Improv Nation

by Sam Wasson

  Sheldon Patinkin appeared back stage after one performance to chastise the ensemble for their overt polemicism, but Andrew Alexander and Kelly Leonard, good to their word, their commitment to Second City’s legacy of self-regulation, stuck by them.

  Close’s view of the show was more conflicted. As McKay would admit, Piñata, something of a written Harold, owed Del a portion of its existence.

  “You took my work,” Close complained to McKay.

  “Yeah, but you taught it to me!”

  McKay knew they had something with Piñata when, during the show, as flurries of Blockbuster cards rained down around them, he caught himself thinking, People can be awesome. In the course of the run, McKay estimated they collected thousands of shredded Blockbuster cards, an inviolable affirmation of their stated intention—despite some of their most alienating gambits—to really connect with the audience.

  And then, one night, McKay had a horribly adventurous what-if: What if they told the audience that President Clinton had been assassinated? Scott Adsit, the strongest stage actor in the ensemble, volunteered to break the news.

  “Adsit,” McKay asked, “do you think you can seriously and sincerely tell the audience the president was shot?”

  He did. Here’s how it went:

  “I’m sorry,” Adsit began, crying. “We have to stop the show. The president has been shot. We don’t know the details, but there are monitors out in the lobby, and we can watch the coverage. You’re welcome to stay.”

  Before a gasping audience, McKay rolled out a TV monitor and flipped it on, not to coverage of the assassination, but sports bloopers.

  Adsit interrupted. “I want to change the channel.”

  “No, wait. Wait.”

  Adsit made for the TV, but McKay, laughing at a referee getting kicked in the nuts, fought him back.

  “Everyone loves sports bloopers!” McKay cried out.

  Adsit, not disagreeing, sat himself next to McKay and watched.

  The two of them just sat there, laughing and laughing at the bloopers on TV, until the audience realized the assassination never took place, they had been lied to, and filed out of the theater, weeping and enraged. End of show.

  Improviser Rachel Dratch hated the idea from the start.

  Jon Glaser thought the prank too wild to truly disrespect.

  After they tried it, Jenna Jolovitz said, “It was like we raped a whole audience emotionally.”

  But the show itself was a milestone. “That breaking of form [in Piñata],” Fey said, “in hindsight it seemed so simple, but changing the [scene] transitions from just light changes with piano to extreme light changes with music broke that form open. Those things just weren’t allowed at Second City shows. That’s all McKay. It’s just crazy that it took Second City so long. He had the audacity to question things and we all knew that he was the leader, for sure, and the future there.” Scouting for talent, Lorne Michaels recognized it too, and in 1995 hired McKay off Piñata to write for Saturday Night Live.

  Mike and Elaine loved La Cage aux Folles, a farce of incomparable elegance and warmth, and for twenty years, since the release of Édouard Molinaro’s film, regularly discussed the possibility of one day remaking it. Nichols said, “It would always come up between us, how we loved this plot, but we could never get to it.” The moment the rights finally became available, Nichols attached himself to direct, and when producer John Calley asked whom he wanted to write the script, Nichols spoke the name of Calley’s old flame, Elaine May. “The next day,” Calley said, “she said yes.” It would be their first collaboration as film writer and director, marking a kind of Nichols and May reunion, though, technically, since their film careers began, they hadn’t ever been apart. “I never once made a movie,” Nichols said, “without first showing Elaine the script and listening to her ideas or bringing her in to talk to the writers.” She had more than once rescued Nichols; on Silkwood, on Wolf, turning in new script pages throughout filming, as close to the finish line as the very last day of shooting, all the while refusing screen credit; it was Elaine’s custom to keep her name off projects she didn’t control. But collaborating with Nichols on La Cage, she could be assured they’d work side by side throughout and free of divisive creative differences. “Any small differences between us have burned away,” Nichols had explained. “We have only pleasure. What I don’t think, she thinks of; what she doesn’t think of, I think of.” Forty years after their first meeting, their shared sensibility had been preserved, still glistening, an old masterpiece under glass. “The old sketches are still as funny for us,” May said. “I still find Mike so funny—what he says, even his expression when he’s not speaking. That hasn’t changed one whit, tittle or iota.” They fortified their ensemble with first-class improvisers; Robin Williams, of course; the boundless Hank Azaria; Gene Hackman, once of the Premise Players; and Nathan Lane.

  Where the majority of writers, even in the happiest arrangements, are held from production at an arm’s length—close enough to the director to lend assistance, far enough not to interfere—Nichols, from the start, drew in May as his de facto codirector, encouraging her to come to rehearsals and speak openly to actors. He knew, putting her name on a script she wasn’t directing, she was making an exception. “Mike was very protective of Elaine’s script,” Lane said, “and Elaine herself.” In the midst of conversation, he would reach out to brush the crumbs off her blouse.

  “We’re going to rehearse it like a play,” Nichols told his company at the outset of The Birdcage, “so that by the time we’re ready to shoot, you could almost perform this as a play yourselves. Elaine and I are going to be sitting there, so pitch all your ad-libs and try everything you want to try in rehearsal, and we’re going to write down what we think is the best of all the ad-libbing, and we’re going to put it in the script. But then I want you to stick to what we have, because I don’t want to have to cut a lot. I want everything to play as continuous actions, so I don’t want to stop and try nineteen different alternate lines or different versions.”

  In rehearsal, Williams asked Nichols if he could play with an existing dance sequence. “Can I just make it into a history of dance?”

  Already Nichols was laughing. “Let’s try it.”

  Williams took the stage and, from the suggestions Nichols called out to him—Fosse, Martha Graham, Michael Kidd—they produced a manic medley of dance steps . . .

  “Stop!” Nichols pleaded, out of breath from laughter. “I don’t want to see this again until we’re doing it!”

  They still needed something, a line maybe, to cap the improvisation, a point to build to.

  “How does it end?” Nichols asked aloud. “How do we get out of it?”

  A half second later, Lane delivered Williams the perfect topper—“But you keep it all inside”—and Elaine slipped it into the script.

  The idea was to get all the improvisations out up front, but that wouldn’t be easy: there was no bottom to Robin Williams. “[Robin] was always joking around and being really silly and improvising, not just within the script, but at anything that came along in life,” Azaria said. “If he asked you what you did that weekend and you said I went bowling, he would do a ten-minute routine on bowling.”

  Between setups, there was a lot of downtime, waiting, mostly, for the director of photography, Emmanuel Lubezki, aka Chivo, to light a scene. On The Birdcage, he favored the glow of lantern-like orbs that put Robin Williams in an Asian frame of mind. “Mr. Chivo!”—this in his most offensive accent—“We need more balls! More balls, Mr. Chivo! More balls!” These breaks in filming were no breaks for Williams. One incredible riff, performed just for Nathan Lane, Williams based on a toy store owner he had met in Paris. “Robin became this pretentious and arrogant French toy store owner,” Lane recalled, “annoyed by Robin looking for presents for his children.” At one point he handed Robin what he called an existential toy—an empty box. “Robin kept going and going, and I laughed harder and harder until I was crying and begg
ing him to stop. It made him very happy.” “One day,” Nichols remembered, “Robin improvised a gay football player for about three hours. The whole approach was that he couldn’t grasp what he was. He would say, ‘You suck a cock or two, but come on! What’s the big deal?’ We were all in very serious danger of death by laughing. It was so painful. He wouldn’t stop it. You thought you might die. It was infinitely beautiful. It was simply unbelievable. It was a masterpiece.”

  “How much of that do you remember?” Mike asked Robin the next day. “How much of that could you do again?”

  “None of it.”

  Particularly moving to Nichols were Williams’s deferrals to Nathan Lane. To watch the great soloist so graciously cede the spotlight filled him with a respect beyond even the admiration he had for Williams’s talent. “Nathan and Robin were as brilliant as a practiced comedy team,” Nichols said, “but in the way they worked they were like brothers.” They sustained that circle of respect throughout the production. “That was one of the one or two happiest times of my life,” Nichols said, “making The Birdcage.” Making a family. Which is what The Birdcage was about.

  The film was an instant smash, and quickly identified as a landmark American film. Where its antecedents took the “problem” of gayness for their dramatic conflict, The Birdcage takes its sexuality for granted, presenting instead of anguish and isolation an array of shame-free characters more interested in their everyday lives and families than the whys and wherefores of who they love. The great joke here isn’t that the characters are out of the closet; it’s that for the sake of family unity, they’re pretending, and failing, to get back in it. For a “gay” comedy of its time, that alone was a revolution.

  Tina Fey brought her notebook to a performance at the e.t.c. theater and wrote to herself, “Is there a difference between guy funny and girl funny?” After absorbing Jenna Jolovitz’s work in the show, she had her answer “No.”

  Fey dove deeper into improvisation. It was the lure of the mainstage and the ontological implications of Marty de Maat’s teachings, the coming awareness that the rules of improvisation, turned to life, opened your eyes wider to every mote of experience. “I was so sure that I was doing exactly what I’d been put on this earth to do,” she said, “and I would have done anything to make it onto that [Second City] stage. Not because of SNL, but because I wanted to devote my life to improv.” If this right here was it for her, that would be fine. Fey could see a perfect life for herself in Chicago just teaching improvisation, growing into the next de Maat or Close, the Mrs. Chips of Second City. “For many of us,” she said, “improv was close to religion.”

  Moving up, Fey secured an understudy position with a touring company at seventy-five dollars per show (plus twenty-five dollars per diem if it was an all-day gig— they would often drive around all day to qualify), Fey’s promotion to the tiny circle of paid improvisers allowed her, at last, to leave her awful YMCA job and brought her closer to BlueCo improvisers Rachel Hamilton, Ali Farahnakian (also of UCB) and her former iO teammate Amy Poehler. With every stop on the tour, from Waco to Kansas, high schools and business conventions, Tina and Amy fell a little less in love with the classic Second City scenes on their program. “If you found anything [in the Second City archive] that was with Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris, you found a treasure,” she said, but mostly old scenes were out of date and no fun for a woman improviser raring to break out of the bland rotation of Girlfriend, Mother, Wife parts. Poehler had her own outlet with the UCB; Fey found her own in the role of writer, building new scenes for the touring company. “With Ali’s encouragement,” she said, “we would take things out, then we would put a couple of our own blackouts in. We got in trouble because by the time we got to Texas the stage report went back and showed we were doing 80 percent original material.” It became their custom, every night, to replace a classic scene with a new one. She began, for the first time, to write sketch in earnest.

  Eight months later, Jon Glaser left Piñata Full of Bees, and Kelly Leonard put Fey into the cast. The addition was a milestone for Second City, the first time a mainstage company, traditionally (and unofficially) comprised of four men and two women, featured a gender-equal cast, three men, and three women.

  Fey almost couldn’t believe it. Second City’s brick walls, mantled floor to ceiling in the black and white faces of improvisation’s first fifty years, triggered in Fey her most honorable burden, to live up to them. She felt so good. The life she had dreamed of was turning out to be the life she was living, and more so every day. “When the show was open in the summer,” she said, “[boyfriend Jeff Richmond] and I would ride our bikes to the lake in the morning, go for a swim, get back on our bikes, go rehearse at Second City. The greatest life.” Walking into the theater, passing under those famous faces every evening, she thought, overcome, “I work here.”

  “It was the best job I ever had,” she said. “The most fun job I ever had.”

  As a professional, Fey was reverently committed to the Second City process; she was a hard worker and a fair teammate, prepared to concede to a better idea, but never willing to lie down for the wrong one. “She was never like crazy confrontational,” said Scott Adsit, “she was just right.” And she could make her case clearly, unemotionally, like a comedy lawyer.

  Yet for all her resourcefulness, she worried about how she would come off as a performer. She rarely booked the commercials everyone else seemed to, and at Second City curtain calls, she never got anywhere near the best applause and would come home to Richmond, crying. “Oh, I’m not making it . . .”

  Adsit, she thought, had it all: real acting chops, tremendous physicality, a true Spolinite’s feel for space work, and the patience to wait out a meandering, laughless improvisation until it really found itself. Fey would catch herself falling back on bad habits: finger waving, crossing her arms when angry, and, when playing the Mother, resorting to the old hands on hips.

  At first, Fey was reluctant to share her ideas with director Mick Napier. In private conferences, he would implore her to bring her ideas to the group, and in time, she could.

  Years earlier, in 1989, the improviser Mick Napier was teaching at Second City when he saw two images—a prison and a circus clown fighting a drag queen—collide nonsensically in his imagination. Without knowing why, he wrote down the phrase “coed prison sluts,” and read it aloud to his students.

  “Do you think,” he asked them, “this is a funny title for a musical?”

  Yes. They said it was.

  It was ideas like these that made Mick Napier a strange but welcome presence at Second City, teaching at the Training Center and directing Colbert, Sedaris, and Dinello at Second City’s Northwest resident company. But for all that he loved about Second City in practice and tradition, he dreamed in improvisational forms bigger than sketch, and far more theatrical. A lifelong devotee of nonsense, and its evil twins, madness and defiance, Napier “developed,” he said, “an anti-comedy sensibility very early.” There was a little Severn Darden in him; in high school, Napier kept a journal of Dadaesque non sequiturs. He loved to walk down the street speaking sentences that made no sense, “just to jumble my brain up.” To Napier, straight comedy was a salesman faking a grin; he laughed at the dark, the rude, the stupid, the unfunny. His favorite play, Artaud’s Jet of Blood, opens with a nun and a whore eating each other’s eyes out. Napier was as much the son of the director John Waters as early Saturday Night Live, and as tired of the so-called rules of real life as he was of the rules of rehearsed plays. He came to improvisation in college, a constricted theater major looking for freedom, and without a clue of how to do this thing he had only read about. But that was the beauty part. To improvise, you don’t have to know anything. In fact, the less you knew, the freer you were, right?

  So, conceptually naked, Napier started his own improv group and made up his own rules as he went along, all the way to Chicago, where, in 1987, he met Del Close at iO, and for the first time encountered the Kitchen
Rules, all but unchallenged since they were first implemented by the St. Louis Compass thirty years earlier. The irony of this was not lost on Napier: Del Close, the original madman, followed the rules? Rules for improvisation? “Yes, and”? Support your partner? (What about support yourself?) “I noticed,” Napier said, “that when people made a strong choice for themselves, that supported the scene, and that supported their partner.” When your plane goes down—and in improvisation it always does—you put your own oxygen mask on first.

  Hence Mick Napier’s first show as director, Splatter Theater, a bloody comedy he opened upstairs at Crosscurrents, a floor above iO’s big stage, in October 1987.

  Then, in April of 1989, came Coed Prison Sluts, created from improvisation, which would become the longest-running musical in the history of Chicago.

  “I had no intention to start a theater or have a theater company,” Napier reflected, “but after Coed Prison Sluts that’s what happened. We got kind of tight as a company and a group of friends and we started a conversation about getting a building. That’s when we decided to become a company.” They called themselves the Annoyance Theatre, and became, in Napier’s words, a magnet for fun freaks. “I think,” he said, “in reaction to theaters like Second City and iO, that we kind of wanted to be an annoyance in a way.”

  Second City, basically, was a sketch theater; iO, with a few excursions, was a Harold theater; the Annoyance, running, at its height, as many as thirteen different shows a week—Del Close could be heard in the lobby, bellowing, “Where are you, Mick Napier, you prolific motherfucker?!”—really was whatever you wanted it to be, and also precisely what you didn’t. Such was the nature of freedom. And an Annoyance improviser, enriched by Napier’s homegrown school of break-the-rules Rules, was built especially to violate, and as only an improviser can. “Because this,” Napier would say, “really is the freest art form in the world.”