Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Removed from Spolin, Sills, and Shepherd, the St. Louis Compass banished its predecessor’s utopianisms for an innocent ignorance, lightly and wittily trodden by just four players, improvisational virgins all, but each an artist and scientist both. The less ideology Flicker’s Compass assumed, the more they would discover. Those discoveries they would call knowledge.

  On opening night, April 2, 1957, they presented their earliest findings at St. Louis’s Crystal Palace.

  Under the aegis of impresario Flicker, the Crystal Palace traded Shepherd’s Brechtian box for the antique cellar of a mad Victorian sorcerer, dressed up like a fairy tale in vintage old-world crystal chandeliers, crooked panes of stained glass, and black walls behind white marble busts glowing like real faces in the buttery light.

  Lights up!

  Del and Nancy Ponder—he in all black, she in black hose and scarlet blouse—appear through two revolving doors and perch on colored boxes downstage. They begin plucking things from space and eating them. It’s pleasant. Nothing happens. They keep eating.

  Then Flicker, from out of nowhere: “You’ve got to have conflict!”

  In the corner of the stage, light falls on an imaginary apple tree. Del picks an apple for himself and takes a bite. He hands it off to Ponder.

  She takes a bite, a change comes over her, and she looks him over. “You ought to be wearing a fig leaf.”

  Laughter! Blackout. Lights up!

  Flicker reappears, as he will between scenes, as a sort of ringmaster, setting up characters and situations, all scripted, all short and fast. A Grand Guignol–style murder (of hyenas), a satire on the latest labor movement, and a gibberish play, “Mudpies in the Afternoon.” In another scene, Flicker himself plays a farmer who wants to become a sycamore tree. He tells his wife. “Now you’re twigging, George.”

  Blackout. Lights up! Intermission. (The men’s room is soon out of commission.)

  For the second act, Flicker tells his audience, they will improvise. Would a kind gentleman or gentlewoman of the audience please suggest four objects and an opening and closing line of dialogue?

  “Iron maiden . . . beer bottle . . . cigarette butt . . . Roman candle . . .” These are the objects.

  “‘Our marriage is a failure.’ ‘You’re so right.’” Opening and closing lines.

  And now, announces Flicker, the Objects.

  Lights up. Del, acting hard, does his best to inhabit the inner life of a Roman candle. The others pun around their objects. No dramatic situation develops.

  Meager laughter and blackout. (Flicker running between light board and stage.)

  Lights up on Nancy Ponder and Flicker, reading a pantomimed newspaper.

  “Our marriage is a failure,” he says.

  “You’re so right.”

  He turns an invisible page. “Our marriage is a failure,” he repeats, a little slower.

  “You’re so right.” Also slower.

  As the married couple, Ponder and Flicker repeat these two lines, back and forth, over and over, getting sadder and older until they die. Blackout.

  Lights up: Del and Jo Henderson. He grabs her by the throat. “Our marriage is a failure!”

  “You’re so right . . .” she gurgles, then dies.

  Laughter, blackout, curtain.

  How dumb. From these trifles, Del would “emerge burning with humiliation because we knew what we’d done in front of the audience was a con.” He wanted more from improvisation. Something deeper. And farther.

  Ted Flicker needed Mike and Elaine. He knew whoever had them had the future of improvisation. Writing constantly, he implored Chicago’s local heroes to come to St. Louis, where they were rebirthing a new Compass every night, improvising how to improvise. “This is,” Flicker wrote, “the most rewarding theatrical experience of my whole life.” Mike and Elaine knew they had all the power, and no, they did not want to go to St. Louis, though Flicker begged them to reconsider. Mike had just married Pat Scott, a jazz singer (“Isn’t this a beautiful first wedding?” Elaine remarked), and staying with her, in Chicago, where he and Elaine had pending job offers, including the chance to start a new, revamped Chicago Compass with Sills, kept Mike and Elaine closer to New York, their ultimate goal. (Plus, Missouri made Elaine queasy.) They could just go to New York now, and try their luck with agents, but without precedent for improvisation on or off Broadway, they foresaw many dreary months of no work. What if, Flicker suggested, they came to St. Louis in May or June of 1957, and in September headed east to open the New York Compass together? (“I shall take what I want from COMPASS,” Flicker wrote to Severn Darden, “the COMPASS that I made, and I shall try and beat him [Shepherd] to the punch [in New York].”) Flicker had saved ten grand for that very purpose, and he would keep looking for more, but in the meantime, he urged Mike and Elaine to be patient. Improvisation was still too raw for New York’s imprimatur. Compass needed technique. And that’s what they were doing in St. Louis, figuring this thing out, learning, mixing potions like mad scientists.

  In the end, Flicker proved persuasive. They were coming. “Am very glad Elaine and Mike decided to go to St. Louis,” Shepherd wrote Flicker. “Hope Elaine can start working soon on the weaknesses in the company: for instance fact that Del & Mike have many of the same weaknesses and same qualities . . . Del may fall into habit Andy [Duncan] did in Chi—competing with Mike in wit.”

  That summer, the power duo left Chicago and joined the other members of the St. Louis company at 4411 Westminster Place, an imposing brick mansion turned boardinghouse a half-hour walk from the Crystal Palace. Flicker had one of two bedrooms on the third floor, and perhaps out of deference to her position, gave Elaine the other. Mike, Del, and the rest took rooms below.

  They became a team. Living and playing together congealed their appetites, and would become a modus operandi for their descendants for decades to come. Conversation was constant and focused; removed from the idealistic concerns of their Chicago counterparts, consistent improvisational theories sprang up and did not have to fight rocks to flourish. Troupe Flicker, united as entertainers, became the first ensemble devoted to cracking the “how” of improvisational comedy.

  They worked out a plan. Mondays, designated workshop night, they would improvise an entire evening for paying customers. Flicker’s Compass, beyond mere one- or two-word suggestions, would invite an audience member to the stage to monologue about themselves for as long as twenty minutes before converting their free-associative miasma of thoughts and experiences into entertainment. “This is not as exciting to rest of the audience as it is to the story teller and us,” Flicker wrote to a friend, “but every once in a while we get some one who is obviously telling us something out of thir [sic] lives, and then the house gets very very still . . . sometimes uneasy . . . then we play it (adding that which we feel it needs) we usually get a very strong reaction from the story teller.” On Tuesdays through Thursdays, experimentation was sidelined, somewhat, for scenes improvised off suggestions of a theme (love, art, war, and “almost every aspect of manufactured mass thinking”), and on Friday and Saturday, they presented the best of the week’s findings. “We are testing new techniques and methods each night of the week,” Flicker wrote, “and each week they work better. By the time we get to New York in the fall we will be able to take a word, any word, and creat [sic] a scene on the spot from it.” By June of 1957 they had devised over two hundred scenes, and broken all financial records at the Crystal Palace. Most exciting of all, Flicker felt, “is that we are not appealing to just a special group, but it appears that people from almost all walks of life are taking up on us.”

  Flicker’s successful experiments, and subsequent joy, he owed to “the most talented girl that I have ever known let alone worked with,” Elaine May. Every morning at 4411 Westminster Place, they met in the third-floor kitchen across from their bedrooms and discussed, over breakfast, what had been lost and what had been learned at the Crystal Palace the night before. They decided improvisations sho
uld be divided into two categories: public and private. In private, commensurate with the approach Spolin devised, one’s only obligation was to one’s intuition, one’s inner life. In public, Flicker and May found that improvisers, to ensure scenes of dramatic integrity, had to establish a who, where, and what (as in, what are they doing?). To help players achieve and develop such scenes, they wrote, after weeks of breakfasts, what would be known as the Westminster Place Kitchen Rules. There were three:

  Don’t deny. If Severn says he has a bunny in his hands, he has a bunny in his hands.

  Whenever possible, make a strong choice. The less obvious the better.

  You are you. What you think of as your “character” is really just a magnified piece of you. Therefore, onstage, be you.

  In time, the first rule, the rule of agreement, would be abbreviated to “Yes, and,” signifying the composite virtues of agreement (“Yes”) and embellishment (“and”), a player’s duty to both accept his partner’s reality and, in some form, enhance it. Established here, in St. Louis, the so-called rules of improvisation were made to be challenged, and indeed they would be, but Rule 1, the central tenet of agreement, would never be overturned. For the rule of “Yes, and” is the rule that makes cohabitation possible; it is improvisation’s peace treaty, its bill of rights, evidence-based and favorable to amendment. Practicing “Yes, and”—in effect, agreeing to agree—gave Flicker’s Compass the courage to forgo the open, hurried deliberations of “backstage” improvisation for the purity of spot-improv. What they discovered, almost immediately, was that they could do it; “don’t deny” really worked. “You can’t imagine the excitement,” wrote Flicker, “of being able to plan it so that no matter what the audience gives us to play . . . we are able to play it instantly.”

  When Pat Scott visited her husband in St. Louis, Mike’s late-night schedule made it hard for them to catch Sarah Vaughan—tops on their short list—when she came to town. But they had her records. Some Saturday nights, after Mike’s last set at the Crystal Palace, they would walk back to the skinny castle on Westminster Place, drop the needle on Vaughan’s latest, and analyze her riffs till dawn. Riffs: that’s what jazz was, how you played with the notes. Mike and Elaine, they made jazz of “Teenagers,” by now a standard in their songbook. The dramatic beats of the scene were the melody they riffed around, always a little differently, every time they played it. “You can’t plan jazz and you can’t plan improv,” Nichols said. “They must express you in the moment. You can have your central beats—those are the big laughs and the story points the scene needs—but your breaks have to be there in you and come out.”

  Livelier after dark than in the day, the Westminster Place think tank of improvisation doubled, at night, as an experiment in living. You could say—at least, Del would—that the two went together. Life is an improvisation, improvisation is life lived onstage. As his own audience, during the very late and lonely nights in St. Louis, Del began experimenting with a new form entirely, a two-person scene between his brain and his brain on drugs. Can I get a suggestion for a narcotic, please? Benzedrine? Morphine? Marijuana? Opium? Del got his from neighborhood antique stores. They sold dusty old bottles, some of them half-full, purchased, probably, from pharmacies that had been bought out or torn down. It was like having a chemistry set again, only with one beaker.

  Proving Shepherd’s prediction accurate, Del and Mike clashed. Only one vision of improvisation could rule when the company went off to New York: the Jew of the jazz riff or the hell-for-leather WASP. “It is so easy to go out and get laughs, it’s ridiculous,” Close argued. “To do something else, to drive them insane . . .” To enter unknown planes and capsize the audience’s “perceptions of reality so that alternative possibilities enter.” To Mike, Del’s flamboyance was indulgent. Del saw Mike’s variations as improvisation writ small. Each asserted the other was ego-driven, using his theory to rationalize a retreat from full spontaneity back to his creative comfort zone. Meanwhile, Ted Flicker, in awe of both minds, was weary of the single element they did share—highly literate hyperintelligence. Mike’s and Del’s styles he considered too rarefied for general consumption. How, then, were they to be free?

  “The entire history of improvisational theater,” Del concluded, “was balanced on a pinpoint there in St. Louis.” They were a month away, Flicker promised, from New York.

  Seeing the value in each—the witty, the visceral, the purely entertaining—Elaine sided with none. Rather, she played midwife to all. As she had with Mike in Chicago and Flicker in the third-floor kitchen, Elaine conjoined herself to Del, ripe with fresh ideas, on the promise of their mutual expansion. “Under Elaine’s direction, my acting is improving,” Del wrote to Flicker, then in New York, prospecting for their big opening. “I still can’t play children, but I’m progressing apace with playing people.” He may have meant himself.

  While Del and Elaine let each other go and go, Mike often feared, and often rightly, that his tendency to (how to put it?) direct Elaine, whether by nudge or lasso, limited her. “She could explore any sort of character,” Mike said, “and it sort of became my responsibility, or I took the responsibility—I don’t know—of giving our scenes shape.” Despite his young marriage and Elaine’s long-distance relationship with Howard Alk, Paul Sills’s friend in Chicago, the Del/Elaine experiments made Mike more jealous than he could have expected. Her subtle shifts of allegiance hit him like earthquakes, and what he didn’t see onstage, he sensed.

  At night, when Mike took to the town and Del enclosed himself in chemicals, Elaine and Flicker ceaselessly redressed their theories, he pacing her bedroom, she smoking and fingernail biting on the floor.

  “Where does a girl get laid around here?”

  Flicker looked up. “Del.”

  The next night’s performance, Flicker recalled, “was the best improvisation would ever be.” In place of frozen-Del was “Del Dionysus. He danced, he flew. He flung joyous madness into the sounds of all present. That night, stunned, and sated, the audience left in a post-coitus daze.” Through Elaine, his only teacher, Del shot himself up with mythic forces of inspiration and destruction. She even looked like a needle.

  He was in love with her. And he always would be.

  Paul Sills tried, but he could not open his own Chicago Compass without Mike and Elaine. After losing them to Flicker, his deal for a space on Dearborn and Division, where Playwrights Theater Club had been, disintegrated. Soon thereafter, Flicker lost them to New York. They were tired of waiting and bigger things lay ahead.

  Fall 1957.

  You could not have picked a better moment to be Mike Nichols or Elaine May, the first improvisers in New York City. Throughout the decade, notions of authenticity and intuition, from abstract expressionism to bebop to the beats, had been scratching at the shine on corporate American culture. Spontaneity was a counterattack, the artistic Left’s minefield under the battleships of prepackaged mass communication, the cultural equivalent of the military industrial complex, which, since the end of World War II, had metastasized. Look at Archie and Veronica, Ozzie and Harriet: conformists anathema to improvisation. But we bought it because we needed it. Hollywood and Madison Avenue had been hard at work fabricating and selling an image of America the pristine and powerful to a country in serious need of a pick-me-up. In the days before the beats, who defined themselves by their spontaneous style, Allen Ginsberg said, “The air was filled with pompous personages orating and not saying anything spontaneous or real from their own minds, they were only talking stereotypes.” By the end of the 1950s, you could no longer believe what you read, heard, or saw on TV. Was quiz-show prince Charles Van Doren really that good?

  The avant-garde of the Depression had dealt in social reform; in the war-torn 1940s, with psychological disintegration; by midcentury, as the nation turned plastic, the revolution turned to the spirit. If God, Capital, Freud, and L. B. Mayer were the most popular enforcers of what Viola Spolin called approval/disapproval syndrome—the epi
demic of the 1950s—then Spontaneity—or in its performance form, improvisation—was the cure.

  Surely none of this crossed Jack Rollins’s mind the afternoon he took Mike and Elaine to lunch at the Russian Tea Room.

  Between bites of Stroganoff and borscht, Brooklyn-born Jack Rabinowitz listened, openmouthed, fork and cigar suspended in disbelief, as the boy and the girl comics, dressed in their showbiz best, did, according to Nichols, “a set of ad-libbed little skits we not only had never rehearsed but had never even thought of until that desperate minute.”

  The blood left Rollins’s face. “I didn’t laugh,” he said. “In fact, I think I almost cried.”

  When the coffee came, Nichols breathed a sigh of relief as Rollins not only agreed to represent them but also picked up the check.

  Rollins was still smarting from the loss of Harry Belafonte, his star client. His friend. Strolling Sheridan Square seven years earlier, Rollins had stopped at a restaurant window, and there was Belafonte, the singer, flipping hamburgers. “Why don’t you become my manager?” he asked. “If you don’t get personally involved,” Rollins said, “there’s no point in doing it.” Rollins’s personal involvement in Belafonte, his first client, was so complete, he turned down everyone else to focus exclusively on developing him. Hence Rollins’s despair after Belafonte went calypso (Rollins’s idea), got famous, and dumped him for another manager. Hence the scar tissue and subsequent gun-shyness and the tears he almost cried watching Nichols and May eat borscht at the Russian Tea Room. Rollins loved talent, and these kids—directed to his attention by Charles Pratt, a producer friend of Mike’s—had talent to spare. But it wasn’t simply a matter of quantity. Their talent had a special quality: it was their intimacy that captivated him.