Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  In 1984 he chose, instead of Hollywood, Paris. Without much of a plan, Murray, his wife, Mickey, and their son, Homer, left for half a year.

  In Paris, Murray enrolled at the Sorbonne. He studied French grammar in a classroom with a view of the Eiffel Tower; his phonetics class (the professor called him William) took him across the Seine. He studied history, and the writings of the Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff, who believed humanity had lost touch with ancient teachings that could reverse ingrained patterns of mind and wake us from our psychic sleepwalks. For lunch, Murray would stop at his favorite chocolatier, pick up 150 grams, and offer handfuls to people as he walked down the street. It was a good way, he knew, to start a conversation.

  The afternoon he found himself at the Cinémathèque Française, Murray happened on a screening of A Romance of Happy Valley, a D. W. Griffith silent that hit him, he said, “like a thunderbolt.” Could he convey with his face alone all that the actors in the film could? “What would a guy like me do at that time?” he wondered. “Without a tongue, who am I?” He went to the Cinémathèque as much as he could, sometimes taking in two movies a day, after class. Most movie stars, he would see, didn’t share the focus, but Cary Grant “really made other people look good. That’s really what they taught us at Second City . . . you never think of a movie where he was just, you know . . . dominating someone in a scene or being much bigger than they or something. He was always very aware of them, you know, gave them focus.” He loved Margaret Sullavan in The Moon’s Our Home— a movie, Murray said, about “two famous people who are running away from their fame and they bump into each other and fall in love”—because of how free she was in the physical comedy, seeming to take blows from Henry Fonda without the careful or stylized physicality he noticed in too many other stars of her era. Above all, Murray kept thinking, “How could you see all these movies and make some of the movies that are made today?”

  He resolved, upon returning to work, to choose carefully. His first choice was to costar with Dustin Hoffman in an art versus commerce comedy to be directed by Ivan Reitman, about two lawyers fighting over the estate of the artist Mark Rothko. But when Hoffman answered the call—from Elaine May—to star in her next film, Ishtar, Hoffman withdrew from the project, Robert Redford replaced him (and the Rothko idea), and Murray lost interest.

  He would stay in Paris a little longer.

  After Second City’s Twenty-Fifth Anniversary, in the spring of 1985, Bernie Sahlins met Andrew Alexander at Chicago’s Ambassador Hotel to finalize their agreement, the sale of Second City. Sahlins hadn’t really explained why he was selling—not to the buyers, Alexander and his partner, Len Stuart, and not to his home team—but Alexander, reading between the lines, surmised “a combination of things. Bernie had a lot of legacy employees he didn’t know what to do with and he couldn’t fire anyone, so I think that laid on him.” And of course Bernie, then in his sixties, was only getting older than his improvisers, too old for their aging brand of boomer comedy, a derivative form of SNL, which bored and baffled him. “I was getting to the point,” he said, “where nothing was new enough.” His onetime avant-garde theater had degenerated into a sketch revue, just as its cultural stock—as evidenced by the windfall of Ghostbusters—had reached a new apex. (“If you’re not interested,” Sahlins had said, perhaps bluffing, to Alexander, “I have a studio interested.”) It was the time to sell, and Alexander—who had ushered the Fire Hall into the black and brought Second City into big media with SCTV—was the perfect buyer.

  After dinner, the paperwork signed, Bernie announced, “I’m going to go talk to Joyce.”

  Alexander was shocked. Joyce didn’t know what was taking place? Sahlins’s right hand since 1961, Joyce Sloane had long ago transcended the role of touring-company manager, den mother (buyer of birthday cakes, hostess of Thanksgivings), and all-purpose handler of emotions; she had virtually become Bernie’s coproducer. She was family. The news would level her.

  There was nothing Alexander could do. Onward from the Ambassador, he followed Sahlins to Second City and to the threshold of Joyce’s office.

  Behind a closed door, he heard Bernie’s voice: “I’d like to talk to you . . .”

  A few minutes later, Sahlins reemerged. “Okay,” he said to Alexander. “I told her,” and walked off.

  Alexander rushed in to assure Sloane that everything was going to be okay, “but she was in a state of shock,” Alexander said. “I did give her fifteen percent of the business right off the bat, but she and I had quite an unpleasant relationship for many years after that.”

  By the time Andrew Alexander left Sloane’s office, Bernie Sahlins was gone.

  By the age of ten, Stephen Colbert had already discovered, horribly, the truth about everything on earth: what matters now will not matter a thousand years from now, or one hundred years from now, or tomorrow. “In the line of eternity,” his mother explained, “what does this matter?”

  In 1974 her husband, Stephen’s father, had been killed in the crash of a commercial airliner in North Carolina, along with Stephen’s brothers Peter, age eighteen, and Paul, fifteen.

  His mother’s wisdom was offered in consolation. Giving her nine surviving children a God’s-eye view of their place and time, Mrs. Colbert was taking them to the water’s edge and pointing out the horizon. Look how small you are. Everything passes. Nothing important really matters. That’s the good news and the bad. “The world didn’t make any sense,” Stephen, ten years old at the time, reflected, “and so it was easy to remove yourself from the world.” When it all can be undone, instantly and for no reason, why go to school, invest in friends, do homework? Why do or, for that matter, feel anything?

  He detached.

  “I think that really helps if you’re doing comedy,” he would say, “or maybe even specifically doing satire, is that what seems normal no longer has status.” Cynicism was also a numbing agent; it pushed out suffering. “Belated grieving is what it was,” said Colbert, “and it lasted till I got out of college.”

  College, at first, was Hampden-Sydney in Virginia. Colbert’s uniform was “poet-jerk,” black pants and turtleneck, and his major was one of his lost father’s loves, philosophy, which he found suitably hopeless. “I was just incredibly depressed,” he said, “and then I thought, well, if I’m going to pick my liver this hard I might as well get something from it.” As a serious actor (with the beard to prove it), Colbert reasoned he could share his misery with an audience. He would be Hamlet or Bob Fosse, performing his anguish. “There was something viscerally attractive to me,” he said, “about living this sort of life that might kill you young.”

  In year 1984, he transferred to Northwestern, in Chicago, to study theater, and was asked, for the first time, to reveal himself onstage. His acting professor found Colbert’s rage unnervingly powerful. It was too much.

  “I think you could probably use a little therapy,” she said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, because I was physically afraid that you were going to punch me today in class.”

  Over lunch, professor and student discussed the origin of his offstage default position, clowning, and how it defended him from emotion.

  “Well,” Colbert explained matter-of-factly, “it might have something to do with the fact that my father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash when I was 10, and I was left home with a grieving mother. And my main mission became to make her laugh.”

  “We didn’t have a TV,” recalled Mary Scruggs, one of Colbert’s roommates at Northwestern, “so you’d just hang out in someone’s living room, and he’d adopt a character, someone else would adopt a character, and we’d have conversations that way for an hour.” What emerged from these improvisations were not so much characters as heightened versions of Colbert’s natural intelligence, all of them fancifully articulate and insanely erudite. “Stephen was fascinated with language and semiotics,” roommate Anne Libera said, “with the way people tell their stories.” Words we
re his way in.

  Colbert’s friend Chris Pfaff took him to Crosscurrents to watch Improv­Olympic’s Harold teams grapple toward longform. Del Close’s lifelong ambition, the crossbreeding of “low” improvisation with “high” theater, drummed both sides of Colbert’s heart, and where most, if not all, beginning improvisers cowered from their fear of the free fall, Colbert, who had been in free fall for a decade, recognized its secret right away. Laugh or no laugh, time was like Kleenex, easy come, easy go. “And I think some of that comes from my mother,” Colbert said. “I don’t actually believe that the present social norm is some sort of eternal truth.” Life had already proven, tragically, that there were no laws. He could be an asshole, he could be a saint. This thing, the Harold, said nothing is.

  “I have to do this,” Colbert said to himself at Crosscurrents. “I have to improvise.”

  Always in process, incessantly and restlessly sprouting new theaters and theatrical forms, only to halt them before they bore fruit, Paul Sills—cocreator of the Compass Theater, the Game Theater, and Story Theater—relocated his magic to the cozy Heliotrope Theatre in Hollywood, where his jangling band of old-timers—you remember Severn Darden, Mina Kolb, and their friends?—could draw back from their film and TV work, draw back almost to the 1960s, into Sills’s dream of togetherness. They reunited to work on a scripted play, but no one could remember the lines, so Sills, with his mother, Viola Spolin, at his side, took up a copy of Spolin’s 1963 book, Improvisation for the Theater, and they started from the very beginning, playing her games again, but this time as grown adults. “I’ve done musicals and plays and Story Theater,” Sills said, “but I always keep coming back to the games. If you wanted to analyze it, you could say it’s a neurotic thing about my mother, and maybe it is, but I don’t think about my mother when I’m doing the games. We’re just working on something that seems to be interesting.” Second City improviser Tony Holland christened the group Sills and Company, “and we started playing on Fridays and Saturdays,” Sills said, “going out for a beer afterward, just like in the old days.”

  They opened in 1985. For only seven dollars a ticket, I heard, anyone could see them play the hundred-seat converted-garage theater, transformed by Carol Sills into a readily adaptable imagination space of white sheet curtains and risers, which her husband, tearing at his hair like an angry sorcerer, would trample on his way to the stage, to shove one of his company, the world’s most professional children, an inch deeper into their freedom.

  “I’m going to crack you!” he would shout. “Crack you like a lobster!”

  They played full evenings of Viola’s games; there were no sketches to freeze, no mythic forms to ensure spiritual pertinence. Just improvisation. “Nobody,” Sills said, concurrent with Close’s experiments in longform, “has ever done that before.”

  From Los Angeles, Sills took them to Chicago, and then to Broadway.

  Del Close thought he’d be dead before the IRS caught up with him. But he was, unfortunately, still alive when he got notice that he owed twenty thousand dollars in back taxes. In a panic, he confessed all to Charna Halpern, who responded swiftly with a plan of action.

  “You remind me of Elaine,” he told her.

  “I do?”

  “You’re strong. No one takes advantage of you.”

  One night at dinner, Close and Halpern explained the tax details to Bill Murray, who devised, on the spot, a mutually beneficial rescue plan. Murray would cover Del’s debt; in return, he asked that Del help him supervise an improvised feature film, something Murray had in mind for Sydney Pollack to direct. Bringing together some of his favorite actors, mostly untrained in improvisation, Murray envisioned a workshop process, from which a script would emerge. Of course Del said yes.

  In January 1986 Murray assembled his ensemble—a team that included his brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, Dana Delany, C. Thomas Howell, Jami Gertz, Bill Irwin, O-Lan Jones, and Bud Cort—at Crosscurrents’ cabaret. Pollack would observe the workshops, noting tantalizing story and character discoveries, as he himself discovered improv à la Close. (“It was new to him too,” Delany said, “though he would never admit it.”)

  Day one, Close started them off, two at a time, with a simple game of Freeze. In two days, he was giving them Where suggestions, beginning with: circus. Taking the stage, Delany became a tightrope walker.

  “Continue the tightrope analogy,” Close instructed the next players.

  The subsequent scene—asking your boss for a raise—he explained was inspired by the previous one. They would go on like this, Close said, birthing, by association, one scene from the last. “We were learning the Harold,” Delany reflected. “We would do it over and over again.”

  “Breathe in the events of the world,” Del called out, “and exhale comedy.” That was, he said, the metabolism of improvisational performers.

  When the energy flagged, Close led them in a game of Machine, which he based on Newtonian pool table physics. Each player, their own part of a human Rube Goldberg, is not activated until they are “dinged” by another. Once activated, they ding someone else, and onward, until all parts of the machine ding together as a unit. An ensemble.

  Then: “Has anyone had a nightmare recently?” Close asked.

  Yes, of course.

  Up jumped a volunteer to tell his story and the company leapt up behind him to fill in the details and add nightmares of their own. (“When you’re in somebody’s dream,” Murray observed, “you have a responsibility.”)

  Leaving Close in Chicago, they moved onward to New York. Gaining comfort in the process, Pollack started a discussion about the quality of emotion in these, Close’s exercises, namely, how to combine spontaneity with deeper truths and experiences, or as Pollack termed it, “a more Method improv.”

  Bill Murray took the floor to remind everyone what they were really doing here. He shared with his company his growing ambivalence about being a movie star and how improvisation was the cure. In a quiet voice, he imagined aloud the film they might improvise together—his admiration for Kurosawa’s Red Beard, how the film begins in apparent simplicity and expands, planting narrative seeds, he said, some of which grow, some of which don’t . . .

  “Is there a way,” he asked the group, “to start with a small town and braid the film around it?”

  They began to discuss a sort of Our Town. Without scenery, they could move through time; the living would speak to the dead; the Stage Manager would transform himself, like a Spolin player, playing as if Thornton Wilder had written a game instead of a play. Off they went: Bud Cort improvised as the town’s blustery big fish and Bill Irwin a café owner with big dreams. ­O-Lan became a hairdresser having an affair with Brian, the fire chief, married to Dana, society matron, whose bad-boy son, Tommy Howell, didn’t want to go away to college. Bill Murray played the town’s mayor.

  By the time they arrived in Los Angeles, in February 1986, the screenwriter Steve Kloves had joined them. From their improvs, he would write a script.

  Close flew in to check on their progress. He had them reimprovise the same scenes over and over, “an automatic editing process” he implemented to eliminate all the unnecessary material; only what they remembered, he taught them, would be truly essential. After each run, he asked, “What did you discover? Is there anything you want to add?” Then they ran it again. Then more discussion.

  “You go from improv to improv to improv to dramaturge,” he reiterated, “and then back, and we pull up the richness of our unconscious.” And also:

  “Have faith that the scene is going to eventually make sense.”

  “Always look for the solution to the problem, not the conflict.”

  “Hold until you see the other person react to what you said.”

  Wherever possible, Close said, choose the poetic interpretation. Slow down. Choose the second thought.

  Watching them improve, Pollack thought: We’re almost as good as children.

  They were performing full Harolds now,
debating the formal characteristics of their story (linear or with flashbacks?), testing monologues, each one a townsperson’s memory, or dream. From those monologues, scenes, bits of dialogue:

  “I got beat up once before,” Murray improvised. “I sure learned my lesson!”

  “It doesn’t sound like it,” O-Lan replied. “You just got beat up again.”

  “Well, shit, Jackie, there’s more than one lesson in life.”

  And when improvisers left the moment in progress in pursuit of a joke, or a jab at wit, Close interrupted them for a lesson in what he called comedy-aversion therapy. “You don’t have to be funny,” he taught them. “We are hilarious—to be a human being is to be funny.”

  The film was never made. But I’m told videos exist. Steve Kloves, do you have them?

  Caught between boss and interloper, Andrew Alexander didn’t want his first acts in office to be construed as disruptive, so he maintained a “business as usual” policy at Second City as hands-off as his producership of SCTV. With genuine goodwill, he invited Bernie Sahlins to come back and direct (three consecutive) shows and asked Joyce Sloane to run the theater as she always had. But he was scared. “I really felt like an outsider,” he reflected, “and I was flying by the seat of my pants. I really didn’t know what to do with this.” Spending most of his time in Los Angeles, where he went to work, as Sahlins never had, setting up Second City television pilots and developing movies, Alexander protected himself from the backlash (he feared) awaited him back at Wells Street. “For years,” he said, “I flew over Chicago”; it was a decision he would come to regret. Alexander said, “I wasn’t paying the kind of attention I should have.” While Del Close and Charna Halpern were invigorating improvisation with a freshness and fervor it hadn’t seen since its inception, Second City, left, ironically, with Sahlins and Sloane once again, fell farther behind the times.

  There was, however, one area where his attention gravitated. A nonrequired step to the touring company or mainstage, Josephine Forsberg’s Players Workshop and Children’s Theater comprised, for decades, Chicago’s only improvisational training facility and its sturdiest link to the Spolin principles that, depending on who you asked, were or were not the foundation of improv comedy. Alexander, glimpsing something of the future in improvisational education, opened Second City’s own Conservatory, an on-site school, yearlong, for advanced students. Now, Forsberg’s beginners would earn their advanced diplomas at the Conservatory.