Joy and Meaning in Theater Games

How do theater games help make meaning for performers and audiences? Theater games drawn from Viola Spolin and Keith Johnstone, theater practitioners who developed games to teach acting and improvisation, were used in the rehearsal process. However, the playing of theater games creates such an intensely bonded community that the energy and pleasure of the play was not always communicated to those outside of the playing circle. We began to bridge this gap in meaning through traditional performance techniques such as enlarging the actors’ movements and voices to fill the performance space, and extending their energy and awareness outward. The players stepped beyond fourth-wall based Stanislavskian acting techniques as they learned to include the audience, conceptually, as players of their games. This essay is a critical analysis that shows how joy, spontaneity, and meaning are built into theater games.