Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  The Compass was scheduled to open on the hot summer night of July 4, 1955, but the air conditioner broke down and they rescheduled for the fifth. Rushing in and out of huddles, Sills, Shepherd, and the actors spent the day reading, clipping, and gluing together news items for the Living Newspaper, passing out flyers, and debating the scenario play (“The Game of Hurt,” by Sills, starring May and Shepherd).

  The young insurgents of the first improvisational theater lacked the time or energy to contemplate the cultural behemoth they were up against: the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. In 1955, he was a bestseller, a national ideal, and the symbol of acquiescence and self-denial—the fictional antithesis of Spolin, Sills, and Shepherd—in short, the 1950s American. He was not a freethinker; he would have agreed with President Eisenhower’s definition of an intellectual, “a man who takes more words than is necessary to say more than he knows.” If he were to step out of his novel and tour American university life beginning in the late 1940s he would have found himself very much at home. “A vast hush had settled over the universities,” historian William Manchester wrote of the late Truman years. “Liberalism had become tired and dull. There seemed to be no indignant young men on campuses, no burning causes, no militancy, except among a reactionary handful on the far right.”

  All over America, university students were as neat, unimaginative, and complacent as job applicants interviewing at Goldman Sachs, and in a sense that was what they were. They went to college to land jobs. Here and there, a baby beatnik like Elaine or Del kissed off Brooks Brothers with a show of brooding black jackets and denim, but the gray flannel epidemic—brought on by the postwar rush to free enterprise—leveled progressive youth culture with the McCarthy treatment. When the Compass opened, there was no Animal House. Because, in 1955, there were no Blutos. The developmental phase of experimentation known as adolescence, like improvisation, was only just being invented. “None of us had seen or heard anything on TV or the radio that dealt with what it was like for us to be young Americans then and there,” Sheldon Patinkin said. “Compass was about its audience, and we knew it.” Sills said, “We were the first people on stage to mention real names, real products, real streets. Everything was mentioned. Every time you said Coca-Cola in those days you got a laugh, or 55th Street where we happened to have the place.”

  None of them intended to be funny, least of all David Shepherd, but between Spolin and Hutchins, the Compass Players, at that moment in the summer of 1955, were the most liberated comedy ensemble in the country. The Marx Brothers had disbanded. Sid Caesar and Your Show of Shows had gone off the air a year earlier. I Love Lucy still played to large audiences, but no matter how brilliant the show, it was, like all network television and most movies, basically well behaved. The Compass Players did as they liked. With no script and no sponsors to obey, no Legion of Decency or family-friendly morality to uphold, they were saddled with no nos. The effect was instantly obvious to those ninety or so Hyde Parkers present on opening night. Even drunk, they felt it: as improvisers, these amateurs were like no one else on any stage or screen had ever been; they were like the rest of us offstage Americans actually ought to be: free to do and say as they felt. Free to criticize; free to guess; free to feel differently.

  They were not comics, actors, or vaudevillians; they were not even professionals. They were their audience, Chicago people, Spolin-trained. They took suggestions.

  “Just go to the people,” Sills said, “they’ll tell you what they want and you give it to them. That’s what happened.”

  Mike Nichols was still in New York, still studying with Strasberg after two years and still depressed about his nowhere career, when Sills appeared at his apartment three months after Compass opened, in September 1955. With Sills was his twenty-year-old bride, Barbara Harris. She and Nichols first met in the early days of Playwrights, the afternoon Barbara, a local teenager with no theatrical experience, walked into their Chinese restaurant and asked, “What are you doing?” “We have a theater,” someone answered her. “Do you want to be in it?” Barbara was handed something to clean with, and for the next four or five months, every time they looked up, she was mopping closer to the stage, and Sills. Eventually she made her way off the floor and into Brecht. Audiences loved her because she was adorable and real, a genuine innocent caught in the perpetual whirl of “wait, nevermind,” with cherries for a face and a lovely voice that was sometimes nasal, like a librarian’s. “When you watched her,” Nichols would say, “you could actually see her brain working.” She could retaliate apologetically.

  Paul and Barbara told Nichols they were en route to the University of Bristol, where Sills, on a Fulbright Scholarship, would try Viola’s games on the English before heading off through Europe to sample, among other theaters, Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. Their New York leg would be a short one—a disappointment to Nichols. He missed them, his old company. His friends.

  They missed each other. In fact, that’s why Paul and Barbara had come—part of it, anyway. They wanted Mike back in Chicago, in the Compass. A look around his tiny apartment—for furniture, there was only a Victrola on the floor, playing a Dietrich record—and they guessed Nichols probably wanted it, too. Though how to make the offer without implying he had failed as a Method actor in New York?

  “Improvise?” he asked.

  “You want to stay here stealing cheeses from the supermarket?”

  Nichols, insulted, laughed. No matter how much they perplexed each other, he and Sills would always admire the other one’s dream, Sills’s to create theater communities and Nichols’s to be taken into them.

  “But, Paul—in front of an audience?”

  Harris stepped in. “Please go,” she quavered. “You’ll see.”

  Nichols had improvised only in private, with Sills in workshops and Strasberg in rehearsals. The thought of actually getting up there in front of people, without a script, and, just . . . well—it sounded nuts.

  Historically speaking, it was insane. David Shepherd, however, placed Compass very much in line with the commedia dell’arte, those bands of Renaissance actors that strolled European countrysides for nights of drinks and folk comedy. From that tradition, Shepherd borrowed his theater’s scenarios, and with it, he believed, the improvisation required to animate them. Stretching the line of artistic parentage across four centuries, from Italy to Hyde Park, he was sincere; he was also attempting to legitimize an inchoate experimental free-for-all, as if, by giving the Compass an instant history, he could grant it cultural stability, like assigning a foundling to a family. But the Compass was a foundling—Shepherd sold his genius short—because improvisation, as they were practicing it in Hyde Park, had only just been found, and not in Italy, but in America, by Viola Spolin.

  So Mike Nichols was correct. Before the Compass, no theater had ever charged audiences to watch actors—players—get up there and improvise. The sort of “improvisation” that Shepherd understood to take place in commedia performances was closer to ad-libbing. Commedia artisans modified performances to suit the language and temperament of a particular region, but most stuck to their roles for life. Repeating the mother, father, daughter, or count, patterns invariably developed. Speeches were set, and the longer the better: for in that age of slow-traveling news and limited entertainments, power went to those who retained most. Memory, not spontaneity, was the Renaissance player’s tool.

  Sills explained to Nichols how it worked at the Compass. After the first act, someone went out with a notepad and took suggestions from the audience. Movie styles, book styles, characters, settings—anything. Then, during intermission, the players sat around a table backstage, brainstormed scenes from those suggestions, and handed out parts. So, no, they weren’t making it up the moment they got the suggestion, but still they were making it up that night . . . live . . .

  But, to Nichols, the insanity of the undertaking was hardly a consolation. The avant-garde did not entice him. “What about Elaine?” he asked.

  The
y all asked. In only three months at the Compass, May had already established herself as a master of the form—its first. “She only had to touch her shoe,” Shepherd recalled, “and the focus went to her.” And where many improvisers, in the rush to maintain a “funny” rhythm, blurted out some version of the expected response, Elaine would turn up singular, cliché-busting ideas, like the matronly (not embittered) whorehouse madam, who remembered the names of her client’s mothers. May’s preternatural ability was not simply a function of her complete focus, wit, intelligence, and imagination, though she had all that too, in spades. It was more like she had three brains, the actor’s, the writer’s, and the director’s. With split-second efficacy, they thought as one, immersing her in character, whispering ideas into her ear, and showing her the stage picture without one diluting the other.

  Thinking of her, Nichols felt a pull. “I wanted to explore more Elaine and me,” he said. “It was her and that train station and those hamburgers she made me in her apartment, and what came with them that I was thinking about when I decided to go back.”

  The whole business of improvising in front of an audience, Nichols discovered, really was insane. It produced no evidence of art, none of the poetry of great or even merely good theater. Its gifts were intermittent and accidental. Its practitioners—amateurs all—were not penetrating psychological truths (imagine Strasberg’s horror!) or achieving a deeper communion with the human predicament. They had no craft. In the fall of 1955 there were no rules, no methodologies, and no set of assumptions to pass for guidelines. The Compass, as Nichols first encountered it, was the Wild West, and with Sills in Europe, woefully lacking a sheriff. Not even Shepherd, his deputy, acting as director, could tame the outlaws, not with political ideology and not with workshops. What good were the teachings of Marx or Spolin to Mike Nichols, a trained Method actor, in the hot blaze of panic, drowning in the silence of ninety drunken intellectuals (some of them pretty girls) licking their metaphoric lips at his slow and delicious disintegration? They wanted him to fail! To feel better about themselves!

  The first time Nichols improvised, sharing the stage with Compass Player Barbara Gordon and Elaine, he grimaced when one of them pulled a thumb-and-forefinger “gun,” and asked, “Why are you pointing your finger at me?”

  Some nights, the guilt and humiliation were so awful Nichols would have to run—out the back door of the theater, all the way to Lake Michigan, and jump in.

  “Rehearsals” was a term Nichols found ridiculous in this context. How could anyone rehearse spontaneity?

  Still, he went; it was his job (at twenty-eight miserable dollars a week). A late sleeper, Nichols ambled in to rehearsal approximately on time, early in the afternoon, a Kent Micronite cigarette held out in front of him with an air of better than this that was hard to miss. “And then,” Nichols said, “we talked and debated and came up with ideas for scenes to do that night.” More like a rabid book group than a theater, “rehearsals” were spent shouting around a table.

  “The Kafka scene was weak last night—”

  “I thought you were going to come in when I started—”

  “Let’s do something from The Lonely Crowd!”

  “What about that Strindberg thing? Elaine, would you—?”

  “That’s great. What if—”

  “What if Strindberg goes to Hollywood?”

  (This was David Shepherd’s people’s theater?)

  “Strindberg goes to psychoanalysis?”

  “No more Strindberg, please—”

  “They loved Strindberg two weeks ago—”

  “No one loves Strindberg.”

  “Ergo he’s in analysis. He’s depressed!”

  “Well, of course he’s depressed.”

  “I could have told you that—”

  “That’s why it’s funny . . .”

  For all his wit and charisma, Nichols improvised from the brain, his conscious past of his proven jokes and highbrow deflections. He played by himself. He joked. He did voices. He put his voice in his nose, his throat, his stomach. No matter how convincing, it was technique, a trick, and the audience’s silence told him so.

  Nichols tried, but he could not learn from Elaine. She was too good to emulate. “The stuff never stopped coming out of her,” Nichols said. “She threw it away with both hands.” What came out of him? Variations on the Know-It-All, the Ego. But Elaine’s range was voluminous. And where her fellow improvisers dutifully obeyed Spolin’s space rules—a practice Nichols considered embarrassingly close to pantomime—Elaine ignored them. He delighted in these transgressions. They inspired him to do the same. On the occasion she blatantly ignored his “coffee table,” Nichols announced, “Darling, you just walked through my Noguchi.” As ever, Elaine justified her gaffe, instantly incorporating it into the scene. This was the improviser Nichols longed to be. “My impulse to learn from Elaine,” he said, “came as an impulse to be near to her.”

  Improvisers connect for the same basic reason you and your friends connect.

  Say you meet someone. You like something about them and they like something about you. Your mutual interest begets mutual play. Play begets cooperation and mutual understanding, which, trampolined by fun, becomes love. Love is the highest form of play.

  It was as improvisers, backstage, in a loud little room packed with Compass Players and cigarette smoke that Mike and Elaine found that kind of love. They were an actual couple, Nichols said, “only sort of for a minute, but that clearly wasn’t how it was going to be. It was more that we would go through all sorts of not terribly successful things with other people, and always tell each other everything.” Taking down audience suggestions on a large pad of paper, and retreating from the noise of the cabaret to the shouts and sudden hushes of their debating table, Mike and Elaine discovered they shared, beyond rhythm, rapport, and intelligence, a predilection for certain themes and comedic ideas. Their first duet, a dramatic improvisation about a man deciding whether to rat on his friends, sprung easily from their comfort zones; his training in “serious,” “truthful” acting, hers in the theme of betrayal, a lifelong obsession. The theme of pretension both knew and loved; and between his ear for sound and hers for language, and their deep and wide engagement in the canon, they were reference-ready to parody on command. Sitting at that table for those tense fifteen minutes between sets, as the five or six other improvisers deliberated over what to play and who would play it, Mike and Elaine, at the whiff of a girl and boy or mother and son, put their hands up at the same time.

  “When you have to make things up on the spur of the moment,” Nichols said, “you gravitate very quickly to the person who understands you most easily.” But what, exactly, did they understand the most easily about each other? The secret in their special adhesive, as it is with any bond, would take Nichols and May all the way back to their beginnings, to the underground volcanoes of instinct Spolin deemed the place of improvisation. “Where Elaine and I really met most passionately,” Nichols said, “was in being the offspring of classic Jewish mothers.” Commonality drew them together; togetherness deepened their commonality.

  In Germany, Nichols remembered his mother, Brigitte Landauer, to be a flower of music and intelligence, the object of many powerful attentions, a beauty and a muse. It was also how she remembered herself. “But when we got here,” he said, “she just settled into being a Jewish mother.” Though her marriage to Nichols’s father had been deteriorating for years—young Mikhail absorbed innumerable fights and infidelities—losing her husband, her witness to her gloried past, precipitated a series of further heartbreaks for Mrs. Peschkowsky from which she never recovered. She became “a nightmare of accusation.” “I raised you so you could say that to me? Thank you very much, I deserve that.” There started the taking of pills. There were prolonged hospital stays. Why? Who could answer such a question! Everything hurt! Elaine’s mother, Ida Berlin, also a young widow, was herself quite literally in the theater, the Yiddish theater; self-dramatization
was her stock and trade. Both mothers, Nichols said, “were invaders.”

  From these volcanoes rose Mike and Elaine, Siamese twins. With no script to border their neuroses—their buried selves shot upwards with the force of a combined half-century of repressed hostility.

  “Teenagers” was their first masterpiece. It began, like all the others, with a suggestion.

  “Let’s do a scene about two teenagers,” she thought aloud.

  “Oh, good, two teenagers in the backseat of a car.”

  That’s it. No discussion. Just a premise: two kids, slightly younger than their actual ages, caught in the awkward tangle of premarital sex. The rest they improvised. “What we did,” Nichols said, “came so easily to us that we were utterly confused by people making so much of it.” With “Teenagers,” first presented at the Compass late in 1955, Mike and Elaine defied a long-standing ideal of abstinence young Americans had been suffering in popular culture since the death of the flapper. But more than presenting the truth, Mike and Elaine presented the truth truthfully. This was not just sex; it was clumsy teenage sex in the backseat of a borrowed car. These teenagers were anxious, fraught with self-consciousness, cramped, stuttering, sweating, and palpably horny. She babbles on to distract herself from what they drove there, to the lake, to do. He stares at her body, pretending to listen. “Isn’t the lake suicidally beautiful this evening?” she asks. What? He has to practically beg her to put out. “If I went any further,” she warns him, “you wouldn’t respect me.” He stares right back. “Oh, you have no idea how I’d respect you. I’d respect you like crazy.” His voice cracks, he swallows hard. He kisses her at precisely the wrong time, after she takes a drag from her cigarette, and she’s so stunned she freezes in his stupid embrace. Both are frozen. A passionless moment later, she opens the side of her mouth to release a line of smoke.