FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO TO THE SECOND CITY
by Sheldon Patinkin
presented on October 21, 2013 to The Chicago Literary Club
© 2013
Sheldon Patinkin
I entered the College
of the University of Chicago in the Fall of 1950 when
I was 15. I’d gone to the University’s
Laboratory High School, which in those days ended in 10th grade, so
you were either accepted by the College at that point or you went to another
high school for two years. Everyone who
was accepted had to take the same highly structured and extremely difficult
Liberal Arts courses, four a year. Each
course was a school-year long, including three years of the humanities, three
of the sciences, three of the social sciences, a year of English composition, a
year of a foreign language, a year of the philosophy of mathematics, a year of
world history, and a year of philosophy.
Your entire grade for each of the four courses you took each year was
whatever grade you got on your six-to-nine hour final comprehensive exam; none
of your class work (or attendance) counted. Therefore many of the students read
the assignments but frequently cut classes and spent the two weeks off from
classes before finals borrowing class notes and doing lots of all-nighters on
coffee, beer, and No-Doze. There were
occasional suicides and nervous breakdowns.
Based on Adler and Hutchins’s Great Books
plan, there were no textbooks for most of the courses, just the actual texts,
such as Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which I was assigned during my
very first class my very first morning.
Not a book about relativity or a text with notes, just Einstein.
This was post-World-War-Two; there were many
returning vets on the G.I. Bill, some living in rows of Quonset huts set up on
campus. It was also the time of McCarthyism and its attendant fear of
Communism. The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated the
University and labeled it pink – one step below red. During the televised Army-McCarthy hearings
in 1952, many of us – students, faculty, and staff – were jammed into the two
lounges on the first floor of the Reynolds Club, the student center, watching
the hearings on 16-inch black and white TVs. There were comments constantly
being thrown out as well as groans and cheers. When Joseph Welch, one of the
lawyers for the Army, told Senator McCarthy off, the cheers filled the rooms
and the halls.
Among the people taking classes or hanging around campus in the 40s and early 50s (some of them veterans) were Ed Asner, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Bernard Sahlins, Joyce Piven (Hiller then), and several others who went on to make their careers in theater and/or film and TV and were already drawn to the life.
What’s most unusual about so many talented
theater people being on one campus together is that at that time the U of C
didn’t have any theater classes, let alone a theater department. But there was
University Theatre (called UT by everyone), a sort of after-school dramatic
society, with a small theater on the third floor of the Reynolds Club. Everything at UT was students and the one
paid employee putting in the time around classes and homework, or often instead
of classes and homework. Most of the plays were difficult, tending toward the
classic, the obscure, the esoteric; this was the University of Chicago after
all. They were plays our audiences had
read or heard about but had never seen: Webster, Büchner, Ibsen, Wycherley,
Beaumont and Fletcher, less familiar Shakespeare, the Capek brothers.
The word on campus in the winter of 1951 was
that Paul Sills, the campus’s directing hero, was going to direct and act in
Jean Cocteau's The Typewriter, an existential mystery about a detective
(Paul) hunting down a poison-pen letter writer during the Nazi occupation of
France. The cast of five also included Mike Nichols and Joyce Hiller.[i]
The Typewriter was getting its American premiere; a couple
of critics came, making it the first UT show reviewed in a metropolitan
newspaper. The show became a box-office hit, extended twice. Paul had been
talking about starting his own theater away from the University; now he started
talking about it even more and to more people. Of course no one had money, but
that’s never stopped the talk.
There's one big difference between local theaters in Chicago then and now; in 1951 the only locally produced professional theater was in tents during the summer and an occasional itinerant troupe. Everything else local was amateur theater in schools, churches, synagogues, social groups or park districts.
Not that there wasn't professional theater in town; there was a lot. Any successful Broadway play, musical and revue sent out a road company that played one of the ten or more “legitimate” houses downtown. There were usually shows running in all of them, often with stars, never with local talent. I remember Maurice Evans and Helen Hayes in Twelfth Night, Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer in Othello, Death of a Salesman with Thomas Mitchell, Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn in a blistering A Streetcar Named Desire, Mary Martin in Annie Get Your Gun and many more plays and musicals.
The first revue I remember was the intimate
and wonderful New Faces of 1962 (nearly the last revue produced on
Broadway for many years). It included a very funny parody of Death of a
Salesman by one Melvin Brooks with Willie Loman a pickpocket who wanted his
son Biff to go into the family business.
It also had a big song and dance number about Lizzie Borden after she
was exonerated called “You Can’t Chop Your Papa Up in Massachusetts.” The form
was already popular on such TV revues as Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca’s Your
Show of Shows, The Colgate Comedy Hour, and Jackie Gleason’s Cavalcade
of Stars, all broadcast live.
I need to pause here for some theatre history. In New York in the 30s The Group Theatre[ii] was an ensemble of theater artists who did plays on Broadway of social and political significance. They worked in a naturalistic acting style some of them had brought back to the company after studying with the revolutionary actor/director/teacher Constantine Stanislavsky when he’d toured with his Moscow Art Theatre.
A key to what Stanislavsky has taught us
about naturalistic acting is that you act what produces the emotion, not the
emotion itself (called “indicating”). By responding honestly in character to
what you’ve just received from the others, you’re having honest reactions.[iii]
Like most theoretical geniuses, Stanislavsky continued finding new and different ideas throughout his life. Some of the Group went back to study with him again to learn his newest ideas. Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio didn’t go; he wasn’t interested in hearing more or different from what he was already doing, which was known as The Method. It was working for him. Some of those who did go – Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner and Robert Lewis most notably – after giving up on Strasberg, eventually started their own acting schools, taught their own understandings of Stanislavsky, and wrote their own books on acting. (Lewis called his first book Method – or Madness?)[iv]
For four years in the ‘30’s, actors from The
Group ran a Chicago branch. Viola
Spolin, the “mother” of improvisational theater, spent just three months
studying with them; she felt that their way smothered much of an individual’s
creativity. She was determined to find a better way. At Hull House in Chicago,
she was helping immigrants and inner-city people adjust to their lives through
story telling and drama. It was there that Viola started to develop the ideas
for her improvisational game techniques. She formed them more fully while
teaching children and adults for the WPA’s Recreational Project.
Although called games, they’re not about winning and losing; they’re about playing together. Unlike Strasberg’s Method, Viola’s games are focused almost entirely on what’s going on between you and the others rather than almost entirely on what’s going on inside your character. It’s an old saw, but acting is reacting. When you’re improvising, you obviously don’t know your next line or movement or emotional state; therefore those things have to come out of what just happened and your character’s reaction to them. Just as with Stanislavsky, you must be in the moment, not in your head, in order to stay honest to how you react in character to what just happened. The games help actors and improvisers build the “muscles” needed to do that. Furthermore, people playing the games together for a while invariably become an ensemble. “Ensemble,” by the way, is the working title of the memoir I’m writing.
During a master class I was doing with the faculty of the Second City Chicago’s Training Center, one of the teachers asked if I agreed that an ensemble is only as good as its weakest member. “No,” I responded, “an ensemble is only as good as its ability to compensate for its weakest member.” Furthermore, the weakest member can shift at any given time. Improv teacher Del Close defined ensemble this way: If you can make everyone else look good, you’ll look good too. Ensemble acting is the prominent style of most of the theaters in Chicago, and most of the actors and directors here have played Viola’s games at some time or other during their theatrical education.[v]
Viola’s ground-breaking1963 book Improvisations for the Theater[vi] is an explanation of and description of her games. The book, in its various editions and versions, has become a standard text used in many high schools, colleges and other theater and improv classes as well as in seminars and workshops for lawyers, teachers, salespeople, and others who have to deal with the public. Her work is, of course, the foundation of the many generations of the ensemble-based Compass and Second City and of all the improv theaters that followed.
Her son Paul Sills was the original director of The Compass and Second City, and the creator of the Story Theater form.[vii] Paul was as important as Viola in teaching and disseminating her work, now being taught by many of their students and their students’ students and on down the generations. In a panel during the 60th anniversary of Playwrights Theatre Club, Ed Asner said, “If there is a pantheon of 20th century gods of theatre created in this country, if Paul is not the Zeus for how he affected theatre, then it doesn’t matter at all.” During the same event, Joyce Piven said “Paul knew the truth.”
After The Typewriter closed, a group of us got together every Saturday afternoon to learn Viola' s improv games from Paul. He didn’t say so at the time, but by having us play the games for a few months, he was building an acting ensemble for his dreamed-of new theater. The last show of the 1952-53 UT season was Paul's production of Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle in the Reynolds Club’s 900-seat Mandel Hall. It was the play's second production ever. Chalk Circle was Paul’s first application of Brechtian acting theories, the major influence on his developing ideas about a more presentational acting style. Off-Broadway and cabaret revues such as The Compass and Second City use the style, without usually being Brechtian about it. The same is true for musicals, where you have to play characters who can burst into song and dance. Shakespeare’s actors did asides and soliloquies as direct address to the audience; Groucho Marx and Bob Hope, among others, often talked directly to the audience in shows and into the camera in their movies.
Chalk Circle also introduced Paul to a narrative technique
he developed in the late 60s and early 70s into his Story Theater form.
In 1965, Paul and Viola started The Game Theater, where the entertainment was
audience members themselves playing the games. This, of course, was part of
the blueprint for the many groups that have sprung up all over the world who
improvise on the spot. Paul and Viola's
influence through the years has been truly enormous.
After Chalk Circle, Paul was ready to
move on to his own theater. One of the people he’d been planning with was David
Shepherd, who even had a little money. David wanted to start a political
cabaret, but no one was ready for that yet, so Paul, David, and Eugene
Troobnick (later a member of the first Second City cast) opened Playwrights
Theatre Club on June 23, 1953, starting with Chalk Circle. We were located at 1560 N. LaSalle Street in
Old Town, miles away from the University. It was a block away from where
Second City is now, but at that time it was in a slightly seedy,
off-the-beaten-track area for a theater. Our space was a tile-floored
reconverted Chinese restaurant upstairs of a drug store and an all-night
diner. A theatre on a second floor was actually illegal in those days, but no
one seemed to mind. (The building has since been torn down and replaced by,
first, a Burger King and now a Fifth Third Bank.)
We were incorporated as a club because that was the way our lawyer invented for us; a theatre couldn’t be not-for-profit in those days, but a club could. Instead of buying a ticket, people signed up as club members, paying either $1.25, $2.50, or $3.00 for the evening, or you could sign up for a season subscription. Either way, it got you in our membership book and onto our mailing list as well as into the theatre. The cheapest price level was a little higher than a movie, and the other two levels a lot less than the downtown legitimate houses. (The all-night diner downstairs sold a barbecued beef sandwich with fries, lettuce, tomato and coffee for 85 cents.) I was in the box office every night till the show started. I also kept the membership book up to date for both new and returning members. I was also pianist, musical director, assistant director, production manager, co-lighting designer, and I was working on my M.A. in English Lit at the U of C. I barely remember studying. It must have been on the buses and els between school and home on the south side and the theatre on the north side.
Most of the reviews of Chalk Circle
and its production were favorable, ignoring the Marxist doctrine implied in the
play. McCarthyism did have its grip on Colonel Robert R. McCormick’s Tribune
though, and therefore on the Trib’s theatre critic Claudia Cassidy, one of
the most powerful critics in the country.
There was some danger involved in doing a play by Brecht, known to have
fled America to Communist-ruled East Berlin the day after he lied to HUAC about
his political views. Furthermore the show had a cast full of people who’d come
from the “pink” University of Chicago.
However, no one seemed to mind.
We were an instant hit, the first
year-round local theater in years, a breath of fresh air to some theatre-goers
compared to what was available in the commercial theatres downtown. Our
audiences were mostly people with university degrees, as well as college
students and faculty, often from the U of C. We were also the seed of a
movement that wouldn’t start to grow until twenty years later when the building
code for theaters was changed to accommodate store-front theaters and theaters
on second floors.
The ensemble included the entire cast of The
Typewriter, though Mike Nichols didn’t stay long. Joining them were, among
others, Zohra Lampert and her then husband Bill Alton (later, members of an
early Second City cast). Others who came shortly after the opening included Ed
Asner, Byrne Piven, and Barbara Harris (a member of the first Second City
cast). Elaine May joined us that winter;
and Josephine and Rolf Forsberg were among those who joined us our second year.
In just under two years we did close to
thirty productions including Arthur Schnitzler’s La Ronde, Georg
Bϋchner’s Woyzeck, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, S. Ansky’s The
Dybbuk (our biggest hit and longest-running show), Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The
Threepenny Opera (the Chicago premiere), T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the
Cathedral, Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Chekov’s The Sea Gull. Larry Kert in the Trib once described
us as “idealistic, unflinchingly highbrow … with a liberal progressive bent
that shaded toward radicalism.”
Our shows ran an average of three weeks
each, a couple less, a few more, depending on business. We did six performances
a week (no matinees), dark on Mondays. After the last night of a show, we’d
strike and paint and prepare that night and all day Monday, dress rehearse the
next show on Monday night, and open it for the press on Tuesday. (Our second
year we finally figured out to call the first Tuesday and Wednesday shows
previews and not invite the press till the first Thursday.) We rehearsed days
and after the shows, hunted or made costumes and props whenever. Ed Asner 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 our master sergeant and
we were buck privates. If he was angry with you, you got latrine duty.
Bernard Sahlins replaced Gene Troobnick as a
producer late our first winter. Bernie,
who later was the original producer of Second City, was at the time the head of
Pentron, a tape recorder company. He was a man with a deep love of theatre and
some money.
Our second year, we moved to larger quarters
upstairs of 1205 N. Dearborn, just north of Division. To open the new space,
Bernie suggested our Summer season be a four-play
Shakespeare festival, an excellent idea which got us a whole new batch of Club
members.[viii]
The new space had been a photographer’s
studio, and before that it had apparently been a gambling joint. It’s now Gold
Coast Realtors. It was upstairs of a drug store and the relatively expensive
restaurant Ballantine’s, which hated us because we were scruffier looking than
their clientele, as were a lot of our audiences, and we made noise on their
ceiling.[ix]
During a revival of La
Ronde in the early spring of 1955, the fire department descended, suddenly
minding all the theatre’s infractions. Some people believe it's because we were
suspected of being fellow-travellers and possibly even Communists. After all
we'd started at the “pink” U of C, quite a few of us came under suspicion for
being poor but Jewish, we'd done Brecht, and we'd just done an orginal play
called Rich But Happy. Whatever started the investigation, we were certainly
in extreme violation of the fire codes of the day. We had been all along, but now someone seemed
to mind. You needed an asbestos curtain between the stage and the audience, you
weren’t allowed to be on a second floor, and much more stuff we’d always been
in violation of, so they closed the theatre down.[x]
As Playwrights was limping toward its demise
with a couple of shows in rented spaces, the talk was growing more excited
about a political cabaret theater to be created by the performers each night
through improvisations based on audience suggestions. David Shepherd, whose idea it was and whose
money was backing it, originally wanted to open it in a working-class neighborhood
in Gary, Indiana. Fortunately he realized
that wouldn’t work, and in the summer of 1955, The Compass opened in the back
room of a bar back in the University of Chicago neighborhood. It was an enormous hit.
By 1955, what with rising costs and the rise
of national television, things were starting to slow down on Broadway.
Producers were no longer turning out as many shows worth touring – not that
that always stopped them. Meanwhile, the Broadway revue had been getting
smaller and had moved to off-Broadway and to cabarets.
The Compass began life
with a format that included a short opening piece followed by twenty minutes of
improvs off that day's newspaper; then they did a forty-five minute,
six-or-seven-scene play with a scenario that had been written and improvised
out by the cast in rehearsals. To close
the act, they'd take a set of suggestions from the audience and return after an
intermission to improvise on them. They did this five nights a week, two shows
on Friday, three on Saturday, with a new scenario improvised out during rehearsals
every week or two. Eventually it got too
difficult to get the cast to like any new scenario except his or her own. Besides, pieces created in the improv sets
were proving to be repeatable, and soon the show became a two-act revue of
scenes developed from improvisations, and with a set of improvs from audience
suggestions at the end of the evening.
That is still the basic Second City format.
Severn Darden and Roger
Bowen (later members of the original Second City cast) and Shelley Berman were
among those who joined Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris and other
remnants of the Playwrights company brave enough to
improvise. Del Close, Alan Arkin, Anne
Meara and Jerry Stiller were among those who joined it after David moved it to
St Louis in ‘57. When he moved it to New
York, the cast included Alan Alda, Diana Sands and Godfrey Cambridge.
Meanwhile, during the
‘56-57 theater season, Bernie Sahlins ran an Equity subscription season at The
Studebaker Theatre in the Fine Arts Building downtown. Among the shows he produced was Chicago's
first Waiting for Godot. And he brought in people like Sir Cedric
Hardwick, E.G. Marshall and Geraldine Page to work with local talent. He also brought in an actress named Vicki
Cummings to star in the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata with a cast of
mostly Compass players Including Gene Troobnick, Barbara Harris, Elaine May
and Mike Nichols, with Severn Darden as leader of the women's chorus. Paul Sills directed it in a very
presentational, almost deconstructionist way.
Claudia Cassidy called it the worst production of the play in 2000
years.
Soon and suddenly Nichols and May got famous as a comedy team. So did Shelley Berman as a single. Paul and his friend Howard Alk got jobs managing The Gate of Horn, a popular near-north folk music and comedy club where Lenny Bruce, Judy Collins and the Smothers Brothers appeared frequently. Rush Street nightclubs, particularly Mr. Kelly's, were booking comics more than singers, including Shelley and Mike and Elaine along with Mort Sahl and Bob Newhart. Comedy was getting very big in America; it was even selling a lot of records. And it was changing; more personal, more laid back, filled with ideas, characters and stories rather than mother-in-law jokes, all under the influence of Lenny Bruce.
In the summer of 1959, Paul and Viola
started workshops with a group of people who were interested in opening a new
Compass in Chicago. Since the Compass
was still running in St. Louis, the name wasn’t available, so Paul, Howard Alk
and Bernie Sahlins opened it as The Second City, taken from the title of a
series of snotty New Yorker magazine articles about Chicago written by
A.J. Liebling. We opened at 1842 N.
Wells in two reconverted storefronts: a Chinese laundry, which was the
lobby, and a hat shop, which was the theatre.
We also had a summer beer-garden in the vacant lot next door. (They’re all gone now, replaced by Hemingway
House.) The opening was on December 16,
Beethoven's and Oscar Wilde’s birthdays.
By that point, Old Town was exploding.
Paul was the Artistic Director. The cast was Barbara Harris, Mina Kolb, Gene Troobnick, Severn Darden, Andrew Duncan, Howard Alk and Roger Bowen. Howard and Roger left early on and were replaced by Paul Sand and Alan Arkin. Within months we were hailed by Time Magazine as a "temple of satire," and you needed reservations weeks in advance, months on Saturdays. We built a larger theater in half of the beer garden at 1846 N. Wells for plays and sentimentally called it Playwrights at Second City. Business wasn’t really all that great there, so we moved it next door to the Second City, which was smaller, and moved Second City to the larger theater. When the original Second Ctiy cast left for Broadway shortly before the switch, the new cast that moved into the bigger space included Avery Schreiber, Del Close, and Joan Rivers. At the new Playwrights we did very successful Chicago premieres of such shows as Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape,” and Pinter’s The Caretaker, my first directing job. However, with a flop show, Playwrights couldn’t support itself and we had to close it.
The other half of the beer garden was still open where we showed silent movies in the summer and had an ice cream stand. One summer, the soda jerk was David Mamet, while he was still a student at Francis Parker High School. He was also taking improv classes at the time with Paul and me. In the winter, we showed the silent movies in the bar downstairs at 1846.
I was the assistant director and manager in the early years. Then, in 1963, I replaced Paul as artistic director and stayed in that role until I left town for a while in 1968. One of my favorite companies during those years included Fred Willard, Robert Klein and David Steinberg. We moved that company intact to the space we had then in Greenwich Village in New York.
In 1967 we moved to where we are now in Piper’s Alley. The Martin Luther King riots were in April of 1968. All the businesses on Wells Street were closed down by the city for two nights because the riots were too near. Armed National Guard vehicles patrolled the streets. And there was, of course, the 1968 Democratic National Convention. When the police chased the protestors out of Lincoln Park at 11 pm each night, many of them ran toward us, with the police right behind them. We could smell the tear gas. From the steps outside Second City we saw kids getting beaten up against the wall of the Walgreens across the street. One of our actors came down the stairs too far and got hit. 1968 also included the killing of Bobby Kennedy, the My Lai disaster and the election of Richard Nixon. It wasn’t a good year.
Business at Second City in Piper’s Alley dropped in 1969; people were staying away from Wells Street with its head shops and their customers. Second City needed a new audience, so we got a new kind of cast, including Harold Ramis, John Belushi, and Joe Flaherty. The new audience was slow in coming, but, during about three years in the mid-‘70s, Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and Animal House all happened. Those shows made it clear in interviews and articles that many of the people came from Second City, including Belushi, Ramis, Gilda Radner, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Eugene Levy, and Martin Short. Second City became successful again, and has remained so since then, including a lot more tourists hoping to see the next Chris Farley or Tina Fey.
We now have two
spaces back to back in Pipers Alley, and three national touring companies with
a fourth if needed when a booking comes in and the other three are busy. We also have several companies on tour boats,
a group that writes and performs shows for businesses, another theatre in
Toronto, and Training Centers here, in L.A., and in Toronto with enrollments
between them in the thousands. I
co-started the one in Toronto with John Candy and the one in Chicago with
Martin de Maat.
The local theatre scene started in 1959 with
us, the first Actors Equity cabaret theatre, and Bill Pullinsi’s Candlelight, the
first Equity dinner theater. In 1963 Bob
Sickinger started Chicago's first not-for-profit non-Equity theater at one of
the Hull Houses. The community soon
began to grow, and then to mushroom. In
1978, The League of Chicago Theatres, a service organization for Chicago
theatres, started with 21 members; it now has close to two hundred. That was the same year Steppenwolf opened in
a basement in Highland Park. I taught
them the games as they expanded their ensemble for their move into the city.
One of the reasons David Mamet and Stewart
Gordon came to Chicago in the 70s to start their theaters was because Paul was
here. He’d taught them the games, Gordon
at the University of Wisconsin, Mamet when he was our soda jerk. With the change in the building codes, their
theaters, Organic and Saint Nicholas, along with the very young Body Politic
where Paul created Story Theater, were the non- Equity, storefront
beginnings of today's nationally and internationally
recognized Chicago theater community and its invaluable contribution to
American theater, movies and TV for the last sixty years.
We have the largest number of theatres in
the country, although most don’t pay much, some not at all. There are still new ones arriving
yearly. Some even last a while. And the refurbished Oriental, Palace and
Shubert, with their new corporate names and their touring companies of hit
Broadway musicals, have helped revitalize downtown at night, although they’ve
taken business away from some of the other theatres. People have only so much money to spend on
tickets and the downtown theatres are even more expensive than such places as
Goodman, Steppenwolf, and Writers.
We're a big theater town, with an amazing
array of talented artists working in a variety of styles, although most of us
are working in one form or another of what’s known as the Chicago theatre
style, which is based on passed-down Stanislavsky combined with passed-down
Spolin. No matter who’s
doing the passing, Stanislavski's internal truth gets sent out to the other
characters on stage more directly and more energetically than in other styles. Because of the influential of the games, the
energy between the actors flows as strongly as the energy inside the
actors, so strongly that audiences feel it more than usual, increasing their
sense of being in the presence of an event, rather than of just being
entertained or watching some good acting or a chandelier falling from the
ceiling or whatever.
Besides Stanislavsky and Spolin, the Chicago
style came in part from no money, especially for production values, which
forced creativity and ingenuity. Most of
our theaters started with money from friends, relatives and credit cards. The more successful ones eventually got money
from boards, from donors, and from business and foundation grants. We lose a few theatres every year. But there's always new blood to keep things
alive and jumping, starting up like the old ones did. Unfortunately, the number of people who go to
theater in Chicago hasn’t increased in proportion to the number of theater
events that can be seen.
The Second City still does excellent
business. We believe in laughter as the best way of making people think about things;
it gets hard to take seriously something we can make you laugh at. Severn Darden, in the character of his German
professor at Second City, introduced one scene with, and I quote, “John Dunne
once said ‘No man is an island.’ I
always thought that was rather obvious, like saying ‘No man is a potato salad,”
unquote. Theater is an active experience, not passive like movies and
television and the Internet. We believe
it has a social responsibility. Theatre
was built on aesthetic and ethical standards and on a belief in human
worth. That's what brought UT and
Playwrights and Compass and Second City people to it in the first place, and
that's what we must continue to pursue.
Otherwise we’re all potato salads.
[i]
Sills’s name was originally Silverberg.
Nichols’ name was originally
Peschkowsky (changed by his father when the family emigrated
to New York from Nazi Berlin); this was, of course, several years before he and
Elaine May, originally Berlin (her maiden name) had started their act, and even
more years before Mike started directing plays and movies. A couple of years
later Joyce married Byrne Piven, with whom, in 1971, she started the Piven
Theatre Workshop in Evanston, Illinois, which is still going strong. The other two in the cast of The
Typewriter didn’t pursue acting careers, or at least not for long: Charlie
Jacobs (who used Charles Mason as his acting name), and Estelle Luttrell (who
never changed her name, as far as I know).
[ii] It was organized principally by director/critic Harold Clurman. Besides Clurman, The Group included Stella and Luther Adler, Morris Carnovsky, Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, Franchot Tone, John Garfield (then still Jules Garfinkel), and one major playwright – Clifford Odets.
[iii]
Stanislavsky also developed the idea
of the imaginary fourth wall between the stage and the audience to help the
actors stay in the truth of the moment as if there were no audience there.
[iv] Veteran director George Abbott, working late in his career with one of the Actors Studio actors, when ask by the actor what his motivation was for a certain moment, responded “Your paycheck.”
[v] There’s no award for ensemble at Broadway’s Tony Awards, but there’s a highly coveted one at the Joseph Jefferson Awards (Chicago’s equivalent to the Tonys). In fact it’s often hard to find ensemble acting at all on Broadway except when Chicagoans are involved, particularly when Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre brings a show there.
[vi] Published by Northwestern University Press
[vii] The Story Theatre form, which began by adapting myths and fairy tales, with the characters narrating their own parts of the story, as well as doing the dialogue, is also the form of such full-length shows as Nicholas Nickleby, The Grapes of Wrath and Peter and the Starcatcher.
[viii] We were originally supposed to move to the courtyard behind 1020 N. Lake Shore Drive, owned by Mrs. Ellen Borden Stevenson, ex-wife of Adlai. Zoning laws prohibited it, so we moved to Dearborn and Division instead. Having had to deal with Mrs.Stevenson a few times, I think we were lucky it worked out the way it did.
[ix] We were directly across the street from the Surf movie theater, an art house, as such theatres were called then. That meant that it showed mostly foreign films – usually British, French or Italian – as well as feature documentaries and the very occasional independent American film. There were maybe four or five art houses around town, including one in the U of C neighborhood. When Hugh Hefner bought the Surf, he renamed it The Playboy and kept the program of art and foreign films. The building is now part of a large Walgreen’s drug store. Times don’t always change for the better.
[x]
Our lawyer Dick Orlikoff, at the 60th
anniversary panel, said, “We were the sacrificial lamb…. The papers started to
demand change in the outmoded code to make it possible for the Chicago theatre
scene to get started in store fronts and on second floors,” which didn’t happen
till the 60’s.