Chapter 11 — Forms
Other formats
The Harold is one answer to the question of how to organise half an hour. Here are the others worth knowing, and the question you should actually be asking before you pick one.
A format is an agreement about shape, made before anyone walks on. It decides how the piece begins, roughly how scenes relate, and what everyone should be watching for. It does not decide anything that happens.
There are hundreds. These are the ones you will meet.
The Montage
One suggestion, then a series of scenes with no structural rule connecting them. Edit when a scene is done, start another, keep going until time.
The Montage is the simplest long form to explain and the hardest to do well, because nothing is holding it up. There is no diagram to fall back on when the group loses its way, and no scheduled moment where connections are supposed to appear. Everything depends on the cast actually listening to each other and choosing to return to things.
Which is exactly why experienced groups drift toward it. Once callbacks and thematic thinking are instinctive, structure stops being scaffolding and starts being a constraint.
The Armando
A guest monologist — often not an improviser — takes an audience suggestion and tells a true story from their own life. The cast then plays scenes inspired by it. The monologist returns between sets with another story, and the cycle repeats.
Named after Armando Diaz and developed at iO, this is one of the most reliably good formats in the repertoire, for a structural reason: true stories are specific in ways invented premises never are. A real anecdote about a grandmother's freezer contains texture no improviser would have thought to make up, and scenes drawn from it inherit that specificity.
The discipline is to play scenes inspired by the monologue rather than re-enactments of it. The audience has already heard the story; what they want is what it made you think about.
La Ronde
Each scene shares exactly one character with the scene before it. A and B play a scene; B stays and plays a scene with C; C stays for D; and so on around the cast, usually closing with a scene that returns to A.
The chain does the structural work automatically, which makes La Ronde a superb teaching form — nobody can hide, everybody knows when they are on, and the shape guarantees a satisfying close. It also forces performers to carry a character across contexts, which reveals very quickly whether they built a point of view or a voice.
The Deconstruction
One long opening scene — often ten minutes, played straight and grounded — and then the group pulls it apart. Later scenes explore the characters' backstories, the objects mentioned, the themes underneath, the same moment from other angles.
Deconstructions live or die on the opening scene. If it is rich and specific, there is an hour of material inside it. If it is thin, the group spends thirty minutes mining an empty seam. It is associated with the Annoyance and with the more character-driven end of Chicago improv, and it rewards patience more than any other common form.
Two-person forms
Two performers, no back line, no edits from anyone else. Everything is played by the pair, who tag and sweep for themselves and often play multiple characters within the same world.
Brutal and clarifying. There is nowhere to hide and nobody to rescue you, which is why so many improvisers say a year of two-person work improved them more than anything else. It also demands enormous trust, and it tends to make or end partnerships fairly quickly.
Genre and narrative forms
A large family: improvised Shakespeare, improvised horror, improvised musicals, improvised murder mysteries, single-story forms that maintain one narrative for a full hour with consistent characters and an actual plot.
These trade the pleasure of pattern for the pleasure of story, and they are the formats most likely to win over an audience that does not otherwise like improv. They also require a completely different discipline — narrative improvisers must think about consequence and structure while everyone else is thinking about game, and the two skills genuinely conflict.
The question to ask is not "which format is best" but "what does my group keep failing at?" Groups that never call back should play La Ronde or a Harold. Groups that are too clever and never ground anything should play Deconstruction. Groups that are afraid of silence should play a two-person form until they are not. A format is a training weight, chosen for the muscle you are short of.
When form helps and when it hurts
Form helps when it gives a group a shared object of attention. It stops eight people from making eight private decisions, and it gives nervous performers something to do with their fear.
Form hurts when it becomes the show's subject. If an audience is aware they are watching a structure — if they can feel the group hitting marks — the structure has failed, however correctly it was executed. The test is simple and unforgiving: a good format is invisible from the seats. Nobody in the audience knows they are watching a La Ronde. They know they are watching something that keeps satisfyingly connecting.
And no format survives bad scene work. A team that cannot find a game or establish a relationship will not be rescued by a diagram, and a team that can do those things will be fine in a Montage with no diagram at all.
Pick the form that makes your group practise the thing it avoids. Then stop thinking about it and go play the scene.