In the Field: Improvisation and the Unscripted Guest

Apply a structured opening technique for engaging unprepared guests without demanding historical knowledge they don't have.

Read a guest's engagement level and adjust technique accordingly.

Handle genuinely anachronistic questions and objects without breaking character or stonewalling the guest.

Distinguish a persona's plausible in-world ignorance from the interpreter's own knowledge gap, and handle each differently.

Use a hybrid "in-between" approach when full first person isn't serving a particular moment.

Every other chapter in this book happens before guests arrive. This one is about what happens once they do — the unscripted, unpredictable, entirely real moment when a stranger walks up and says something you didn't prepare for. Improvisation is where all the research pays off, or doesn't.

Don't Wait for the Guest to Know the Rules

The single most common way a first-person encounter goes wrong isn't a hard question — it's silence. Guests don't know whether they're supposed to play along, ask questions, or just watch, and an interpreter who waits expectantly for the guest to make the first move turns that uncertainty into visible discomfort. The Modern Reenactor blog's discussion of visitor engagement lays out a workable five-step opening for exactly this problem:

Identify a human trait the guest can relate to immediately — pride, curiosity, a sense of fairness, honor — rather than assuming any historical background.
Greet guests and supply context right away. Don't wait in silence for them to guess what's happening.
Ask an opinion-based question that needs no historical knowledge to answer. Guests can always tell you what they think, even about something they've never studied.
Layer in more information gradually, once the guest is engaged, rather than opening with a wall of facts.
Follow up with questions shaped by what the guest actually showed interest in, rather than a fixed script.

The blog's own worked example is instructive: a French officer persona opens not with a history lesson but by asking visitors whether they agree that Washington "killed a French ambassador in cold blood" — a claim almost every guest has an instant, opinionated reaction to, with zero prior knowledge required. The historical content follows from the conversation the question starts, rather than preceding it as a lecture.78

This technique generalizes well past its original example. A blacksmith might open with, "Tell me true — does a man who won't pay a fair price for good work deserve to have it done at all?" A tavern-keeper might open with, "You've the look of a man who's had worse ale than mine — go on, tell me about it." A midwife might open with, "Every mother thinks she knows best how to raise a child before she's had one — do you find that so?" None of these require the guest to know anything about the eighteenth century; all of them invite an opinion your persona can then build on.

Nat Lasley uses a version of this opener that works regardless of trade or strong opinion: he simply asks a guest where they're from, then reacts to the answer in character, usually with a small, humanizing joke about the distance or the (mis)match to his own persona's geography. It costs nothing to set up, needs no prepared position on anything, and does exactly the same job as the more elaborate examples above — it gets the guest talking about something they already know, before any history has to enter the conversation at all.79

Tip: Build one or two of these opening questions specifically for your persona before you ever need them — tied to something your character has a strong, defensible opinion about. Having it ready removes the awkward pause where both you and the guest are waiting for the other to start.

On-the-Spot Audience Casting

A more advanced version of the same instinct, described by Noah Lewis, gives a guest an active role in the scene rather than just a question to answer. Mid-presentation, Lewis will turn to an audience member and declare, in character, that they are now General Washington — then immediately ask a question built so the "correct" answer is close to unavoidable: "General Washington, sir, are you aware there's a goodly number of redcoats behind your position? ... What are your orders?" The guest hasn't been asked to invent anything; the question itself carries most of the answer, which is what makes the technique work. Lewis describes this candidly as controlling the guest's response by feeding it to them inside the question, rather than leaving the shape of their reply to chance.80

This buys you the engagement value of putting a guest "in role" — they leave feeling like they were part of the scene, not just spoken at — without the real risk of an open-ended question to an unpredictable guest derailing the moment. It isn't foolproof: Lewis is equally candid that a guest can still answer in a direction you didn't expect, and the honest response is to roll with it rather than treat it as a failure of the technique.

Reading the Guest

Not every guest wants the same opening, and part of improvisation is reading which one you're dealing with in the first few seconds:

The eager engager makes eye contact, slows down, and often speaks first. Meet this guest with your prepared opening question and let the conversation run — this is the guest the five-step method was built for.
The cautious observer hangs back, watches, may not want direct address at all yet. A lighter touch works better here — a passing comment made to the group in general, or continuing your task audibly ("mind the smoke, it always catches this time of day") rather than direct address, gives this guest room to opt in without being put on the spot.
The rushed guest, often part of a family managing several children or on a tight schedule, doesn't have time for a long exchange. A short, self-contained, memorable line does more good here than an opening you'd need several follow-ups to land.
The tester, often a guest who knows some real history and wants to see if you actually do too, responds better to being met on the merits — a direct, confident, specific answer — than to being redirected away from the question.

Note: Reading guests wrong costs you little — worst case, you offer an opening they don't take, and you adjust. The point of this section isn't to get it right every time; it's to notice quickly enough to adjust when your first guess doesn't land.

Consent Matters

A related point, and one the same critics raised in Chapter 1. Why First Person, and Why It's Hard are right about: guests dropped into a first-person exchange with zero warning can feel cornered rather than invited. Where your site's format allows it, signal clearly that an interaction is interactive and first-person before committing guests to it — a posted sign, a verbal framing line, a moment where you make eye contact and let them choose to approach rather than approaching a browsing visitor mid-thought. The Modern Reenactor blog's own suggested fix — museums explicitly advertising which encounters are interactive, and using a simple opt-in signal like a sticker a visitor can choose to wear — is a concrete, low-cost model worth adapting even at a smaller site: a sign at the entrance to a first-person area, a docent's brief framing line before guests enter, or simply a consistent, visible posture (facing outward, making eye contact, versus absorbed in a task with your back half-turned) that guests learn to read as "approach me" versus "observe quietly" over the course of a visit.81 An engaged guest who opted in is a fundamentally better teaching partner than a startled one who feels obligated to "perform back."

Handling the Anachronistic Question

Guests will ask about smartphones, cars, the internet, and a thousand other things that flatly did not exist in your character's world. This is not a threat to your portrayal — it's one of the most reliable, teachable moments available to you, if you have a ready technique for it rather than freezing.

The blogger behind I'm Living History frames this honestly: language and modern reference points genuinely are "a barrier," and there's no single correct answer for every situation — "it completely depends on the circumstance." What experienced interpreters generally converge on is a small set of responses, matched to the moment:

Genuine confusion, played straight. "I confess I do not take your meaning, sir" or "I know not what strange thing you speak of" — the companion volume's Quick-Reference Appendix lists several period-flavored equivalents. This works well for a passing, low-stakes question and keeps the whole exchange inside the frame.
Redirect through a related period concept. If a guest asks about your phone, you might genuinely not understand the object, but you can engage with the underlying human need — "I have no such thing, but when I would send word to my sister in Williamsburg, I..." This uses the anachronism as a bridge rather than a dead end.
A brief, deliberate step outside the frame. For a question that clearly wants a real historical answer, not an in-character deflection — a parent asking on a child's behalf, a guest with a genuine research question — stepping out briefly, answering plainly, and stepping back in is often the more respectful and more educational choice. Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly covers exactly when and how to do this well.

Caution: A deflection used every single time, for every anachronistic question, starts to feel evasive rather than charming. Vary your response to the guest's actual apparent intent — genuine curiosity deserves more than a stock line, even delivered in character.

Anachronistic questions come in more than one flavor, and it helps to tell them apart:

Object anachronisms (a phone, a car, a camera) are usually the easiest — your character genuinely wouldn't recognize the object, and honest confusion or a redirect both work well.
Future-knowledge questions ("do you know the Revolution will succeed?", "what happens to you eventually?") ask your persona to know things that haven't happened yet from his own vantage point. These deserve a firmly in-character answer built on real uncertainty — a persona in 1774 genuinely doesn't know how any of it turns out, and playing that uncertainty straight ("I know not, and any man who tells you he does is a liar or a fool") is both historically honest and often a stronger answer than a deflection. Two more polished versions of the same move are worth having ready. Bill Barker, Colonial Williamsburg's longtime Thomas Jefferson interpreter, met a guest's question about a decision his persona hadn't made yet — why he'd appointed Meriwether Lewis governor of Louisiana — by treating the premise as a live, interesting possibility rather than breaking frame: something to the effect of "that is an interesting idea; I shall consider it," delivered so smoothly guests rarely notice the dodge. Nat Lasley's version leans the other way, turning the gap into an invitation rather than a deflection: "I cannot see the future, but if I could, I believe I would do this, this, and that" — and then simply tells an entertaining, plausible story built on the premise, which guests generally enjoy more than either a flat non-answer or a broken frame.82
Meta-questions about the performance itself ("is this real?", "are you an actor?") are usually better served by a brief, honest break in character than by an in-character answer, since the guest is asking about the frame itself rather than something inside it — see Chapter 11. Breaking Frame Responsibly.

Your Persona's Ignorance vs. Your Own

A distinct and easy-to-conflate problem: sometimes a guest asks something your persona would plausibly not know (a laborer asked about high politics, a woman asked about a topic reserved to men's conversation, a rural character asked about city affairs), and sometimes a guest asks something you, the interpreter, simply haven't researched yet. These call for different responses. The first is free, in-character material — your persona's plausible ignorance is itself informative, and a good answer owns it directly: "That's talk for the courthouse crowd, not for the likes of me" tells a guest something true and interesting about eighteenth-century social structure. The second is a real gap in your own preparation, and the honest move is a graceful in-character redirect to a plausible authority your persona would defer to — "you'd do better to ask the parson on that, he's the schooling for it" — rather than bluffing an answer that might be wrong. Guests rarely notice or mind a well-executed redirect; they do notice a confidently delivered wrong fact, especially if they happen to know better.

A specific, useful variant: sometimes the historical record itself shows your persona deflecting a topic, and that documented deflection is fair game to reuse, in character, exactly as recorded. Martha Washington is on record telling a reporter during the Constitutional Convention that she had "no mind for politics" — almost certainly untrue, and almost certainly deliberate. Delivered with a small, knowing pause, that same line closes off a line of questioning as authentically as anything invented for the purpose could, and lets an attentive guest sense there's more behind it than the words admit. And when neither your persona's plausible ignorance nor a documented deflection fits, it is simply fine — in character or out of it — to say "I don't know," note the gap for next time, and, if you interpret alongside other personas, point a guest toward whoever's more likely to actually know: a military question toward whoever plays a general, a legal question toward whoever plays a lawyer. Treating your fellow interpreters as a shared resource beats trying to cover every possible question alone — advice Katherine Pittman, who has portrayed Martha Washington at Colonial Williamsburg for over a decade, gives in exactly these terms.83

The "In-Between" Approach

Strict, unbroken first person is not the only legitimate way to run an encounter, and treating it as an all-or-nothing commitment sets an unnecessarily high bar. I'm Living History describes groups that speak "in accent, in character, but acknowledging a few modern things" as a deliberate middle path — sustaining the voice and posture of first person while allowing brief, controlled acknowledgment of the present when it genuinely serves the moment. The blog cites one such group, the Autumn Tree Armored Combat Company, as a working example of exactly this style. This is a legitimate technique, not a failure of discipline, and many highly regarded interpreters use it constantly without guests ever noticing the seams.84

Nat Lasley offers a practical rule for when this softened register earns its keep: mainly one-on-one, not in front of a group. Stepping partway out of character for a single reluctant guest costs little, but doing the same thing with a crowd watching can undercut the experience for everyone else present, who may have been perfectly happy inside the frame. Even one-on-one, his instinct is to "put up a little fight" rather than dropping character too readily — reserve the softened register for guests who genuinely aren't going to engage any other way, rather than reaching for it at the first sign of hesitation.85

There's a deeper reason the in-between approach earns its keep beyond any single guest's comfort: total period fidelity, played with no acknowledgment of the gap at all, can misfire on a modern audience in a way full accuracy doesn't excuse. A persona played with your character's actual eighteenth-century reticence, formality, and unfamiliarity with anything past 1774 would, for a lot of guests, simply read as boring, or as flatly strange — a person in old clothes insisting, with total sincerity, that they're someone who died two and a half centuries ago. A light, self-aware acknowledgment of that gap — sometimes through a small joke, sometimes just a knowing pause — is a legitimate bridge across it, earning you the room to be more accurate for the rest of the encounter, not a concession that undermines the accuracy of everything else you do, per Pittman.86

Note: Prejudices your character holds "other than our own" — a phrase I'm Living History uses directly — deserve the same deliberate handling as anachronistic objects. A guest reacting strongly to a period attitude your character expresses in good faith is not a sign you've done something wrong; see Chapter 8. Portraying Across Station, Race, and Bondage and the next chapter for how to navigate exactly this kind of moment without either backing down from the history or letting a scene do real harm.

Practicing This Under Pressure

Improvisation skill comes from repetition, not from reading about it once. Chapter 13. Rehearsal, Feedback, and Building Your Impression includes specific drills — including a version of the sentence-conversion practice from the companion language book — built to put you under exactly this kind of unscripted pressure before you ever face it with a real guest.