Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  In rehearsal for the two-act children’s comedy The Clown Who Ran Away, they tried an improvisation for feet. Sand said, “We had to get a lot of safety pins and pin up this curtain so only our feet would show and convey what was happening to us only through our feet.” Using a technique she called side coaching (“directing” was too close to tyranny), Viola would call out helpful reminders to focus the players as they played. “See each other with your toes!” “Cry with your feet!” It worked. Players played, and character relationships surfaced. The games freed truthful behaviors.

  Paul Sand, Viola’s freest, most buoyant young improviser, particularly impressed a twelve-year-old student in Viola’s class. “I remember Sand was kind of a big shot,” Alan Arkin said. “He was very tall and kind of ruled the roost there.” The Arkins had only just moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. Arkin’s father had come to Hollywood expecting to work as a set painter, but he arrived with his family just as the set decorators were about to strike. “We didn’t have a lot of money for me to do anything,” Arkin said, “and my aunt Helen knew I wanted to act, so she got me a scholarship to Viola’s workshop.”

  Viola’s teenage son, Paul Sills, was often present. He had been exposed to improvisation his whole life, since the days he tagged around after Viola at Hull House. “I grew up with a lot of these games,” Sills said. “This is my family work.” Visiting the Young Actors Company with his friend, a black-haired girl Viola introduced to the group as Elaine, Sills’s interest in his mother’s experiments deepened. Mother and son would sit together in the audience, rapt in discussion about improvisation, and how, if at all, they could be used to create a totally new kind of theater. A theater of personal liberation. For years he had watched improvisation create communities of players and audience, instantly bound together, in ways traditional theater rarely could, through this act of communal spontaneity. He watched his mother teach them to rediscover what they had lost—what had been buried under years and years of petrified behaviors mistaken for free will—the old roads to their intuition, “the diamonds,” Paul Sand said, “that you have as a kid.” Sills watched her teach them how to be themselves.

  Meanwhile, in his Kansas basement, young Del Close was experimenting. “As a kid,” he said, “I wanted to be a chemist.”

  The glass bottles, beakers, burners, droppers, and clamps of Del’s beloved chemistry set would be tinkling there on the magic mixing table he loved like a best friend. But far more entertaining than a human friend, and far more compliant, Del’s boys-only Gilbert Chemcraft was the greatest thing his parents ever gave him. Here was the joy of limitless discovery, the wild rainbow of escape. What happens when you mix sodium bicarbonate and tannic acid? What happens if you take a hammer to a packet of potassium permanganate and sulfur, a trick Del liked to perform for his friends? (Ka-BOOM!) What is dangerous?

  To be or not to be? Yes! Yes to both!

  The answer for Del, even if he ultimately discovered it was no, always started as yes.

  And what about people? If you stirred together the right emotions and certain odd circumstances, would ancient and ferocious selves shoot out of their bodies? “Every kid assumes he has a secret identity,” Close would say, “and if you could just find the magic word, the godlike powers would indeed burst forth.”

  Other people only sometimes listened; Mike Nichols could hear. Waiting for his moment, lingering on the edges of the University of Chicago coffee shop, absorbing the chorus of student dialogue around him, he could feel, beneath the words, people’s real selves pouring into him. Conversation was just a public vessel, like good manners or clothing. Reality came to Nichols under cover of rhythm, silence, and volume—a secret knowledge he harvested from air. It was his superpower, honed over years of difference and estrangement. He did not always understand. But he heard. Pauses, panics, subtleties the literalness of language could not convey. Over there: He hears a man falling out of love with the girl sitting across from him. Another only pretends to hate Senator McCarthy; really, he is afraid not to. And there: one couple he’s been observing sound ready to leave—the moment Nichols has been waiting for, his cue to hover, then swoop in just as they get up from the table and, before the busboy beats him to it, steal the unfinished food off their plates.

  It was humiliating. Acutely so for Nichols, who had been born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, resplendent of Europe’s cultural aristocracy, son of Dr. Nicholaeivitch Peschkowsky and Brigitte Landauer, herself the daughter of Hedwig Lachmann, poet, translator, and onetime librettist for Richard Strauss, and the estimable Gustav Landauer, philosopher, anarchist, magazine editor, and one of the first Jews—the very first, Nichols believed—to be killed by the Nazis (“pre-Nazis, really,” Nichols said) in 1919, months after the provisional Bavarian Soviet Republic had declared Landauer their minister of public information. “Basically, they beat my grandfather to death over two days. Kicked him to death,” Nichols said. “It took him forever to die.”

  Mikhail retained few details of Nazi violence from his early childhood in Berlin. Once, at school—a school for Jews—some Blackshirt kids stole his bicycle. He remembered that. But more formative than the scenes themselves were the intentions. Like the silence between words, what would linger years later was the panic that accompanied the Peschkowskys’ mobilization. He was too young to understand what his parents were doing, pulling every string, meeting with consulates and diplomats who could help them pay, sign, and stamp their way out of Germany, fast. Looking back, he would understand how they got out. Their escape—which Nichols would come to regard, with the lifelong terror of a debt unpaid, as mere luck—owed itself to the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which permitted Russian Jews, briefly, to leave Germany. “I’m incredibly lucky,” Nichols would say, “and getting on that boat was my first piece of luck because two weeks later, the next boat to America was turned away.”

  On April 28, 1939, Mikhail, seven, and his brother, three, boarded the Bremen with nothing but fifteen marks sewn into their shirts and eight words of the native language: “I don’t speak English” and, to ward off the kindness of strangers, “Please don’t kiss me.” Neither parent accompanied them. Mrs. Peschkowsky was too sick to travel and their father was already in New York. He had gone a year earlier to set up a new medical practice.

  The first thing Mikhail saw when he got to New York, to America, was a Jewish deli. “Is that allowed?” he asked his father.

  “It is here.”

  His father said they could be Jews in America, but in his intuitiveness Mikhail heard something different: hiding wouldn’t hurt. “I don’t know what happened,” he said, “but I must have, without knowing it, wanted to put Europe aside completely.” He said “Europe,” but you could hear “Jew.”

  No one would tell him how to be an American. The secrets of assimilation took figuring out, had to be gleaned. “I think there is an immigrant’s ear that is particularly acute for ‘How are they doing it here? What must I do to be noticeable, to be like them?’”

  Five years later, more injustice: Nichols’s father died of leukemia. It was his X-ray machines; in those days, few people knew the risks of radiation. Nichols’s mother took a series of jobs (bakery, bookstore), but without her husband, money would be scarce. She grew angry. Nichols grew angrier.

  Every young boy feels different, but unlike most of his classmates, Mikhail really was. He sounded like a Nazi to them and had no grip on their customs (“They fucked me on baseball”); he did not carry in him the freedom they took for granted, and perhaps most humiliating of all, he was bald. A bad reaction to a whooping cough vaccine rendered Mikhail completely hairless. “The kid was as far outside as an outsider can get,” said one of his classmates at the Dalton School (and, like Nichols, a future titan of improvisation), Buck Henry.

  Mikhail saw how they watched him, but assimilating, or trying to, was grasping at quicksand. “Nichols”—the new family name—made him a liar. Even if the goyim bought the disguise, the Mikhail Igor inside him never
could. “He’s the one,” Nichols said of the enraged child. “He’s somewhere saying, ‘Don’t fuck with me.’ And I can’t stop him.” Which isn’t to say he didn’t make a beautiful “Mike Nichols.” Consider—but not too closely—all that convincing blond hair and those thin, elegant eyebrows. Consider his grateful smile, his rich, rolling laugh, the three-pound diamond he had for a brain. They would never know Mike was a refugee for life. “That was cast in bronze,” Nichols said. “That’s where I was chained in the galaxy forever.”

  In self-defense, he learned to hear—or imagined he heard—what people thought. “It makes for being socially adept,” Nichols said. He was too new to this business of hearing to understand that his exile’s ear, all that sensing instead of seeing, would sharpen his powers of interpersonal acuity into an instinct verging on ESP, Mozart via Freud, but in time, he would learn that language and behavior were utterly distinct, one guarded truth and one revealed it, and that by mastering the secrets of human motivation, one could master one’s enemies.

  One day he would get back at them—or it: “I was motivated then,” he said, “and for a long time afterwards by revenge.”

  His prodigious brain had earned him a scholarship to the University of Chicago in 1950, but all Mike Nichols knew, lurking in that coffee shop, was hunger. He had two choices. Either he could attempt the leftovers method or, for a full meal, walk into the student cafeteria backwards, through the exit, to give the impression he had already paid, and then grab a bowl of peas. What’s the worst that could happen? If one of the busboys caught and hauled Nichols back to New York or Germany, at least then he’d stop feeling bad about feeling good and finally feel bad for good, which is what he, a survivor, deserved.

  To hold your attention, Del would tell you about the time he ran away from home for the traveling geek and freak show carnivals he knew, or heard, were crammed with hoopla, string games, rat games, the Armless Wonder from Tulsa, Oklahoma (“See her dial a telephone! See her comb her hair!”), and Whitey the Albino, who taught him how to swallow swords. Or about the time someone strapped his fat body to the hood of a beat-up car and crashed it head-on through a brick (trick) wall. Dangerous? Of course it was dangerous! That was the point!! There was no miracle until Del, hundreds of eyes in the palm of his hand, got up off the dirt and gave them a big “Ta-da!”

  He would tell you about the time, at the age of fourteen, he fell in with Dr. Dracula’s Den of Living Nightmares, a broken-down spook show that toured the movie theaters of the Midwest, starring Card Mondor as the titular undead guy, and little Del as his sinister assistant. Near the end of their act, the theater would go completely black, the audience screamed, and Del would yell, “A plague of worms will descend upon you!” and toss handfuls of cold spaghetti onto the crowd. Then, for the finale, Dr. Dracula himself would appear at the footlights and lower a flaming torch down his throat. Ta-da!

  The looks on their faces!

  How Del wanted Mondor’s secrets. But Mondor would not show his apprentice how it was done. So Del observed and stole.

  “You call this entertainment?” came an angry voice from the back of the theater one night. “I just shit my pants!”

  It took several failed attempts, but eventually Del discovered how to swallow fire, dousing a torch in gasoline and, as Whitey the Albino had showed him, taking it down without triggering the gag reflex. “It’s a matter of the threshold of pain,” he explained. “It’s all over before I feel anything. You can die if you inhale the flames.”

  Yes, sir, Del thought. I do call that entertainment. I want to squeeze you dry, whether it’s of laughter or shit.

  Onward to Viola’s son, Paul Sills, the future cofounder of the Second City, now a busboy at the University of Chicago coffee shop, where he let the nimble guy in the cheap toupee steal lunch off the paying customers’ finished plates. (“I don’t know why,” Nichols said.) But that was Sills. He could see, in you, the truth you didn’t know was there, and beneath Nichols’s refinery—the grin, the ornate argots—he could feel the kind of emotional hunger, Sills, a rowdy street Jew, did not pretend away. Sills was early to self-acceptance. Growing up watching his mother transform mere humans into founts of inspiration, Sills had seen goodness burst forth from so many kinds of people so many times that—without devolving into a cheerful individual—he had started to cultivate something like faith. Not in God—though, unlike his mother, Sills hadn’t ruled out the possibility—but in something God-like that manifested from the communal experience. Viola’s games interested Paul, but less as an actor’s tool, which is how she used them, than as a means of helping people throw their arms around each other and draw themselves together. “What I really want,” he said, “is something that has the sense of the great periods of your youth when you’re working with people—you know, some sort of activity, starting a magazine—Boy Scouts have it—this great sense of being part of a group doing something that’s fun, only on an adult level.” He sought community; small but socially oriented—“the way good theater should be.” Sills, in 1944, had left his mother in California for the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago. He knew, had there been no community to buttress him, he never could have directed theater at Parker, played football, or had a place to live—a hotel, with his girlfriend and her family. His parents sent money, but Sills owed his happiness to the people around him. It was only through community, he believed, that people could free one another. On their own, they were stuck inside.

  When they finally did speak, Paul had a bite of food for Mike. “Right away,” Nichols said, “we started bullshitting about the theater.”

  First off, they were in complete agreement about the state of the art in Chicago. There was virtually nothing of interest. If you were starving, you could head out to the Loop and see a road company on their way down from Broadway, but most of it was commercial bullshit and none of it Chicago’s own; Chicago, Sills decreed, would remain a truly second-class city, at least theatrically, if it continued to accept New York’s breadcrumbs for sustenance.

  A. J. Liebling would later echo this stance in the pages of the New Yorker. In 1952, preceding its publication in book form, his thorough and weary valuation of contemporary Chicago—a place Liebling deemed America’s “Second City”—unfolded over a series of three cheerily degrading installments needling every facet of the local character, which, he wrote, evoked “the personality of a man brought up in the expectation of a legacy who has learned in middle age that it will never be his.” Chicago’s theater scene, Liebling continued, “is outclassed by Oslo, which has a population of four hundred thousand”: “Plays at Chicago theaters, for example, are always locally assumed to be inferior versions of the New York productions, or, if they are the New York productions, with original casts intact, the actors are presumed to be giving inferior performances. Taking an interest in the Chicago theater, therefore, is regarded as naïve . . .” Furthermore, Chicago theatergoing was prohibitively inconvenient. Potential audiences were stymied by “awful” after-hours public transportation to and from the suburbs. “And those great, silent, though densely populated, spaces, the outlying city wards, are peopled by frequenters of neighborhood movies who are now turning to television.”

  The on-campus options weren’t much better. U of C had no actual theater department, and there was nothing in the University Theater, largely a well-behaved, meat-and-potatoes enterprise not worth reinventing. Had Mike heard of Tonight at 8:30, the only student-run theater group of U of C? It was still coming together, but for the theater people on campus it was the only thing going. Was Mike an actor or a director or a writer?

  Actor, sort of.

  Sills? Director, maybe. Sills had begun a series of open-invitation Spolin game workshops. Prior theatrical training was not required for admission. All Sills required of his amateurs was willingness. What would emerge from them would emerge. Sills intended only to create the environment for emergence.

  Nichols, despite his curiosity about the wor
kshops, couldn’t quite digest the semimystical flavor of the experiment. His taste took him slightly to the right of Sills. A psychology student, devoted analysand, and Upper East Sider, Nichols was, at nineteen, predisposed to the Method technique and its acolytes. Beginning at eight o’clock, he remembered every shattering detail from December 3, 1947, the night his then girlfriend Lucy invited him to Broadway, to the Ethel Barrymore Theater, to see A Streetcar Named Desire. It was only the second performance. He remembered the great shock of Brando, how, at intermission, both he and Lucy found the other actually unable to stand, how they wouldn’t dare hold hands the first act and held on all through the second, but mostly he remembered the substance of the production, the commingling of total reality the director, Elia Kazan, had merged with total poetry, neither negating the other.

  Yes, that element there hit the bull’s-eye in Paul Sills. Though the Method struck him (and his mother) as overly cerebral and dependent on the past—the theater, like play, happened here, now, in the present—the emergent director in Sills had already begun to dream of a best-of-both-worlds theater of his own hovering between real and ideal, community and spirit, rocks and sky. If he could just get the right actors together.

  Over the course of many weeks, Sills and Nichols took their conversation from the campus coffee shop to Jimmy’s, a local brick saloon with one rickety pinball machine and, to settle arguments, an Encyclopaedia Britannica on a shelf over the bar. The rest was tables. Whoever you were, as long as you could talk, you could find your table at Jimmy’s: the Communist Table, the Aristotle Table, the Hegel Table, and of course the Theater Table. They were the informal symposia of the University of Chicago. And if you played them well enough, you got laid.

  This was not Liebling’s Chicago, but Saul Bellow’s. “What we had [in Chicago] was a cultureless city pervaded nevertheless by Mind,” he would write. “Mind without culture was the name of the game, wasn’t it?” At U of C, it certainly was. If your half-baked idea seemed improbable, funny, or even ridiculous, all the better; it meant no one had ever thought of it before. “It was some sort of hotbed,” Sills said. “You were where it was at. It must have had something to do with Hutchins.” Robert Maynard Hutchins was elected president of the University of Chicago in 1931, at the age of twenty-nine. His revolutionary Hutchins Plan, aka Hutchins’s “Chicago Experiment,” emphasized thought for thought’s sake; the idea was not to prepare students for the workforce per se, but to make good minds, and the earlier the better. One didn’t even need a high school degree to get into U of C. Hutchins had done away with the university’s age requirements. (“As a result of this generous stand,” Liebling wrote, “the University of Chicago’s undergraduate college acts as the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children’s Crusade.”) To gain admittance, prospective students needed only to pass all of U of C’s fourteen insanely difficult entrance exams. (Mike Nichols was a college freshman at fifteen.) Though they read everything—“five to six hours a night,” U of C student Sheldon Patinkin recalled—what went into those minds mattered less to Hutchins than how his students played with them. Most classes were discussion-oriented, attendance was not mandatory, and there was only one examination per class, at the end of the year. “Your entire grade,” Patinkin said, “was based on what you got on the final. Each was six to nine hours long, half multiple choice, half essay, and they covered the entire year. It was grueling. In the couple weeks before exams, there were occasional nervous breakdowns and suicides.”