Rumors
Rumors is a scene game in which a piece of information passes through a chain of performers, each of whom retells it to the next in a brief two-person scene. The message transforms with each retelling as performers misunderstand, embellish, or omit details, until the final version bears little resemblance to the original. The game dramatizes the mechanics of gossip and gives performers a visceral understanding of how information distorts through social transmission.
Structure
Setup
Five or more performers line up at the side of the space. The facilitator privately tells the first performer a specific, detailed piece of information: a rumor about a fictional person or situation. The more concrete and specific the original information, the more satisfying the distortions become.
Gameplay
The first performer and second performer play a brief scene together, during which the first performer passes the information to the second as naturally as possible within their characters and circumstances. The scene does not have to be about the information; it simply needs to occur so that the passing can happen organically.
The first performer exits. The second performer then plays a scene with the third performer and passes what they understood of the information. The original context, characters, and specific details are subject to change at every retelling: the second performer may have misunderstood, remembered it differently, or added their own interpretation.
This continues down the line until the last performer has received the information. The facilitator then reads the original message aloud, and the final version is compared to it for the group.
Scene Structure
Scenes should be varied: different locations, relationships, and circumstances for each pair. The information should emerge from the scene rather than being delivered as a speech. A performer who has two characters meet in a coffee shop and gossip will reach the same mechanical outcome as one who has them share information at a bus stop or in a kitchen, but the variety keeps the structure alive.
How to Teach It
How to Explain It
"I am going to tell the first person a secret about someone in this scene. They will pass it along, and by the time it reaches the performers on stage, it will have changed. Play the scene as if the rumor is true. The scene decides what the rumor means."
Objectives
Rumors trains performers to build a scene around given information without making the information the scene's only purpose. It also illustrates the improv principle that information changes as it travels, which has implications for how performers track and trust offers across a longer scene or set.
The debrief after Rumors is particularly useful in applied contexts: the game gives concrete, observable evidence of how information distorts through social networks, making abstract principles about communication and listening immediately tangible.
Facilitating
Choose the starting rumor carefully. Vague information produces vague distortions. Information with specific numbers, names, and causal relationships produces the most satisfying transformation. Example: "Sarah told me that Thomas borrowed forty dollars from the drama teacher to pay for tickets to a show that was actually cancelled."
Common Coaching Notes
- "Don't hand over the information. Let it come up naturally in the scene."
- "You're not trying to distort it. You're trying to remember it. Let the distortion happen."
- "Play the relationship, not the message."
- "Specifics get garbled. Emotions survive. Watch for that."
How to Perform It
Playing the Scene vs. Passing the Information
The failure mode in Rumors is the scene becoming a delivery mechanism: two performers face each other and one immediately says the information. Strong performances integrate the information into a real scene. The audience should feel the naturalness of the transmission, which makes the subsequent distortion more surprising.
The performer receiving the information should not appear to be memorizing it. Taking the information lightly, not urgently, is more realistic and produces more interesting distortions: if the receiver treats the information as trivial, they will misremember it more thoroughly.
Distortion Strategy
Deliberate distortion undermines the game. Performers who intentionally change the information are sabotaging the exercise. The best distortions happen when performers genuinely try to be accurate and fail: misunderstood words, transposed details, omitted qualifiers, characters who heard only part of the sentence.
History
Rumors is an improv adaptation of the children's party game Telephone (also called Chinese Whispers in British usage), in which a message passed in sequence through a line of participants distorts through mishearing and misremembering. The theatrical adaptation adds character, scene, and circumstance to each link in the chain, transforming an information game into a performance exercise.
Gavin Levy documents the game as Exercise 131 in 112 Acting Games, describing it as "a fairly well-known activity with a little twist" that gives students "a visceral understanding" of information distortion. The game appears in improv and drama education curricula under multiple names. Gay Grasberg documents a version called Ridiculous Rumors in Great Group Skits. Mary Gwen Kelley lists Rumors as a game option in Improv Ideas.
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How to Reference This Page
The Improv Archive. (2026). Rumors. Retrieved March 17, 2026, from https://improvarchive.org/games/rumors
The Improv Archive. "Rumors." The Improv Archive, 2026. https://improvarchive.org/games/rumors.
The Improv Archive. "Rumors." The Improv Archive, 2026, https://improvarchive.org/games/rumors. Accessed March 17, 2026.
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