The Birth of Improv
Compass helped spawn Chicago's premiere improv venue, The Second City, preceding it by half a decade, as well as Saturday Night Live, which first aired 20 years after the Hyde Park group's first performance. But a documentary filmmaker in Bucktown says the small group that changed theater forever hasn't gotten the credit it's due-and time is running out to commemorate its original founders on the big screen. "No one knows the history of this art form that is original not only to Chicago but to America," says Bucktown documentarian Mark Siska. A close associate with one of the two original founders of Compass, David Shepherd, Siska has been working since 2005 to immortalize the surviving Compass Players in an hour-and-a-half long film titled "The Compass."
The Compass Theater was founded by Shepherd and Paul Sills in 1955, when members of Hyde Park's Playwrights' Theatre Company began holding performances at a storefront that formerly operated as a gypsy fortune telling parlor. The University of Chicago did not have a theater department at the time, and Sills was training actors in an improvisational style developed by his mother, Viola Spolin. Spolin created the improvisational games during the Great Depression, while working with poor children in Chicago.
"She felt people would play games easier than memorizing their parts; many kids could not memorize their parts-they could barely read," Shepherd, now 83 years old, said.
"She wrote the Bible on improvisation for the
theater." The games
were passed down to her son, Paul Sills, who taught them to actors in
Hyde Park. That's what caught Shepherd's attention.
Shepherd, originally from New York, said he felt the theater there was expensive, atrophied and inaccessible, and he had moved to Chicago in the 1950s with the goal of bringing theater to the common man. "Theater in New York was very effete and based on three-act plays and based on verbiage and there was not much action," he said. "This would not be of interest to people in the street. I was interested in popular theater. I wanted to create a theater that would drag people off the street and seat them not in rows but at tables and give them something to drink, which was unheard of in [American] theater."
With a small inheritance as startup money, Shepherd teamed up with Sills to start The Compass. The storefront theater focused on relationships between people and the human condition, drawing much of its material from daily newspapers, Shepherd said. "We wanted to do a [scenario-based] show that would change every Monday," Shepherd said, noting that the group often took on weighty political topics such as the blacklisting of movie actors by Sen. McCarthy. "That was impossible to bring off because the company became exhausted."
One series of improv skits, known as the living news, riffed on headlines and advertisements from the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times. "We hoped to satirize this media and show people how ridiculous it was and how they were wrong," he said. After running out of material from the newspapers, the troupe focused on unusual magazines such as the Journal of Atomic Scientists and the pulp magazine Argosy, he said. Although the living news and other skits lent themselves to satire, Shepherd said improv as a form was not initially intended to focus solely on comedy. He said long form and dramatic improvisation never took hold the way comedy did. At that time, he said, comedy rarely looked inward. "Back then comedy was shallow," Shepherd said. "You made fun of your boss or your wife on the stage. You never made fun of yourself."
He said actors working in the early days of improv began to "mine the comedy within their own selves" making longer routines. The comedy just came natural, he said. Siska said he believes that's what makes modern comedy shows such as "Seinfeld" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" so funny and attractive to the audience. "When you say improv to people they think comedy right away, but it's more than that," Siska said. "Viola and David Shepherd and Paul Sills hated an actor just wanting to get a laugh. What they believed was if you create something interesting through interaction, the laughs are going to come out. The best comedy is the comedy that doesn't struggle to be funny. The humor will come out of the everyday situation."
After running out of routines from newspapers and magazines, the Compass Players eventually turned to audience suggestion for their performances, a direction that, in Shepherd's mind, began to pose a serious problem for the form. As time went on the suggestions became increasingly risqué, he said, which ultimately began to turn off many in the audience. He said The Compass came to an end about a year after it was formed because the cast eventually ran out of scenarios.
Shepherd still leads improvisational workshops near Amherst, Mass., but he said he's spent a lot of his time over the last year and a half working with Siska on the documentary. Shepherd said he first met Siska about 15 years ago while shooting improvisational short films in Bucktown. "We became very close and together we produced a longer piece called 'How To Tell If You're in Bucktown,'" he said. The scenes played largely on themes of gentrification that had just begun in the area, with scenarios that explored homelessness, displacement and the disparities between rich and poor.
Siska said the films were partly shot using the backroom theater of the defunct Urbis Orbis, a coffee shop that once occupied the building that now houses the Cheetah Gym, 1934 W. North. "It was on the cusp of gentrification and we were interested in integrating documentary with scenario," Siska said. "Like the developer and the lady who owned a bungalow for 30 years meet on the El platform and what happens." Siska said the two would use seasoned actors for some of the roles and contact average people such as architects and real estate agents for other parts. The film still is available at the David Shepherd archive at the University of Chicago.
Siska said he's hoping to have "The Compass" completed by the fall of 2008. In the meantime, he's still trying to get interviews with some of the big name actors associated with The Compass such as Alan Alda ("M*A*S*H"), Jerry Stiller ("King of Queens," "Seinfeld") Mike Nichols (director of "The Graduate," "Silkwood," "Primary Colors") and Elaine May (co-writer of "Tootsie," "Heaven Can Wait," "Primary Colors"). "If it's not made and it's not documented, then there's no way to go back and document these people who revolutionized American theater and American popular culture," he said.
This article originally printed in Chicago Journal by Timothy Inklebarger
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