Improv Game: Improv Turducken

The NIC Thanksgiving show (or T. Hanks Giving, as we call it) is coming up this Saturday and we are getting into the holiday spirit by stuffing our games with seasonal cheer. The Improv Turducken isn't a game that we slightly altered to fit a theme, but one that sprang forth in rehearsal as a twisted reminder of what happens when your improv ingenuity goes to far. It is an improv scene, stuffed with another scene, stuffed with another improv scene. It is beautiful and terrifying to behold and also sometimes covered in cranberry sauce.

Improv TurDucken: We have improv'd too deep, and too greedily.

When you think of what the Improv Turducken is, think of what a real Turducken is. First, it is a decadent and delicious abomination. More importantly, it is a bird inside a bird inside a bigger bird. For an Improv Turducken, you create a scene and then you stuff a second scene inside of that. It sounds like chaos, but that's because it is chaos.

All right, that's a lie. Think of this game like Tag Team Timeline. There you have three two-person scenes. The scenes are connected to each other by individual lines. Players clap themselves in and start their scene with the most recent line. Ideally all of the scenes in Tag Team Timeline are completely different and they only intersect at the clap-in lines. Improv Turducken is the reverse of these rules.

First scene starts with a one-word suggestion. It runs until everyone gets a feel for it and the second pair of players decide to clap themselves in. The second scene steals inspiration from the first scene, but not directly (as with Tag Team Timeline). Ideas are taken and morphed to make a different scene that riffs off of the themes in the first. The third pair of players clap themselves in and take ideas from the first couple scenes and stretch them as far as they'll go. It is a cross between a mini-Harold and Inception.

Beau, Kelsie, Chandler, and Molly setting up the first layers of our Turducken.

Some Suggestions:

• Try not to use exact lines of dialogue or be in the same location. The key to this game is the feeling that the scenes are the same, but nothing quite lines up.
• Go with how the previous scenes make you feel. You capture themes and ideas better that way than by thinking of them. It will also make it easier to create a bunch of new, unrelated junk to load into your scene.
• Your scene partner is always the same person. Time and place can jump if you like.
• Once the first rotation is through, speed up the clap-outs. This will make it easier to find a button and help increase the urgency in all of the scenes.
• After the second or third rotation of all the scenes, they'll probably start to get listy. I find that the game works best when you wrap your original scene around the new, bizarre inspirations. It gives the whole game a dream-like flair to have reality constantly impeded upon by these new ideas.

There you have it, a delicious Improv Turducken. You can play it in your groups and change it to work however you like. Comment if you have any questions about the game or if you've had any experience playing it/something like it. Til next time, friend-o's!