The volunteer disaster has a recognizable shape. You invite someone up, they get on stage, and within thirty seconds you know — in the slow-motion way that is specific to live performance — that this is going to be a problem.
Maybe they’re determined to be funny. Maybe they’re nervous to the point of paralysis. Maybe they’ve decided that the appropriate response to everything you ask is to deflect with a joke, and the joke isn’t landing, and now the audience isn’t sure who to watch. Maybe they’re simply not following what you’re asking of them, and the gap between what you need and what they’re providing is growing.
Every performer who’s done enough shows has been here. And every performer who’s done enough shows has also learned that volunteer disasters are almost never random. They’re usually predictable — you just didn’t do the work to predict them.
The Myth of the Surprise Volunteer
There’s a romantic notion in performance that the best volunteers are the surprising ones — the quiet person in the back who turns out to be hilarious, the skeptic who gets genuinely astonished. These stories are real. They happen. I’ve had some of my best show moments from volunteers I didn’t expect to be great.
But romantic stories survive because we remember the successes and forget the failures. The ratio of pleasant surprises to unpleasant ones, in my experience, depends almost entirely on how much you’ve screened before the invitation.
The unpleasant surprise — the volunteer who derails the effect, makes the audience uncomfortable, or simply can’t give you what the moment needs — is avoidable far more often than it seems. The trick is that you have to do the screening invisibly, as part of what looks like normal social interaction.
Before the Stage: The Conversation
I arrive early to shows. Not early so I can set up — I need time for that too, but it’s not the point. I arrive early because the time before the show is the most valuable screening window I have.
At a corporate event in Graz, I might have twenty minutes of pre-show time while guests are finding their seats, getting drinks, settling in. During those twenty minutes I’m doing something that looks like being personable and getting comfortable in the room. What I’m actually doing is running a low-key assessment of the people I might bring on stage.
The assessment is simple. I move through the room, talk to people briefly, and notice a few specific things: How do they respond to unexpected questions? When something slightly surprising happens in the conversation, what’s their natural reaction? Are they quick or slow to process? Are they looking for control or comfortable to follow?
None of these assessments are explicit. I’m just talking. But I’m reading the conversation for the qualities that matter on stage.
The Ten-Second Question
The most efficient screening tool I’ve found is what I think of as a micro-interruption.
In conversation, I’ll introduce a small non-sequitur — a mildly unexpected observation, a question that requires a brief creative response, something that briefly takes the conversation off the predictable track. I watch how the person handles it.
Some people pivot easily, lean in, get curious. These are the people who will be good on stage. When you give them an unexpected instruction mid-effect, they’ll adapt rather than freeze.
Some people get slightly rigid. They redirect toward familiar conversational ground, answer the literal question without engaging the creative element. These people aren’t bad audience members, but they’ll need more careful management if you bring them up.
Some people — and this is the category that matters most to identify early — try to take the conversation over. They’ll respond to a surprising question by launching into something about themselves. They’re performing rather than participating. On stage, this becomes someone who’s competing with you rather than collaborating.
The whole assessment takes ten seconds. No one knows it’s happening.
What Good Participation Looks Like Off Stage
I’m looking for three qualities in particular, all of which are visible in casual conversation before the show:
Responsiveness. When you ask something, do they respond to what you actually asked, or to what they expected you to ask? The responsive person hears the specific question. The less useful person hears the category of question and answers their version of it.
Presence. Are they in the conversation, or are they partly somewhere else? Looking around the room, checking their phone between sentences, giving you social-compliance responses without actually tracking the content. Someone who’s only half-present in a casual conversation will be half-present on stage, and half-presence from a volunteer is usually visible to the room.
Ease with uncertainty. Most of what happens during an effect on stage involves responding to something slightly unexpected. The volunteer who can sit comfortably in “I’m not sure what’s happening here” is infinitely more valuable than the one who needs to be controlling the situation at all times.
The Late Discovery
I didn’t develop this practice deliberately. I developed it through a string of difficult volunteer moments that I eventually noticed had a common pattern: in each case, the difficult volunteer had displayed, in pre-show conversation, exactly the behavior that made them difficult on stage.
The overpowering volunteer who tried to run the routine himself had been the loudest voice in the pre-show room. The frozen volunteer who couldn’t follow instructions had been visibly uncertain and deferential in the conversation I’d had with her beforehand. The disruptive volunteer who kept playing to their colleagues hadn’t been talking to me backstage — they’d been talking to the room through me, using our conversation as an audience.
I hadn’t been reading any of this because I hadn’t yet understood it was readable. Once I understood it was readable, I started reading it, and the rate of difficult volunteer moments dropped significantly.
Not to zero. Sometimes you invite someone who presented beautifully before the show and something shifts when they’re on stage. Stage fright is real, and it can make a confident person go blank. The assessment is a probability filter, not a guarantee.
But the probability matters. Going from one difficult volunteer every four shows to one every twelve shows is a meaningful improvement in performance consistency.
Making Peace with “Not This Person”
Sometimes the pre-show conversation tells you clearly that someone would not be a good volunteer, and you have to set that information aside graciously. This is easier than it sounds.
Not everyone needs to come on stage. In fact most people in any given show shouldn’t, and don’t. The assessment isn’t about finding people to exclude — it’s about knowing, from among the people who’d be willing, who will most help the show.
If someone has “difficult volunteer” written all over their pre-show behavior, I make a note (mental, not literal) and simply don’t make eye contact with them when I’m inviting participation. They’ll never know they were assessed. They’ll enjoy the show as audience members. Everyone’s fine.
The person you choose instead — the one who leaned in when you asked the unexpected question, who responded with genuine curiosity, who was present in the conversation — will get on stage and make the moment better than you planned.
That’s the whole point of the assessment. Not to protect yourself, but to give the audience the best possible version of the moment.
Know your volunteers before they know they’re going to be volunteers. It changes everything about how the show goes.