Actors playing stock characters were permitted to improvise dialogue adding topical references, for instance as long as they hit each point in the scenario. Shepherd meant to start a company that would perform scenario plays about contemporary society.
He soon hooked up with Paul Sills, a University of Chicago student who directed campus shows. With this objective, the young performers soon forgot their shyness and focused their attention on meeting the challenge of the game. Sills used the Spolin games as a way to build rapport within the Compass ensemble and also as a basis for the short improvisations that would follow each evening's scenario play. Created from audience suggestions, these witty, often topical skits were a big hit—too big for Shepherd, who saw his egalitarian dream theater being trampled by the college-educated professionals who queued up to see them.
Short skits not only supplanted scenario plays at the Compass but throughout the entire improvisational movement as it developed over the next 35 years.
Though some artists—including Sills and Shepherd—would continue to investigate other possibilities, there would be no strong challenge to what became the orthodoxy of the short skit structure until the beginning of the s.
Since then, however, there has been an explosion in formal experimentation. Thanks to the innovations of groups like Ed and Annoyance Theater, even the formerly staid Second City seems ready to reinvent improvisation.
Spolin, Viola. And, it was not unusual to find Dustin Hoffman taking his place when the regular Improv pianists were on break! For a young comedian, success at the Improv meant everything. Budd had a vision to expand the Improv and, in , he headed West and left Chris Albrecht as the manager in charge. Budd opened his second Improv on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, California, where it still stands today. The club included the trademark piano and the iconic brick wall. Jay Leno, no longer sleeping in cars, helped to paint the ceiling.
As in New York, the next generation of artists and entertainment executives worked the Improv—on stage, in house, or at the bar. But comedy at the new Hollywood Improv was not without drama.
In , a talent strike was organized against Mitzi Shore and her Comedy Store for failing to pay non-headlining comedians. The Improv was set to reap the benefits of the influx of comedians working only our stage until a massive fire nearly burned the entire building down.
The mystery was never solved, but the fire did close the showroom. To help Budd quickly rebuild, Improv favorites Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman organized fundraising shows, just one of many examples of legendary comedians showing their support throughout the years to the place that started their careers.
Cable television was exploding across America, and Budd, with his signature monocle, became as well known to viewers as Johnny Carson and Ed Sullivan. Robin Williams was on the cover of virtually every magazine for his movie roles. The Improv began expanding its comedy empire. After seventeen years of going solo and running the club on a modest budget, Budd realized that he needed some support. And the light revealed imaginary space and real people — children first, then college students, then grown-up actors — playing within the imaginary space, passing it between themselves, shaping it into objects, transforming it.
And the make-believe space grew solid. It changed into neighborhood bars with small stages and storefront theatres and large institutions, and more people came to inhabit them. Too often, when players departed the space, it seemed that darkness fell again upon the face of the city.
Other times there was dazzling light. What does it mean to be in Chicago in or or ? Who are we when we stay in Chicago and who are we when we leave? What is community? And from the questioning began the begatting, which too, started with Spolin. Her real life son, Paul Sills, begat with the help of others the Playwrights Theatre Club which begat the Compass Players which begat Second City which begat too many famous people to list, though these included David Mamet, who became the first Chicago playwright and begat St.
Nicholas Theatre. And Second City also begat Stuart Gordon, who begat the Organic Theatre Company, which gave many others the courage to begin begatting on their own. Spolin and Sills begat a community and taught it to improvise. And so it improvised itself an identity: It created a Where. Within the Where things happen; people come and go. And every change influences the actor. Moreover, they learn to share space, to take impulses for action off of others, to give and take.
The motivation is built in; action is generated not from psychology but from contact with others in space.
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