Improv Nation

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Improv Nation Page 1

by Sam Wasson




  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Hi, How Are You?

  We the Jews

  1940–1955

  1955–1956

  1956–1959

  1959–1962

  1962–1963

  1963–1967

  1967–1968

  We the Punks

  1969–1972

  1972

  1973–1974

  1974–1975

  1975–1976

  1977–1982

  1982–1984

  Photos

  We the Nerds

  1984–1987

  1988–1994

  1995–2001

  2001–2008

  Goodnight, Everyone

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Sample Chapter from FOSSE

  Buy the Book

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Sam Wasson

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-55720-8

  Cover design by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Cover illustration courtesy of Second City of Chicago

  Author photograph © Gary Copeland

  eISBN 978-0-544-55825-0

  v1.1117

  For

  Jeffrey Wasson

  Cindy Wasson

  Sophie Wasson

  Andrea Martin

  Bob Dolman

  Jack Dolman

  Joe Dolman

  Ours is the only modern country which is in a state of permanent revolution.

  —Harold Clurman, The Fervent Years: The Group Theatre and the Thirties

  Hi, How Are You?

  No one had any idea this would happen. Improvisational theater—as created in the early twentieth century by a young settlement worker, Viola Spolin, to foster self-expression and interaction among immigrant children; then developed by the young artists and intellectuals of the University of Chicago; then urged on by Mike Nichols and Elaine May into an expression of psychological healing and liberation; then urged on further into visionary presentational forms by director Paul Sills—was laughed into what we call improv comedy, or improv, for short, completely by accident. None of these giants set out for laughs, yet somehow we owe them Second City, Alan Arkin, Bill Murray, Tina Fey, The Graduate, Saturday Night Live, Waiting for Guffman—you name it.

  The commerce, practice, and eventual art of improv comedy were themselves improvised. And why not? Many have surmised that improv’s origins date back centuries, to commedia dell’arte. I don’t agree. Nor do I believe it was “always there.” Like anything else, improvisation had to be invented—and it was invented, in America, by young, mostly middle-class amateurs, performers, and producers who, in the true spirit of the form, were making it up as they went along. Sounds crazy at best, stupid at worst, and definitely not like the foundations of a sensible commercial or creative enterprise—let alone an entire industry and America’s farthest-reaching indigenous art form, which is what improv comedy has become. As you’ll soon see, no one in this story expected that to happen.

  But I think that’s partly why people went to see and be a part of it, returned for more, and keep coming back. They can’t believe it. They can’t believe anyone, sane or insane, would risk that kind of public humiliation. And when improv really hits the heights, they really can’t believe it. “No way,” you’ll hear over your shoulder. “They must have written that. They couldn’t have just made it up!” On those nights, it’s like watching a magic trick, but while a magician always knows more than the audience, improv’s magic is just as mysterious to its improvisers. It’s a special form that says, Even though you’re down there and we’re up here, we’re discovering this together.

  We all of us can identify with the improviser’s predicament, the terror of not knowing what to say or do when all eyes are on you. That right there is a human drama on its own, and it’s really happening to real people, right in this moment.

  And if you’re there in the room, you’ll likely realize that the deepest, most explosive laugh, the painful, blinding gasping for breath that has you physically bracing yourself on something solid so you don’t fall over, is the laugh that erupts from the spontaneous materials of real time, in real life.

  This is improvisation, the First Amendment in action. In improv venues across America, speech is, theoretically, as free as it’s going to get; free of pop culture conventions and political correctness, free of the watch-what-you-do-because-it’s-written-in-stone inhibitions of everything published in print or online. In improv, nothing is written in stone. “It’s kind of like fireworks,” Del Close, one of its foremost innovators, once said, “the most ephemeral of art forms. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, baby. There’s the afterimage for a few seconds, but nobody will ever see anything like it again.”

  The impact this ephemeral art form has had on popular entertainment, beginning with the opening of Second City in 1959, is undeniable. Since then, the number of leading comedy artists who rely on improvisational techniques has grown exponentially. America in midcentury had only one, two, or three improv comedy theaters operating at a given moment, and only in Chicago, St. Louis, and New York. Today you can see improv in practically every big city and on every college campus in the country. Burgeoning and proliferating, meme-like, from a dingy avant-garde theater outside the University of Chicago all the way to The Colbert Report, improv has replaced jazz as America’s most popular art.

  This is the story of that proliferation, of improv comedy’s fifty-year ascent from performance technique to popular entertainment to formally and emotionally complex art to philosophy of being—and all of it as American as democracy. For improvisation isn’t merely an analogue for democracy, it is democracy, demanding that its individual players and audience members uphold the democratic ideal of total collaboration, of hearing and being heard, and rewarding both sides with the very good feeling of shared humanity.

  This book about democracy in comedy is not in itself egalitarian, insofar as it does not consider the life and art of every single improviser who has ever improvised. Many—I hope not too many—have been left out or scaled down. A better strategy than holding up an all-encompassing mirror, I decided, would be to chart the high points, to tease out the grander story of improv’s invention, cultural dissemination, and artistic development, and portray the changing circle of improvisers who kept making history happen.

  Who knows what the next chapter will be? A significant change at this point in improv’s history is that we know now there will be a next chapter. We didn’t always. For its first decades, the Second City—the world’s longest-running and most successful improv and comedy theater—was always on the verge of shutting down. Its founders, better intellectuals than businesspeople, struggled to negotiate the rough waters of changing tastes and commerce; its leading improvisers, once “discovered,” were forever leaving for Hollywood and New York; its critics, thinking they had seen it all, got used to denigrating popular improv as on a level with mediocre sitcoms—or worse, as “jokey.” It was only in the last decades of the twentieth ­century—after Del Close and Charna Halpern’s iO (formerly ImprovOlympic) shook up the Chicago scene, Andrew Alexander and his team of producers re-improvised old standards of Second City comedy, and the ne
w run of luminaries from Chris Farley to Tina Fey, the first generation to come of age in a culture made by improvisation, infiltrated the establishment—that improv’s financial and creative stations, a half-century after Viola Spolin first asked for an audience suggestion, were finally secured. My book ends there, but its story is still a work in progress. I leave it to someone else—to you, to everyone, really—to write the next installment. And I do mean you, whoever you are. Because as any experienced improviser will tell you, every audience member watching the show is improvising too.

  We the Jews

  1940–1968

  1

  1940–1955

  Imagine Viola Spolin, the mother, the Jewish mother, Paul Sills’s mother, Tina Fey’s spiritual grandmother, the mother of theatrical improvisation. There was no radio in those days, in the early part of the century, and Viola’s parents, Russian immigrants, didn’t have a lot of money, so as kids Viola and her friends had to invent their own amusement. Instead of going to the theater, they played tag, jacks, marbles, hopscotch, changing the rules as it suited them, breaking the rules, inventing new ones, up and down the streets of Chicago and for as long as the day would let them. When it got dark, Viola joined her big, rollicking, Jewish socialist family—father, mother, and five siblings—for long and elaborate games of charades, dressing up together, falling down laughing, and singing impromptu, Yiddish-flavored operas.

  Let’s jump ahead to 1924, when Viola, now a pretty and adventurous eighteen-year-old with an interest in social work, enrolled at Hull House, a community center offering educational and cultural enrichment programs to Chicago’s poor, immigrant populations. There she trained under sociologist Neva Boyd, a progressive educator and leading play theorist. Boyd’s Recreation Training School at Hull House instructed participants in group games and other communal activities including theater arts. Viola called Boyd, who envisioned play as essential to emotional and physical well-being, her “inspirator.” “Play means happiness,” Boyd wrote. “It is characterized by feelings of pleasure which tend to break out in laughter.” Boyd took her students out of the classroom to engage in “play behavior,” learn, and remember why, as children, playing felt so good. “When we find ourselves in situations in which we are free to act as our ‘feelings’ prompt,” Boyd wrote in “Play—A Unique Discipline,” “there is no emotional conflict in the functioning of the organism. This is what happens in spontaneous play.” When you play, you are free to be most you.

  Viola began to think about play as a way into the unconscious, a means of unearthing, as she wrote to herself, “qualities which cannot be talked about.”

  Some years later, talk was a problem for the multiethnic, multilingual youth of the recreational theater Viola directed at Hull House. Participants were intensely inhibited onstage. As long as these children—divided by culture and self-censored by fear—were unable to communicate, they would stay locked in, isolated from one another and ultimately from themselves. Getting them to play together, Viola believed, would loosen them up onstage and maybe light a flame under the melting pot. To provide them “a non-authoritarian climate” necessary for freedom, she had them extemporize together. Imagine a world where adults did not exist, she prompted. What would you do? “The unfolding of the scene was quite a revelation,” she wrote. “Never were boys and girls more charming, more courteous to one another. They were gentle and tender, they spoke in soft tones, they were concerned with each other’s simplest problems—they loved one another!”

  They were improvising. That’s what happens when you improvise.

  Now let’s go six hundred miles southwest, to Manhattan, Kansas, where, in 1942, nine-year-old Del Close—chubby, with big glasses and crooked teeth—was sitting in a movie theater.

  “To be or not to be?”

  This was the question Jack Benny was asking in a film of the same name, as Del sat watching, riveted to the movie screen. When it ended, he drifted from the theater high on the film’s title: To Be or Not to Be, “the first intelligent question,” he said, “I’d heard a human being ask himself.” Who was this Shakespeare and what was he up to and why would anyone not want to be? What did that mean, not to be? He needed more.

  Had his father, Del Close senior, a depressive alcoholic jeweler, been at any way available to his son, instead of caught up in his work at Del Close Jewelers, or in his depression and his drinking, had Mr. Close been home the night Del discovered human beings had a choice, and therefore a very big problem, and therefore a lifelong pain no metaphoric tunnel of what-ifs could help them escape, Del would not have made the trip to his grandfather’s bar in nearby Abilene. “My grandfather,” Close would recall, “kind of caught on that I thought some kind of secret shit was going on.” Stepping around the bar, the old man led Del—the incipient mad scientist of improvisation—to his first lesson in freedom. From inside a glass-door bookcase, Grandpa removed a leather-bound copy of Hamlet, and put it in the boy’s hands.

  Back now to Viola, the teacher, the social worker, the bringer-together. She met and married Ed Spolin in 1940, while they were at work for the Chicago WPA; he was a set designer, she a theater director at the WPA’s Recreation Project, by that time divorced and with two teenage sons, Paul and William Sills (when they wed, her husband had taken her surname). Expanding on her earlier efforts at Hull House, Viola was formulating techniques to help disparate populations dramatize their shared problems. By then, she had developed a format. First she would split her players into two groups. The performing group would decide on a subject worthy of improvisation, play for two or three scenes for the second group, their audience, who in turn would respond to the scenes with feedback. Then they would improvise the scenes again. “Every few months, the cast would pick out the best scenes and perform them for an actual audience. There were about 150 people in [one] cast,” Viola would say, “Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, Negroes, and I don’t know of what other racial strains. They were of all ages and of both sexes.” And they all played together.

  In 1940, in Chicago, Viola introduced the notion of audience suggestions.

  On a trip out West several years later, Viola and Ed fell in love with the brown and purple wilds of the Santa Monica Mountains, and bought a patch of raw hillside on the edge of Mulholland. Ed built them a cabin in the hills over the city, and Viola bought herself a lime-green convertible, in which she would curl down the mountain to a big red barn at 1745 North La Brea, just north of Hollywood Boulevard, that she named the Young Actors Company.

  From the bus stop on Hollywood and La Brea, her charges trekked up an old road that led them, just behind the Hollywood Women’s Club, to the clapping of a fountain and Viola’s big red barn, nestled in a ring of tall oaks. “It was like stepping into paradise,” said actor Paul Sand, who began studying improvisation with Viola at age nine. Kneeling to child height, Viola would hike up her sarong-like dress and meet her young actors face-to-face, booming with warmth. She gave off the homey scents of roast chicken, herbs, and cigarettes, and her skin was tan from being outside all day playing with children. But although she was always gentle, “Viola was a powerful woman with a very strong voice,” said her student Ronnie Austin. “You would have cast her as a labor organizer.”

  Imagine them playing inside too, onstage, games Viola designed to release spontaneity. Games were for rehearsal, intended to help the players—Viola became weary of the term “actor”—apply their full selves to traditional scripted performances. “The games were really what the whole class was,” said student Jackie Joseph, “although Viola didn’t call them theater games at the time. She called them improvisations.” Divesting herself of parental power and authority, Viola said it was the games, not the teacher, that instructed. That was important. Playing the role of “teacher” could introduce what she called approval/disapproval syndrome and inhibit spontaneity. Viola was careful then not to become a rule maker but rather a diagnostician, prescribing a specific game to each actor to address a specific interpers
onal block. Was a player struggling to relate physically with the others? Have him play Contact! (in which the individual touches someone every time he says a line). Was a player thinking too much? Play Mirror! (Mirroring someone else, you stop thinking about yourself.) “We were guinea pigs for the games,” Paul Sand said. “She was creating them on us, with us.”

  Sometimes Viola would give the players a Who, Where, and a What, and have them figure out the How, tossing out “some surprise little thing,” as Joseph put it, from her folding chair in the back of the auditorium.

  “The submarine window broke!”

  “Your pants just fell off!”

  “Paul, you’re a fish—go!”

  Or, when their commitment to the improvised reality broke: “Focus!”

  Laughing focused them. Viola laughed all the time. Joseph said, “Viola gave me, by her laughter, the confidence I needed to keep my focus.”

  Focus on the game was essential. Actually doing, not thinking or feeling, was the way to freedom. Engaging with the imagined physical space—the “Where,” Viola called it—was the only way an improviser could vanquish his everyday anxieties and habitual pasts and emerge with new selves, reborn in the moment. Don’t think, do! “Out of your head and into the space!” Viola would say. Need a glass of water in your scene? Reach out and grab one! Another player might pull up a chair and join you. Now you’re at a table together. The two of you have communicated Where without speaking a word. You’ve collaborated. “The games really are a form of breaking the ego,” said Ronnie Austin. “If you really get into full communication with others and start feeling their feelings, you really do find yourself letting go of yourself.” When a roomful of improvisers has let go of themselves, they can be remade into an ensemble. “You can’t play tag alone!” Viola would remind them.

 

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