Recently I wrote about Bob Sickinger, the Godfather of Chicago theater, whose Chicago career took place under the aegis of Hull House. I'd heard of Viola Spolin, but just learned that she, too, worked at Hull House in the 1930s. Viola developed a whole new method of teaching children (and adults), non-actors, how to act, showing them how to improvise scenes rather than working from a script. This was the birth of modern American improv.
Improv's childhood came in the late forties when Viola's son, Paul Sills, joined with friends at the University of Chicago to create a group called The Compass. The Compass left Chicago, moving to St; Louis, with branches opening in other cities, spreading the new form. In St. Louis, in the mid-fifties, a company which already included Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Severn Darden, was joined by an erstwhile fire-eater named Del Close. A few years later some of the Compass Players would return to Chicago to found Second City, and would invite Del (who was doing stand up) to join them. There, Close began the first of his two tenures - ultimately, he was fired twice - where he taught and directed some of the greatest improvisational performers of the past fifty years.
In between stints at Second City he lived in San Francisco, where he created the original psychedelic light show for a group called The Warlocks (they changed their name soon after), roomed with Wavy Gravy, hung out with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and taught his techniques to The Committee, another legendary group (who may be seen in the movie Billy Jack, of all places). After leaving Second City for the second time, a much longer stint during which he helped create SCTV with the Toronto company, he joined ImprovOlympics, teaching there for the rest of his life.
Close was a madman, his madness exacerbated by heavy drug use, and was a physical wreck by his early sixties, when his partner at ImprovOlympics, Charna Halpern, hired one of their young students, Jeff Griggs, to chauffeur Close, a job made complicated by the fact that neither Griggs nor Close owned a car. Griggs performed this duty for two years, forming an unlikely friendship that led to his book, Guru.
I never met Close. I wish I had, though there is no telling if we would have hit it off. I did meet an interesting friend of his, Don Depollo. I was at a New Year's Eve party at Becky Brown's house in 1971-1972. Becky also had interesting friends. (Me, for instance, if I may be so bold.) At her party there were members of The Process (not an improv group, they were believers in a Manichean religion that used to wander around Chicago in black robes, selling pamphlets and looking spooky). And there was Don.
"What do you do?" I asked.
"I'm the head writer for Second City."
"They don't have writers; they improvise." I was naive.
He laughed. "Oh, yeah? I have a staff of twelve."
Second City features shows that run for a few months, e.g. Sex Among The Buffalo, or The Gods Must Be Lazy. After the show, on certain nights, they invite the audience to stay for the improvs from which the shows are created. The audience is invited to provide place, some characters, and a situation, perhaps "a plumber and a Japanese tourist, on a Madison Street bus, trying to persuade the driver to run them up to Wrigley Field in time for the game." Then, they improvise the scene. What I now realized was that they would fill a blackboard with suggestions, but they did a bit of steering, so that the choices they made from the audience suggestions were not entirely random, and some bits would drop in that were not entirely improvised. The writers would work with this material to polish it, and eventually when enough polished bits were gleaming they would have the next show.
This was part of the reason that Second City and Del Close parted company for the last time. Second City's head, Bernie Sahlins, and Close, disagreed about improv. Close believed it to be a new and independent art form, that entire shows could be improvised. Sahlins felt that ultimately, even the best material needed writing and editing. While the ghost of Del Close may rise angrily from the grave, and pee on my keyboard, I side with Sahlins.
Don't get me wrong, I love improvisation, but I am a writer. The best written dialog (to say nothing of plot and dramatic structure) isn't like actual conversation, it only sounds that way. Real conversation is filled with ers and ums and huhs, sentences that stop in the middle, or begin there. There is needless repetition, and plenty of boring "you remember ... " that the reader can't possibly remember, so the writer must either drop that prompt, or fill in what is being remembered. If you don't believe me, check out some of the improvised films of John Cassavetes or Robert Altman. Both managed original, creative work, but the dialog is boring, phony, or both, even with the benefit of film editing. Improvised dialog produces pearls, but someone then needs to choose them, polish them, and string the best ones into a necklace.
Griggs took the pearls of his time with Del Close, polished them, and strung them together into his book. Anyone interested in improv, Second City, or anecdotes about an amazing person, should check it out.
Guru
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