Toilet Paper Tug of War

In my earliest stages exploring what would become the Interplay Games Curriculum, before I discovered that children’s street and playground games were going to be the key to the soul of my work, I focused solely on theater games. I had had some wonderful experiences teaching kids improvisational theater and had hoped to bring similar joy and creativity to my inner-city charges.

I managed to develop a few game-like exercises that proved fun enough for the kids to want to play again and again. One of which was Toilet Paper Tug of War.

The way I played it (a bit differently from that depicted above), I gave two kids a length of toilet paper (about a yard) and invited them to act as if they were playing tug of war with a real rope. To succeed at the improvisation, one of the kids had to lose, and the toilet paper had to remain intact.

It turned out to be surprisingly fun, though rarely successful. I’d say out of every 10 attempts, only one pair managed to get through the exercise without tearing the toilet paper. But the kids loved it and wanted to play it over and over. I don’t know if it was because we were using toilet paper (a vaguely “naughty” prop) or because the task was so silly in the first place. But serious fun was most definitely had. And it was, to me, at least, a near-perfectly objective correlative for what the art of acting was all about: the delicate art of creating a believable relationship.

In my later years, I tried playing it with a rope made of socks, which also invited the exercise of high drama and modicum of interpersonal restraint, but, for me, at least, trying to play a believable game of tug of war with a yard of one-play toilet paper remains in my memory as an apotheosis of educational theatrics.

Tagged as: children's theater, theater games