The Script: The Hidden Enemy in Theater Workshops for Children, Teenagers, and Beginners

When people discuss theater workshops for beginners, especially those for children and teenagers, the script is often treated as a fundamental and unavoidable stage. A text is chosen or written, the roles are assigned, the lines are memorized, and finally an attempt is made to stage them.

After almost thirty years of leading theater workshops, particularly with children and teenagers, I have reached the opposite conclusion: when introduced too early, a script can become one of the main obstacles to the development of creativity, listening, and expressive freedom.

The problem is not the script itself. The problem is when it is introduced and the function it is given.

For an experienced actor, a written text is a tool rich in possibilities to explore. For a beginner, however, it can easily become a sequence of words to memorize and repeat precisely. Attention shifts from making theater to trying not to get the lines wrong.

The Mistake of Starting with a Written Text

I consider the idea that theater must always begin with a text to be profoundly mistaken.

Theater can begin with a gesture, an emotion, an image, an object, an everyday situation, or a dynamic that emerges within the group. It can develop from something imagined by one of the participants, from an unexpected event, or from an intuition that initially no one—not even the workshop leader—had foreseen.

Starting immediately with a rigid script can stifle these possibilities. Participants are thrown into a test of memory and precision before they have learned to listen, use their bodies, inhabit the space, build relationships, and understand what is actually happening onstage.

Their main concern becomes remembering the exact words. Everything else becomes secondary.

The script is transformed from a theatrical tool into a cage.

“For this production, I don’t have a script; I have a map.”

Marco Baliani, speaking to me about his production Tracce

A map indicates a route, but it does not force us to take every step in exactly the same way. It leaves room for listening, relationships, and whatever may happen in the present moment of the performance.

What a Theater Workshop Should Teach

The primary goal of an introductory theater workshop should not be interpreting the written word.

Before approaching a text, participants must explore their own expressive possibilities and acquire practical tools. They must work with the body, voice, space, emotions, objects, and, above all, their relationships with others.

Interpreting a written text is a complex process. It requires skill, awareness, and the ability to understand what lies behind the words.

The most beautiful poem or the most profound monologue, performed without skill, produces bad theater. A high-quality literary text does not guarantee a good theatrical result. On the contrary, the more complex and profound the text, the greater the ability required to interpret it.

Mechanically applying the procedure of “choosing a text, assigning the roles, memorizing it, and staging it” to beginners is simplistic and, from a pedagogical standpoint, harmful.

Not least because knowing how to write does not necessarily mean knowing how to write for theater.

“Classic dramatic texts should be points of arrival, not points of departure.”

Gian Renzo Morteo

Within a training process, work with a written text should begin only when participants already possess the tools needed to understand it and transform it into stage action.

In his seminal essay Ipotesi sulla nozione di Teatro, Gian Renzo Morteo distinguishes the written text from stage writing. A performance is not the same thing as the words printed on the page: it arises from the meeting of actors, space, light, sound, objects, rhythm, and audience.

A text can provide a structure, but theater exists only onstage.

When Memory Replaces Listening

When beginners have to remember their lines exactly, they very often stop truly listening to what is happening.

While their scene partner is speaking, they do not follow what is being said: they mentally repeat the sentence they must deliver next. The other person’s line becomes merely the cue telling them when to begin speaking.

In this way, the relationship is lost.

One forgotten word, a sentence delivered differently, or a small variation is enough to bring the scene to a halt. Participants do not yet possess the tools needed to respond to the unexpected and continue acting.

A mistake is experienced as a failure because the entire process has been built around the precise reproduction of predetermined words.

Theater, by contrast, requires listening, adaptability, and presence. Anyone onstage must understand what is happening at that moment and respond accordingly.

Furthermore, not everyone has the same relationship with the written word and verbal expression. Some people may be more naturally inclined to express themselves through the body, gesture, gaze, or silence. Always beginning with a script immediately privileges a single language and prevents the others from emerging.

Creating Together Without a Script

The solution I have reached, and have now used for many years, is to begin with the participants’ creativity.

Stories, situations, characters, and scenes are built together through improvisations created by the participants and subsequently analyzed, refined, and organized.

This does not mean asking participants to write scenes freely and then having me reassemble them into a script. That would merely be a device leading us back to the starting point: words fixed on a page, to be learned and reproduced.

The work takes place directly onstage.

Participants receive a prompt, develop a situation, and look for a concrete way to represent it. Having a good idea is not enough: they must learn to transform it into theatrical action, make it understandable, and give it an effective form.

This process can be taught and trained even with very young children. We begin with simple prompts and ask small groups to invent short scenes and perform them for the others.

I allow very little time, sometimes less than five minutes.

This is not because everyone produces ideas at the same speed, but because the ability to find concrete solutions can be trained. Time must not become an excuse. Participants must learn to do their utmost within the time available and still arrive at a proposal.

Having more time does not guarantee a better result. It often leads only to postponing decisions, engaging in pointless discussions, or complicating an idea that was initially simple and effective.

Working within a limited time teaches participants to:

• collaborate;

• listen to other people’s suggestions;

• make choices without becoming lost in endless discussions;

• integrate different ideas;

• quickly transform an intuition into something concrete;

• take responsibility for what they bring onstage.

The groups are continually reshuffled. In this way, participants learn to work with different people, welcome other people’s ideas, and avoid always imposing their own. At the same time, they must learn not to reject every suggestion automatically.

These are dynamics that the workshop leader must observe and manage.

Learning Through the First Scenes

The first scenes may be extremely short, unclear, or confused.

It does not matter.

The initial objective is not to achieve a perfect result immediately, but to teach a creative process. Every scene allows the workshop leader to show what worked and what needs to be improved.

There is always something to build on: an idea, a gesture, a relationship, a voice, a look, an interesting use of space, or the ability to handle an unexpected event.

Identifying what works does not mean claiming that every result is acceptable. It means recognizing useful material and teaching participants how to develop it, revise it, and incorporate it into a more solid theatrical structure.

By continually performing their scenes in front of the group, participants also become accustomed to the presence of an audience. They do not wait until the end of the process to discover what it means to be watched: they experience it from the very first sessions.

When participants invent theatrical material themselves, they understand and remember it far more securely than material learned from words written by someone else. They know where it came from, why it exists, and what function it serves within the scene.

They are not carrying out something imposed from above. They are responsible for it.

The Workshop Leader Knows the Destination, Not the Route

In this process, the workshop leader is not merely a facilitator and does not relinquish their responsibilities.

Nor is their task to arrive with a ready-made script and a precise idea of what the performance must look like, then try to steer participants toward a result decided in advance.

In workshops, I explain it this way:

I am like a guide. I know where we need to go, but the route changes every time.

The destination is a performance that works. This does not mean that I already know what it will be like.

When I begin working with a group, I allow participants to amaze and surprise me. Different people bring different ideas and relationships, and therefore create a different journey. I guarantee that we will reach the destination, but I do not impose the route in advance.

The workshop leader must listen to the group, recognize valuable insights, offer new prompts, and determine how the different materials can find their place within the performance. Deciding where each fragment belongs and how to develop it is the leader’s responsibility.

They must focus above all on how—on theatrical language—without continually imposing what the group must create.

This requires expertise, attention, and the ability to remain present. It is more demanding than carrying out an established project because it requires the workshop leader to process continually what the group produces.

It also requires trust.

More than once, choices made by participants that initially left me perplexed have proved brilliant. They probably gained strength precisely because the group recognized the trust I had decided to place in them.

Working Without a Script Does Not Mean Working Without Rigor

Working without a predetermined script does not mean allowing everyone to do whatever they want.

Improvisation is not approximation, and spontaneity alone is not enough. Every proposal must be observed, tested, repeated, and turned into a conscious choice.

Participants must learn to understand why a scene works or does not work, what reaches the audience, what relationship is being created, and what emotion they want to produce.

The work can be extremely rigorous even without a written page to follow. The structure emerges gradually from the choices made onstage and the awareness acquired throughout the process.

Only later, when participants possess more solid tools and have fallen in love with theater, may they naturally want to explore other territories: techniques, styles, authors, and existing texts.

At that point, the script is no longer a cage. It can become an ally.

Conclusion

Theater must not become a memory contest or a struggle against words that participants are afraid of forgetting.

A theater workshop must offer the opportunity to create, make mistakes, observe, revise, and try again. It must develop listening, awareness, relationships, and the ability to transform an intuition into something concrete.

Beginning without a script returns responsibility for the creative process to the participants. It does not turn them into executors of a project conceived by someone else, but into the protagonists of their own journey.

The real challenge is not remembering a line. It is understanding what is happening onstage, acting consciously, and communicating with the other performers and the audience.

Only after learning all this can participants truly interpret words written by someone else.

First comes theater.

Then, if it is needed, comes the script.