REHEARSING THE AMAZING IMAGINATION MACHINE:
Tips for Teachers Directing the Play

The instructions and video on this page provide a helpful guide for anyone directing “The Amazing Imagination Machine,” the play which serves as the final workshop performance in Curtains Up Acting Studios free drama curriculum.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step 1: Start rehearsal by having the students make a machine. You may need to tweak the machine or even rearrange the students to make sure it has variety and so everyone can be seen. You can review making a machine by going to the “Machine” page.

Step 2: Once the students have created a machine, you can add controls—teaching them to: 1) turn off and on by freezing, 2) run faster as an imaginary wheel is turned, 3) run down and stop and 4), get pumped back up and run again.

Step 3: Once you’ve created an interesting machine with controls, it’s time to rehearse the objects the imagination machine will make during the show, and the scenes that accompany those objects. They are: 1) a piano, 2) a tree, 3) a dog, 4) an elephant, 5) a car, and 6) a roller coaster. You may want to review the page on “Body Scenery” to help you with this: REVIEW BODY SCENERY PAGE

Refer to the video of THE AMAZING IMAGINATION MACHINE PERFORMANCE to see how to stage the brief scene that goes with each object. Also: Make sure to challenge your cast by naming some objects they haven’t rehearsed—so they learn to improvise when given a suggestion by the audience. Basically, to improvise new objects, when any team member gets an idea of how to begin they should just start doing it—and the other cast members should jump in and support that idea without stopping to discuss it. Sometimes the improvised object won’t look that great—but that’s O.K. You can always go on to the next object in the script---one that they have rehearsed.

© 2023, Friends of the Groom Theater Company

Curtains Up Curriculum by Friends of the Groom Theater Co. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Curtains Up is a training program designed for young actors sponsored by Friends of the Groom Theater Company.
It is available to the general public for free under the terms of the Creative Commons License above.