Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  It had been two years since Nichols had spoken to Elaine May. Two very good years.

  He’d try to pick her up.

  As benches go, it was a fairly long one, crowded with people Elaine hardly seemed to notice. Nichols, however, was fully aware of them, and the adverse effect they would have on his seduction scene. A rush of unwanted attention could make Elaine uncomfortable, or worse, awaken painful memories of Jean the valet. He would be wise to operate covertly.

  So he sat down beside her.

  He leaned toward her ear.

  Out of the side of his mouth, in a German accent, he whispered, “May I seet down?”

  Immediately, she replied, “If you veesh.”

  (“I knew then,” Nichols said later, “that she was the best girl I had ever met.”)

  Her eyes were on the magazine.

  “Do you haffa light?”

  “Yes, zertainly.”

  People turned to look.

  “I het a lighter, but I lozt eet on Feefty-Seventh Street . . .”

  “Oh, of course, you muzt be Agent X-9?”

  “Shh.”

  They were still at it on the train home, gossiping in character.

  May: “Who was it? Uh—Agent, uh—oh, we can say her name now, she’s dead. Myrtle Henning.”

  Nichols: “Mmmyes.”

  “You know Myrtle?”

  “Mmmm.”

  “Ah. Well, I saw her two months ago, and she gained a lot of weight, and I find out that she’s dead. Well, can you . . .”

  “It’s a terrible thing.”

  They weren’t just parodying the spy genre; they were doing actual people. You could hear it in their delivery: praising Myrtle, but really, deeper down, congratulating themselves for praising her. Double agents have needs too.

  They took the train back to her place, a basement apartment that looked like its inhabitant hadn’t committed to moving in or moving out. Scribbled notes lay everywhere. “Elaine’s shortcomings,” Nichols observed, “were purely organizational.” She made him her specialty, a hamburger with ketchup and cream cheese served on two pieces of toast, and they talked through what was left of the night.

  She was born in a Jewish trunk, the daughter of Jack and Ida Berlin, showfolk of the Yiddish theater, and the trunk never stopped traveling. Philadelphia, she said, was where her parents “just happened to be . . . at the time” of her birth; from there, Elaine was bounced from Chicago to Mexico to California. It was her father’s theatrical company. They toured. Ida printed tickets, worked the box office, and understudied when necessary; Jack handled the art. He starred in Velvele Ganef. He wrote, produced, directed, and starred in The Dance of Death, a play about drug addiction. Before she could walk, baby Elaine appeared with him onstage—“carry-on bits,” she called them. When she got older, Jack sometimes gave her the boy roles, which lasted only so far as puberty, because “our people do not believe in breast binding.” Not long after, Jack died of a heart attack.

  Elaine and her mother (along with Elaine’s cousin and aunt, widowed at almost the same time as her sister Ida) moved to Chicago, where Ida went into business with Uncle Louis. Uncle Louis was in deals. He bought surplus coffins from the army, opened a beauty parlor to straighten curly hair, and had an ulcer. An opportunity in lumber brought Uncle Louis and the gang out to Los Angeles, where Elaine made the rounds from Fairfax High to Hollywood High to John Burroughs Junior High until she turned fourteen and decided to quit formal education for good. She wrote advertising copy, studied the Method with Maria Ouspenskaya in Chicago, and the games with Viola Spolin in Los Angeles. At sixteen, she married toy and orthotics designer Marvin May and had a daughter, Jeannie. The marriage failed, Elaine decided then to become “extremely educated,” left the baby with Grandma Ida in Los Angeles, and hitchhiked to the University of Chicago. Then it was back to L.A. and Jeannie and her mother, a tiny living working for small theaters, and eventually a letter from Paul Sills inviting her to return to Chicago and join the Playwrights Theater Club. She did.

  She had come to Playwrights to lend a hand wherever she could, acting, directing, selling concessions, and leading the company through game workshops (after Sills, she was the most experienced Spolin game player), but “it was as a writer,” Nichols remarked, “that Elaine decided she would achieve immortality.” Her total concentration was evidenced in the forgotten things seemingly dropped around her basement apartment, left there, as if partway into trying them, she had reconsidered their usefulness and ran off to try something else, quickly, before she could forget what she thought she needed wherever she was going. “I always learn the same thing about Elaine, if it’s then or now,” Nichols said. “Physical reality does not interest her.”

  What interested Elaine, often to the exclusion of all else, was truth. Not poetic truth. Real truth.

  Elaine, he understood, was addicted to the secret truths beneath the surface of people and events and conversations. The unsaid consumed her. But this archaeological project came with a price—hostility toward apparent reality, the pervasive suspicion that people are not exactly who they claim to be, or even believe they are. A seasoned skeptic in his own right, Mike could appreciate Elaine’s position—it was a variation of his own. “We analyzed voraciously,” he said. Apart, each was perceptive, brilliant even; together, they were baroquely and gorgeously judgmental, Fred and Ginger on Freudian parquet. He had the gift of hearing, she the gift of paranoia. Distrust was her shovel. Jamming it into the soil between what is and what really is, she could dig up the world’s entire catalogue of comedy problems. That’s what so much of comedy is—problems. Take, for instance, the present seduction scene between Mike Nichols and Elaine May. In the wide shot, it is the story of a gleaming new romance. But move in closer, pursue the details to their crisis point, describe what’s really, really happening, and you’ll see the beauty and emotion give way to unavoidable facts. In that sense, yes, she believed comedy was more honest than drama. “In a comedy, as in life,” Elaine said, “you meet a guy, you like him, you want to invite him up to your apartment. But you’re thinking, ‘My underwear doesn’t match, my bra is on its last legs, there’s a splotch of nail polish on the run on my pantyhose.’” Commit to the big beneath, to betrayal and personal hell. You’ll find yourself miserable, but laughing a whole lot more than a happy person.

  Oh boy, Nichols thought that night. This is going to be fun.

  A few months later, David Shepherd was on his way to meet Roger Bowen, a writer, for coffee. They were going to talk about Shepherd’s dream—what was left of it, anyway. For almost two years, the producer had watched the Playwrights Theater Club, under Sills, transform from a progressive young-people’s theater with leftist tendencies, producing over twenty classic and original ensemble plays, about one every month, to a full-blown critical success, the highbrow puppet of Hyde Park’s bourgeoisie. It was time, Shepherd decreed, to wipe clean the slate and open America’s people’s cabaret. Whatever that meant.

  Any cabaret, he reasoned, that could survive the rambunctious atmosphere of a working-class crowd would have to be fast paced, direct, and inexpensive, something that could be packed up and transported from town to town. But in lieu of plays, Shepherd still didn’t know what kind of dramatic material—“simpler forms than those of the contemporary theater,” he once wrote—would work in that kind of environment. That’s why he was meeting with Roger Bowen, a university law student and part-time theater critic for the campus newspaper. Bowen liked what he’d seen at Playwrights and was eager to hear what Shepherd had in mind.

  Shepherd, meanwhile, was eager to hear what Bowen had in mind. Having placed ads in American and English publications calling for original plays—fables, satires, re-creations of important historical events—and subsequently rejecting all of them, he came to the U of C coffee shop directed only by an inclination away from the sort of theater he didn’t want, and a single, confounding phrase, “scenario play”—borrowed from commedia dell’arte, the
world’s original people’s cabaret—to point him toward the theater of his dreams. Shepherd asked Bowen to write one.

  “What’s a scenario play?” Bowen asked.

  “We won’t know until we’ve done it.”

  With only notions of simplicity to guide him, Bowen wrote an outline. Seven scenes. Four teenage boys. One used car for sale. Some complications along the way. Bowen called it Enterprise. Besides brief scene descriptions and briefer character sketches, the scenario provided the actors and their director only the most basic plot points and motivations—ingredients any nonactor could digest. The dialogue—none of it specified in the scenario—would be supplied by the performers every night. In that sense, Bowen and Shepherd’s Enterprise, when it premiered at the University Theater in May 1955, would be improvised. And in that sense, it was the first improvised evening in theater history.

  Mike Nichols, having left Chicago for New York to begin his career, was depressed. He lived in a miserable eight-dollar apartment on the Upper West Side and worked the smart-aleck shift at a Greenwich Village Howard Johnson’s. The job, like the others, didn’t last. Nichols said, “I was fired when somebody asked me the ice cream flavor of the week and I said chicken.” He dreamed of chicken. He dreamed of cheese. “One night,” he said, “I woke up so hungry that I ate the only thing I had in my room—a jar of mustard.” He mooched off a couple of girls who lived across the street. They loaned him money when they could, and when they couldn’t, he stole from their icebox. When they got wise to him, Nichols started going to the Automat. If he had enough for a cup of tea, he’d stir in some crushed crackers and ketchup and urge it toward tomato soup. Then, if he was still hungry, he would make more. Hot water was free.

  As a student in Lee Strasberg’s class, he cried his eyes out. Because that was the Method. You had to work very very hard at hurting yourself and then you had to cry it out in the scene. Strasberg’s view of the director came easier to Nichols, and it hurt considerably less. The director’s job, Strasberg explained, was to create the events of the play. The event is what the audience sees. And a good director creates an event for every moment in the play. “Every moment must be physically comprehensible,” Nichols learned. “You must see people trying to do things that are not expressed in words. Very often they are the direct opposite of the words. And those are the events.”

  Alone in his apartment, Nichols switched his little television set from channel to channel, searching the employable faces of Philco Television Playhouse for some future sign of himself. He found none. According to the casting office in his brain, Mike Nichols did not exist. He was not a heavy, he was not a leading man; he was not urban enough for Paddy Chayefsky’s work, or character enough for Rod Serling’s. He wasn’t ethnic. He wasn’t even the Jew. Edward G. Robinson and Jerry Lewis—they were Jews. Or John Garfield. What was Nichols?

  He missed Elaine.

  Elaine would bring the typewriter into bed, prop it up on her knees, and lay there, sometimes very late, braining out a play from the puzzle-patchwork of papers she dumped out of coat pockets, handbags, the backs of drawers, onto the mattress around her. The unlucky ones never made it back to her bed. “I picked them up when I could,” Patinkin said. “I, like everyone else, was in love with her.” But she was living with someone else, an actor, Jerry Cunliffe.

  Patinkin would put his own schoolwork aside to try to help Elaine hold the net over her ideas. His function was primarily organizational. “Not that it did much good,” he said. “Elaine would write notes on anything.” They were the middles, ends, and beginnings of plays, ideas for plays, like Mikey and Nicky, an idea she had about two small-time hoods, and the betrayal of one by the other. Her thoughts flew out too numerous to capture, and the few Patinkin managed to grasp left his hands the moment he opened his mouth. It was not a question of his intelligence but of speed. Elaine was simply gone. When she created, Elaine was possessed, removed from the writer’s call to structure and story, to an infinite place where no one could find her. When she returned, it was with pages upon pages of new material that may or may not pertain to the play at hand. But relevance mattered less to her than possibilities. From those possibilities, buried troves of new relevance could surface. Hence the flood of papers Patinkin couldn’t hold or hold back. “I helped her off and on for months, maybe years,” he said. “The play she was working on, about a young warrior of some kind or another, reached two hundred and fifty pages and was nowhere near done.”

  Not too far from Elaine’s apartment, David Shepherd played Sills his recording of a rowdy performance of Enterprise, watching his friend’s stolid face for hints of enthusiasm. He still needed a director for his unborn cabaret theater, and Sills, Shepherd knew, needed a new theater. A few months earlier, the fire department had shut down the Playwrights Theater Club, citing its illegal second-floor space and lack of a fire curtain. (“I do think our politics played a part in that,” Sheldon Patinkin said. “Most of us were just casual lefties, but it was McCarthy time.”) Remembering the effect Sills’s workshops had on inexperienced actors, Shepherd knew Sills was perfectly suited to lead his ensemble of real, working people. Enterprise was his bait.

  “I don’t know why they’re laughing,” Sills mused during playback. “But they’re laughing, so it must be good.”

  Sills, a grumpy mystic, was conflicted. No one, least of all him, intended Spolin’s games to get laughs. Until that moment, Sills never considered how unleashing one’s spontaneous self—the intended result of his workshops—could be so funny. But that’s what happens when your personal truth breaks out and blows up the socially acceptable one. Perhaps, he conceded, there was something mystical in comedy.

  Shepherd had his director.

  He also had his director’s mother. Having just directed Playwrights’ final production, Viola Spolin was an exile in Chicago. Back in Los Angeles, her marriage to Ed Spolin was crumbling, and the Young Actors Company, after ten years, had closed. Like her son, she also needed a new theater.

  In the spring of 1955 Shepherd invited Spolin to lead a monthlong series of improvisational workshops, which he would open to anyone interested in learning the games. From this group of real people, he would build a company for his dream theater, the Compass, the first improvisational theater in the world.

  2

  1955–1956

  To get to the Compass, a couple of doors down from Jimmy’s, you had to walk the row of schlumpy storefronts that sat along Fifty-Fifth Street, into the semirenovated Hi-Hat Lounge, and continue through a hole they literally knocked in the wall that separated the bar area from the narrow next-door space they were calling a theater, though not officially. The dubious closing of Playwrights (“The same space was opened up three months later as a nightclub and got away with [the same violations],” Sills said) taught Sills and Shepherd the Chicago way of finagling a theater from a couple of back rooms: rub together a cabaret and liquor license, charge no admission fee, only for drinks, beer mostly. They split the proceeds with Hi-Hat’s proprietor, Fred Wranovics, himself a U of C graduate and former bartender at Jimmy’s, grossing the Compass team—at a capacity performance of ninety individuals—a grand total of fifty dollars six nights a week, before that sum was divided among the actors (at twenty-four dollars a week, more than the bartenders) and the various bill collectors, to about a twenty-five-dollar net, weekly.

  In those days, Hyde Park was still “experimental,” a transitional mix of working class and ivory tower, black and white. You could feel the friction, especially at night, during bar time, when young women were smart to check twice over their shoulders on their way into the street.

  For a set, all Compass had was chairs and some colored louvers upstage that could be shuffled into place for entrances and exits.

  One more thing: as opening night approached, no one was really sure who Shepherd and Sills had selected from Viola’s workshop to join the permanent company. As ever, Shepherd knew what he wanted but not how to get it. “I
was going on something you could not measure,” he said, “which was a sense of their insight into what was happening in society and the ability to play a whole bunch of parts,” an understanding of “the social world of our heads.” To Shepherd, that meant Elaine May, certainly, and Roger Bowen, and the writer Robert Coughlan; there was the luscious and cautious and then quite suddenly insane Barbara Harris, and Shepherd too, if the need arose. But his attention, for the moment, was on the paucity of original material his dream cabaret had to offer. A forty-minute scenario, written by actors, Shepherd and Sills on a volunteer basis, could not sustain a full evening of theater, no matter how socially observant or civically engaged Enterprise demonstrated the form could be. He needed more.

  Shepherd went to Bowen. “I want to have a ‘Living Newspaper.’”

  “What is a ‘Living Newspaper’?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I want something called the ‘Living Newspaper.’”

  For the Living Newspaper segment—whatever that was—Bowen suggested he act as a kind of narrator, reading aloud bits of preselected clippings from news articles, film reviews, fashion pieces—whatever they deemed relevant to the common interests of their working-class, ivory tower, black and Caucasian audience—while a handful of other players stood beside him, supplying dialogue, playing Khrushchev, or anyone, or anything, when called upon, reinventing stage space, as they had been taught by Viola Spolin, throughout. This offering would come early in the show and last about twenty minutes, and they would make up a new one every day. It was, after all, the news.

  Still, that wasn’t enough entertainment. After a little curtain-raiser scene, the Living Newspaper segment, and the scenario, it was decided, for their second act, the Compass Players would improvise a scene based on a suggestion taken from the audience. “The idea,” Bowen said, “was to keep them there a little longer and sell them another drink.”