Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Paul Sills, however, saw through the tension, deeper in to something strange and good. “If you ever want a job in Chicago,” said the director to the actor, “come out.”

  At this, Arkin only nodded. Yeah, right, he thought. I’m going to bury myself in the Midwest for a hundred bucks a week? I’d rather starve in New York.

  In New York a year later, Alan Arkin was a starving out-of-work actor, less a wife and two children. Only the offer from Sills remained. “Making that call,” Arkin remembered, “was like phoning in my own obituary.”

  Arriving in Chicago in December 1960, he moved into Emma’s Boarding House (a dollar a day, bathroom down the hall). The place reeked of failure, a smell Arkin knew well.

  He did not like what he had to do at Second City. A trained actor, Arkin needed direction, dialogue, anything sure, “something solid out there that would fill the void,” but improvising gave nothing solid; it was a hell of free will. To survive, an improviser had to fill that void with a piece of him, a tall order for most, but for Alan Arkin, who had spent his life pretending to be other people—Chaplin, Danny Kaye, Beethoven—it was paradoxical. “I had no interest in being myself onstage. In fact, there was no possibility of my playing myself on the stage because I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a clue.” He read Dostoyevsky constantly. He didn’t want to be funny.

  When he wasn’t alone at Emma’s, felled by despair, he was with the group from morning until night, sometimes sixteen hours a day, rehearsing, performing, staying up late to beat the inevitable adrenaline rush that followed every show. Instead of sleep, Arkin and Sheldon Patinkin—hired, the day Arkin arrived, as Sills’s assistant and the general company’s “nervous Jewish mother”—would venture downtown, to the Clark Theater, for a bounty of foreign films, double features, a new pair every night, La Dolce Vita, Through a Glass Darkly. The Clark barely closed. Approaching sunrise, Arkin and Patinkin would debate Fellini versus Bergman back to the all-night diner under the Lincoln Hotel, nod at the friendly Mob guys in the next booth, and talk on through dawn, two nighthawks in a Hopper painting.

  Arkin’s first character—“a character that was serious”—was a working-class guy, not necessarily employed, and not from this country. Like Arkin at Second City, he was dislocated. Arkin’s pain and isolation: you could see it in the way he played the character, the two or three feet Arkin put between himself and the others, the still, tense face not-erupting with repressed anger. And to his surprise, audiences laughed at this guy. “Then I found a body of characters that no matter what I did with them there was some humor in them,” he said. Out burst a Dickensian assortment of fringe folk and foreigners, Arkin’s autobiography in improvisation. “They were all unemployed or menials and yet they had an all-encompassing pride in their work,” he said, “which was how I felt about the acting profession.” A Jewish pretzel peddler, an Italian immigrant, a Puerto Rican kid who didn’t want to go to school, and one night, six months after Arkin arrived at Second City . . .

  “Beatnik.” The suggestion.

  After the intermission, Bill Mathieu at the piano played Arkin and Barbara Harris out onstage; Arkin, guitar in hand, wore a schlumpy jacket. Harris had on black glasses and a beret. Daintily, she scrutinizes something on the invisible wall, consults a guidebook, and scrutinizes again. Arkin watches her calmly, then breaks the silence with a sudden and crazy strum on his guitar. He stops.

  “I don’t mean to seem like a prude,” she says, “but you’re going to get kicked out of here if you don’t watch out.”

  “I don’t care. I gotta speak my mind.”

  “That’s healthy! I mean, as far as I’m concerned, of course, it’s all right with me. I mean, I know who you are.”

  “Who am I?”

  “Well, I mean, I know who you are generically . . . You see, I took a humanities course last year . . . and I, uh, I—” She’s scared and excited. He’s her anthropological study. “I, uh, read quite a few of the generation’s, the beat writers . . .”

  Harris smiles at her own hipness; Arkin doesn’t smile.

  She asks him about Allen Ginsberg, he asks her about the art on the wall (we’re in a museum!), and from there, each unknowingly reveals to the other his tribal pretensions. Arkin and Harris’s “Museum Piece,” as it would come to be known, is a satire of ideology, and in the tradition of Second City under Paul Sills, a warm one. Long, too. At fifteen minutes, longer than most Compass scenes, “Museum Piece” exemplified Sills’s taste for the so-called people scenes, bite-sized plays about relationships unfolding at the un-jokey pace of real life. We’re serious, people scenes say; it’s what we do and think that’s absurd.

  Arkin and Harris’s collaboration “came out great,” Patinkin said, “the first time they did it.” “Museum Piece” would go into the repertoire, Sills decided. But turning the improvisation into a sketch, and putting it into the main portion of the evening, “took three weeks of screaming, cursing, and tearing hair out.” It was Sills’s fear—neurotic and also reasonable—of completion. When the scene “works,” it’s done, under glass, dead. When it’s broken, the scene yields more surprises, more life. “I think Paul suffered,” Patinkin said, “trying for perfection and then running away from it.”

  When Second City was approached to film a stage show for Canadian television, the first time most improvisers in Arkin’s company would be on camera, “Museum Piece” got self-conscious. Striving for perfection, Barbara Harris clenched. She stopped responding to Arkin improvisationally. As if scripted, her reactions hardened and her attention shifted to herself and the audience’s attention followed. “Museum Piece” became Harris’s showcase. To stay alive in the scene, Arkin yanked as hard as he could in the opposite direction, going bigger, faster, louder . . . but it didn’t work. The harder he tried to win back the audience, the uglier the scene got. All that once was wonderful in “Museum Piece” vanished. Arkin decided he hated Harris.

  Out of ideas, he ventured into the only place left, the counterintuitive. One night, a day or so before the film crew arrived, instead of even improvising, he tried to love her. (“Where that idea came from,” he said, “I will never know.”) At first, Arkin felt like he was dying. Laughs were life preservers, and after casting them overboard, he felt himself drowning in blandness and humiliation. But on his way down he felt a quickening. Harris and Arkin connected. Real moments returned. Barbara Harris, and “Museum Piece,” came back, and deeper than ever.

  Arkin knew why. He had permitted himself to plunge, feet first, into certain failure. “The truth of the matter is,” he said, “is if [improvisers] allow that to take place, and to be gone, and empty, it’s gold.” Egolessness; it was freedom, a state of grace Arkin would spend the rest of his creative life trying to recapture. “They are those rare moments when we are operating past our abilities,” he wrote. “They are the most exhilarating moments in life. It is as if we are not responsible for our own actions but are witnessing them from some exalted vantage point.”

  He fell in love with Barbara Harris.

  “When you do a show for a year,” Nichols said, “especially on Broadway, you can’t be best friends anymore. It’s like when you’ve lived with somebody and fucked each other’s brains out and you’re so sick of them, you just have to get out of the house.”

  “Form is the thing that interests me,” he now understood. “In the act with Elaine, we were doing little plays. She was the gifted one. She had the ideas. I gave them a beginning and end; I gave them form. I was the director and she was the author.”

  “I once saw a very rich man standing with his beautiful wife and maybe three or four other people,” Nichols said. “He was leaving his apartment and giving instructions to the maid: and as he was doing this, he held the maid by her right breast. What interested me even more than the fact he held her by her right breast was that everyone, including his wife and the maid, acted as if he weren’t. And I thought, the things that happen between people casually while they’r
e just standing around are so extraordinary that if I can create that kind of behavior—I don’t mean simply bizarre, but unique and revealing of character—if I can do that, I’m a director.”

  As an improviser entering a world he did not create, Del Close joined the Second City company—a completely revised edition—in the summer of 1961. Following the sold-out smash of An Evening with Nichols and May, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Paul Sand, Severn Darden, and the other members of Second City’s first generation had gone off with Sills to present their material on Broadway, a thrilling showcase for the organization and the improvisers both, but one that left the home front rather confused, improvisationally speaking. The campus/Compass foundation had gone. In came Avery Schreiber and Jack Burns, regular guys. Cabdrivers. Del’s friend, John Brent, brought drugs into the scene. Few took to Spolin. Soon after their induction, the revolving cast, mostly virgins, were marched into Viola’s workshops, but without Sills to ground their game work in actual scenes, a theatrical product that made professional sense to the actors, they resisted her. Del performed his disgust.

  “This is fucking bullshit,” he murmured, loudly, to improviser Larry Hankin. (Hankin agreed.)

  “Concentrate on your ‘Where,’ people.”

  “Our what?”

  Close fought everyone—and every theory of improvisation—at Second City. “Del had a problem with authority,” Hankin said. “He didn’t want anyone teaching him stuff. He was going to discover it himself, Goddamnit.”

  He fought Sahlins. Close argued for improvisation’s inherent value as an art form in its own right, independent of the written sketches it emerged; his boss saw it as merely a tool, a means of arriving at the finished sketches he considered Second City’s most significant contribution. He fought Sills (who reappeared erratically, tiring of the company in New York, to rehearse shows in Chicago). Their issue was satire, which defeated its own purpose, Del believed, “because assault in the sense of attacking is a tribute” to the thing being attacked.

  We were just getting into Vietnam. “Why do you want us to do this political shit on stage, Paul?”

  “To remind the audiences that we’re living in the same world they are.”

  Del admitted Sills had something there. Politics was the Now, a moment uniting the community. But in the final analysis, comedy was about hurt and healing—end of story. “The issues are immaterial,” Del said. “It is the response that is the only important thing and the rage that drives the comedian. In order to heal the audience, you have to heal the actors in the audience’s presence and take the audience along, which is why I’ve been devoted to improvisation for such a long time because it does precisely that.”

  He fought one of his newest colleagues, a relentless, barrier-breaking, born stand-up, Joan Rivers. She denied, as Shelley Berman had denied in Compass. She didn’t join anyone else’s reality. She never said, “Yes, and . . .” But did Del? How often would his old stand-up material appear in sketches and improvisations? How often would Del choose to improvise as a professor, intellectual, or any other stringent, verbose character that justified a solo turn? He played generals, fathers, authority figures—fighters all—who took it out on Joan Rivers, a woman. “Del did not love women, no,” Sheldon Patinkin said.

  He fought Alan Myerson, his new director. “I have no idea why Paul hired me to direct,” Myerson said. “I had no experience in improvisation except teaching acting in New York. But it was nothing like Second City.” He and Sills first met in New York, through Myerson’s ex-girlfriend, Roger Bowen’s current girlfriend, a waitress at Second City. “It wasn’t even an interview,” Myerson said. “I think he was just interested in getting a sense of who I was.” Del complained to Sahlins almost immediately. He called Myerson—a soft-spoken, analytical director, 180 degrees from the tempestuous Sills—a martinet, and worse. As the company’s veteran improviser, to say nothing of his emeritus stature in the field (“Del was a mythological figure to us,” Hankin said), he should have been next in line to direct Second City. Not Alan Myerson. “Del was also driven and determined,” Myerson said, “whether it was taking over the show, getting a laugh, or scoring the speed.” And Sahlins listened. For all the havoc Del wreaked, on himself and others, he had in frightening abundance the quality Sahlins admired above the rest, above humor even—Del had intelligence. It was Sahlins’s motto. Spolin preached space, Sills community, Del risk and innovation, Mike and Elaine insight, and Bernie Sahlins would sacrifice all to keep his theater smart. “Always play at the top of your intelligence,” he would advise the improvisers, almost singing, almost every day. Not IQ, mind you, but reason. Don’t compromise truth or integrity for a laugh. Play characters as bright as you are. Let them know what you know. And don’t goof. Wherever Del failed as an improviser, he forever stuck true to Sahlins’s refrain—and Sahlins loved him for it. Five months after he’d been hired, Myerson was let go.

  “Del was becoming a director,” Hankin said. “You could feel it.”

  Ted Flicker had a methodology. It had taken him three meticulous months and over a thousand one-minute auditions and five hundred callbacks to find his Premise Players. Where Sills sought in his improvisers some ineffable, mysterious x quality, Flicker applied himself to building a functioning organism, people who, by following the rules—the Kitchen Rules—could play together. For each candidate, he briefly ran through the three points he had devised at Westminster Place with Elaine May, and then:

  “Do you want to improvise?” he asked big-eyed Joan Darling. She was, like Elaine, dark, small, and smart.

  “Now? Sure.”

  “Okay,” Flicker said. “The place is a jungle.”

  “Okay.”

  Darling sat on the floor and started swatting at bugs. “They’re early today.”

  He stopped her. “Is your thought the bugs come every day at a certain time?”

  “Yes.”

  He hired her on the spot. Darling joined the group of George Segal, Tom Aldredge, and Flicker himself, perhaps the busiest man in “instant theater” (his term). At the Premise, a one-man auteur operation, Flicker emceed, directed, improvised, and produced everything. His mission—an antidote to the comic vacuity of televised entertainment and the insularity of Broadway theater—was “to find a form for improvisational theater that would not only train these actors in ensemble techniques, but would also explore methods of dealing with audiences in such a way as to genuinely affect their immediate thinking.” Premise improvisation was not intended to be political or mystical; if it succeeded, Flicker’s bite-sized off-Broadway basement would precipitate a total reinvention of the American theater, a revolution in show business. “The Premise,” he wrote, “is a result of a conscious effort by serious theater people, dedicated to the theater, to find a means to save the theater from its slow death.”

  His ambition was huge; his budget was not. For lack of a liquor license—the improvisation business’s secret weapon—Flicker ushered the Premise into selling Danish and coffee. For lack of an aesthetic, he bought 160 colored doors and called them decorative. Instead of scenery, Flicker’s improvisers had colored boxes. In lieu of an actual kitchen, an espresso machine hissed (during performances) just off stage right, and with no room for bistro tables, Flicker installed schoolhouse chairs with attached desks to hold cups and small plates.

  For a dishwasher, Flicker hired an actor. “Dustin Hoffman tried out for the Premise,” Darling said, “and we all wanted him desperately but he couldn’t resist doing sexual or scatological material that was really too much for the time. Ted was concerned about his off-color material, which was really funny but at that time in the early sixties it wasn’t really acceptable onstage. No one was really doing sex yet.” (Flicker hired Hoffman’s friend Gene Hackman instead.) But they all liked Hoffman and he needed a job, so Flicker brought him on to serve the hot chocolate and espresso during intermissions. When he could, Hoffman watched the show from the back. It was his first taste of theatrical improvi
sation, “the first time,” he said, “I ever saw the audience creating the characters and the setup for the actors.”

  Above all else, Flicker advocated entertainment. Scenes had to be short and funny, an approach Flicker tested in St. Louis and perfected in New York. “We are going to do three kinds of scenes for you here this evening,” he announced at the top of each show. “One type we will invent on the spot from suggestions made by you, another type is invented during the intermission from suggestions made by you having to do with events or on the political front that interest and amuse us all, and the third kind are scenes that we have created in the past either from audience suggestions or out of our own insanity that we repeat as often as we think we might get away with them.” If a scene didn’t find itself fast enough, Flicker would kill it, quickly, with a blackout (yes, he did lights too). And if he—running from stage to light board in the wings—didn’t kill zombie scenes fast enough, improvisers were free to whip out their invisible “suicide devices” and do the deed themselves. Darling said, “If we were in the middle of an improvisation that didn’t work—I had a long, deadly hat pin, Tom Aldredge had a poisoned ring—we would simply find a way to bring out our weapons and kill ourselves.” Flicker, unlike Sills, had no patience for discovery, personal or otherwise. As emcee, he would regularly interrupt scenes to drive them in another direction—of the audience’s choosing. “Freeze!”

  Flicker leaps onstage midway through a parody of Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty.

  “All right!” he announces, laying a hand on Segal’s shoulder. “How do you want this scene to end?”