Playwriting

In the vocabulary of improvisation, "playwriting" refers to a scene behavior in which a performer narrates, directs, or controls the action as though writing a script rather than participating as a character within it. The term is almost always used critically, describing a habit that removes spontaneity and collaboration from a scene by treating other performers as actors executing one person's vision. When an improviser playwriters, they step outside the shared reality of the moment and attempt to impose a predetermined structure, plot, or outcome on the work.

Keith Johnstone devoted specific attention to the problem in his foundational text "Impro," placing the concept alongside his discussions of status transactions, advancing, and reincorporation. For Johnstone, an improviser could study all of these skills and still fall into the trap of playwriting, which he treated as a distinct failure mode in which one performer's desire to shape the scene overrides genuine interaction. The instinct to playwrite often emerges from anxiety; performers who feel responsible for making a scene "work" may resort to directing their partners rather than trusting the collaborative process.

Viola Spolin addressed the same tendency from a different angle. In her framework, focus on a shared point of concentration absorbs subjective needs and frees performers for genuine relation. She identified playwriting, alongside emoting and psychodrama, as behaviors that disappear when artistic detachment takes hold. For Spolin, the antidote was not willpower but structure: her theater games were designed so that the rules of the exercise naturally prevented any single player from seizing authorial control.

The tension between improvisation and playwriting surfaces in practical terms throughout the history of the form. In "Something Wonderful Right Away," Jeffrey Sweet's oral history of The Second City and its predecessors, performers describe the pull of wanting to establish a plot while acknowledging that improvisation is not playwriting. One account captures the contradiction directly: the performer needed to pursue a clear action but found themselves "really playwriting" in the process. This honest admission reveals that the line between scene initiative and scene control is not always obvious, and crossing it can happen gradually.

In teaching, playwriting is typically addressed through side-coaching rather than lecture. A coach might call out "you're playwriting" when a performer begins giving stage directions disguised as dialogue ("Let's go to the store, and when we get there, you'll see your old friend"), narrating what other characters do or feel, or rejecting offers that do not fit a privately held plan. The correction usually involves redirecting the performer toward listening, agreement, and response rather than orchestration.

Playwriting is closely related to several other improvisational concepts. It overlaps with "driving," where one performer steers the scene's direction, and stands in opposition to "yes, and," the foundational principle of building on a partner's contributions. It also connects to the broader challenge of "being in one's head," where intellectual planning replaces present-moment awareness. Spolin's linkage of playwriting with emoting and psychodrama suggests she saw all three as varieties of the same underlying problem: the substitution of private psychological activity for shared theatrical work.

The concept carries an important nuance that is sometimes lost in teaching. Having a point of view, making strong choices, and pursuing an action within a scene are all considered good practice. Playwriting begins only when those choices extend to controlling what other performers do, say, or feel, collapsing the collaborative space into a single author's domain.