Free, forever
Nobody knows what happens next. That is the entire point.
Improv is the only theatre where the audience watches something get built and taken apart in the same breath. This is a free guide to how it actually works — the craft, the history, and where to go see it.
Two people walk on stage with nothing. No script, no set, sometimes not even an agreement about who they are to each other. Ninety seconds later a room full of strangers is laughing at a relationship that did not exist when the lights came up and will not exist again once they go down. Then it is gone. There is no recording worth watching and there is no second take.
That impermanence is not a limitation of the form. It is the form. Improvisers spend years learning to build something worth keeping and then let it evaporate, and the skill turns out to transfer to nearly everything else — listening, teaching, negotiating, running a meeting that has gone sideways.
Most of what is written about improv online is either a listicle of party games or a corporate workshop deck that mentions "yes, and" and then stops. The actual craft — how a scene finds its game, why the second line matters more than the first, what Del Close spent thirty years arguing about — is mostly passed down in person, in rooms, by people who learned it the same way.
This site is an attempt to write it down properly and give it away.
Where to start
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Learn
The craft, from the ground up
What improv is, how agreement really works, how scenes find their game, and where the tradition came from. Written to be read in order, or raided for the one thing you needed.
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Kansas City
Shows, classes and jams
Who is performing this week, where to take a first class, and which open jams will let a total beginner walk in the door. Kansas City first, more cities to follow.
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Resources
The good stuff elsewhere
The books actually worth your money, the podcasts worth a commute, and the theatres worth planning a trip around. Annotated, not just listed.