Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  “It wasn’t that Elaine pulled me out of myself,” Nichols said. “She pushed me into it.”

  With Elaine, Mike abandoned his previous go-to persona, Jean the valet, the prick-ego, in favor of the all-purpose nebbish. And by the law of emotional physics, Elaine inflated. Her repertoire of commanding personalities—shrink, actress, spy, queen, lover, intellectual, and pseudo-intellectual—blossomed in their work together. May’s psychological acuity deepened. A juicy joke possibility often tempted Nichols, but May stayed ferociously committed to truth. “Elaine and I had a rule,” he said, “never try for a laugh. Get the laugh on the way to something else. Trying for it directly is prideless and dangerous, and the audience loses respect. The audience should find the laugh itself.” Relinquishing the need to be funny, he discovered, actually made him funnier. Because, in reality, people are, mostly, not trying to be funny. They’re just reacting, being themselves—which, it turns out, is pretty funny on its own.

  David Shepherd, suddenly the producer of a local hit, needed a bigger theater. Folks were driving in from all over to witness for themselves the uncanny spontaneous satirical conjurings of the twenty-five-year-old Mike Nichols and twenty-four-year-old Elaine May. How could it be that these kids were actually making this stuff up, live, every show? Was it a trick? Something they actually had memorized and rehearsed? On its own, the novelty of improvisation, in 1956, was news enough to fill the Compass, but as word spread and audiences grew, it could no longer be argued that this new theater turned on a gimmick. Now, on their way through the door, repeat viewers reassured the incredulous: “I went again last night, and it’s true! They really did make it up!”

  The irony was not lost on Shepherd. His socialist cabaret, its revolving team of nonprofessional actors and worker’s sensibility, was ceding, rapidly, to the intellectual elite. Odd, then, that when it came time to grow, he moved his theater from the university milieu of Hyde Park to a larger venue called the Dock, on South Lake Park Avenue—farther from bohemia, yes, but closer to the bourgeoisie. “I forgot all about the audience,” he would confess. “I should have been building audiences out there—training audiences how to improvise and direct and write and get into the act. But I wasn’t.” Paul Sills, if he were there, in Chicago instead of Europe, might have reminded him. But he wasn’t.

  Nichols went back to New York, on a short vacation from the Compass, to solve a little mystery. He knew something unusual was happening to Ruth Gordon at the Royale Theatre, where she was playing—rather, playing with—Dolly Levi in Tyrone Guthrie’s production of Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker. It was, in 1956, wholly inconceivable to Mike Nichols that these men, giants of the theater, would permit Ruth Gordon to interfere, even slightly, with a single piece of blocking, or phrasing; Gordon’s every deviation, no matter how inventive, would topple the carefully assembled domino line of actors and stage people on the lookout for their own cues. Nichols was no director, but he knew Gordon was doing something unacceptable, something different technically, and considerably more real, more surprising and eccentrically human than he had ever seen in a comedy. Returning to the Royale a second time, he was determined to find out what.

  Broadway comedy in the 1950s had no Elia Kazan. It did not engage in naturalism, poetic or otherwise. It had no, or negligible, psychology, and no matter how funny, bright, or whimsical, it portrayed human lives obliquely, through the pink filter of farce, or some equally confectionery form. Its master was George Abbott, the speed king. Where there were doors in need of slamming, or adulterers in need of escaping, there was the director of Room Service, Where’s Charley?, and The Pajama Game to conduct actors through windows and out of closets. His comedies were immaculate laugh machines, but as much as Nichols admired them, he sometimes thought there wasn’t much else there. Abbott, unlike he and Elaine, was famously uninterested in behavior or latent truth. Hence the famous exchange between a befuddled actor and George Abbott: “Mr. Abbott, what is my motivation here?” “Your paycheck.”

  The second time he saw The Matchmaker, Nichols believed his eyes. Here and there, Ruth Gordon was changing things, little things. Not the dialogue; she was changing her stage business, discovering new relationships to her physical world as if she weren’t doing what she had been directed to do, but living, really living, as Dolly Levi, and not the way she lived the part the last time Nichols saw her, but as a person changed by the circumstances of tonight, alive once again for the very first time. “There were little moments that she just improvised every night,” remembered Gordon’s costar Robert Morse, “but there was this amazing eating scene between Dolly and Vandergelder. I watched it from the wings almost every night for about a year. It was brilliant. She would—not the dialogue, but the actions, the behavior—improvise that whole scene, that whole eating scene, and it was quite remarkable for that time. She was cutting and talking and chewing and doing different things. I was amazed at her peculiarity, pushing the plate toward him, offering him a bite.”

  “That was the best thing I ever saw,” Nichols said. “I was obsessed with it.”

  It wasn’t always a matter of inventing the whole thing from scratch. There were kinds of improvisation. There was the scenario kind, which came from an outline; there were his scenes with Elaine, which came from a suggestion they chewed over backstage; and there was what Ruth Gordon did, which erupted behaviorally from between the lines. He thought, “She respects the play too much to let habituation kill the work.”

  Unpredictably alive, Ruth Gordon, Nichols thought, was the Brando of comedy. This right here was how to act in a comedy.

  Nichols saw the show again, for a third time.

  A word now about Severn Darden, the improviser’s improviser. This person—a description too limiting for Severn—did not distinguish stage and life. He lived as an improviser—you couldn’t miss it—the cape, the walking stick, the buoyant stride. Fearlessly free and just as intuitive, he would always appear, somehow, at precisely the right moment, as if he had been waiting for it, his cue to launch the one-man parade. Don’t look now, but he’s standing in the door frame, stroking a stuffed parrot. “Good afternoon, fuckers!” The munificent entering or exiting of Severn Darden into or out of Compass rehearsals or anywhere else on earth was a Dadaist’s Christmas to all who beheld its splendor.

  There was the time, before the Compass, when Severn, still enrolled at U of C (“It was thought crass to graduate,” he said), had snuck into the women’s dorm and waited up all night in the bathroom, his hand on the shower rail, just so he could ask, as smoothly as a Dixie colonel, when a naked girl appeared the next morning: “Is this the way to Clark Street?” His name was on the dean’s Ten Most Wanted list. “Severn was,” Nichols said, “number one. He was the purest, the greatest, the best, the most gifted, the smartest, the finest, the best human being.” The Tao of Darden, Nichols noted, was good religion; it espoused danger and spice. “Severn,” Nichols said, “would leap first, fastest, and farthest. He was always inventing.”

  It was Severn—the first in a line of kamikaze improvisers who would take John Belushi and later Chris Farley for their archetypes—who suggested Del Close come up to Chicago and audition for the Compass. Del had no improvisational chops (it was 1956; who did?), but Severn recognized Del’s crush on theatrical Russian roulette as approximately suited to Compass.

  Del knew the players; he’d remembered them from a Playwrights production of Volpone, and liked what he remembered. They had brains as big as his own, but were much more sophisticated than he could pretend to be. Del’s thick, chic glasses and skinny hipster tie would help, somewhat, to close the gap, and all that tech talk he appropriated from science fiction and comic books sounded good when he rattled it off at warp speed, but still Del was tentative. They, with their college educations, argumentative bent, and existential cult of Freud, looked a lot meatier than what he had grown up with in Kansas. He said, “I began to think of myself as Jewish or at least a Jewish fellow traveler because I thoug
ht the Jews were the hip people.” Their whole psychological thing—on the titillating threshold of 1950s culture and counterculture—enchanted Del. If the Jews were on the outside of WASP America, as they claimed, then Del, who hailed from WASP America, was on the outside of the outside. He wanted in.

  As if Freud himself were pulling the strings, Del, for his Compass audition, was paired with Elaine.

  They were given characters and circumstances. Del was a businessman with a plane to catch; Elaine was the woman he wanted to go to bed with. Except for the businessman part, Del had a lot of real life to bring to the improvisation. He truly did have to be back at the Barter Theatre, in western Virginia, where he was under contract. He was a twin-engine plane ride away, which left him not much time to get to know more about Elaine, though he wanted to.

  She spellbound him. It was her exotic Jewishness. And the way she tended to him onstage. “I really didn’t know what to do up there,” Del said, “but Elaine brought me through the scene and made me look good.”

  At the end of the audition, Del baffled them all by eating fire.

  He was offered a place with the Compass, but couldn’t accept. He owed the Barter more time. Improvisation, and Elaine May, would have to wait.

  Imagine their shock, Sills and Barbara Harris, returning to Chicago and the Compass. What they saw bore only the slightest resemblance to the rough-and-tumble amateur theater they had cofounded a year earlier. Once again, Shepherd had moved his company—by now, all professional actors—into a bigger space. But the Argo Off-Beat Room, a slick, nightclubby venue on Chicago’s North Side, was no cabaret; it had a balcony. It had a kitchen. Its audiences, martini people, came in gray flannel suits and ties. Scant were the black turtlenecks and professorial tweeds of Compass yore. Scant were the scenarios. Remember those? Though Shepherd and May had tried to keep the withering form alive, writing and rehearsing fresh forty-minute plays every two weeks was physically exhausting and clashed creatively and commercially with the ensemble’s new unofficial mandate: be funny. Laughs sold. Critics came. Successful scenes, like “Teenagers,” were repeated—“frozen,” they called it. Jokes that worked last night would be punched up for tonight.

  The first improvisational theater in the world had ceded to a polished revue-style entertainment.

  Was improvisation, which Sills had intended to serve everyone, really just a theatrical bonbon for the skyscraper set? In Europe, he had begun to wonder. Returning to the Compass, in the summer of 1956, he knew for sure. “In the American culture,” Sills said, “the working class has no understanding of itself as such, as you might find in Europe. So, it can have no theater. It doesn’t have what Marx called ‘class consciousness.’ These people go directly to the popular culture on TV and movies without any sense of being wrenched out of their lives.” Improvisation, for player and audience, was all about wrenching. One couldn’t discover new lands without being cast out to sea.

  His mother returned to Los Angeles, but perhaps it was for the better. Had she seen the Compass at its peak, I imagine Viola would have been heartbroken. None of these “improvisers” was connecting. They were merely talking, thinking fast, being brilliant, nearly dead to the mysterious moment in each other.

  Not Elaine, though. The sea was her paradise. Once she hit land, she turned around and started out again.

  Mike, a polisher of pearls, stood on the shore and watched her go.

  Severn had pinwheels for eyes and a Ferris wheel brain.

  Oh, the Compass Players were wonderful—Mike, Elaine, Severn, Andrew Duncan, Bobbi and Mark Gordon—but they were no longer a reactive ensemble. Not with each other and not with their audience. Kierkegaard jokes? Here outside the university? Those giant laughs: were they laughs of recognition, or laughs of outsider derision, the sound of suburbanites taking down the coeds? To Paul Sills, and to Viola, the distinction mattered. The Compass “was leaving the community from within,” he said, “it was hardening into a professional form and so its ties with the community seemed to lessen.”

  Shelley Berman, the latest and most divisive addition to the schizophrenic unit, gave a face to the devolution. A trained actor, sometime sketch writer for Steve Allen, and combustible personality, Berman had “Compass” written all over him. But no one had told Berman that improvisation was not a one-man show. Instead they threw him out there, and to keep from drowning Berman did as any comic would: he went for laughs. Getting them, he tried for more. “Hey guys,” Berman said one night. “Mike had three scenes in that set, and I only had two.” (Nichols said, “It was a whole new idea in Eden to count.”)

  It was then that Berman’s fellow players understood that no improvisational ensemble could sustain an atmosphere of competition. Good manners had nothing to do with it; creating spontaneous realities en masse demanded the sort of patience and consideration Berman’s egotism could not tolerate. As a monologist—a form he was soon to reinvent—Berman alienated his team.

  To stay in the game, the other players had to defend their laughs, or try to. It threw the Compass out of sync. “The next time you fuck me up on stage,” Elaine said to Shelley one night, “I will pull down your zipper and pull out your dick.”

  Improvisation had gone funny. Paul Sills was outnumbered.

  3

  1956–1959

  Theodore J. Flicker had a goatee. In 1956 that was interesting.

  The learning impresario in him had begun to see most successful entertainment, low or high, as fascination, an almost erotic satisfaction of urgent interest. The job was to create that interest, like a magician. But in what theater? An erudite man in show business, Flicker’s tastes ran too traditional for the avant-garde, too adventurous for Broadway. He had no home.

  Months earlier in New York, before the Compass had begun to fray, Flicker’s pal Severn Darden had introduced him to David Shepherd, and they’d discovered in each other flecks of the same dream, to create a popular theater in America. And neither was sure of his next steps. True, they were philosophically opposed—Shepherd was politics and Flicker was entertainment—but Flicker had money ($34,000), Shepherd had the theater, and together they would rescue improvisation from the university elite. Joining forces, Flicker and Shepherd decided they would bring Compass to New York City, where all the world could see it, and from there they would sow the seeds of improvisation across the country.

  That’s why Shepherd had invited Flicker to observe the Compass as it disintegrated—and most of what Flicker saw appalled him. In performance, the Argo players wore street clothes and smoked cigarettes. This was theater; where were the costumes? Where was the formality? And where, Flicker wondered, was their technique? Did they know how to do what they were doing?

  A new low came the night Severn appeared onstage cupping his hands together around a little ball of air.

  “Look at my rabbit . . .” he cooed to Shelley Berman.

  Berman took a look at his partner’s empty hands and glanced up at Severn as if he were crazy.

  Flicker recalled, “He made the audience his ally in making a fool of Severn because there was no rabbit.” It got Berman an easy laugh, but denying the existence of Severn’s rabbit ruined the scene. Flicker immediately identified Berman’s choice as “the cardinal sin of improvisation,” and decided a better improviser would have instantly accepted any idea presented, no matter how outlandish, and run with it. He had to agree—to say yes. They needed rules, Flicker decreed. If improvisation were to catch on in New York, and spread on from there, it could not be only free—that would make it anarchy. If people were going to play together, Flicker reasoned, they needed some kind of bill of rights.

  For the final performance of the Compass at the Argo, in January 1957, David Shepherd brought back the first-ever scenario, Enterprise, insisting the format was still, and should remain, the backbone of theatrical improvisation. Collecting the more successful scenarios, Shepherd believed, would provide Compass with the written material any theater needed to secure its posit
ion in American culture. The Group Theatre had Clifford Odets; Compass would have Shepherd, Bowen, and May. Right there, he had a massive problem solved, he thought; to disseminate this ephemeral form, as he and Flicker planned, they would disseminate these scenarios. “If I succeed,” he wrote to Spolin, “the Compass may not make more money, or branch out more quickly, but it will be a better theater. The question is: how?” A year and a half after Enterprise’s premiere, he still didn’t have an answer. Moreover, none of his fellow improvisers liked working from an outline. This essential dispute between freedom and form would become the driving tension of improvisational comedy for the next half century.

  Del Close left New York in a virtually floorless Volkswagen that was so cold he had to burn a can of cooking fuel to keep from freezing. Ready or not, he was on his way—a trek of one thousand miles—down to St. Louis to join Ted Flicker. They were going to improvise. They were going to throw out everything and start over.

  Shepherd had tasked Flicker with replicating his version of the Compass in St. Louis (their New York backers had withdrawn). Flicker nodded obediently, but the P. T. Barnum in him had other plans. Del at his side, he would transform the St. Louis Compass, his Compass—comprised of Close, Nancy Ponder, Jo Henderson, and himself, doubling as director—into a manic circus act of whimsical ingenuity and derring-do. “Ted’s idea,” Close said, “was to present improvisation as an intellectual feat, as an unusual human ability.” “It was Del,” Flicker said, “who brought the truly unknown into the improvisations of the St. Louis Compass.” The rest they would figure out as they went along.

  The scenarios, Del agreed, were total bullshit. This was improvisation! Del insisted on what he called spot-improv, improvising from a suggestion right there, on the spot, not from a concept agreed upon during intermission, and certainly not from a scenario, but the way he and Elaine had at Del’s Compass audition—suddenly and without a plan. Flicker agreed wholeheartedly, but with a single caveat: an entire evening of spot-improv was too much of a commercial and artistic risk. Sure things were needed: good sketches and blackouts refined in rehearsal. Unlike the Chicago Compass, whose talky, cerebral explorations could drag on, sometimes for twenty minutes, Flicker impressed upon Close the need to play their scenes for speed. Speed and variety. They were improvisation’s insurance against failure. Didn’t like that one? Try this. Now this!