Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater

By Mark Larson

This definitive history brings Chicago’s celebrated theater and comedy scenes to life with stories from some of its biggest stars spanning sixty-five years.

Chicago is a bona fide theater town, bursting with vitality that thrills local fans and produces generation after generation of world-renowned actors, directors, playwrights, and designers. Now Mark Larson shares the rich theatrical history of Chicago through first-person accounts from the people who made it.

Drawing from more than three hundred interviews, Larson weaves a narrative that expresses the spirit of Chicago’s ensemble ethos: the voices of celebrities such as Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Asner, George Wendt, Michael Shannon, and Tracy Letts comingle with stories from designers, composers, and others who have played a crucial role in making Chicago theater so powerful, influential, and unique.

Among many other topics, this book explores the early days of the fabled Compass Players and the legendary Second City in the ‘50s and ‘60s; the rise of acclaimed ensembles like Steppenwolf in the ‘70s; the explosion of storefront and neighborhood companies in the ‘80s; and the enduring global influence of the city as the center of improv training and performance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 13, 2019
• ISBN: 9781572848054

Book preview

Preface

A DO-IT-YOURSELF MOVEMENT

THE CHICAGO THEATER MOVEMENT AND I ARE ABOUT THE same age, if you mark its inception, as I do in this book, with the founding of Playwrights Theatre Club in 1953. It’s hard to imagine today, but prior to that, Chicago theatergoing audiences’ choices were limited to community theaters, summer stock, and the large touring shows from New York. Chicago was, as director Bob Sickinger once observed, a theater desert.

But in the early ’50s, a convergence of nascent talent at the University of Chicago triggered a new theater movement that changed everything. A young director named Paul Sills met a restless and determined producer and director named David Shepherd. Together they created Playwrights from a dream of Sills’s to develop a repertory theater company, aided by some inheritance money of Shepherd’s. Playwrights Theatre Club soon attracted a handful of extraordinary actors in the first moments of their careers, including Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, Joyce Piven (née Hiller), Byrne Piven, Ed Asner, Fritz Weaver, and Sheldon Patinkin, then 17 years old. In just two years, they produced some 24 classic plays, first at the Reynolds Club at the University of Chicago and then in one of Chicago’s first storefront theaters, a Chinese restaurant they renovated on LaSalle Street, not far from where The Second City is now. When that venture disbanded in 1955, Shepherd had a chance to create his own dream idea, the one he had come to Chicago to seed: the Compass Players, America’s first improvisational theater of its kind. Compass lasted just 18 months, but its impact would be seismic, not least of all because it led to the establishment in 1959 of a cabaret in a converted Chinese laundry on Wells Street, across the street from the Hotel Lincoln. Founders Paul Sills, Bernie Sahlins, and Howard Alk called it The Second City.

By the time I was in high school in the mid-’60s, a few more venues for theater-hungry Chicago audiences had opened, offering early experiences with what would later become recognizable as Chicago-style theater—intimate, raw, authentic. Bob Sickinger’s Hull House Theater now was offering current off-Broadway works (without bothering to acquire the rights) using Chicago-bred casts. Soon to follow was Paul Sills’s Story Theatre, the Body Politic—which saved Lincoln Avenue from the urban renewal wrecking ball—and then Kingston Mines, where Grease was born. Chicago was on its way to creating what Chicago Tribune critic Richard Christiansen refers to as a theater of our own.

In the early ’70s, I caught my first glimpse of how the gears of this emerging Chicago theater scene mesh and move, and I was eager to be a part of it all. My mother, who worked at a bank in Evanston, talked one of her customers, Jim Fisher, a member of the Second City cast, into meeting me on a park bench in Evanston to hear about a musical play my friend, Rusty Steiger, and I had written and produced in college. I gave Jim a cassette recording of a performance, and he gave it to Josephine Forsberg who, unbeknownst to me at the time, had been a part the Playwrights Theatre Club, along with her husband, Rolf Forsberg. Now she had created Players Workshop, the first-of-its-kind school to teach improvisation, and was also overseeing a children’s theater that performed at Second City on Sundays.

Jo eventually called me and said she wanted to produce our play at the Second City Children’s Theater, and that I should direct it. It was a simple musical fantasy about a king so bad at his job that his subjects abandon him, leaving behind a boy who longs to be dubbed a knight, even by a flawed king. Jo told me to go to a small coffee-house theater called the Players Oe in Old Town, where her Workshop students got a chance to perform for an audience. She wanted me to select the cast out of that group, as long as I cast her son, Eric, to play the little boy. I chose a young woman with a wry spark, named Molly Brown, and a big guy with a dry sense of humor, named George Wendt.

Victory Gardens Theater, meanwhile, had been established just a few years earlier in 1974 with a particular interest in new playwrights. I added to their growing stack of submissions one of the two-handers I’d written, and they selected it for production in their studio space. After each performance, we’d gather with other theater people at the Gingerman Tavern, a narrow, always crowded bar next door to Victory Gardens where we made large plans at small tables. I would not know till years later the full extent of what was being hatched in the Gingerman, nor that a wedge-shaped storefront adjoining the tavern would soon become the first home of the adventuresome and influential Remains Theatre, where actors like William Petersen, D. W. Moffett, Amy Morton, Natalie West, Gary Cole, and others would begin their careers.

Meanwhile, to make ends meet, I worked as a driver for Carol Channing while she was in town doing Hello, Dolly! and as an assistant to TV pioneer Burr Tillstrom for his live shows at the Goodman Theatre. But in time, and with the births of twin daughters, I came to understand that my place in Chicago theater would always be, in Joan Didion’s words, on the edge of the story. And it turns out I like it here. So it is from this vantage point that I have attempted to capture the story of the Chicago theater movement, from 1953 to the present. It is told entirely in the voices of the people who made it happen, from Ed Asner, Barbara Harris, and Joyce Piven in the beginning, to Jeff Perry, Gary Sinise, and Terry Kinney, the founders of Steppenwolf Theatre in the middle years, straight up to the new, young talent carrying the work forward today. Some are artists who are known and seen mostly at a distance on stages and screens, like Michael Shannon, Tracy Letts, Laurie Metcalf, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and others are arts administrators, builders, designers, and technicians, whose roles in forming and sustaining the movement may be less visible but are no less noteworthy.

A vision Paul Sills long ago described to Jeffrey Sweet in Something Wonderful Right Away has come to pass. The Compass Players, if carried to its logical conclusion is a story of a ‘do-it-yourself movement,’ Sills said. I’d like to see neighborhoods all over the city form groups like this. It’s a search for community.

In the 65 years since Playwrights Theatre Club (and I) were born, the Chicago theater community has ballooned to somewhere (depending on how you count them) between 250 and 300 theaters of various sizes and types. Six theater companies that began as peripatetic troupes or in storefronts have constructed their own exquisite buildings from the ground up, indelibly changing the Chicago landscape. Four of these theaters have received regional Tony Awards. Chicago now exports award-winning and transformative new plays and artists at a steady pace, becoming a significant global source of theatrical talent, energy, and innovation.

The theatrical community that spawns this work at a vigorous rate is uncommon in its collective spirit, working, as many told me, like an ecosystem or a large repertory company or a single great ensemble, wherein the focus is on the work itself more than on individual accomplishment. The artists who have founded and work in these theaters take pride in the sense of community they have built. Ensemble is the story of how this community came into being and grew exponentially over the course of one (relatively) brief lifetime.

I approached this book with an interest in how both individual and collective choices shaped the ethos and aesthetic of the Chicago theater movement. I chose oral history for two compelling reasons: first, because so many of the pioneers of this movement are still alive and were willing to talk to me, and second, because oral history permits the reader a unique opportunity to intimately witness history in the making through the first-person accounts of those who made it. I am interested in the intersection of these people’s lives and work with the inception and growth of the community we know today.

I conducted over three hundred interviews with artists and administrators who played a part in the story. Some interviews were necessarily conducted by phone, but whenever possible I secured face-to-face meetings, mostly in Chicago but also in LA, New York, Sarasota, and Minneapolis. We met in dressing rooms, theater lobbies, coffee shops, their homes, and my home … and once on a private plane. Initial interviews generally lasted between one and three hours. Sometimes, such as when a subject’s experience spanned more than one aspect or period of Chicago theater history, I conducted two to three follow-ups, which normally lasted between 30 and 60 minutes.

The interviews were recorded and professionally transcribed verbatim. While editing, I was committed to retaining both the individuality of the interviewees’ speaking voices and the intention behind what they were saying. Sometimes, perhaps paradoxically, that required making changes in the text for the sake of clarity, readability, and/or fidelity to the original intent. Our ears are more forgiving in conversation than our eyes are in reading. Where significant changes were made, interviewees were offered an opportunity to review their sections for approval and/or alteration as needed. To create a narrative flow and to eliminate the inevitable backtracking and repetition of casual speech, the order of elements was often rearranged.

I made my first serious foray into oral narrative while working on my doctoral dissertation in 2011, for which I interviewed six prominent progressive educators about what it means to persist over the long haul for equity in education. To create a home for extended versions of those interviews, I developed a website, AmericanStoriesContinuum.com. I later expanded the site to include interviews I conducted across the country on two additional themes: money and change. The core proposition that drives my work is that we need a multiplicity of stories to tell the whole story.

In talking with me about the burgeoning Chicago theater community and its audience, Criss Henderson, executive director at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, said, It’s like we are making this together. That principle binds and sustains this community, I’ve found, so I have endeavored to replicate that spirit, the ensemble way, by approaching this book as a collaboration.

We made this together.

Part One

THE NEED AND THE HUNGER FOR GOOD THEATER

(1953–1971)

Beginning in the late 1930s and rolling on through the 1950s, Chicagoans produced much of what the world now calls American: the liberated, leering sexuality of Playboy; glass and steel modern architecture; rock and roll and the urban blues; McDonald’s and the spread of the fast-food nation; the improvisational sketch comedy that’s trained everyone from Joan Rivers and John Belushi to Steve Carell and Tina Fey; Ebony magazine and Emmett Till, whose murder catalyzed the civil rights movement; geodesic domes; avantgarde jazz and gospel music; the Nation of Islam; modern photography; the atom bomb and the Great Books; Kukla, Fran and Ollie; and the last great political machine.

THE THIRD COAST, THOMAS DYJA

The Past Is Prologue

THE OFFSPRING OF VIOLA SPOLIN

When Steppenwolf Theatre Company opened the Front Bar adjacent to their theater in 2016, they had grown into a 41-year-old institution with a rich and influential history, not just in Chicago, but nationally and internationally.

The décor of the bar includes, here and there, mementos of this history. A globe light recalls the now-defunct O’Rourke’s Tavern, which had once been an important place for ensemble members to gather with other Chicago theater-makers, many planning new companies of their own. Bookshelves display some valued items, like a Buddha, in honor of former artistic director Martha Lavey, and several stacks of selected books. They come from the Steppenwolf private library, said Lauren Spivak, special projects coordinator, who curated the shelves. You can tell by their rich texture that these books have been read and loved.

One of those books is Viola Spolin’s 1963 groundbreaking work, Improvisation for the Theater: A Handbook of Teaching and Directing Techniques, which has particular significance for original Steppenwolf ensemble members. During the company’s foundational years in the ’70s, they met a director and teacher named Sheldon Patinkin, who at the age of 17 had worked with Spolin and her son, director Paul Sills. Patinkin soon became an important influence on the Steppenwolf founding ensemble members.

Sheldon would teach us improv games, remembers Steppenwolf cofounder Jeff Perry, using a range of exercises that go back to Viola Spolin and Paul Sills. He took us through a lot of exercises that had to do with being aware of the other person, being open to the moment, and physicalizing character. We loved that work, and it has really stuck with me as an actor and as a teacher.

By way of Sheldon Patinkin and Viola Spolin’s work, Steppenwolf Theatre, like so many other Chicago theater companies, is hereditarily linked to the originators of the Chicago theater movement.

ARETHA SILLS (associate director, Sills/Spolin Theater Works; teacher; Paul Sills’s daughter and Viola Spolin’s granddaughter): That book was the product of a lifetime. She had been working on it for years. It was a long torturous process [laughs]. Paul used to say that he had to write out a whole first draft to get Viola going. He sent it to her, and she was like, Oh no, no, no. He told me that not one word he gave her made it into the final publication. He had done it just to spur her on, because he knew the book was in her, but it was hard to get out. And that did spur her on.

People often proudly tell me, I have a first edition, and that’s what I work from, and I say, Well, there’s a lot of stuff you should know, but it’s in the third edition. That’s because she never stopped adding new games, and new important discoveries to the book. If you look in her archives, you’ll find little scraps of paper with notes on them. Every time she had a thought, she would write a note and put it in a file. There’s a game in her archives that she was thinking of developing. Before I had learned to write, like a lot of kids, I would scribble just to look like I was writing. There’s a note in the archives, something like, To develop: Aretha’s gibberish writing exercise. She saw what I was doing, and she thought, ooh, that’s a game! She never stopped developing her work. She never stopped thinking about her work.

JEFFREY SWEET (playwright; author, Something Wonderful Right Away): Viola Spolin is one of the most influential figures in American theater. Her ideas have ended up being the seed for so many companies. And what campus doesn’t have an improv troupe, now? They may not know they are the offspring of Viola, and they may not bother to actually study her book, but they are impacted by her work.

THOMAS DYJA (author, The Third Coast): I still have my old Avon copy of Jeff Sweet’s book, Something Wonderful Right Away. That was probably the first time I ever read about Viola Spolin. Aside from my obvious admiration and excitement about that seed that gave rise to Compass Players and The Second City, and so much else in improv today, I love the origin story of it.

ARETHA SILLS: Viola grew up playing street games in abandoned lots with her friends. They also made up all sorts of new games. She went to Lakeview High School and was, she said, a great basketball player. But she wasn’t a great student because she wasn’t all that into school. Lakeview was a huge school, and back then it was a very authoritarian school as well. Viola was a very social girl. Her nickname was Spark. She had a really strong group of friends, modern girls who would bob their hair, use red lipstick, and wear men’s overalls.

After high school, her sister Pauline, who was slightly older, heard about Neva Boyd and that she was giving classes in group work at her home. Neva Boyd was, of course, an early theorist in the uses of play in education and very important in the training of social workers. She later became a professor of social work at Northwestern University, wrote a lot on the subject, and founded the Recreational Training School at Hull House. She had come out of the progressive education movement that was swirling around Jane Addams’s Hull House at that time, and she was very influenced by all those thinkers like John Dewey and Jane Addams herself.

Viola studied with her for two full years. Neva told her she had never met another adult who knew so many games already. Well, Viola already knew about the power of games because she came from a tradition of play. It was central to her family life. Her Russian Jewish family often played charades and put on plays for each other. One of the things I always have to correct people about is that they think of Viola as a social worker who was training kids to communicate better. Well actually, Viola was interested in the theater from a very, very early age.

CAROL SILLS (director, Sills/Spolin Theater Works; Viola Spolin’s editor): That family loved theater, and the opera, too. They would get together and improvise and sometimes stage opera at home. Her dad was a policeman, and because he spoke several languages, they put him on opera duty. He would take Viola with him to the opera, and she was able to watch from backstage.

ARETHA SILLS: In 1939, Neva Boyd recommended her for the position of drama supervisor for the WPA (Works Progress Administration) Recreational Project, where she worked with children and recent immigrants. She said that she needed a nonverbal system because she was working with children and a lot of people for whom English was their second language. She knew, through her training with Neva Boyd, how people actually learn through experience and play. Play allowed her a nonverbal system of teaching. So every time she had a problem directing, she would create a game and the player would learn the more formal rules of the theater. It all happened organically.

Neva Boyd wrote that play develops social values as does no other behavior. The social values that Jane Addams called social ethics are necessary for a democracy to function. We all have to learn how to meet with people out of our particular class or race. We need to all meet on common ground and begin to come to understand each other and understand that everybody is part of the whole. Viola created games that made that happen.

So Viola’s work emerged out of Neva Boyd’s and Jane Addams’s ideals. In fact, some of Viola’s games actually embody Jane Addams’s philosophies and ideals. It’s quite remarkable, for example, that Jane Addams said that a cultivated person (meaning an educated person, but she used the word cultivated) is one who can see through the eyes of another. And when I’m teaching, that’s what people tell me happens when they play [Viola’s game] Mirror—that they’re seeing through someone else’s eyes. Other games like Give and Take embody the ensemble nature that’s the spirit of what Viola’s work really is. So, Viola’s games are almost like a direct embodiment of Jane Addams’s ideals of social ethics.

THOMAS DYJA: I find Viola to be not just someone with a good idea, but consummately Chicago and the Chicago aesthetic. All of this had its roots in, not just the WPA, but the John Reed Clubs and a sense of activism and politics. Her work, coming out of Neva Boyd and the WPA, was a creation that grew out of a petri dish of a lot of the things that were in Chicago at the time. It had its roots in activism and that sense of connection to humanity as opposed to theory. It’s about people; it’s about community and connection.

I think it really is a part of that whole sense of experimentation that is, to me, at the heart of the Chicago aesthetic. It is very different from the sense I have of New York being a place where you come to market and sell your goods. Chicago is a place where you try things, work it out. Things like improvisation were legitimate, real products of a time, and most importantly, a place.

I don’t want to gild this whole idea, but I do think that it is something that undergirds a lot of great Chicago art, through that period at least. In my mind, that period was what we call now agglomeration of talent, for reasons that had to do with more than just a coincidence of everyone showing up there. People were there for reasons.

ARETHA SILLS: When Paul was very young, Viola couldn’t work because no one could afford babysitters back then, but she would have girlfriends come to her apartment. She’d have game nights there and put Paul up on the bed, and he’d watch. So Paul’s education started very early, as had Viola’s, with the family tradition of playing games. He was just sort of born into this world of the theater that Viola had created, so he understood it deeply in his bones. From a preverbal state he understood that theater was play. In many ways, he later took her work to a different level, though he wouldn’t admit to it. To him, Viola was the great genius, and he would say he was just doing her work. He said that to his dying day. I would say it this way: he showed the world what it could do.

In 1948, after serving in the merchant marine and the army, Paul Sills enrolled at the University of Chicago under the Chicago College Plan, which, between 1931 and 1959, allowed students admission to the university if they could pass an entrance exam, regardless of age. Devised by Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins, the plan attracted an uncommonly precocious group of young people in their teens plus some returning military personnel (like Sills and Ed Asner) with an interest in acting.

Even in the absence of a university theater department—or perhaps because of it—they found one another and discovered their own gifts. Sills offered workshops in Viola’s theater games to anyone who wanted to learn them, free of charge, for four hours every Saturday. His aim was to build an ensemble for a theater company he wanted to create.

In 1955, Sills and a new arrival to Chicago with ideas of his own, David Shepherd, formed Chicago’s first homegrown professional theater company to come along in decades: Playwrights Theatre Club. Together, they opened one of Chicago’s first storefront playhouses when they transformed a former Chinese restaurant into a small theater. In so doing, they opened chapter one of the Chicago theater movement.

We begin as the actors assemble.

Chapter 1

IMPROVISUS MEANS UNFORESEEN, UNEXPECTED

PLAYWRIGHTS THEATRE CLUB

The Playwrights Theatre Club was founded in 1953 by Paul Sills and David Shepherd; the producers were Sills, Shepherd, and Eugene Troobnick. The company members included Ed Asner, Byrne Piven, Barbara Harris, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Joyce Hiller (Piven), Sheldon Patinkin, Fritz Weaver, Rolf Forsberg, Josephine Forsberg, Joann Shapiro, and Bernie Sahlins (producer after first year).

JOYCE PIVEN (actor; teacher; co-founder, Piven Theatre Workshop): I feel like I’m one of the last people standing. There is no film; I have photographs, but because filming started with Second City [1959], our history, in some people’s minds, starts with Second City. Whereas Playwrights Theatre Club, which came first, is not recorded on film. I worry that our early history is in danger of being lost, for whatever that’s worth.

I think it’s the birthplace, it’s where it all started. All of it. We were the crucible, and that’s getting lost. It’s important that it not be lost. But I guess we can begin.

Way, way, way back, I was a product of the Depression. 1930s. My mother came over [to America] at 12, alone, and was raised by various relatives that may have been cousins or half sisters, half brothers. And then she married my father, which was very joyous and everything, but … the Depression hit. I was given to relatives from age four to seven, given away. We couldn’t afford to live in the same house.

When I got to be 15, I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to go to college to get an education or to be trained as an actor. I went to my parents, and they said, But we don’t have the money to send you to college. That, to me, amazingly enough, was somehow not an issue [laughs]. It was sort of in the air, that mentality of entitlement.

I opted to go to the University of Chicago. The [Robert Maynard] Hutchins plan took anybody in who could pass the test, regardless of age. I went there at age 17, but there were kids there who were 12 and 13; they were prodigies of sorts, brilliant. We went there because of this exciting new plan that Hutchins had of reading texts in the original, and having no syllabi.

We all found each other there. A young man named Fritz Weaver—I knew him well—came there for the university, but he was a born actor. And eventually Byrne [Piven] came. He had majored in theater at Syracuse, but left and went to New York. Nothing much doing there, so he decided to do graduate work at the University of Chicago. That’s where we all ended up.

It was an idealistic time. Communism was popular. Socialism was popular. There had been a world war, a Holocaust. That energy was informing everything.

ED ASNER (actor): I came from Kansas City, Kansas. We started out in the apartment above my father’s junkyard, which was across from Armour’s packinghouse. So it was rough and gritty. All day you could hear the cattle and sheep and the goats, the pigs being led to slaughter over the wooden bridge that led from the stockyards into the packinghouse. Most of my memories are of seeing all these men that came out in their white freezer coats from the packinghouse covered with blood, carrying their knives and their helmets with them.

When it came time, I did want to get away from home. My wonderful younger sister very graciously typed up applications for scholarships to every college in the country. I loved history, at the time. As I got a little older, political science had a draw on me. I had a cousin at the University of Chicago in political science. I wasn’t crazy about him. But U. of C. was considered pretty good for political science. Thought, well, that’d be a good place to go. Far enough away from the family. Political science. OK. So I chose to take the test for the University of Chicago scholarship. I didn’t get the scholarship, but I was accepted. I entered in the fall of ’47. I loved the University of Chicago; I loved the milieu.

BARBARA HARRIS (actor): We had all the whiz kids there, and they were all incredible. It was a very interesting group of people. They didn’t have to go to class; all they had to do was pass a test [at the end of the term]. They’re all reading books galore. It was a different time where you could live without money.

JOY CARLIN (actor): Most of us in the group that Paul started only went to two years of high school, or maybe even no high school. It was totally academic. It was a great, great education. Always grateful for it.

WARREN LEMING (actor; writer; musician): People tend to forget that U. of C. was a mecca for a certain kind of bohemian or quasi-bohemian outsider intellectual. Witness: Elaine May. Some of them didn’t even take classes there, but they were there, they were on the scene, they were part of that culture. Mike Nichols, Susan Sontag. They were 15, they were 16, so you had this freak show in terms of what the larger populace would look like.

JOY CARLIN: I was 15 years old and all the other students in my classes were veterans, quite a few of them, and that’s part of what made the discussions so interesting.

W. A. MATHIEU (author; composer; accompanist for Compass Players and first musical director at Second City): At that time, the University of Chicago was very hungry for students. It was hiring those commie pinko jews and other crazy people, immigrants from Europe who maybe did have a little communistic or socialist history, or they were gay, and et cetera, and so they were maybe not acceptable to most schools, but were indeed the intellectual cream of the crop. The Hutchins program meant round tables and lively discussions in the classes, no textbooks, nothing but original texts. If you were studying optics, you read Huygens. If you studied Kant, you didn’t have a textbook with Kant in it, you studied his writing.

I was kind of a problem kid. My dad preferred that I be out of the house so he’d have the house to himself with his wife. He suggested that I try for early entrance into the University of Chicago. I thought I wouldn’t get in because I spent my life in English class and math class writing music. I had a B average, and you can’t get into a good college with a B average, much less if you’re only a junior. But I took his suggestion to apply, and they wrote me back a letter of apology: You should apply next year. If your academic grades were better we’d let you in, but apply yourself and you’ll make a good prospect for the University of Chicago.

I was crestfallen, but I’d expected to be refused—it was my dad’s bright idea, after all. When he came home from work that night he read the letter and said, I bet you can talk your way in. I said, Uh, no I can’t. He said, I’ll bet you $10. For me that was a pure win: I’d have $10 to go on a date. I said, OK, I’ll bet you, and we shook hands. The next morning, I was on a plane to Chicago. I sat in front of an admissions officer. The admissions officer said, Tell me why you want to come here. And I became passionate. I stated a real case for myself. I heard from them two weeks later. They said, We’ll let you in on probation for a semester, and if you behave yourself and do well here, we’ll be happy to have you. So I was accepted. That night when dad came home and read the letter I expected him to be jubilant, but he said, You owe me $10. I didn’t have $10, so I had to borrow some singles from my mom. Next day I went to the bank to get a brand-new $10 bill. That night I handed it to my dad. He took it and tore it in half. He gave me half and put the other half in his top dresser drawer. I said, What are you doing? He said, Just put this in your wallet, and next time you think something’s impossible, take out your wallet and look at it.

So I went to the University of Chicago, and I did well, and goddamn if it wasn’t the best year of my life, at least up to then. I was in a 17-year-old’s heaven. Everybody weird went to the University of Chicago. My dorm was a crazy place—15-year-olds, misfits of every sort, geniuses of every sort, and we were all in classes studying Freud and Schopenhauer and Haydn’s sonata allegro form, and it was wonderful.

JOYCE PIVEN: There was a guy there who was employed by the university. His name was George Blair. He was in charge of the Reynolds Theater, and it was like our playground. He was there to accommodate us. "Oh, you want to do the Oresteia? OK. Hedda Gabler? Sure." We did all the classics. There was this incredible energy.

JOY CARLIN: I read a sign somewhere saying this guy was going to start a theater group. Anybody want to come, come and see, and that was Paul. I believe I was in the first play Paul ever directed. It was The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife by García Lorca. We performed in Mandel Hall.

JOYCE PIVEN: Paul directed a play called The Typewriter, by Cocteau. We did it in the round [in Reynolds Club]. There was a little proscenium but we didn’t use it. I don’t know if people had done shows in the round like that before. Paul was always trying new forms. Mike Nichols was in it, and Paul and me. I played Solange, the lead, a 40-year-old. I was 20, 21. The three of us spent six months working on this play. I don’t know what we were doing, I think we were fooling around, and we had a lot of beer, but we thought we were working on it.

JOY CARLIN: When I graduated in 1951, I wanted to continue in theater, so I went to Yale Drama School. I don’t know how I got in but in those days it was very, very easy to get in. I also don’t know how my parents paid for it. It must have been very cheap because we didn’t have any money. But I did go there and then after two years I got a call from Paul: Come back to Chicago. We’re starting a real theater. I quit school and went back. The first play we did was The Caucasian Chalk Circle.

JOYCE PIVEN: It was Paul and David Shepherd who formed Playwrights.

DAVID SHEPHERD (actor; co-founder, Playwrights Theatre Club and Compass Players): The way I ended up in Chicago was a big mistake. I was in Bombay, teaching, and I decided to change the American theater, which was then all three-act plays—ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum! I went to New York and started a theater, and I failed. I found New York theaters effete. So I left, and I was hitchhiking to Cleveland. A truck driver who [picked me up] said, I’m not going to Cleveland. I’m going to Chicago. You want to go there, instead? I said, OK.

You see? It was all a big mistake. But I don’t regret any of it.

When I got to Chicago, I made a few friends and they said I should meet Paul Sills. We made plans to meet at a coffee shop. He forgot about the appointment, but we eventually worked it out.

I talked to Paul about [my idea for a cabaret theater], but he was into his own thing [creating a repertory theater]. So we made a deal where I’d help him do his thing for a while, then he’d do my thing.

Shepherd contributed $7,000 from an inheritance from his stepmother to found Playwrights, and the new theater company was formed. The small troupe found their first off-campus home on the second floor of a Chinese restaurant at 1560 N. LaSalle Street (at North Avenue). They made a thrust stage in the small space, which accommodated about 150 canvas director’s chairs. Around the sides of the theater, the restaurant booths remained and some company members used them as accommodations. They had to refer to their theater as a club because it was the only way to get not-for-profit status. They sold memberships the way companies today sell subscriptions. After their first year they had some two thousand subscribers. Playwrights Theatre Club opened on May 23, 1953, with Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which they had done on campus. They would rehearse and perform an ambitious schedule of 24 productions of classic plays in the next two years.

JOY CARLIN: John Holabird was an architect at a big firm. He was a friend of Paul’s and he built this stage. When you came up the stairs and you came into the theater, the stage was on the left and there was this big round area where the seats were set up. The stage was a thrust stage. We did amazing things. The stage was small. You couldn’t do much scenic stuff on it. It was all words, and of course there was music. Sheldon Patinkin, darling Sheldon. He often was our orchestra, so there must have been a piano somewhere.

Around the edge of the space were these little champs séparé, they’re called. They’re little dining spaces, booths. That’s where a lot of the actors slept, and they lived there.

JOYCE PIVEN: We did Roundabout, we did Sartre, Red Gloves. We did Henry IV, Part 2, I think. We did Peer Gynt; Byrne was Peer Gynt. Ed Asner was in it. We did The Seagull, Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rolf Forsberg did Shakuntala, a famous Indian play. We did Romeo and Juliet, we did The Overcoat, and Juno and the Paycock. We did everything. We did the histories, Henry I and II, we did T. S. Eliot. We did a play David Shepherd wrote, The Fields of Malfi.

ED ASNER: It was a nice play, I thought, but I had to laugh. I played a blind peasant in it named Bippy. At one point, David has me saying, Something broke the wind. And I could barely keep myself from breaking up every time I had to say the line. And David, with his Eastern Brahmanism, never could really understand what’s funny about it.

JOY CARLIN: David was not a warm, cozy person. But smart.

ED ASNER: One time, the theater’s lawyer came up to me, and he was being friendly, surprisingly. For want of conversation, he eventually says, So, are you thinking of theater as a career? I think I answered him decently, but I thought, what the fuck am I doing here if I’m not here to be a professional actor and wanting to spend my life doing this? Why do you think I’m doing all these roles here? Yes! I definitely want to see myself in theater for the rest of my life.

One of my siblings, I think, had urged me to get [my parents] to come up to Chicago to see me act, so I waited until we did The Dybbuk. I played Rabbi Azriel in that. They came up and stayed at the Lincoln Park Hotel. I had told them that I was also in charge of cleanup, so after the show my dad gave me certain pickups. He found the banister at the back stairway to be too dirty, too dusty. He reprimanded me on that. I said, yeah, I’ll take care of it, Dad. My mom is the one who kvelled. But I don’t recall him saying anything. Found out later that, when he got back to Kansas City that he told everybody that I played the age so well that he wanted to get up on that stage and help me. That told me that he approved.

JOY CARLIN: We did a musical version of The Imaginary Invalid with music by Bill [W. A.] Mathieu. I played Toinette. It was great and actually somewhere I still have the score. It was beautiful. I don’t know why that never went anywhere. We did it outdoors. There was a fountain at Mandel Hall outside and I just remember running a lot to make entrances around different places but it was a wonderful show and with beautiful music. Very clever.

LINNEA FORSBERG (teacher at Players Workshop at The Second City, 1979–2000; daughter of Josephine and Rolf Forsberg): I was born when my parents were on the road with a show, and during that part of their life, they did a lot of things on tour. Sometimes I toured with them and was the kid in the company. Until I was five [1950], I would always go on the road with them.

Playwrights seemed like a place they were going to stay. They’d done Drury Lane, but that’s a summer theater, and all these road shows, but when they got to Playwrights in its second year, it seemed like they were going to stay. It seemed like this was it, to me, too (at eight or nine). They were both happy with it. It was just the kind of theater they wanted to do.

It was a family. I think that’s why I loved it, too. We were like a big family with all different personalities in there. I’m trying to think if there were any older actors. I don’t think there were very many, which is why Ed Asner, at 26, kept playing the older men. Mom mostly acted, and she also sewed costumes with Elaine May. Mom was a good seamstress. Everybody did more than one thing.

Dad wrote a play they put on. He also acted and directed a lot. He did all three. He directed The Tempest when they did a summer Shakespeare festival. Ed Asner was in it, and Barbara Harris and Zohra Lampert and the rest of the company. Mom did a small part. That was very, very successful. Dad has been proud of that his whole life.

I remember seeing it. It was beautiful. Again, from a nine-year-old’s perspective. Zohra was Ariel, which is often played by a man. Ed was way too young to play Prospero, but I wouldn’t know the difference at that time. Barbara Harris was cute as could be. I was a showbiz kid. I watched the show over and over again, and when I could be, I was in it. I was a sprite. I didn’t have any lines, and it wasn’t a part that was in the script; my dad just stuck me up there.

I used to love to be with Sheldon because he played with me. He’d play games with me, like a little kid, so I loved that

I had such a crush on Byrne Piven. I thought he was so wonderful. I liked Joyce, but I had a crush on Byrne, and I told Joyce much later. I saw her at the Playwrights [60th] reunion [2013], and I told her I had had a terrible crush on her husband, and she said, So did I.

JOYCE PIVEN: Paul Sills was a visionary. He was always seeking truth, authenticity on the stage. I guess you could say he was eccentric. But we never thought of him as eccentric. Somehow he managed to convey that he was very knowledgeable. He recognized the truth. But he steadfastly refused to articulate it. Every form that he created, he would not verbalize it. Very kind of Zen thing, though we didn’t know anything about Zen then. I remember, when I played Nina in The Seagull, I went to Paul and I said, Please, please, Paul, help me! What do I do? I was 20-something, and it’s a role that should be played by a 45-year-old woman. I could play it now. But I played it then, some people think. So I went to him and I said, Please, what should I do? He said, Just do it. Just do it!

W. A. MATHIEU: Paul Sills’s mind would spur off in a lot of different directions. In fact, I got permission to do that from him; not from him personally, but from being around when he would interrupt himself and then he’d be somewhere else, and somewhere else, and you were supposed to follow him. It was a kind of an intrusion on your own mind that you’d have to follow this guy’s train of thought. On the other hand, he’d take you to places that you didn’t know you could go.

ED ASNER: He was full of energy. Grumpy, all the time grumpy [makes growling noises]. You know. Grunts and groans and undecipherable epithets. But still, I guess you’d have to say that he was an inspired producer-director. I can’t remember one direction he gave me, though. I’m sure it must have happened. Or maybe I was an actor who, by my style, my innate style, affected him. Who the hell knows? But that’s because I’m selfish. I should’ve been more aware. But there was great hubris to Paul. And David must have sensed it and tagged onto it.

JOY CARLIN: After a year or so at Playwrights, Mike Nichols and I looked at each other one day and said, I don’t know what I’m doing. What are we doing? We decided to go to New York. I went to New York then to study with Lee Strasberg. Mike and I both did that. Then everything happened for him.

LINNEA FORSBERG: I remember being upset when [the theater] was closed down [in 1955]. My parents said they thought they were giving competition to the other theaters. At that time, it was Playwrights and then the downtown theaters. There wasn’t a lot. It wasn’t like it is today in Chicago. I remember my dad saying he thinks the downtown theaters went to the fire department and made sure they were closed down because they were giving them competition, and they were. I don’t know how much competition they were giving them. It’s very different to be a small theater doing new plays and Shakespeare and classics and all of that and being downtown doing My Fair Lady or whatever. But he always felt that way about it.

BARBARA HARRIS: I think the night of closing Playwrights Theatre, [David Shepherd] said, I have this idea. We’ll move from neighborhood to neighborhood and we’ll do [material based on] whatever is going on in that neighborhood and what’s important. We will move into bars, and from all those people sitting there drinking, we’ll find out what their issues are. Then we’ll do them onstage in an improv way.

I thought the idea was wonderful, going into neighborhoods and finding out where the stresses were, or where the problems were. But it ended up being near the U. of C., so the audiences talked about the U. of C. and the issues there. We’d say, Well, we don’t know if this is going to be funny or if it’s going to work, but let’s go try it because something might happen.

DAVID SHEPHERD: I was looking for a different kind of theater that would come out of the audience more clearly and be accepted as well. I was interested in changing the theater totally from three-act plays to something more vigorous, more vital, more effectively relevant to how people live. I wanted to call it Compass because it expressed centrality. A compass is a way of finding out where you’re at.

THE COMPASS PLAYERS

The first performance of what would become the Compass Players occurred, as Playwrights had, in Reynolds Club. It was called Enterprise. They needed a space of their own in which to perform and found a willing partner in Fred Wranovics, a bartender at Jimmy’s Woodlawn, who had purchased the Hi-Hat Lounge at 1152 E. 55th, just down the block from Jimmy’s, as well as the gypsy joint next door.

As would be the case for countless Chicago storefront theaters to come, everybody applied whatever skills they had (or could fake). As Janet Coleman notes in her book The Compass, Andrew Duncan and Paul Sills, for example, built the rudimentary stage and a baffle to tone down the sound of the people in the bar during performances.

When the core company debuted July 5, 1955, it consisted of Roger Bowen, Elaine May, David Shepherd, and Andrew Duncan. Soon, Shepherd persuaded Paul Sills and Barbara Harris, now married, to join. Paul would direct. Later, Mike Nichols, Severn Darden, and Shelley Berman would join them. The Compass Players’ schedule was demanding; they performed five nights a week, with two shows on Friday and three shows on Saturday. There was a new show every week. Shows consisted of a curtain raiser, the Living Newspaper (about 20 minutes of material drawn from the day’s news), a 45-minute scenario (outlined but not scripted), and an improv set based on audience suggestions.

DAVID SHEPHERD: It was not meant to be a revolution. I was into creating a theater that would satisfy me and the audience, and would give the audience some role other than sitting there after paying something. It’s about giving the audience a role. European theater reflected European life, but what about us? What about American life? I wanted to see the average person onstage. That’s why I was hitchhiking to the middle of the country. That’s where the real people were.

W. A. MATHIEU: I was 18 years old. As a piano player, I was a bit of a musical prodigy, at least as far as improvisation was concerned. At Juilliard, I would have been considered a dunce, but at the University of Chicago I was recognized. A best friend of mine was into musical comedy, [but he] played the piano marginally. He tried out for something that was going on at Jimmy’s Bar. He said, I tried out to be the intermission pianist for this theater that’s opening, but I don’t think they liked me very well. Why don’t you try out? I said, OK, it’s a gig. Do they pay? Yeah, I think $5 a week. OK. So one afternoon I went to the back room at Jimmy’s Bar and tried out. And there was David Shepherd.

He’s tall, wears glasses, he stoops, and he looks like a vicar of some imagined country church in 1820. But remember, I was at the University of Chicago. Everybody fit right in. All of the people I knew and was attracted to were quite unusual in some way, and usually very gifted in some spiky way. It was clear that David was gifted in some spiky way. I didn’t recognize him politically as being the extreme leftist that he is, but I listened to his ideas. I was just a kid coming from a relatively sheltered, upper-middle-class, upwardly mobile, aspiring background. My parents were strivers, and this extreme of social justice was new to me.

[When I got there] I remember Mark and Bobbi Gordon were onstage improvising a scene. I tried out for David Shepherd, and he gave me the gig. Of course, they were all way older than me. I was like their puppy. I was the mascot, but I knew what I was doing.

When the Compass opened, I didn’t have much to do with the company because I didn’t play for the shows, I played only during intermissions. I had my own grand piano, painted white—that’s how I knew I was in a nightclub, because it was painted white. It was a broken-down piano, and I had to spend my own money and many, many hours repairing it, which I learned to do in order to make it playable. But I did come round to the theater to watch them build the stage, and practice their improv techniques, and hone their set pieces. I was just in awe, especially of Mike and Elaine, but Severn [Darden] was in the company, and Jesus God, I knew he was the funniest man alive. I was thunderstruck. I had no idea what was going on, except that I was vastly entertained. But I did gradually begin to understand. David Shepherd would hold court at rehearsals; so would Mike, so would Elaine—everybody had something to say. Andrew Duncan, Mark and Bobbi Gordon, all had something to say. It was like a free-for-all, but people listened to David. They respected him. They knew he was nuts, and they respected him.

DAVID SHEPHERD: Each night the audience would see their own genius translated by Mike and Elaine [in improvisations]. The Living Newspaper, I think, came from me. But it’s a standard cabaret form. The easiest thing you can do is to dramatize whatever it is the audience is reading.

BARBARA HARRIS: Sometimes the Living Newspaper was very awful. We’d learn the hard way by going out and doing the paper for that day. [Sometimes] it would flop terribly; we’d run backstage, embarrassed as heck.

Mike couldn’t stay in a scene. He would break. He would just look at the audience to see if they were laughing. I mean, he couldn’t stay focused at all, and he’d break up at any moment. He would laugh.

Let’s say I’d be the waitress, and I had nothing to do but walk on to show that they were in a restaurant. I would just go and bring things for people and then walk offstage. He’d always stop the scene to say, Lemon, please, after I started to leave and was on the way out. He would go, Lemon, please! And there was no reason for that.

Then one day, I said, "A whole lemon?" Well, he burst out laughing. And then he’d look out in the audience to see if anybody got it. It was just … whatever Mike did was wonderful.

W. A. MATHIEU: One night just after the show, when they were planning the oncoming set, Mike Nichols came to me and said, We’re going to do a scene in a Paris café. Will you play background music like ‘La Vie en Rose’? a song which I scarcely knew then and still don’t know except that the tune sounds an awful lot like the opening bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring—wow, I never made that connection—that’s funny. I wonder who got it from whom? It’s probably some old Russian dance. Anyway, he asked me to play that, so when it came time for that scene, up went the lights and I began to play—sort of picking the tune out. I had no idea what was going on onstage. I couldn’t look up at the actors; I was trying to figure out the fucking song. Loudly. Mike and Elaine were trying to have a conversation at a table, a make scene, as usual, and they were needing to speak louder and louder over the music. Mike began to say things onstage like, Isn’t it interesting how loudly we have to speak in this café? But I was oblivious. Finally, he said, "Garçon, piano player, you there, could you play softer?" I looked up like, oh, Holy Jesus, there’s a scene going on in back of me. The most embarrassing moment, and the beginning of the history.

I had to learn to play in the service of the scene. It was my education, quite a fortunate education for an 18-year-old striver like me, but I had to be taught it.

But I didn’t play much for the Compass. They moved to the Near North Side somewhere. One of my colleagues, Eddie Baker, who was much older than me, became their musician.

The Compass Players moved on October 1, 1955, to the Dock, a Hyde Park nightclub at 6473 S. Lake Park Avenue, which converted part of its space into a cabaret, seating 140.

Sills got a Fulbright scholarship and in September, along with Barbara Harris, he went to England and then Berlin. Shepherd took over the directing responsibilities, spelled, now and then, by others. Elaine May conducted workshops based on Stanislavski. Also during this time, Severn Darden joined. When Darden took a break, Shelley Berman stepped in.

In the spring of 1956, they moved to the Argo OffBeat Room at 6344 N. Broadway Avenue, where they could seat 250. The grind of constantly developing new work was beginning to show. As Janet Coleman notes, the players were realizing that some of the more popular pieces, especially those between two people, could be repeated and refined, and Shelley Berman was developing the one-sided telephone monologues that would soon make him famous. The work of the Compass Players was evolving and beginning to resemble what we now think of as the work on offer at Second City: short scenes developed from improv then refined into set pieces, followed by an improv set during which they developed scenes derived from suggestions from the audience.

In January 1957, the Compass closed. Shepherd would open Compass Theaters elsewhere in the country, including the Crystal Palace in St. Louis, where the cast included Jerry Stiller, Anne Meara, Julie Ponder, and Alan Arkin.

ALAN ARKIN (actor): David Shepherd was enormously passionate about getting the message of improvisation out. We were good friends for a while; I was deeply grateful for him putting me in the group, because I couldn’t even get arrested anywhere else. He was the only person who saw any germ of anything in me, and was very encouraging of me. I have nothing but gratitude for what he gave me, which was the beginning of a career. He was a little dry in an academic way, which I think turned a lot of people off, but it didn’t bother me.

DAVID SHEPHERD: Compass in Chicago accomplished more than I had hoped for because the audience got into it, and it turns out the audience is very talented. It was a matter of finding out the fucking talent of the audience.

But it changed gradually as Second City took over. They were more interested in straight-out comedy. I was not interested in comedy.

DRURY LANE THEATRE

In the late ’40s, about the time that Paul Sills, David Shepherd, and the other actors who formed Playwrights and Compass were beginning to arrive in Chicago and discover one another on the South Side, summer stock theaters began to appear in the northern suburbs.

Even if they didn’t aim to challenge the norms of American theater or test audiences’ sensibilities the way Playwrights and Compass did, they did plant and nurture another type of homegrown theater experience that would mostly offer tried-and-true Broadway fare with Chicago talent: Man of La Mancha, The Sound of Music, and the comedies of Neil Simon. They would also, in time, give many Chicago actors more work at better pay than the storefronts could.

In 1945, a young, energetic theater enthusiast named Marshall Migatz had managed to bring Buster Keaton to Chicago for a production of Three Men on a Horse at what had been the Bon Air Country Club just north of Wheeling. Marshall was working to make Chicago one of the theater centers of the nation, wrote Bruce Vilanch in the Chicago Tribune. His efforts, which culminated in the establishment of the Academy Festival Theatre of Lake Forest, helped put Chicago on the map as a working, producing theater metropolis, one that could be as proud of its local productions as it could of the dozens of Broadway companies that trooped through the Loop.

There was also producer Herb Rogers’s Tenthouse Theater in 1948 and, later, his Music Theater. Both were in the suburb of Highland Park, and both were under canvas tents. A couple years later, Migatz, who also had produced plays under a tent, moved into an old movie house in Hinsdale. There he offered audiences closer glimpses than they could get in the big Loop theaters of stars like Ethel Waters, Judith Anderson, and Debbie Reynolds. He would open several other venues, too, where he gave initial opportunities to future stars like Anthony Perkins, Eileen Heckart, Lee Remick, and Cliff Robertson.

Migatz died in 1973 at the age of 50 when he was struck by a car.

Another suburban theater that first started in the late ’40s in a tent, ultimately opened six different venues, and is still going strong today: the Drury Lane Theatre, named after