Second City Lives On

Chelsea Clinton News, April 29 - May 8, 1992

By Dan Isaac

Paul Sills, the legendary founding director of Second City, was working in New York for a few brief weeks, and anyone who wants to find out what the world-famous theater innovator is doing will want to go to the New Actors Workshop on West 30th Street and see “Chinese Ghost and Love Stories.”

Paul Sills was born to be an explorer of theatrical form, for his mother is the famous Viola Spolin, who wrote the seminal book Improvisation for the Theater. Between the two of them, they turned improvisational theater into an art form in the '50s when they founded the Compass Theater with David Shepherd on the South Side of Chicago, adjacent to the university that bears the city's name. Sills went on to start Second City on the Near North Side and in the process created a distinct and definitive American acting style that is every bit as influential as the work of Lee Strasberg with Actors Studio.

At a certain point Paul Sills left Chicago and the Second City tradition. He lives now on a farm in Door County, Wisconsin, an impertinent peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan hundreds of miles north of Milwaukee. Several decades ago, he had begun to work with another form he more or less invented, story theater, but today he does little actual work in the theater. This current presentation by the New Actors Workshop, which was founded by Nichols, Sills and George Morrison, is a rare exception.

Paul Sills is a devoted reader of Martin Buber, and it was a recently published collection of Chinese folk tales, retold by Buber in the German and translated into English in 1991, that led Sills to begin work on this present production. After the performance, I asked Sills what got him started reading Buber, and I was staggered by his answer: “It was during the early Second City days and I was looking for the laughs.”

Story Theater is a more deliberate and serious genre; but if you are looking for the laughs, you will find them aplenty in between the beats of this New Actors Workshop presentation. There are 10 folk tales in all, and they compose a two-hour long evening. Most of them are so filled with unexpected twists and curves that they feel like book-long sagas.

Story Theater permits an acting group to fly through complex stories by narrating some of the in-between parts. But what remains in a memory of the performance are indelible images of intensely lived moments.

It is the sensational physicality of the acting that most surprises. The body work - the best I've seen since Grotowski - is not what you might expect from story theater. But the stories seem to pulse and flow through the bodies of this company of young actors, who are students at the New Actors Workshop.

You should see and experience them for yourself.

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