Friday, June 6, 2008
Performing Arts / Onstage Paul Sills remembered at Chicago Improv Festival
Posted by Ryan Hubbard on Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 9:37 AM
The Chicago Improv Festival opened on the same day, June 2, that improv pioneer Paul Sills died. Sills, cofounder of the Compass Players and later of Second City, was a transformative figure in both American theater and comedy, as a performer, director, and teacher. He was 80 years old.
Festival director Jonathan Pitts says that this year's festival has been dedicated to Sills, and at opening night at the Lakeshore Theater he talked to the audience about Sills's legacy. Then the theater dimmed the lights for a moment in memoriam.
Second City has posted a memorial page, and WBEZ organized a discussion about Sills with theater critic Jonathan Abarbanel. Your comments about him are welcome here.
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Paul Sills was one of the two most important director-teachers in post-World War II American theater -- the other being Lee Strasberg. If Sills had chosen to work in New York he might have received the same recognition that Strasberg did. But he chose to work in Chicago at a time when little outside attention was paid to the grassroots theater movement taking root here. I was too young to see Second City when Sills was directing there, but films of those early shows (featuring the likes of Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Severn Darden, and Paul Sand) put Sills's brilliance as a director on display. The sketches were funny and satiric, but in addition the acting was nuanced and textured. The same was true of Sills's later Story Theater shows--hip retellings of fables and myths--at the Body Politic in the late 1960s and early '70s. Sills, along with community activist Jim Shiflett and composer William Russo, founded the Body Politic in 1969 as the first professional off-Loop theater. Ironically, off-Loop theater didn't start winning international recognition until after Sills stopped working here on a regular basis.
P.S. For a different take on Sills, go to Mike Miner's reflection in the Reader's News Bites blog: http://blogs.chicagoreader.com/news-bites/2008/06/03/paul-sills.
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