Something Wonderful Right Away: The Birth of Second City—America's Greatest Comedy Theater

By Jeffrey Sweet

Discover the behind-the-scenes story of how The Second City theater created a generation of world class great actors, directors, and writers.

In the late Fifties and Sixties, iconoclastic young rebels in Chicago opened two tiny theaters—The Compass and The Second City—where they satirized politics, religion, and sex. Building scenes by improvising based on audience suggestions turned out to be a fine way to develop great actors, directors, and writers. Alumni went on to create such groundbreaking works as The Graduate, Groundhog Day, and Don’t Look Up. Many of them also became stars on Saturday Night Live. Something Wonderful Right Away features the pioneers of the empire that transformed American comedy.
 
This new edition tells even more of the story. Included for the first time is an interview with Viola Spolin, the genius who invented theater games that were the foundation of improvisational theater. Also included are dozens of follow-up stories about Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, Del Close, Joan Rivers, Alan Arkin, and Gilda Radner, plus “You Only Shoot the Ones You Love,” the story of how this book’s author, playwright Jeffrey Sweet, became so involved in the community he covered that he was captured by it.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allworth
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781621538257

Book preview

1.

VIOLA SPOLIN

A lot of people who claim to teach improvisation, including some who have published books, evidently don’t know who Viola Spolin was. There is no excuse.

Improvisational theater started with her on two counts. 1) With her development of theater games she laid the theoretical foundation of the movement. 2) She was the mother of Paul Sills, who carried her work forward.

Spolin initially dreamed of becoming an actor and went to New York as a young woman to attempt to break into the theater. She didn’t have much luck. So she returned to Chicago and began her life’s work. As fortune would have it, an alumnus of Second City, writer-director Paul Mazursky, cast her in his 1970 film Alex in Wonderland playing a thinly disguised version of his own mother. In a dream sequence she got to dress in a circus costume and ride a horse under the big top. Film critic Roger Ebert gave her a good review.

* * *

SPOLIN: As a child, I lived in a neighborhood where we played on the street. Millions of kids. We played from morning till night. There were six of us kids in my family. There was no television or radio. I read. A library was a few blocks from the house. I read every fairy tale that was ever written. I can still see that row of books—the blue, the green, the yellow. We lived near Humboldt Park in Chicago. Crystal Street. It was a working-class neighborhood. The moving vans still had horses. God, I sound ancient, don’t I? They’d leave the vans in the lot. They’d take the horses elsewhere. We had a ball on those vans. Pretend to go on cross-country trips. And there was a building that they never completed, and we’d play there. The pulley they used to bring the bricks up—one of us would sit and the others would pull us up. It’s a wonder we didn’t kill ourselves. I must have played the same amount of hours that the kids today watch television.

I remember my brother George developed a game. He’d be the king. He’d sit up on a table and say, Do this! And we’d go do it. Do that! And we’d do it. And we’d bow. And then he’d suddenly go very fast: Do this, do that, do this, do that! And we’d throw him off his throne and somebody else would scramble up and be king. That’s revolution! (Laughs.) That’s revolution through play!

Q: So you’re not the only one in your family who made up games.

SPOLIN: And, of course, we’d act out the movies we saw. I remember doing one in which we played dope fiends. When pot came along, I said, Gee, I was raised to go like this! (Mimes melodramatic eye-rolling.) Which was the movies’ image of what dope fiends were.

My parents and a lot of the others we knew came from Russia. Every Sunday we’d take the streetcar and meet at somebody’s house. Nobody had babysitters. They always sang, they always danced. And they would make up the funniest operas. I remember I had a friend, a very proper English girl, she came with one time and said to me, I didn’t know people did things like this in their house.

My father was a Chicago policeman. He was on opera detail. He was very well-educated in Russia. Spoke six or seven languages. He took us to the opera all the time. And I fell in love with it, especially when it snowed on the stage. La Bohème. That was pretty exciting theater for a kid to see. And I was a super once in Boris Godunov with Chaliapin.

I did my first play when I was ten years old. Wrote, produced, costumed. For admission, I charged a penny or ten pins. I don’t know how I came up with ten pins. Certainly a penny would have been more useful.

I don’t know how I got through high school. I was so busy with basketball and baseball. I was a great basketball player. I tried to get into the drama class, but my grades were too low and they wouldn’t take me.

Q: How did you meet Neva Boyd?

SPOLIN: Miss Boyd had a school called the Recreational Training School. My sister had heard of it, which is how I got there. The school was at Hull House. It wasn’t part of Hull House. It wasn’t their program at all. She just rented rooms there because it was the heart of the settlement. I went for two years to Boyd’s school, right after high school. I was eighteen. When was that—’24? I went there till I was three months pregnant with Paul. In fact, I brought him to school with me the following year. My two sisters also went to the school.

Boyd taught group work. Table games, arts and crafts, folk-dancing. Kentucky running races. She’d traveled all over this country and Europe and brought back games and folk dances and taught them to us. Today, I can still call a square dance. She touched everything that was traditional that had the spirit of play in it. Her basic theory was to adjust the child to the existing culture. To adjust them to live happily in the existing environment. She had the kernel of change in there, but she didn’t know it. I moved into change. My things were to change.

Outside of that, I had such a riotous time with my friends. We divided up into teams. We had a big box with all sorts of things in it—hats, coats, and we’d grab things out of drawers. We would play in the living room. I remember we played a form of musical chairs where you’d put a series of objects on the floor. When the music stopped, you had to grab an object. We did that for two or three years. Nobody was allowed to be audience. In a way, I think that’s where Second City began. People used to say, You guys ought to rent a theater. I think Paul absorbed a lot of this as an infant on the bed.

I had a little smattering of Stanislavski after Boyd. One summer I went to New York to become an actress, do you believe it? I remember one day walking down the street with tears running down my face. Here I am in New York, but my kids are back in Chicago. But I learned something there: I realized what a terrible waste—all those people running back and forth. I was only there temporarily.

I was really quite disturbed by what I called the creative waste of kids. I wrote a little poem:

When did the artist die, O Lord?

When did the artist die?

When but a tender child.

I don’t know, it goes on and on. I saw the death of the soul as a result of poverty.

Q: How did you get involved with the WPA?

SPOLIN: Miss Boyd. They had called her, knowing of her work, and she recommended me. So I got a job as drama supervisor. I think I made $95 a month. (Laughs.) I went back to Hull House to use their theater. I was teaching creative recreational theater. The people who worked with me—the teachers—came to me there, and then I would do fieldwork. I’d go and see how they were doing. The WPA had set up recreational centers all over Chicago—in old car barns, in somebody’s basement, in an empty store. And sometimes they’d close off a street for play.

I remember trying to get boys to join the group. I don’t want to. I want play Hi-ho, Silver. So come play Hi-ho, Silver on the stage. So they came in and they played Hi-ho, Silver till I was about to die. Then they gave it up and worked.

It’s all related, for goodness’ sake. I get annoyed when people say I sat there and thought up games. I never even realized they were games. I used to call them problems. I’d be onstage and I’d need something, or something wasn’t happening. I remember Alan Arkin was with me when he was a kid for a few months [later] in California. And a friend of mine sitting next to me said, You ought to have him right stage. I said, Yes, I know I should. Well, why don’t you get him right stage? I haven’t figured out how. What do you mean, you haven’t figured out how? "I’m not going to tell him to go to right stage. He has to figure out for himself he should go there. So maybe that’s where share the stage picture came from. At first, I would name the person. So-and-so, share the stage picture." Then I realized, no, it was everybody’s responsibility to share the stage picture.

Or rocking the boat. That came up to teach little kids something about blocking. What happens if you all get on one side of the boat? It tips over. So if they were all clumped on one side—You’re rocking the boat. And then I developed another game where they were to deliberately rock the boat.

You know how contact came about? I had a bunch of teenagers. Still had that innocence and gawkiness. Like they were characters out of Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen. We were working on a scripted play. I didn’t know how to get them to get closer. Then I said, OK, on every line, make physical contact. We found all sorts of moments from that that ended up in the final show.

My work was not predicated on improvisational theater. That was just something we did in workshop to work on plays. Though I remember when Paul was going to Francis Parker—a marvelous school near Lincoln Park in Chicago—I took my little troupe there. Paul was about eleven then, twelve. And the kids in the audience would stand up and say what they wanted to see, and my kids would do anything they wanted. Paul also came to some of the workshops at Hull House.

I also did something with the kids I called skeleton plays. Where you figured out the skeleton of the story ahead of time.

Q: Sounds like the scenarios David Shepherd used at the Compass.

SPOLIN: We did one about a little girl who bit her fingernails. It was in ten sections, I think. The kids made up their own words. A girl is getting slapped because she bites her nails. And then there’s a scene where she’s with a nurse and she’s biting her nails, but it’s the girl who gets slapped again. And then we catch the mother biting her fingernails. By the end, everybody is biting their fingernails, but it’s only the girl who is getting slapped for doing it.

The empty stage, which is a hallmark of improvisational theatre, developed from where. I wanted to get the player inside the set as against passing through. So I’d have the kids draw a floor plan—where the couch was, where the window was—and they’d pin this up on a curtain behind the stage. And then they’d come out and play on an empty stage. And from the way they played in the space, we’d see how much of the room the audience could reconstruct. And the kids in the audience would go to a blackboard and draw a ground plan from the way they saw the kids use the space onstage.

I asked an ex–football player once, I asked him, What’s a game? He’d played football for years. What would you call a game? He said, A set of rules that keeps a player playing. I said, Thank you. When the playing stops, you know something’s wrong.

That’s where these things came from—from the recognition of the need to keep the play going. Because the director, the side-coach, is part of what is happening and has to capture the emergence so as to return it to the player. So there’s never an imposition put upon the player. I never critiqued, I never directed. And yet, theater games are basically director’s techniques. That’s why those who really understand them can direct, they can write, they can act. Because they’re the same thing.

It was later on I realized they were theater games. And that came out of lecture-demonstrations I was doing. To demonstrate what I was doing I had to develop a format that would propel a large group into an organic situation without chitchat. The games were meant to be springboards to the intuitive. They’re catalysts.

When the war [World War II] came, I came here to Los Angeles and started the California Young Actors Company. People used to ask me, Where do you get all those talented kids? And I’d say, There’s very little of what you call talent on the stage. What you’re seeing is kids who are free.

I wanted a peer group. I didn’t want a teacher and a bunch of kids. First, I asked them to call me Viola. I never gave direction. All I gave them was the language of a game. Share stage picture. Make contact. The workshops were every Saturday and two or three times a week. I had a repertory theater. I had a following of about four thousand people who came to every one of the plays. These kids were extraordinary.

Q: You returned to Chicago in the ’50s.

SPOLIN: Paul brought me into Compass to direct Juno and the Paycock.

Q: For Playwrights Theatre Club.

SPOLIN: Ed Asner was the Paycock. Shepherd was beginning to start work on what became Compass. Viola, you’ve got to stay and run our workshops. I remember jumping up and grabbing him and saying, What are you trying to do—break up my marriage? It broke up anyway.

Paul brought my work out into the wide world by doing Second City. They had an idea for a satirical theater, based on the political theaters of Europe. That was not new. There were many of them around, you know, in Hitler’s time. What was new was how they found the scenes. I worked at Second City for a time. I remember giving a crash course. Del Close was in it, Dick Libertini, Dick Schaal, Avery Schreiber.

One time at Second City, we played three innings of baseball in the park with no bat and no ball. Once we were playing dodgeball, and this girl got hit in the back. Without a ball. Without her being able to see who threw the space ball. I always loved the invisible world. The task is how to make the invisible world manifest.

Q: What kind of reaction did you have when you first saw Second City? It was a company that came out of your work, but so many of the players—being from the University of Chicago—were more intellectually oriented, more word-oriented.

SPOLIN: Well, Paul was there to help stop that. But when I saw Second City, I was very excited. It was not strange to me at all. It was more sophisticated than what my kids had done, of course. Though I had had some pretty sophisticated work from kids on my stage. And then Paul asked me to stay. I came for a two-week vacation and stayed seven years. He asked me if I would run a workshop. I said sure. So pretty soon I wasn’t Paul Sills’s mother, I was director of the workshop. Which was better.

I never intruded on Paul’s direction. He was the director. But I would watch to see what the players were doing and how I could help.

Q: How did your book Improvisation for the Theater come about?

SPOLIN: I wrote an article when Paul was twelve or thirteen on the importance of this kind of work, as a result of my work with the WPA. And then I realized each paragraph was a chapter.

Writing’s difficult, because I never had to write a paper. And I never had to write a thesis. I was always in action. I’m best when I’m walking around. The fact that I didn’t go to university, never had to write a thesis . . . this gave me a freedom on the one hand, but it was a restriction on the other. It was hard for me to do. I prefer directing.

I’m making little changes in my books because I don’t hold with many things any more that are in there. You develop. You grow. Which is very hard for people to understand. They think because you wrote a book . . .

If I take your hand, I’m in this space. I know something. I want to guide you to where I am. Because I’m guiding you to where I am, you see I’m organically pushed into another place. This is the true practice of teaching.

I remember telling a group of teachers at Brandeis, "You and a six-year-old are facing the same thing: the unknown. What’s behind you is known and is different. But you’re both facing the unknown."

I once asked Paul, What is improvisation? I know what ad-libbing is. What is improvisation? Most people who say they’re in improvisational theater are really in ad lib theater. So I said to him, "What is improvisational theater? And he said, How do I know?" To this day I’m not certain what it is. I think it’s transformation. Total facing of the unknown.

* * *

This is the first publication of this chapter. After recording the conversation with me and reviewing the edited transcript, Spolin decided not to permit its inclusion in the 1978 edition. I asked her why. She said, Oh, honey, people have been making money off of me for years. I’ve decided to draw the line. I replied, Viola, you’re drawing the line in the wrong place. I promise you I will make no serious money off the book. This did not change her mind. The book was published without her chapter.

Some years after it was published (I’m guessing 1984), I attended a performance of Sills and Company in Los Angeles. The evening consisted of a gathering of improvisational players—many of them Second City alumni—playing theater games under the guidance of Paul Sills, who acted as host and side-coach. After the performance, Viola swooped down on me and embraced me, saying, Jeff, honey, do you hate me? And I said of course I didn’t. And then she swooped away. It was the last time I saw her. She died in Los Angeles on November 22, 1994 at the age of eighty-eight. Not long after, as per her instruction, I received in the mail a photo of her.

In September 2010, an article I wrote about her appeared in Dramatics, a magazine for high school students involved in theater. The cover of the issue featured a portrait of her. I got a call from Carol Sills, Paul’s widow, Viola’s daughter-in-law and herself an accomplished teacher of theater games. Viola—a cover girl! She would have been thrilled. (The article is available online at https://spolingamesonline.org/the-innovators-viola-spolin-by-jeffrey-sweet.) I asked Carol if I might finally be allowed to include my conversation with her in a new edition. She gave me permission.

A website devoted to her life and work is at www.violaspolin.org.

2.

DAVID SHEPHERD

David Shepherd’s association with the theater crowd at the University of Chicago began in 1952. Though not enrolled at the university, he became involved with campus theatricals and, through them, met Paul Sills. With Sills and Eugene Troobnick, Shepherd produced Playwrights Theatre Club.

But it is as the founder of The Compass Players in Chicago that he made his most significant contribution to theater. He conceived The Compass, produced it, wrote scenarios for it, and sometimes acted and directed. To put it simply, The Compass and, by extension, The Second City, The Premise, and The Committee came about because of his pursuit of the ideal of a truly popular theater.

After the Chicago Compass closed, Shepherd directed and/or produced a number of other Compass troupes, as well as occasionally supplying The Second City with material.

He continues to experiment with methods designed to involve in theater people from all walks of life. Currently, he is organizing teams of improvisational players in the United States and Canada for the purpose of having them compete in matches. Ultimately, he hopes to have dozens of teams participating in an annual International Improvisational Olympics.

* * *

SHEPHERD: I remember hearing, when I was fourteen, The September Song sung by Walter Huston to a very young blonde, which moved me deeply. I later found out that it was written by Bertolt Brecht’s partner, Kurt Weill.

I didn’t have any idea at the time. I didn’t know that I was into an anarchist, leftist, psychedelic culture. I liked September Song before I found out it was written by an ex-anarchist, and I liked Coleridge before I knew he was a drug addict.

I majored in English at Harvard, where I acquired an intellectual interest in theater, and I took an MA in history of theater at Columbia. All of the other dudes were way ahead of me. They were putting on Henry V and they were doing five-hour Ben Jonson plays on campus. And I was just at this primitive level where I was saying, What we’ve got to have is a popular theater. I was saying that for, like, ten years. We’ve got to have a theater that will work in the Catskills or in a factory or in a school or in a hospital or in a prison! And everybody thought I was crazy.

I wanted to rejuvenate the theater. My first love was the theater, which I found had been captured by Giraudoux and Shaw and Ionesco, who would come in and turn it into a distorted picture of life. Instead of being about what’s happening in the streets of Chicago, it was about love affairs in Nice which took place fifty years ago. And I thought it was obscene for the theater to be dominated by French and English people. I mean, obscene. I mean, I’m a Yankee. I’m a WASP. I want a WASP theater, OK? And you can’t get it on the East Coast because it’s dominated by European culture. So you go to the Midwest, which is what I did.

I met a group of people in Hyde Park who were students who were going to the University of Chicago and putting on shows there. I worked out with Tonight at 8:30. I did a Shaw play, and Paul Sills saw my work and we started to rap about it. We started to rap about a repertory theater, and within nine months it was open.

Q: Do you remember the first contact you had with improvisation?

SHEPHERD: I went to see one of Paul’s workshops at the University of Chicago. There was no structure, and people were creating constantly. Actually, it turned out the structure was the games. But then I didn’t know games. So it was this hidden structure. And Paul was there and just going through his mother’s games, which have gotten him through half of his adult life, you know? When in doubt, do a game. His mother taught him how people could relate through improvisation in ways that they did not relate in life. Through closer touching, through fuller expression of feelings, through the fuller use of the resources of things around them. Most people cannot make contact in real life.

That’s true of myself, too, you know? I am interested in improvisation because I don’t do it. I never had it. When I was brought up, I had no encounters with brothers and sisters because I didn’t have any. I had no conflict with my mother because I had no mother. I was brought up like a monarch, you know, going to a very fine private school. There was nobody in my family except my father. So I’m interested in embracing a larger community of people which I did not have.

Q: You were talking about the first games workshop you saw at the University of Chicago . . .

SHEPHERD: The students were so good at them that they were able to transform the stage from moment to moment. First it would be a carnival and then it would be a beach at midnight and then it would be trenches in World War II. With hardly any use of lights and with no use of costumes and with a minimum use of props, these ten or twenty kids were able to create a whole afternoon of theater. Out of nothing. Nothing!

Q: I’d like to get into what the social atmosphere was like in Hyde Park at that time.

SHEPHERD: Very mixed and very flowing. There were hardhats and intellectuals, steelworkers and students and professors and homosexuals and . . . lots of different people living in low-rent housing before urban renewal hit Hyde Park. And we enjoyed a renaissance of the University of Chicago. The aura through Robert Hutchins. There was a lot of love between people of very different backgrounds. And a lot of these people were in and out of the university, whether they were fifteen years old or forty-year-old paratroop veterans.

Hutchins had set up a very libertarian college in which kids could enter as soon as they could read and write and do math well enough to pass the exams. They could have been twelve years old and going to the University of Chicago, you know? A lot of the people I worked with either lived with U of C graduates and staff or were U of C graduates and staff. It was a community. An enormous one. When you left it, you might go to Evanston, but you still felt a part of it. And we were there. There was the most conspicuous assertion of civil rights and tenant rights, and people were into community development in Hyde Park like nowhere in Chicago.

Q: What effect did the McCarthy era have?

SHEPHERD: Almost no effect. There were very few people who were concerned. I thought it affected my friends in New York much more because I had a lot of blacklisted friends in New York. But in Chicago you felt a kind of piggish strength in the Tribune, and you felt a liberal candidate might have a hard time, but, during Compass days, it was I who was saying to Mike Nichols, Let’s do something about the red-baiting, and it was Mike Nichols who was saying, What does that have to do with my life? And it was I who was saying, Look, there’s a political climate to this which is stealing over this country, is going to steal our institutions away. Let’s check it out. Let’s see what’s happening. We were never able to address that much. What we were able to address was the tyranny of the middle-class Jewish family. That’s what Compass was all about.

Q: I understand you originally wanted to do Compass in the stockyards.

SHEPHERD: The stockyards wouldn’t have me. I worked in the stockyards in the same area that was organized by Saul Alinsky. It was a very reactionary area. I found no support.

And then I was saying, I’d like to do a theater in a bar on 63rd Street for the hardhats because those are the people who need theater. And my friends were saying, Bullshit. Our mothers and fathers need it much more than the hardhats on 63rd Street.

This is what Compass came out of along with my notions of pantomime and what I knew of Robert Breen’s chamber theater at Northwestern University. And along with the louvers I designed, which were panels that would turn on pipes, and along with the notion of letting people eat and smoke, which I got from Brecht. If you’re going to have a popular theater, you have to let people come and go and smoke and drink be comfortable and not think of theater as something holy and untouchable.

And get up on the stage and do your number and sing a song if you want, and do it on Monday nights and have folk singing, and relate to what you read, which is the Chicago Tribune, the Sun Times, the New Yorker, or Popular Mechanics or whatever people in Hyde Park were reading.

Q: How did you come up with the idea of working improvisationally from scenarios?

SHEPHERD: Well, I was forced to go into improvisation, because I found that nobody could write the scripts I needed for the theater that was in my head. A theater where everybody would come. I mean everybody. Literally everybody. Not only theatergoers, but also non-theatergoers, which meant 95 percent of the people who lived in Chicago, whether they’re steelworkers or college students who don’t have the money to go or the Japanese and black minorities who were sweeping across Hyde Park at the time. Whoever they were, I wanted them in my theater, instead of being in the Lyric movie theater watching Westerns. I wanted them in my theater watching stories about Hyde Park.

It was a church we were running in Hyde Park. I have met girls and boys who were ten years younger than I who said they first woke up in Playwrights Theatre Club or The Compass because it was their first contact with situational morality. And also it was a very heavy attack on their parents going on all the time at The Compass. If you wanted to see your parents under attack, go to Compass. Especially if they’re Jewish. It came out of Elaine May’s and Paul Sills’s and Shelley Berman’s love-hate thing with their parents. You know, the permissive Jewish parents. The intellectuals who bring up their children to hate them. When Elaine May would play a Jewish mother or Mike Nichols would play a businessman or when Shelley Berman would play a delicatessen father, these were people who were living out their liberation from their families. They were in analysis and they were using the stage of The Compass to liberate themselves from a whole lot of shit they had fallen into.

Q: How did you train for Compass?

SHEPHERD: We had no training except for what Viola was able to do, and then we went on from there. Viola is very good for designing games for teachers who have ten minutes to fill in the classroom. But we had a sixty-minute gap to fill: a Living Magazine, which lasted about twenty minutes, and then a scenario, which lasted about forty. The scenarios were simply little skeletons for stories based on what was happening in the community. We had no training for doing that.

People would get off the plane and we would throw them onto the stage. We were famous for throwing geniuses onto the stage and letting them swim. That happened to Severn Darden. After his first five hours onstage on Saturday night, we let him go have a drink at the bar. And he was standing there, huffing and puffing and getting back his breath, and somebody ran up to him and said Sev, you’re onstage! You’re Dr. Schweitzer! That was the training. The training was going on in front of the footlights.

Most training is done by teachers talking and the students taking notes. And the teacher says, This is the theory behind it and this is the history of it and this is how I did it and this is how you will do it. Right? But until the student goes out and does it one time, he hasn’t learned anything. I was saying, I’ve studied the theory, I know the history, I’ve done it, now you do it now!

When I hired people, I wasn’t going on their having academic training you could measure. I was going on something you could not measure, which was a sense of their insight into what was happening in society and the ability to play a whole bunch of parts—old ladies and cops and crooked lawyers and whatever constellation of characters inhabited the social world of our heads.

Now the social world of our heads was very different from the social world. It had very few hardhats in it. Our social world included whatever characters Barbara Harris had been studying for years. And she was studying her mother for years. And Elaine May had also been studying under her mother for years. They could do their mothers brilliantly. And Elaine May had also been studying Hollywood starlets, and she knew about uptight secretaries. And Severn Darden had been studying German philosophy professors for years. He could do them very well. He did them for days at The Compass. Other people did their things. Whatever they had been studying. It might have been a certain kind of insincerity or braggadocio or . . . Well, I mean, take the first Nichols and May record, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I mean, that’s it as far as I’m concerned. There’s more crystallized character work on that record than anything else you can listen