THE AMAZING IMAGINATION MACHINE:
A Free Easy-to-Rehearse Play for Kids

You can stage this fun 15 to 20 minute play for children and intergenerational audiences in as little as two rehearsals using a little improv, audience participation, and an adult narrator to guide the action. Designed to be performed by upper elementary aged students, teens, or even adults, the play is composed of two parts. The first section introduces the “imagination machine,” a flexible framework that can be used to lead into a number of stories. In this example, the actors perform the Three Little Pigs. We’ve provided all the downloadable scripts, instructions, and how-to videos you’ll need to produce the play for free. The play also serves as the final workshop performance in Curtains Up Acting Studio’s free drama curriculum—which can be accessed through a button at the bottom of the page.

Rehearsal Tips

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 see how to make a human machine here: MACHINE

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 can see detailed instructions for how a team of actors can make objects with their bodies here: BODY SCENERY

Refer to the video of The Amazing Imagination Machine Performance above 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.