Goon River

Goon River is an opening used to create ideas for improv scenes. After recieving a suggestion from an audience member, each performer lines up and begin to tell the same story, one by one. They each take their turns telling the story as a character in the story (ie the pirate tells about his experience in the story and the princess tells about her experience in the story). The performers usually speak at random, but all try to end the story at the same time. The performers then use elements from the story, along with the characters they created, to perform improv scenes. Its name is derived from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters: a collection of free-form poems presented as epitaphs read by the dead themselves depicting the life in a small town.