An Improvised Life (5 page)

The serious start of my professional life began with Second City. Everything up to that point was prelude and rehearsal. I threw myself into the work with a feverish passion. I lived
in a ten-by-ten-foot room with a bathroom down the hall, ate at a hotel across the street, and did my laundry at a Laundromat a couple of blocks away, but I didn’t even notice the conditions. I was ecstatic. I had a life. I had somewhere to go, a place to be responsible to on a daily basis, people to work with and get to know. I could be financially responsible for my children.

Often, after the show, my friend Sheldon Patinkin and I would go to the Clark Theater, which played art films and stayed open all night. We’d watch foreign films with religious, worshipful attention, and then afterward walk miles back to Old Town, tearing apart and analyzing every moment of what we’d seen. Sheldon was the general manager of Second City. We became friends one day when Bernie Sahlins, our producer, said he wanted to start a film series on Saturday afternoons. He said he needed a couple of volunteers to run it. I raised my hand; Sheldon raised his. Bernie told us to design a list of films for the series. I said to Sheldon, “Why don’t you write down your favorite twenty films, I’ll do the same, and we’ll compare notes.” Sheldon went off and wrote his list in about four minutes; I did too, and we compared. They were the same list. We became friends on the spot, and have remained friends to this day. And fifty years later, we still have the same lists!

To this day I’m not sure why Sills hired me. My work for the first several months wasn’t good. I didn’t know how to be funny on cue. I wasn’t clever. My work often lapsed into the maudlin and overly serious. The other members of
the company were more versed in the political and social issues of the day, and I started to become concerned that I wasn’t going to make it there, which was a terrifying thought. If I couldn’t make it at Second City, there was no place for me anywhere.

After several abortive and frustrating months, and a feeling of impending doom, I found a character who, although I took him seriously, managed to make the audience laugh. I hung on to this one character like a life preserver. For weeks he was my survival mechanism. He was the only character I would go near. Whatever my assignment, I’d do it as this one character. I suppose it wasn’t surprising, since from the beginning I always thought of myself as a character actor—someone who transforms himself into other people. I had no interest in being myself onstage. In fact, there was no possibility of my playing myself on the stage because I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t have a clue. I only knew myself as other people, and this character that I found, whoever he was, became my anchor.

In the months that followed, as I became more comfortable and secure, I started to let go a little and I began to explore other characters. I found a proud and untrusting young Puerto Rican, a devil-may-care Italian worker, a stalwart and stoic old Jew—all of them immigrants or misfits. I felt at home as a foreigner. As a stranger. As anyone who was an ocean away from his own environment and a million miles away from his own identity, whatever that was. Interestingly, at that time I was aware only of the great variety of
characters I was playing. The fact that they were all foreigners and misfits didn’t occur to me until years later when I had started down a path of self-examination, and realized that this was the way I saw myself.

For all the intense work I had done within the craft, within the confines of the safe and comfortable box I called
acting
, I had done no work on the mystery of my own self. In fact I had no idea that work could be done on this self, or that help was available out there from endless sources and in hundreds of modalities. I was too busy enjoying the fruits of a quarter-century of preparation to notice that outside my life as an actor I had almost no life at all.

CHAPTER FIVE

Here’s the way the shows at Second City worked. There was a formal part of the evening that lasted about forty-five minutes. Then there was an intermission, at the beginning of which the performers took suggestions from the audience. The second half of the show consisted of improvisations based on the suggestions given to us by the audience. These suggestions were in categories such as current events, people in the news, movie titles, book titles, song titles, and proverbs. During the twenty-minute intermission, the eight of us raced backstage to formulate the second half of the show, trying desperately to come up with material that might work. We’d pace, we’d think, we’d smoke, we’d sweat, we’d confer with each other in a desperate attempt to create viable material. Two-people relationship scenes, blackouts, pantomimes, the reworking of old jokes—every night was guerrilla warfare or a kamikaze raid. Before going onstage to perform the improv section of the show, we lived in a state of terror. Sometimes, on weekends, we did two shows a
night, which meant we got to feel this terror twice. But what a gift it was! What a deep and concentrated training it was, and what a blessing. And the intensity of those shows! My God, we’d play ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty different characters during the course of an evening. Some ideas worked, some didn’t; the ones that worked became part of a library of characters we’d hang on to and even use later on, after we’d moved away from improvisational theater and were acting in plays or movies, or even if we’d switched over to writing. But most importantly, the thing that separated my experience at Second City from every other endeavor I’ve ever been connected with was that we were in an arena where we were allowed to experiment. To change. To grow. And not only that, we were we allowed to fail.
Allowed to fail!
And audiences came to the theater knowing this was very likely to happen. They knew that part of every evening wasn’t going to work. They came to Second City to see process unfold, and they knew that if one scene was terrible there was every possibility the next one would be memorable.

God help us, we are living in a civilization where
failure
is a dirty word. It’s become a moral issue. If you fail at something you are a bad person. Failure doesn’t look good on ledger sheets. You have to explain it to stockholders, and sadly this kind of thinking has permeated every nook and cranny of our civilization. We don’t have the time anymore to learn from trial and error. We have to do everything right the first time, and continue to do it right ever
after. But how in the world are we to grow if we don’t fail? Is it possible to have an endless series of successes without falling on our faces? I suppose it is, but I think it would entail doing the same things over and over again without taking chances, without taking risks or exploring our limits, without finding out what we can and can’t do. And if we don’t grow, we decay. It’s that simple. Nothing in our universe is static. There’s no other possibility. At Second City we weren’t allowed to decay. My gratitude for permission to fail, granted by our producer, Bernie Sahlins, and our director, Paul Sills, is endless. There are people who come up to me to this day and talk about improvisations they saw at the club almost fifty years ago, and in their faces you know that these memories were magical and have stayed completely alive.

One night, about six months into my life at Second City, I improvised a scene with one of the women in the company that got an enormous audience reaction. It was a relationship scene and it ran over fifteen minutes, which was much longer than most of the material being done at the club at that time. With Sills directing, we rehearsed it for the next few days, fine-tuned it, and put it into the show. It was perhaps the best work I’d ever done, and certainly one of the best things my partner had ever done. Around that time the club was approached by some producers who wanted us to do an hour-long special for Canadian television. This would be a huge break for many reasons, not least of which was that it would be the first time any of us had
ever been on television. The special would be shot in our theater, with a live audience, and my new scene with this actress was to be one of the centerpieces of the show.

As the weeks went on and the TV special loomed closer, I began to feel that the actress I was working with was no longer relating to me. I felt she’d stopped listening to anything I said, and working with her started becoming unpleasant and difficult. The TV show was upon us, and once again I felt my career—my whole future—was at stake. As we continued to perform the scene in the club, I became more and more frustrated. During the scene every other word out of my mouth was “Listen!” and each night it became more emphatic. “
Listen!
” I’d say to her. “
Listen
to me!” I couldn’t seem to make any impact; I couldn’t get her to play ball or to bounce off me. Looking back at it now, I know that her behavior came out of fear. At the time it felt like selfishness, something that she was doing to upstage me and take all the attention for herself, and it drove me crazy. I became so annoyed with her and the way the scene was going that I started to miss laughs, my timing was thrown, and I even began to feel that the audience was starting to dislike me. They didn’t seem to be concerned with my partner’s selfishness; they didn’t notice that she wasn’t
listening
to me, one of the first lessons every actor is supposed to learn. In fact, the worse it got, the more I struggled, the more positive the audience’s reaction to her seemed to be. I began to intensely dislike the audience, feeling betrayed by what I’d felt until then had been a very intelligent crowd, a
university
crowd. We had a
following
, for God’s sake, people who came back, show after show, and up to now had demonstrated taste and intelligence. I started to hate them, and the actress too, and I began to dread doing the scene. Once again I felt my career slipping away.

I tried everything I could think of to fight my way back into the scene. I tried rethinking my character; I tried not paying any attention to the actress, both to regain my power on stage and to give her a dose of her own medicine. I tried to punch up my delivery, I tried talking louder, I tried interrupting her. Nothing worked. A day or so before the TV show, as a last resort, in desperation, hoping for any straw to hang on to, I found myself thinking, “I’m going to love her. Whatever she does, I’m going to accept her just the way she is—I’m going to love her.” Where that idea came from, I will never know. It was completely out of character, completely unlike me. I had never before thought in those terms. At that point in my life the word
love
was not much in my vocabulary, but there you are, desperation does interesting things. I went onstage that evening with one thought in my mind, “I’m going to love her. Whatever she does, I’m going to love her,” and the whole scene came back to me. The character came back, my laughs came back, the audience regained their intelligence, and I found some peace for the first time in weeks. It was probably the most important realization I had ever come to. At that time I didn’t have the wisdom to realize that I had stumbled upon a crucial tool for life—it was simply a way to make
the scene work, which was the deepest understanding I was capable of reaching. My work onstage seemed manageable, sometimes even understandable and concrete. Life offstage was an impenetrable mystery. I wish I’d had the sense then to realize that for a big life, a
macro
life, the walls between career and life have to come crashing down, but I had not yet reached that level of self-knowledge. It took another five years for that idea to begin penetrating my consciousness, and even then it came by microscopic increments. At the time I was still too much in the thrall of earning a living in the field I had been plowing for twenty-five years. There were still worlds to conquer.

For the next six months things got better and better. The group became tighter, we took endless chances, our repertoire grew broader, we had an intensely socially conscious base that we all shared, and we felt proud of our niche and thumbed our noses at “the commercial theater.” I remember an evening when David Merrick came to the show. At that point Merrick practically owned Broadway. He showed up at Second City on a packed Friday night, without a reservation, announced his name, and the manager said, “Oh, hi. We have a full house but we can probably find a place for you to stand in the back.” “I guess you didn’t hear me,” Merrick said imperiously. “My name is
David Merrick
.” The manager said, “Oh! In that case we’ll
definitely
find you
a place to stand in the back.” Merrick watched the show standing in the back. We all thought it was great.

I stayed with the group in Chicago for a year. I found out, very late in the year, that when I was hired it was intended that I front a second wave of actors, the second company ; the first company had long been slated to go to New York. But I had gotten along so well with them that I was now asked to stay with the first company and join them in their Broadway debut. Needless to say, I was ecstatic.

From my one year in Chicago I gained ten years worth of experience. We all did. We did every kind of scene imaginable. We played characters of all ages, throughout history. We played every nationality, we played children, we played animals, we played extraterrestrials and machines. We did mime, we did political satire, we sang songs. One time we did a twenty-minute fake Mozart opera, brilliantly composed by our resident composer/pianist, Bill Mathieu. Once we did a three-minute farce that took place in a Chinese restaurant. One of the actors had to leave for a few days; Tony Holland took over his part without any rehearsal, and that night the scene lasted eighteen minutes. We’d never heard such laughs. For the next few days we tried to recapture what had happened, but we were never able to.