About the Play:

Impromptu is a one-act comedic drama by Tad Mosel. In this one-act gem four actors are called to a theatre for a performance. When they arrive, there is no script and the stage manager is not around. What can actors do when called upon to give an impromptu presentation? Impromptu will take your audience on a thought-provoking journey as the actors struggle to perform a play with neither script nor director. Especially recommended for school and contest use.

Impromptu brings together four unsuspecting actors sitting on a darkened stage, awaiting the arrival of the stage manager who has called them together. Lacking his authoritative presence they are merely characters in search of a play to become part of, for their own personalities seem unformed and shallow next to the full-blooded figures they are used to playing. They are also stereotypical "types," and each of them has absorbed most of what they are from what they pretend to be on the stage. As they wait, the stage lights come up – but still no one appears to tell them what they are to do. They find themselves in a play they know nothing about and, once they see an audience, have to improvise their way along. Because the four neither believe in themselves nor dare to allow their real feelings to show, they find the task impossible. Ernest, the self-confident, "leading man," exercises the prerogative of star billing and assumes command. He plunges ahead, assigning roles to himself and his colleagues – Winifred, a veteran actress who always plays the "leading lady's best friend"; Lora, the stage struck ingénue; and Tony, the juvenile lead seeking meaning in his actions. Will they be able to drop the acting and begin feeling and communicating for real? The "drama" unfolds in a mixture of truth, fantasy and well-rehearsed situations, but as they are trying to figure out what to do, in subtle progression, we learn more about the real personalities behind these theatrical facades. Impromptu is a classic one-act of life in The Theatre. 

Impromptu was written in 1948 while Tad Mosel was studying at Yale Drama School. It has become one of the most frequently produced one-acts in the American Theatre and is regularly performed in high school and college theatre productions as a showcase of student talent.

Cast: 2 female, 2 male

About the Playwright:

Tad Mosel (1922-2008) was an American playwright and a leading writer of original scripts for early live television dramas such as Playhouse 90, Omnibus, Goodyear Television Playhouse, and Chevrolet Tele-Theater. He was known – along with Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal and Rod Serling – for making dramatic plays a staple of network broadcasts, but it was a play he wrote for the theatre, All the Way Home, that earned him a Pulitzer Prize.