Thirty-eight years ago this summer, Paul Sills and David Shepherd organized the Compass Players, thereby starting what is now blandly, routinely, and pretty much correctly referred to as a theatrical revolution. At a time when the American theater’s deepest thinkers were immersed in the angst of the Method, the Compass was busy pioneering a technology in which people create plays by actually playing with each other.
Second City domesticated the Compass revolution. It gave improvisation a job, a home, a family, and an incredibly rosy future. Current co-owner Andrew Alexander pegs his annual gross at $3.5 to $4 million–and that’s not counting television deals like the one with Disney, where veteran Second Citizens use improv to develop sitcom concepts; or with Western International Communications, which may result in a 24-hour, Second City-run Canadian comedy channel; or with the Arts & Entertainment cable network, which will air a “sketch-driven” pilot, The Second City’s 149 1/2th Edition, on November 18. In September, Alexander opened a Detroit cabaret to go with the complexes already operating here and in Toronto.
For more than two decades, that personality belonged to Bernard Sahlins. Both Sills and Alk had dropped out of Second City early on, leaving Sahlins in charge. Unlike Sills, who is considered a founding genius of modern improvisation (and Alk, who at least climbed up onstage at the Compass and Second City), Sahlins came to the form as a producer rather than as a practitioner. He was never much imbued with the faith of improvisation.
Far from dismissing improv as a mildly interesting game or a writing tool, Close extols it as “a kind of meditation . . . a doorway into something. Improv isn’t a mode of writing–it’s a mode of behavior.”
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“There’s a huge ethical dimension to this,” Close continues, back now in the present. “The way you treat people onstage when you’re improvising. . . . You have generosity, the almost tribal sense of taking care of each other. Respect for each other’s ideas. My job is to make you look good and to validate further your ideas, and that’s your job with me . . .
Still, the hazards of seeing improv narrowly, as nothing more than a source of revue grist, became apparent over time. The work became repetitive, and therefore dull. By 1984 even Sahlins was bored. He allowed himself to be bought out by Alexander and Alexander’s partner, a bingo card mogul named Len Stuart–and went on to become the Chicago theater community’s number-one neomedievalist, creating, among other things, the short-lived Willow Street Carnival (a sort of a cross between a commedia troupe and a morality play) and two genuine morality plays, The Creation and The Passion.
Perhaps the best evidence of a renewed spirit is the fact that so many local companies are experimenting with the possibilities of long-form improv. The ten masterful young members of Jazz Freddy, for instance, are able to create an hour’s worth of communal, continuous, interconnected, and very funny riffings out of just two words solicited from an audience; the artists who gathered from time to time as Ed built whole evenings of ambitious, often intensely cerebral improv theater from an elaborate set of rules.
