm. The suggestion should come from the audience.
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Related Exercises
Audience Warm-Ups
Audience Warm-Ups refers to a collection of techniques used to engage and energize a live audience before a show begins. Common methods include call-and-response games, group participation exercises, and quick demonstrations of improv concepts. Strong audience warm-ups establish trust, set expectations, and create the collaborative atmosphere that improvised performance depends on.
Tagout
Tagout is a fundamental improv technique and exercise in which a performer on the sidelines physically tags a player in a scene to replace them and initiate a new scene or take the scene in a different direction. The technique is the backbone of many long-form structures. As an exercise, it trains the instinct to recognize edit points and enter with purpose.
Make More Interesting
Make More Interesting is a hybrid game and directing exercise in which a director or facilitator watches a scene and, at any point, stops the performers and asks them to replay the most recent moment -- the same beat, the same content -- but made more interesting. The request does not define what "more interesting" means; performers must find a more specific, more committed, more unexpected, or more resonant version of what they just did, discovering through the iteration what raised the scene's quality.
Last Text You Sent
Last Text You Sent is a personal-connection warm-up exercise in which each participant reads or paraphrases the last text message they sent, and the group uses that content as a window into the participant's actual life in the moment. The exercise grounds ensemble work in genuine personal material, combats the detachment of purely theatrical warm-up routines, and builds group intimacy by sharing real, unscripted moments from participants' daily lives.
Move On
Move On is a scene exercise in which a facilitator calls out the directive to prompt performers to abandon their current scene beat and transition immediately to a new choice. The call forces performers to leave comfortable territory and advance the scene rather than circling the same material. The exercise builds editorial instincts about when a moment has been fully explored and trains the habit of moving forward rather than sideways. It develops the internal sense of pacing that distinguishes dynamic scene work from repetitive scene work.
How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). I Need A…. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/exercises/i-need-a
The Improv Archive. "I Need A…." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/exercises/i-need-a.
The Improv Archive. "I Need A…." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/exercises/i-need-a. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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