Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Bill Mathieu lived at 452 Webster—a big, wood-frame country house decked out in the Second City style with walls of crisscrossing old elevator grates and repurposed curiosities d’art—a mile from the theater. Severn Darden’s ex-wife, Ann, had the second floor; Mathieu’s acid hookup was stationed up on the third; Dennis Cunningham, Second City bartender and occasional improviser, could be found above the little studio inhabited by Fred Kaz, a skinny shipwrecked Ahab, and also a pianist, who could play Bach with his left hand as barroom jazz came out of his right. And at the nerve center of 452 Webster, Paul and Carol Sills, in love with each other, and increasingly with Martin Buber, humanist philosopher. It was on their first date, the year Second City opened, in 1959, that Paul and Carol discovered the other’s passion for Buber. To achieve existence, Buber preached connection, the word “yes,” a tunnel of yeses from one person into another. It was improvisation.

  In the back of the house, they built a sound sculpture, “a jungle gym of junk,” Mathieu explained, a heap of found objects they would add to over the years—four years, actually—and came together to play it, banging away at pipes and chairs and broken planks for hours after dinner. Music, Mathieu knew, had something to teach Second City improvisers. In a way, language was a barrier to full ensemble improvisations. “Because words don’t mix, you can’t have everyone improvising at once,” he said. “But in music, sounds mix. You can close your eyes and listen.” With Viola’s encouragement, Mathieu developed musical games at Second City, “a discipline,” he said, “from which freedom can arise.” They were played in Spolin’s (now defunct) workshops. She wanted to show the improvisers how every creative gesture, beyond a two- or three-person dialogue, could be the product of the entire ensemble, the collective mind. The question was, how would improvisers spontaneously create that mind and think with it together? To this end, Mathieu introduced a game he called Meat Stop. He said, “Everybody piles in sound like a pile of meat and then there’s a sudden stop. You have to agree to stop at the same moment—without agreeing of course. No cue. Everybody stops on a dime. Or tries to.” But the Second City actors, failing to see Meat Stop’s application to comedy, weren’t interested.

  But Mathieu stayed the course. With the collective mind, he was on to something new, bigger, the next thing in improvisation. “Acid,” he said, “was important to this.” On one memorable trip, he hallucinated hearing language as a dog might, the sounds of the words clanging and humming together—a sound sculpture of human voices.

  About ten improvisers—the Cunninghams, the Dardens, Mathieu, Paul Sand, and others—were all seated around the big oak table in the Sills’s kitchen at 452 Webster when, after dinner, Sills started lecturing about Buber, and Mathieu—in boredom and accord—jiggled some silverware. Dennis Cunningham picked up on the sound and started tapping his wineglass. As Sills talked on, others joined in, tapping chicken bones, wobbling plates, “diplomatically,” Mathieu said, “in the pauses Sills put in his speech,” and after a moment, Paul reached for a pewter pitcher and accompanied himself. Getting up from the table, Carol Sills searched the kitchen cupboard and reappeared five bars later with a bag of rice, an ice tray, and, Mathieu said, “a gleam in her eye,” as she dropped, slowly, tinkling rice into the metal tray, while the orchestra faded into place around her. Then, in the hush, she walked in a circle around the table, letting the rice from the tray fall over everyone’s plates, cups, forks, “the finale,” Mathieu said, “of a dinner symphony.” Everyone cheered. This, Mathieu thought, was how church, or heaven, ought to be.

  Paul Sills met Mike Nichols for lunch in New York.

  It felt different now. The two friends used to eat dinner out of cans and argue about Brecht. Now, in New York, Nichols was living in a penthouse tower above Central Park and had four hits running (Barefoot, The Knack, Luv, The Odd Couple), and was, on his way to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, indisputably the most respected young director in America—and Sills, though he smiled across the table, hated all of it. “Paul didn’t want to be successful,” Nichols believed. “It was his own decision. But I think that his headlong rush away from success didn’t deprive him of rage and envy.” Sills was angry with his friend, and because of his anger, ashamed. His shame embarrassed Nichols, who could hear everything Sills wouldn’t confess. Over lunch, they discussed their various projects, carefully.

  “What are you working on?” Nichols began.

  “Well, you know. We have this little group . . . You know, I’m just . . . I’m just doing what I always do. Trying to make a connection with the community.”

  After looking for new theater spaces upstate, Sills explained, he decided that if he were really going to press the reset button on civilization, which had grown so treacherous and deceitful since the Kennedy assassination, and build a new population of free people, he and Carol had to go back to Chicago, where their friends were, and improvise a theater. From play, he knew, a healthy community would come. Whatever “art” resulted was inconsequential, merely a by-product of the goal, harmonious, joyful cohabitation. The important thing was being.

  At first, Paul and Carol met every Saturday in Lincoln Park, a space big enough to accommodate everyone who came. They played the old dance and folk games of Neva Boyd, Viola’s mentor, and to their delight, friends came with friends and friends with children and the children brought more friends. Sills brought them all inside to play Viola’s games—players were pulled from the audience—and soon everyone was playing and watching. There was no audience; the players were the audience. Sills called his community the Game Theater. Anyone was welcome. “Paul did it in order to explore the play that they’d been doing at Second City,” Carol Sills said, “but to explore Viola’s exercises as performance and to invite the community to not only offer suggestions but to get up and play.” The Game Theater offered the only way to effect civic revolution. Government had no ear for the poor, the ethnic, the American unloved. Participatory art was their only refuge. The resultant stories didn’t have to be “good.” They were—from the people for the people—beyond art and comedy, as necessary as conversation. There were no sketches at the Game Theater. “With the games,” said Sills, “you don’t embalm the scenes so you can get the same laughs night after night.” To sell a work, and therefore imply its completion, falsely implied a completion to human ingenuity. That was Nichols’s thing, Sills thought. Perfecting, sealing, and selling.

  Nichols’s heart, soaring for Sills, broke a little for himself. “Paul,” he replied, “you are still active and I am still passive.”

  Nichols was only making art; Sills could change the world.

  But it was not that easy. The Game Theater was only a pistol fired on the starting line. To change the world, Sills had to grow beyond Chicago. He knew that eventually he had to spread his mother’s games everywhere. He also knew, from the lessons of Compass and Second City, that by entering the world and spreading the games, improvisation would be embalmed. Just look at Mike Nichols.

  Nichols felt the look and thought, We are fucked. Sills, who had started him in the theater, whom Nichols loved, didn’t like him anymore. Having spent his entire life an outsider, desperate to belong, he had at last reached the inside, the penthouse, only to find himself, like Montgomery Clift in his favorite film, A Place in the Sun, as estranged from the people below as he once was from the giants above. He was different again.

  It was one of those before moments. You could see, across the improvisational theater—and because improv is a mirror, you could see it in the streets too—the sense of dissatisfaction that portends decline and, hopefully, resurgence. Change had to happen. But it was not clear—at least to Second City—how improvisation had to evolve to mirror the new America.

  With no intention of founding the Committee, improvisation’s answer to the 1960s, Alan Myerson married Second City’s Irene Riordan, left Square East in New York, where he had been directing, packed up his van, and together with his bride set off on a cross-country h
oneymoon to visit each other’s parents in L.A. and Phoenix on their way to San Francisco, to meet a friend of Myerson’s brother and a cousin of a cousin, “relative strangers,” Myerson said, “but those were the times.” Soon after greetings and chitchat, the inevitable question, “Where did you two meet?” and the answer, Second City, prompted an unforeseen follow-up. “Why don’t you two do something in San Francisco?” Why not? The question stuck. Alan and Irene had no plans, and San Francisco, on the crest of revolution, was relishing a citywide improvisation of its own. Our theater: a place for the big-dreaming young of psychedelic San Francisco, a town hall unencumbered by literary “good taste,” “good behavior,” or any of the other Eisenhoweran refinery that along with wit, elegance, and polite satire was the stock and trade of Second City. At this our theater, personal authenticity and political urgency—not just discourse, but real action—would characterize the improvisations. Beyond the charge of entertainment or even satire, Myerson’s company was committed to truth in all its dimensions. They called themselves the Committee, in ironic tribute to all that was awful about the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC. In lettering evocative of the New York Times masthead, they hung their logo, like a coat of arms, above the entrance to their theater, a former Italian restaurant in North Beach. EAT MORE ART was scratched in the pavement out front.

  Second City broke holes in the fourth wall and patched them up again; the Committee, by way of drugs and love, demolished the wall. “Most of our great moments,” Myerson said, “had to do with including the audience, not just for suggestions, but in a really personal way.” In one scene, improviser Howard Hesseman drops acid—not actually, although . . . maybe—and his scene partner, Chris Ross, walks in with a bag of apples.

  “How’s it going?” Ross asks, meaning the acid.

  Hesseman ignores him.

  “What do you see now?”

  Tripping, Hesseman starts talking with the audience.

  “You can’t do that!” Ross protests.

  “Why?”

  “There’s nobody there!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  To prove he isn’t actually hallucinating, Hesseman drags people up onstage. You see?

  “How did you do that?”

  “I brought them through the heater grate.”

  Ross freaks out—like it’s his trip—and Hesseman tries to calm him down.

  On its own, far-out material did not suffice. It was not enough to simply improvise anymore; a Committee improviser had to improvise with improvisation. “Been there, done that,” Myerson said of shortform sketches and blackouts. “I wanted a really sustained experience based on simultaneity and watching [separate] events [onstage] catalyze one another,” a theatrical plaything that could approach the meandering randomness of actual life the way Lenny Bruce could extend a monologue by returning again and again to a particular theme or rhetorical device. One Bruce vehicle in particular had impressed itself on Myerson. “He started riffing on ‘What if . . .’” Myerson explained. “‘What if such and such was really such and such . . .’” If thoughts were tiny embryonic dramas, then every one of Bruce’s what-ifs was like a link between scenes. What if Myerson improvised a series of what-ifs? Between workshops and performances, he developed a forty-five-minute sketch and improvisation sequence (interspersed with audiovisual excursions), the Fear, Guilt, and Impotence Collage. For example: What if . . . the mouth was a sex organ and we ate with our vaginas? (Would gynecologists give us fillings?) They did that scene, followed by another, followed by . . .

  “I need a job.” It was Del calling from California.

  “Okay,” Myerson said. “Come on out here.”

  Though Alan Arkin had scored, big-time, on Broadway, in productions of Enter Laughing, for which he won the Tony, and Luv, directed by Mike Nichols (for which he won the Tony), director Norman Jewison expected the studio wouldn’t agree Arkin was perfect for The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Arkin had never been in a feature film before, let alone starred in one, and moreover, United Artists had originally intended the part of Yuri Rozanov, a Russian submariner dispatched to Cape Cod, for Peter Ustinov. But Jewison had loved Arkin in Luv, and through the grapevine heard he was a master of accents.

  “Well, what do I have to do?” Arkin asked Jewison.

  “You don’t have to do anything. I just want to get a few feet of you on camera. We’ll just talk.”

  They would shoot the test in New York on the set of Sidney Lumet’s The Group. When Arkin arrived, Jewison explained that although he considered the Russians script nearly perfect, he had cast renowned improvisers Carl Reiner and Jonathan Winters in other parts. Should Arkin be given the role, Jewison added, he would surely be asked to respond improvisationally.

  “Okay,” Arkin said. “What should we—”

  Jewison tossed him a heavy leather jacket. “Put this on,” he said. “You’re going to be a KGB Russian agent who is here with the ballet company and I’m going to do an interview with you, like a television interview.”

  Jewison rolled camera on Arkin for “a smart, funny, and lucid improv,” Jewison said, “that proved to me that with a little work he could be wonderful.” Arkin played a Russian actor in round one, drawing from his Second City catalogue of immigrant misfits.

  “What is your name?” began Jewison, off camera.

  “Constantin Gabrilich Stepanowsk.”

  “Is that your name?”

  “Yes, is my name. Stepanowsk. It was longer, but I shortened it to go onstage.”

  “You play an instrument?”

  “I am wiolinist.”

  Jewison tried to keep from laughing. “A wiolinist?”

  “I denote a slice of humor on your part. We have our way of pronouncing. I don’t make fun of the way you pronounce my name.”

  “Could I see you without your hat?”

  Arkin took the suggestion. “This is my real hair and top-of-head. It was used very successfully in many films, in films of I. Pudovkin. In Mother, it was used in scene of infant’s top-of-head. That was when I was very young.”

  Jewison, loving this, moved Arkin into his next character, a Russian officer claiming to be CIA, and then into:

  “Constantin Mevedenko.”

  “How do you spell that?”

  “M. E. V. A. U. W. Y. X. G. Evynik.”

  Jewison was losing it. Arkin was pressure in human form, a slow-burning nervous breakdown, but there was Zen in there. If stars are contradiction, the impossible person made real, then Arkin, anxious Buddha, had a real shot at making it in the movies. UA agreed. Based on his improvised screen test, they gave Arkin the part.

  He said, “There’s not a line in the film that I said as it was in the script.”

  Well in advance of shooting day one, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made people nervous on and off the Warner Brothers lot. The play, by Edward Albee, was notoriously difficult and unanimously admired, under glass and untouchable, like a painting in a museum; its adult themes and colorful language, direct assaults on Hollywood morality and the withering Production Code, recurrently aggravated studio head Jack Warner. The operatic volatility of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton preoccupied Ernest Lehman, Virginia Woolf’s screenwriter and first-time producer, who feared that first-time film director Mike Nichols, at thirty-four years old, would be powerless to corral his stars’ drinking, egos, sex rows, and talent. Nichols’s permissive attitude and playboy persona, his new Rolls-Royce and poolside weekends, panicked Lehman. “I have felt that Mike tends to leave the picture behind when he leaves the studio,” he wrote, “and I think he goes off to a very happy social life in the evenings. Now perhaps it will all work out well, but I have worked with other directors, and it seems to me that if they were in Mike’s position, directing their first picture—a picture as important and as difficult as this one—they would be burning the midnight oil trying to find all the answers to all the questions.” Lehman had never worked with a
n improviser. On July 20, 1965, his first day as a film director, Nichols decided a little improvisation might open the production’s emotional-release valve. Late in the afternoon, before rolling cameras, Nichols let Burton and Taylor play with scene one, shot one, the loopy, liquored moment when their characters, George and Martha, return home after a late-night party, and she surveys the premises and blurts out, “What a dump!” But just for laughs, Nichols had Taylor improvise as George and Burton improvise as Martha.

  It was a wild idea and everyone laughed. Except Ernest Lehman.

  Nichols called him at the end of the day, elated. “Did you hear me say Action?! I said it—the first time in my life. Wasn’t I good?”

  Nichols was already home, at his rented house, the Cole Porter estate in Brentwood; Lehman was still at the office.

  “You certainly were,” Lehman allowed. “Now you are a film director.”

  Lehman reserved his actual feelings for himself. Improvising in nightclubs was one thing, but in Hollywood, on film, where mere seconds cost thousands, free play smacked of immaturity and decadence; it showed artistic indulgence; disrespect for traditional studio hierarchy where producers and production heads controlled their directors and actors. Improvisation started with actors, not executives. It would be a fight between the Old Order and the New, but with Mike Nichols leading the charge, the New had a chance. Nichols had the star clout—and, as an improviser, the interpersonal finesse—to wrestle down guardians of the Old like Jack Warner and Joseph E. Levine, the independent financier of his next film, The Graduate, which Nichols had already begun to imagine. “My hope,” he said, “is to make the picture free-wheeling, partly improvised. To make something happen that only happens once—and you’ve got it. The idea of doing it quite loosely interests me.” He saw the character of Mrs. Robinson as a version of Elaine.

  Buck Henry was in L.A., living at the Chateau Marmont, working on Get Smart, the show he created with Mel Brooks, and would, from time to time, drop by the Virginia Woolf set to check in on his friend, former fellow Premise Player George Segal, whom Nichols had cast in the movie. Since their Premise days, Henry had worked mostly as a writer, for Steve Allen’s Tonight Show, briefly, and That Was the Week That Was (TW3), a satirical news show—the first of its kind—populated by Compass and Second City improvisers. On TW3, unlike other shows, they were actually allowed a regular platform to improvise. Nichols and May, Arkin, Andrew Duncan, Mina Kolb, and others made up a kind of revolving repertory company from episode to episode, taking suggestions from their studio audience. It was unprecedented.