There are some really fun short form improv games out there – some are really simple to get your head around and others take a little more time to get your head around them. Today we are going to look at a game that is incredibly popular but when I first got taught the game, it took a while to get my head around it as it is simple but a tad confusing if you had not played it before.

The game Meanwhile is a fast paced game where you take suggestions from the audience and turn them into quick scenes. The suggestions and the scenes are not connected so it is like very short scenes and it is what scenes the audience want to see what would happen. They can be really simply like “meanwhile Hannah is jumping around” or more bizarre like – “meanwhile at the space station”.

This is a great game to put into your rehearsals and let me tell you why.

When most players are welcomed with this game in a show, the most obvious thing a lot of improvisers do is jump in and find the most obvious joke or instantly turn to make it a really funny scene with an obvious joke. The one thing that is important to develop in rehearsals is how to create more in depth short scenes that just doing the obvious.

Now this is not easy to do, as it is sometimes a hard thing to do in such a short amount of time but there are ways that you can rehearse this – the first thing you can do is play the game so that each ‘Meanwhile…’ is an actual scene which allows you to develop it. When you start to have more in depth stories and not just a jump at the obvious jokes, start to reduce the time you have in each scene.

This sort of practice will allow you to develop more interesting characters and also focus more on the narrative then the obvious. If you have audience members who attend a lot of shows they may get bored of hearing similar jokes so being able to learn how to develop characters and stories in a short amount of time means that it allows more variation and can create some really fun and surprising outcomes for both them and you the players!