Second City

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Chapter One

Before the Beginning

Predecessors to Second City...

In the early 1950s, the Korean War was raging to its eventual stalemate, people were becoming wary of an atomic attack by the Soviet Union, and Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was frightening America with his claims of communists all around us. Conformity and men in gray flannel suits were becoming the norm, post-World War II affluence and the birthing of babies were still on the rise, and the suburbs were becoming an attractive alternative to city living.

    A black-and-white TV with an aerial on the roof or rabbit ears on top of the set was now a fairly commonplace sight in American living rooms, and people weir discovering the joys of staying home to watch Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, and Ed Sullivan live, as well as Groucho Marx, Jack Benny,Amos 'n' Andy, I Love Lucy, and Dragnet on film or kinescope. Holly wood was fighting the concurrent loss of business with widescreen and 3-D movies. Rodgers and Hammerstein were the reigning kings of Broadway. Pop songs tended to be about Tennessee waltzes and doggies in the window.

    Comedy, mostly seen in nightclubs and on TV variety shows, was jokes, often about wives or mothers-in-law. What passed for political humor was best represented by Bob Hope's gags about President Truman's piano playing and his daughter Margaret's singing career or, later, Eisenhower's golf game and his wife Mamie's hats.

    But the early 1950s were also when Arthur Miller was writing the anti--red-baiting dramaThe Crucible, the Beats were starting their protest against conformism by heading for the road, and Ernie Kovacs was playing with our minds on TV. White kids were finding black rhythm-and-blues on a few radio stations broadcast from remote spots on the dial (to their parents' dismay), and political satirist Mort Sahl's career, based on that day's newspaper, was taking off in nightclubs and on long-playing records.

    In Chicago, there were fashionable nightclubs slightly north of downtown and popular jazz clubs on the South Side. Long a source of some national network radio programming, the city was now also sending out several locally produced shows on the newly formed TV networks, includingKukla, Fran, and Ollie; [Dave] Garroway at Large; and Studs' [Terkel] Place, all broadcast live. There was even a nationally televised soap opera called Hawkins Falls. But almost the only professional theater was Broadway road companies playing in downtown houses. Locally produced theater usually could be found only in summer tents and community, school, and church spaces and patronized, for the most part, by friends and family. There was, however, something brewing at that South-Side bastion of scholarly intellectualism, the University of Chicago.

University Theatre

    In the late 1940s and early 1950s, among the people attending classes or hanging around at the University of Chicago were quite a few who were soon to become participants in Second City and/or its predecessor, The Compass. They included Paul Sills, David Shepherd, Bernie Sahlins, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Severn Darden, Andrew Duncan, Roger Bowen, Eugene Troobnick, Bill Alton, Zohra Lampert, Tony Holland, and me. There were also quite a few others who've made theater and film their careers, including Ed Asner, Fritz Weaver, and Joyce and Byrne Piven. The irony is that the University of Chicago had no theater department--or theater classes--and it still doesn't.

    But there was University Theatre, a sort of after-school dramatic society for smart kids. It had a paid artistic director and a budget from the University. Everything else came from the students putting in the time around schoolwork or, as often happened, instead of schoolwork, leading to panic, craziness, and threatened suicides before final exams. The plays produced at UT were difficult, tending toward the obscure and the esoteric: Buchner, Wycherley, unfamiliar Shakespeare, the Capek brothers. And we had no instruction to help us over the rough spots, which were many. Some shows were considerably better than others.

    In January 1952, Paul Sills directed and acted in UT's production of Cocteau's The Typewriter . The cast also included Mike Nichols and Joyce Piven. I learned how to run lights for it.

    The Typewriter was a rebellion against the dominant fourth-wall method of acting. The concept of the fourth wall is part of the theory of acting developed by the enormously influential late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian actor-director Constantine Stanislavsky and brought to America in the 1930s by Stella Adler, Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and other members of the Group Theatre. In fourth-wall acting, you're pretending that the front of the stage is the fourth wall of the room you're pretending to be in. In other words, the actor tries to leave out any sense of performing for an audience. (Apparently Marlon Brando, a fourth-wall actor, couldn't even be heard in the back half of the theater when he played Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway) By the early 1950s, fourth-wall acting was the norm for any actor who wanted to be taken seriously. Thanks to Rodgers and Hammerstein, it was even starting to be expected in musicals. Comedy, however, doesn't bounce well off walls. You have to play the audience and their laughter--or silence--and therefore can't pretend to yourself that they're not there. It's one of the many reasons for the famous quote, attributed to several people, though most frequently to Groucho Marx: "Dying is easy; comedy is hard." It's also one reason why so many Strasberg-trained Method actors can't do comedy, or at least not very well.

    The Typewriter became a box-office hit, and talk began about starting our own theater. Of course, none of us had any money, but when has that ever stopped the talk? (One big difference between then and now: there was no existing precedent in 1952 for starting your own theater company in Chicago.)

    With the talk getting stronger, a bunch of us got together for five hours every Saturday afternoon during much of the 1952-53 school year, and Paul Sills taught us the improvisational games and exercises he learned from his mother, Viola Spolin. There are many of them. Exercises are usually used as warm-ups or to end a class and require no advance planning. Here's one: the group is divided into two teams who then have a tug-of-war, only the rope is mimed.

    Each game has a single rule of play and, with few exceptions, is performed on an empty stage, with no costumes, and everything mimed except chairs. A game begins with the class counting off into two, three, or four people per team for that particular game. Then each team privately plans the three basic questions needed for any improvised scene: who? (who you are), what? (a mutual physical activity), and where? (the setting of the scene). After planning that much, and usually only that much, you're given the rule for the game you're about to play. It might be to do the scene in gibberish or as a silent movie. It might be to make as many entrances and exits as you can, but only while everyone else on stage is looking at you and without your saying anything about the fact that you're trying to make an exit or entrance. Or the teacher will side-coach you to heighten or explore any passing moment of your scene. Or your team will divide in half, with one half on stage acting the scene and the other half watching them behave and dubbing their dialogue while the actors on stage try to mouth the dubbed words as they're being said.

    Some games and exercises help work on character (the who), some on the where, some on the what, some on focusing on the other, and there are many other kinds as well, all helpful to the actor in creating an individual character within an ensemble.

    Paul, of course, had started learning the games from Viola when he was a child in Los Angeles (as had Elaine May, Paul Sand, and Alan Arkin). By 1953, he knew he was teaching us the games on those Saturday afternoons in order to build an acting ensemble for his dreamed-of new theater, and that's what happened to us. That's what always happens when a group plays Viola's improv games together for a while; they learn to trust each other, to more or less cope with each other's foibles, and to work off what's happening between them and the others instead of just off themselves. After all, in an improv, as opposed to a play, you don't know what you're going to say or do next, and whatever it is has to come off what you see and hear from the others, combined with what you want from them.

    The last show of the 1952-53 University Theatre season was Paul's extraordinary production of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in its Chicago premiere and second production anywhere. (Given Brecht's communism, it opened, fittingly, on May Day.) The cast of twenty, between us, played about sixty characters without ever leaving the stage--a perfect chance to use the ensemble techniques we'd been learning in the workshops.

    With the arrival of David Shepherd, who had as strong a vision as Paul's and a little money, talk also began on the possibility of opening a political cabaret for working-class audiences, which was David's dream.

    Since no one was really ready for a political cabaret yet, Paul Sills, David Shepherd, and Eugene Troobnick opened Playwrights Theatre Club on June 23, 1953, with a restaged and somewhat recast production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle .

Playwrights Theatre Club

    Playwrights was located at the corner of North and LaSalle (a block from the current Second City) on the outskirts of the area known as Old Town, far from the University of Chicago and slightly off the beaten track. Our space was a tile-floored reconverted Chinese restaurant upstairs from a drugstore and an all-night diner. (The building was later torn down and replaced by a Burger King.) We incorporated as a club because that was the only way you could be not-for-profit in those days--our lawyer had to invent a lot of that stuff as we went along. We sold memberships instead of tickets. The seats were wood-frame director's chairs with detachable red, blue, or yellow canvas seats and backs; each color was a different "membership" price.

    There was a record heat wave on opening night and no air-conditioning, but the critics loved us anyway, and we were an instant hit in our 125-seat house with individual memberships priced at one to two dollars. (The diner downstairs sold an excellent barbecued-beef sandwich with fries, lettuce, tomato, and coffee for seventy-five cents, if that helps you understand the economy. Somebody always seemed to be playing Eartha Kitt's "I Want to Be Evil" on the juke box down there.) We were the first local theater in years, the beginning of a movement that wouldn't see its major growth until the late 1970s.

    In two years, we did close to thirty productions, including The Glass Menagerie, The Dybbuk, Murder in the Cathedral, Peer Gynt, The Sea Gull, Oedipus Rex, Juno and the Paycock , the Chicago premiere of The Threepenny Opera , some Shakespeare, a few originals--including one by Paul Sills and another by David Shepherd--an occasional evening of Poets' Theater, and a children's theater for which Elaine May wrote a very funny adaptation of "Rumpelstiltskin." The shows ran an average of three weeks each, some less, some more, depending on business. We did six performances a week, no matinees. We'd close on a Sunday and open the next show on Tuesday. We were young and didn't know you couldn't do all that. We were learning our craft by doing it six nights a week.

    A lot of talented people were drawn to Playwrights in those days and by the opportunity it offered young actors to learn their craft and to work on a regular basis. Ed Asner (later of off-Broadway, Broadway, such TV shows as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, The Bronx Zoo , and Thunder Alley ) was one of them. He was in charge of cleaning up the theater before the show every night. He'd recently gotten out of the army and ran us like he was the master sergeant and we the buck privates. If Ed was angry with someone, that person got latrine duty that night.

    We rehearsed daytimes and after the shows, and made sets, costumes, and everything else whenever we could. We lived communally off the take, earning five, ten, or fifteen dollars a week, each according to need. (Since Barbara Harris and I still lived more or less at home--we were both seventeen when Playwrights started--we were among those who got five bucks a week, as did those few with day jobs. I sometimes brought food from home for everyone, since my wonderful parents worried about whether anyone was getting enough to eat.) Many of the men in the company lived in little alcoves around the back and one side of the theater, separated from the main auditorium by curtains, not doors, leaving privacy at a premium.

    As we were approaching our first anniversary, we decided to move to a bigger space and join Actors Equity, the actors' and stage managers' union, which provided a minimum guaranteed salary of fifty-five dollars a week, allowing the guys who'd been living in the theater to move into their own small apartments and still have enough money to eat. By then Bernie Sahlins--at the time a businessman with Pentron tape recorders and a travel agency and therefore someone with some money--had replaced Eugene Troobnick as one of the producers. Eugene didn't want to be a boss anymore, or at least that's what we were told.

    The second Playwrights space--a two hundred-seat theater--was a reconverted photographer's studio at the corner of Division and Dearborn, upstairs from an expensive restaurant (which hated us) and across the street from the art-film house. We opened the new space with a four-play summer Shakespeare festival, which was mostly standing-room only, and we even brought in two "New York actors" to augment the ensemble. Membership prices went up a little. Business was usually excellent, but there were more seats to fill and more expenses. Actors started leaving for New York because there wasn't enough work in Chicago, and most of it didn't pay much better than Playwrights. (If you were going to make it, New York was the place to go. It had Broadway, it had the newly developing off-Broadway movement, it had many of the best teachers and most of the country's live dramatic TV shows.) Also, after eighteen months of productions, we were getting tired, especially Paul Sills, who'd directed most of the shows.

    In early spring of 1955, the fire department descended. To this day, some people believe it's because we were suspected of being fellow-travelers and possibly even communists in that Joseph McCarthy era. Among other things, we'd started at the University of Chicago, which had been labeled "pinko" by anti-communist government investigators of the time. Quite a few of us came under suspicion because we were poor but Jewish. Also, we'd produced works by Brecht, who'd recently lied to the House Un-American Activities Committee, fleeing the country the next day to take up residence in communist East Berlin; and we'd just done an original play called Rich But Happy . Whatever started the investigation, we were certainly in violation of the outmoded fire codes and had been all along, and they closed us down. We did a few shows in rented spaces, but the spirit was gone, as were many of the original ensemble.

The Compass

    During the nearly two years of Playwrights, we'd worked on Viola Spolin's improv games with her son Paul Sills whenever we could. Viola herself, who was living in L.A., came in toward the end, when excitement was building about opening David Shepherd's political cabaret theater. She arrived just in time to do improv workshops and help form the ensemble that became the first company of the new place, which David decided to call The Compass because he wanted it to point in whichever direction society was already going.

    It was to be informal and close to where people lived so they could come without dressing up, where there'd be food and drink, and where they'd see shows dealing with the life they led, rather than the illusions, dreams, and lies being put out by Hollywood, New York, and Washington. David wanted to open it in a working-class neighborhood in Gary, Indiana, a steel-mill town an hour's drive from Chicago, or in the neighborhood of Chicago's stockyards; fortunately (though not from David's point of view) neither of those worked out.

    Fred Wranovics, a popular bartender at the Woodlawn Tap (known as Jimmy's) on 55th Street in the University of Chicago neighborhood, had just bought the Hi-Hat Lounge, also on 55th Street, and had also bought the empty store next door. After knocking a hole in the wall between the two buildings, the Compass ensemble, with a lot of hard work--especially by Andrew Duncan--converted the empty store into a playing space. The storefront windows were left unblocked so passersby could see the show--an excellent way of getting them inside. Fred rechristened the place The Compass Tavern, and the show opened on July 5, 1955. (It was supposed to open on the Fourth, but the air conditioner broke down.)

    Paul Sills directed all the shows the first summer, and David Shepherd was the producer and one of the performers. Among the many performers that summer along with David and Andrew Duncan were Roger Bowen, Barbara Harris, and Elaine May.

    The Compass began with a format that included a short opening piece or two to get the audience laughing, followed by "The Living Newspaper"--twenty minutes of improvs on and narrated reenactments of articles in that day's paper. Then came a fifty-minute or so, nine- to twelve-scene, politically or socially conscious play created from a written scenario--a scene-by-scene breakdown, usually without any of the dialogue--which was then improvised out by the cast in rehearsals and even in performance. The scenarios dealt with such subjects as teenage parental and peer pressure, high-powered salesmen, tax evasion, and the University neighborhood itself. (It was because he couldn't find new plays and playwrights to suit his purposes that David Shepherd settled on the idea of improvised scenarios instead.)

    At the conclusion of the act, the actors would take suggestions from the audience in such categories as political events, authors, pet peeves, and so on and, after a short break, do a set of improvisations based on the suggestions. All this, done with some chairs and hats as the only props, was performed five nights a week, two shows on Friday, three on Saturday, with a new "Living Newspaper" every day and a new scenario every week or two.

    David Shepherd and business manager Charley Jacobs moved the show on October 1, 1955, to The Compass at the Dock on Lake Park Avenue near 53rd Street, a larger space on the fringe of the University of Chicago area. There were some changes in the personnel: Paul Sills had gone to England on a Fulbright, taking his then-wife Barbara Harris with him; Roger Bowen was about to be drafted; David Shepherd was now the director; and Elaine May was running the improv workshops and performing along with Andrew Duncan and a company enhanced by the arrival of, among others, Mike Nichols and Severn Darden.

Continues...

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