How to Play Taxi Theater Game

The game "Taxi" compels students to act spontaneously.

"Taxi" or "Taxi Cab Driver" is a classic improvisational game for theater and improv students. The game is appropriate as a warm-up activity or as tool to help students fine-tune their abilities to mimic or to think quickly. The game encourages players to make strong choices and to develop characters and then discard those characters and develop new ones with new motivations and goals. According to Philip Bernardi, author of the book "Improv Starters," such a game forces players "to react spontaneously to what is happening on stage."

Instructions

1. Choose one player to act as the "cab driver." This player will pretend to drive around the room or stage as the other players watch. Encourage the player to develop a distinct personality as a cab driver and to talk or mumble to herself.

2. Instruct one of the watching players to pretend to enter the backseat of the cab and ride around in the cab as a "passenger" with the cab driver.

3. Tell the passenger to pick a distinct personality, profession and destination and to chat with the cab driver in this new personality. For example, he could be a British doctor on the way to the hospital to deliver a baby, a Southern belle on her way to a dance or even an obnoxious child. There's no limit to the characters that can be invented.

4. Tell the cab driver that she must adopt the accent and mannerisms of the passenger exactly as she converses with her passenger.

5. Tell another player to jump in the cab with the other passenger. Make it clear that this passenger must also have a distinct personality, different from the others. The first passenger and the driver must now imitate the accent and mannerisms of this new passenger.

6. Continue to have the remaining players enter the cab as passengers with new personalities and accents, which the others will imitate.

Tips & Warnings

• This game can also be played by setting up a chair for the taxi driver and several other chairs for the passengers.

• Make it clear to players that you don't expect them to imitate every accent and personality perfectly, but to always try their best.

References

• "Improv Starters"; Philip Bernardi; 1992