Playbook

How to Explain It

"We do not have a set list tonight. We have a playbook: a collection of games and forms the ensemble knows. We build the show in real time, calling what fits the moment. Give us a suggestion to start."

Format Use

Playbook is used by ensembles that have trained extensively in short-form games and want to perform without a fixed game order. The captain or ensemble reads the audience, reads the energy, and selects from their shared repertoire. The skill is in reading the room and choosing well, not in executing any single game.

Teaching Context

Teaching Playbook means teaching show flow and curatorial instinct. Begin with a fixed roster of four or five games and let the ensemble vote on order after each round. Progress to real-time selection as the group builds confidence in reading what the show needs next.

Common Coaching Notes

• "What did the audience need after that last game? Did you give them a change of pace or more of the same?"
• "When the energy drops, what does your instinct say to call?"
• "A bad game choice recovers with full commitment. A distracted captain does not."

The format's primary challenge is collective decision-making under performance conditions. In a predetermined format, the next structural element is always known; in the Playbook format, the ensemble must agree (tacitly or explicitly) on the next element while maintaining the show's energy and the audience's engagement.

The most effective Playbook performances develop an ensemble shorthand for signaling transitions and calling structures. A captain or designated caller reduces the cognitive load on individual performers, allowing the group to focus on executing the current element rather than debating what comes next.

Audience reading is critical. The format's flexibility is only valuable if the ensemble can actually assess what the audience needs at each moment: when to escalate, when to change register, when to slow down, and when to end. Ensembles that cycle through structures without reading the room produce shows that feel arbitrary rather than responsive.

Andy Goldberg documents Playbook as a named advanced exercise in Improv Comedy (1991), listing it in the Advanced Exercises section of his curriculum. Goldberg's inclusion of Playbook in an advanced curriculum suggests it was used in developed training programs by the early 1990s.

The concept of drawing from a shared repertoire of games and structures at performance time reflects a broader practice across short-form improv programs, in which ensembles develop a working knowledge of multiple games and apply them flexibly within a show. The Living Playbook, noted by Amy Seham in Whose Improv Is It Anyway?, was an online resource cataloguing improv games and structures that reflected the field's interest in systematizing and sharing repertoire knowledge.