Bernard Sahlins

Allen Ginsberg had read his poem "Howl" in October 1955, and The Second City was part of the expression of a growing anti-establishment sentiment. The sixties, the rebellious sixties, were dawning as a counter to the conformist fifties, and questions were being asked. As usual, literature led the way. Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg; Bellow, Roth, and Glass; Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, and Norman O. Brown. In comedy, the careers of Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl were beginning to be noticed beyond the counterculture. To put Eisenhower and Nixon on stage, indeed to do anything topical, to smash icons, to discuss the events of the day from the points of view of well-acted characters, was deliciously new and terribly exciting for young audiences. We were often treated to the phenomenon of open-mouthed young people, hanging about forever after each show, bedazzled by hearing their concerns expressed on stage.

One of the joys of the review form is its immediacy. A straight play can take years between its conception and its appearance before the public. With a review scene, an idea conceived in the morning can be seen on the stage that night. And one can capture the sometimes ephemeral visit of the zeitgeist, reflecting the preoccupations of the actors and the audiences at a given moment in time. The review form is flexible and can stretch to receive even the most abstract of concepts.

A certain amount of oppression is good for comedy. The firmer the taboo, the more excitement when it's violated-like Eve's apple made more delicious by being forbidden. But unlike the Beats, unlike Bruce, we represented the respectable, the acceptable face of dissent. We were neither hostile nor in a rage. We did not separate ourselves from the mainstream. Our irony was gentled by the fact that we included ourselves among its targets. We soon stopped trying to save the world in favor of laughing at it. We did not preach the apocalypse. Our audiences laughed the laugh of recognition.

We were, of course, political liberals. And we took our easy shots at the Ku Klux Klan, at Nixon, at racism. But we also recognized that the proper target of a satirist is himself and the members of his own class, their shibboleths, beliefs, and dogmas. The worthiest scenes exposed our own culpability in the face of such issues as racial prejudice and injustice.

Another reason for our success was not artistic but financial. Mostly through sheer dumb luck we had stumbled on a form, and a formula, that made for economic advantages unusual in the theatre. We had a lower cost base than even a storefront theatre. With no set, with a couple hundred dollars' worth of costume elements, with a small cast, with one musician and a stage "crew" consisting of one combination light, sound, and stage management person, we were lean. There were other savings. We rehearsed a new show with the same cast that played the old one. We earned extra revenue from serving drinks. We never advertised.*

These factors enabled us to keep our prices down. In a business notorious for being transient, we survived and even flourished with a relatively small theatre.

But the chief reasons for our survival, aside from our favorable business setup, were the intelligent actors, highly skilled at both writing and acting, guided by the genius of Paul Sills. Plus the fact that not one of us, including our savvy, loyal waitresses, wanted anything other than a good, uncompromising show. Because we had a bar and served at tables, people often characterized us as a nightclub. To them I would explain that we were a theatre that served drinks, not a bar that put on a show.

That is the sum of it. We appeared at the right time with a great format, a viable financial venture, a great director, and marvelous actors. Although we were and still are known as political satirists, the fact is that politics was but a fraction of the subjects we considered. We often disappointed those who held the idea that we should be more heavily engaged in social critiques. But irony was our metier. We applied it to the family, to courting, to work and the workplace. We parodied Mozart and Superman. We sang songs about nature. We were young people talking to young people.

And it didn't hurt that we were inexpensive. We felt from the beginning that our competition was not other theatres but movies, and we always tried to be within a few dollars of the price of a movie ticket. With all that, it was an actor's medium, and it was Paul Sills who held us all to the highest standards of acting.

After a couple of months it became apparent that we were indeed a success. And while it is true that every actor, every director, writer, producer in the theatre expects a miracle each time out, there coexists a pessimism that accepts the many failures. "I must complain," said Swift, "that the cards are ill-shuffled till I have a good hand." And in this business good hands are rare.

No wonder so few, if they do triumph, avoid the perils and pitfalls created by success. I don't mean the obvious discomfort of having one's privacy constantly invaded.* I mean the quietly insidious ways in which the promise of success can affect the work at hand. Guilt, hope, fear, desire: these form a dangerous concoction. As I look back on twenty-five years of The Second City, I see clearly that our deepest problems came from our successes, starting with my co-founders, Paul and Howard.

Howard was a free spirit, chafing at any long-term commitments. His departure was amicable and, as I see now, inevitable. Paul had a more complex reaction. In a most subtle way it was difficult for him to deal with success. In the theatre a production is always a group achievement. Thus, oddly, theatrical success is a leveler. In the theatre the director and some of the actors may have been stars going into a production or may become stars as a result of a production, but custom and indeed reality impose a "we're all in this together" attitude which mandates that success be shared. It wasn't that Paul was greedy or nonsharing; far from it. But somehow success was noisy, disturbing his muse.

Two months after our opening, it looked like we would survive, but Paul's inquietude that had propelled us to this point did not fade. Paul paled at he thought of endlessly doing shows in a single style. The telltale signs of his restlessness were evident. Already he was talking of the Story Theatre form that he eventually staged on Broadway and for television.

This was the first of many times that I found myself trying to keep things together. At that point, if Paul went, we all went. I had a sneaky solution.

In some of our earlier incarnations we had worked with an impossibly talented, impossibly demanding gentleman named Del Close. I sent for Del some six months after we opened. Sensing that Paul was alarmed, even panicky, at the prospect of doing show after show, I thought it might be helpful to have Del Close around if we needed a director. We had worked with Del in the past and had found this acerbic, quick-tongued, excessive man to be a genius, a dark genius- from Kansas yet. When he wasn't astounding audiences with intelligent wit, he was drinking, drugging, and destroying himself. He was the quintessential beatnik-Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg rolled into one. Del, who died in the year in which this book was written, and I had a longstanding, sometimes good-natured argument about the use and abuse of improvisation. He found in it a magical, transcendent quality that resulted in a unique stage expression. I saw it as a technique, a stage tool like mime or fencing. He maintained that it was indeed an art form, deserving to be elevated to presentational status. I felt that to do so was a self-indulgence, that improvisation elevated to a form of presentation failed most of the time, that any scene could benefit from editing, concision, and shaping.

Del devoted the last years of his life to teaching and inspiring a small, devoted band of committed improvisers. It was a guru-disciple relationship that bred fervent devotees to improvisation as an almost mystical form of theatrical magic.

On the night before Del died, there was a party in the basement recreation room of his hospital. Dozens of people were there to pay their respects in what was really an affecting celebration, sort of a wake with the central figure alive and present. The party was only slightly marred by the Druid ceremony that closed the evening (Del was a witch). Del himself, white-haired and white-bearded but with impish grin intact, sat there with air tubes and IVs snaking around his wheelchair, clearly enjoying it all. When I approached to pay my respects, he wagged a finger at me and half-bellowed, "It is an art form," and then went into what I thought was a long chuckle.

I said, "Del, for tonight it is an art form." Where upon someone said, "You're standing on his air tube." It was like a bad Second City improvisation. I hastily slid away and all was well again. The next day Del died, having willed his skull to the Goodman Theatre to be used in the gravedigger's scene in Hamlet.

Now that I look back on it, I think my bringing in Del might have been a shameless sort of manipulation. But it worked. Del was the spur to Paul's competitive nature. Paul directed another show. Later Del joined the company as an actor, escaped briefly to San Francisco, and then returned to direct. Actors loved him in what I called their "let's eat babies together, send up our parents, and do drugs" mode. Eventually, his excesses were unsupportable.

Also rejoining us from previous ventures soon after we opened was Sheldon Patinkin. Sheldon, twenty-four years old at the time, was a prodigy. A talented pianist (he had steered us through a production of the Three-Penny Opera when he was nineteen) and opera lover, and widely read, Sheldon, in addition to being an achiever, was also the group's Jewish mother and its priest. He listened to confessions, took no sides, was always available and generous with his sympathy. I hired Sheldon as general manager and general assistant to everybody.

Early in 1961 Sheldon was supplanted-no, augmented-as the Jewish mother of us all by the real article. Joyce Sloane joined us, at first selling benefit performances to small organizations, then taking on a general role as associate producer, a role she filled for me for twenty-five years. Joyce is calm, infinitely loving, and generous as a saint.

Hundreds of actors have appeared on Second City stages over its forty some years, and I swear that Joyce keeps in touch with all of them, remembers their birthdays and their children's names, follows their careers, visits them in New York or California or Toronto, calls, writes, and sends presents. She is universally loved. No small part of her job was to heal the wounded feelings often left by Paul or myself. Nor are Joyce's maternal ministrations confined to The Second City. The entire Chicago theatre community basks in her beneficence.

This, then, is how it was at the start: Howard, Paul, myself, Joyce, Sheldon, Del, a successful show. It was a good beginning, but we had no presentment of how quickly our lives were to change.

Days and Nights at the Second City
By Bernard Sahlins
Edited by Ivan R. Dee

About this contributor
Bernard Sahlins was born in Chicago and studied at the University of Chicago before he turned to the theatre. He has won the Sergel Prize for playwriting and several Joseph Jefferson Awards for directing, and has produced television specials for HBO, Granada Television, and CBS.