The Second City's facade (gray building on the right) began as the Schiller Theater, the home of the German Opera Company in Chicago, and was designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler in the 1890s. This portion was salvaged when the building was razed in 1960.
One of the best things I ever did for myself as an aspiring writer was take acting classes. It was also one of the best things I ever did for myself as a human being. I'll get to the why of that soon. First I want to fill you in on the where--as in where I took these magical, life-changing acting classes.
In Chicago there's no shortage of places to study acting. Theaters are to Chicago what pubs are to Dublin. "Good puzzle would be cross Dublin without passing a pub," wrote James Joyce in Ulysses about his hometown. "Good puzzle would be cross Chicago without passing a theater (or a hot dog joint)," writes me, here, about my hometown. Some sources put the count of theaters in Chicago at over 200. Some also claim this makes Chicago the true theater capital of the U.S. I don't know enough about American theater to back up or challenge that claim. But I do know that Chicago's contribution to American theater--and world theater--is pretty significant.
Chicago is, after all, the Second City and the home of The Second City, the improvisational theater troupe that revolutionized comedy theater in the U.S. and beyond when it first opened its doors in 1959. The Second City is also where I took those magical acting classes, and where I recently joined up with a walking tour of Chicago's Old Town neighborhood on a brisk Sunday morning.
Balloon house architecture in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood.
In Old Town.
Seen in a chocolate shop window in Old Town. Money, guns, and high cholesterol--the story of Chicago.
Second City alumni John Candy, Dan Aykroyd, Rosemary Radcliffe, Eugene Levy, and Gilda Radner, in 1974, pic on entranceway to The Second City theatre in Chicago.
And that's just from the Mainstage. Famous names who have taken classes at The Second City Training Center (without going on to perform on the Mainstage) include Amy Poehler, Halle Berry, and Jon Favreau. Other improv schools in Chicago, like iO and Annoyance Theatre, can boast of having taught Vince Vaughan, Jason Sudeikis, Seth Meyers, and Jane Lynch (as well as a good few of the names already mentioned above) a thing or two at the start of their careers. After Chicago, many of these actors went on to join the cast or writing crew of "Saturday Night Live," the longest-running sketch comedy show in American television history. From "SNL" it was typically on to Hollywood. In other words, there's an excellent chance that if you've ever had a really good laugh some night watching TV or at the movies in the last 50 years, you've got Chicago to thank for it. (You're welcome, world.)
Considering Chicago improv's solid record of churning out future stars, it only makes sense that the most famous improv theater of all would milk its reputation for tourism purposes. The Second City has long promoted itself as a must-see attraction for visitors to Chicago, and its walking tours of the Old Town area are nothing new--there was a tour on offer by the theater going back at least 10 years ago. After a few years' hiatus of the original Second City tour, the current walking tour was created by Margaret Hicks, a Chicago tour guide, author, and improv performer. Hicks leads the tour twice a week--on Sunday mornings and Wednesday early evenings--from May through October. The tour lasts about an hour and a half to 2 hours and costs only $15 per person. (Hicks has her own tour company that offers a few other walking tours of different areas of Chicago, called Chicago Elevated. She didn't tell me this, as I turned shy and forgot to ask her a few basic questions about herself after the tour, but I stalked, er, Googled her later and found her Twitter account and FB page--I've provided links in case you'd like to stalk her too.)
Margaret Hicks in front of the Twin Anchors. I could not for the life of me get a picture of her with her eyes open this day.
Margaret Hicks shows us a Chicago home with a plaque on it, so naturally we had to stop and look at it.
Hicks's version of the tour offers a bit of general Chicago history (i.e., the Great Fire of 1871, neighborhood architecture, and, ahem, local corruption) along with stuff about the beginnings of The Second City, the rules and philosophy of improv, and gossip about some of The Second City's famous alumni. The gossip is the best part of course. Everyone wants to hear about John Belushi's wild days and genius, about Chris Farley's loyalty to Chicago (even after finding fame in New York and Hollywood) to the end of his life, about Gilda Radner's pure joy for performing and making people laugh, about Harold Ramis's Chicago-based inspiration for his blockbuster Ghostbusters (even though the film was set in New York), and about how Mike Myers and Joan Rivers actually kinda sucked at improv.
St. Michael's Church in Old Town. Part of the church survived the Chicago Fire of 1871. This is also where Second City alum Chris Farley went to mass regularly.
The Twin Anchors bar and restaurant in Old Town. Fans of the films Return to Me and The Dark Knight might recognize this place.
Just a few blocks from The Second City and Piper's Alley, the Twin Anchors was a favorite hangout of Frank Sinatra. By the way, that dude on the right is having his novel made into a movie by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.
But is the tour funny? That's the question. The answer is Yes...and. (Improv in-joke there.) Hicks manages to get a lot of mileage--and laughs--out of Chicago's history of violence, corruption, and general weirdness. She gets in a lot of jokes at the expense of New York too...maybe even too many. Like any true Chicagoan, I think New York City is inferior to Chicago, even something of a craphole to be honest. I will never understand why so many foreign visitors who travel to the U.S. consistently limit their sightseeing here to those 4 American hell zones known as New York, DisneyWorld, Las Vegas, and Hollywood, and completely bypass the country's actual gems, such as our national parks and wilderness areas and genuinely lovely and interesting cities like Austin, San Diego, New Orleans, Portland, and yes, Chicago. Saying that, I think too much ribbing or comparison to other places during a tour can wear itself out a bit. Comparing Chicago to New York over and over only tends to expose those infamous "second city" insecurities that earned us the nickname in the first place.
The Sears Tower as seen from an Old Town side street.
Up the street from The Second City,a bit of Old Town and old Chicago history.
In Old Town. Not a theater, this is a horse-and-carriage company and stables.
Comedy competition in Old Town. The difference between a club like Zanies and The Second City is that Zanies is strictly stand-up (i.e., scripted) while The Second City is improv and experimental.
More famous faces.
Speaking of which, Chicago's branding as "the Second City" by Mr. A-Hole J. Liebling back in the 1950s is covered by Hicks on the tour, as she explains how and why The Second City theater appropriated the nickname for itself. And in between the laughs, Hicks does a good job making clear how seriously Chicago takes improv. Before this tour, I never knew of improv's surprising beginnings as a tool invented by Viola Spolin for helping immigrant and inner-city children. Spolin's son, Paul Sills, a student and theater director in the 1950s at the University if Chicago, borrowed his mother's techniques to form the Compass Players, the first improvisational theater group in the United States, and later The Second City. Not content with just making audiences chuckle, the early players and improvisers of The Second City created comedy that satirized and commented on current social and political issues and set down rules for improv that encouraged players to perform as a team, stay in the moment, follow their instincts, keep the momentum of the scene going, and play up to the intelligence of their character and audience.
List of Second City alumni inside the theater building.
Find the famous name.
These rules aren't as easy to bring to the stage as some might think, especially night after night. If you don't believe it, try taking an improv class yourself and see how you fare at it. Along with improv rules, The Second City also created a full-fledged training program for aspiring improvisers, comedians, and actors. Hicks lays it all out on the tour, explaining that while anyone can take beginning improv classes at The Second City, getting to perform on the Mainstage takes several years' commitment and a little bit of good timing. Aspiring players must first take at least a year's worth of improv classes before auditioning for The Second City Conservatory, where they'll learn how to put together sketches for a revue and perform on the school's smaller stages such as Donny's Skybox. After two years with The Conservatory, students can audition for The Second City's touring company and gain a few more years' experience. The end goal of all this apprenticeship is to get hired as one of the resident actors on the Mainstage or with the e.t.c. cast. Getting to the Mainstage is far from a given for Second City alumni. Hicks explains that there are only 12 spots altogether between the Mainstage cast and the e.t.c. cast, and unlike The Conservatory and the touring company, there's no auditioning for the Mainstage. Cast members are instead chosen by a combination of luck, talent, and reputation--i.e., there's a spot open, the theater company knows who you are and has taken notice of your skills and development, and you haven't burned any bridges or stepped on too many toes (but have maybe held onto a few coattails--that's allowed) to get this far. If all these stars are aligned, you might get the tap on your shoulder by the company. Might. If not, I suppose there's always New York or L.A. (Who's the "second city" now, bi-coasters?)
There's another specific requirement on the way to The Second City Mainstage, one that's required even before auditioning for The Conservatory. Improv and comedy writing classes aren't enough. All aspiring Conservatory students must have completed an acting course before auditioning. And that's kinda where my own experience with The Second City comes in...
I've never auditioned for The Conservatory. And I'm not a former improv student. What I am is a woman who had wanted to be an actress when I was a kid, but never pursued it in any way. I was extremely shy for one thing...I still am. Plus it was made clear to me when I was young that such dreams weren't realistic. "You want a nice clean job," I remember my mother telling me when I was young and mentioned something about wanting to be an actress. What she meant was some position in an office or a school maybe, something stable. I didn't have the confidence back then to push ahead with my dreams anyway, but I didn't have the practicality in me to entirely forget them either. And there was the shyness problem anyway--really the biggest obstacle. (In defense of my mother and father, I came to understand that their point of view comes from being born into the Great Depression to uneducated parents and growing up during a world war in urban poverty--in my father's case--and working-class--in my mother's case--with little education of their own beyond high school. They didn't have much stability or financial security growing up. They wanted to be sure their own children did. And one of the last occupations that provides stability or security is acting.)
Outside the Mainstage entrance, by the box office.
Famous faces on the box office wall at Second City.
But in the winter of 2006-07 I made a decision to make some changes in my life. I was living on my own in Chicago with a full-time job and friends and my family living fairly nearby. But I was habitually bored and pretty lonely. A new year was approaching and I decided I'd try to shake things up a little in my life, maybe get out more, meet some people, make some new friends, volunteer somewhere. Some time in 2006 I'd picked up a flyer about acting classes being held at some studio in the city, and I thought 'Maybe you should finally give this a try.' A few months later I was watching an episode of "Cold Case" where a cab driver named Dennis goes after his dream of being an actor, lands a role in a community production of "Cabaret," but then gets rubbed off on opening night. "Dennis was brave," the lady detective taunts the production's musical director, who as it turned out murdered Dennis out of jealousy. 'I wanna be brave,' I remember thinking. So I decided then and there to go ahead and sign up for acting classes somewhere, even if it was sad and cheesy that my inspiration was an episode of "Cold Case."
On the box office wall. Stephen Colbert would be so proud of me turning a night vegging on the couch watching "Cold Case" into the beginning of a creative journey. ;-)
I chose acting classes at The Second City because of the theater's reputation. I didn't consider that such a reputation would probably just make my jitters worse by the time the first class session began. I was a nervous wreck the day I took the Brown Line to the Old Town neighborhood for the first class--and I was a nervous wreck pretty much every class session after. It never got easier for me--the jitters and the fear. I just got a little braver at living through it.
The acting program at The Second City Training Center at that time consisted of 3 levels (I believe they've since added on 1 or 2 more). In a nutshell, in the first level you worked on a monologue, in the second you got a partner and worked on a scene, and in the third you worked on scenes and monologues from a specific, more challenging playwright (in the case of my group, we worked on Tennessee Williams). All 3 levels were taught by Michael Pieper, a theater director from San Diego (by way of Nebraska) who created the acting program at The Second City. He'd probably be embarrassed for me to say it here, but I came to regard Michael as something of an angel. Though a big man with a fullback's physique, he was nothing like the scary and demanding "Master Thespian" type teacher I expected. He was never pretentious, never insulting or unfair. He had no interest in making a student feel inferior or unable or as if he or she had no right to be in his class. Michael taught us acting based on the Method technique, pioneered by Stanislavsky and later Lee Strasberg. We rarely did anything improvisational in class. We worked with scripts, we learned beat work, we memorized lines, we rehearsed, we learned how to audition. That isn't to say we never experimented--Michael in fact encouraged this. I remember one class in the first level where we all practiced our monologues over and over, out loud and at the same time, using different accents, different emotions, different postures and positions, no matter how seemingly inappropriate some of these accents or emotions or movements might be to the scene. The idea was that you never knew what such experimentation and play and creative open-mindedness would trigger in your interpretation of a character and scene, what complexities and nuances might develop. Don't worry about making a fool or failure out of yourself, Michael would tell us. Just play. Use your body. Get out of your head. Live in the moment.
Ordinary Chicago setting, a few blocks from The Second City.
Chicago home.
Our city in a garden. Under the el tracks in Old Town.
In the second level this experimentation and play was used more in service to specific senses and in calling up specific memories to help you emotionally develop the scene. We had exercises where we had to all walk around the room with our eyes closed while trying to identify our scene partner by the sound of her voice or by his smell. Trust was also a big focus in this level, and it was around this time when I began to be aware of how much these classes were helping me. I have a lot of problems with trusting people. And of course, it's had an effect on my relationships with other people. Until acting classes, my not getting to know and connect with other people easily was always something I'd blamed on my shyness. And despite being an emotional person, for years I'd been stuffing my emotions, shutting them down essentially, after a particularly difficult time in my life around 2001. That emotional repression definitely affected my attempts at acting in the first level--Michael summed up my final performance of my monologue (from The Widow's Blind Date by Israel Horowitz) by telling me, "You're holding back." Considering my monologue was of a woman who'd been gang-raped at 18 finally confronting and moving in for revenge on 2 of her attackers 20 years later, there was no place for holding back. (Sidenote: In case you were wondering if we worked on comic plays and scenes in class, what with this being The Second City and all, the preceding sentence should answer your question. No. No, we did not work on funny stuff in class. Not even close.) By then I had already signed up for the second level, and Michael singled me out of everyone else in the first level to tell me, "I'm going to push you. Just so you know. Be prepared."
He wasn't joking. He did push me, and everyone in the second level class. This was the level where you had to start trusting your classmates and scene partner (and really, the audience) by opening up with your emotions. This meant exercises like getting onstage and sharing memories of highly emotional experiences in your past with the entire class. It was scary as hell, but an essential part of moving forward with your creative (and I'd say personal) development. And it created a bond with your classmates that made performing (and for me, coming to class) easier and more natural.
Another thing about our second level classes was that they were held in the Mainstage theater. So every week we
rehearsed onstage alongside the spirits of crazy John Belushi and young Stephen
Colbert and in between the tables and chairs in the audience section. Looking back, I
wish I'd thought to take some pictures during class, even once. But I was always so
nervous before every class, it never occurred to me how fortunate and cool this experience was and that I might take a picture or something for memories' sake.
Piper's Alley marquee advertising Second City productions. Piper's Alley houses The Second City.
Self-explanatory.
Serious face on the facade of Second City's entrance. German novelist Fritz Reuter or Parks and Rec cast member Nick Offerman. You be the judge.
By the third level, our class size had dwindled considerably since the first (which had several sections). By this time, you were sticking with the program either because you were serious about acting or loving the experience of learning about acting...or maybe both. I stuck with it because I knew it was helping me to grow and face up to certain issues in my life. I would also see a change in my writing after these classes--more emotion, more vulnerability, a little more trust. Just play, I try and tell myself when I'm worrying too much about a piece of writing. Use your heart. Get out of your head. I have acting classes to thank for opening me up. And I loved the teacher and my classmates, some of whom I still count as good friends today. In all honesty, I never got over my stage fright or shyness enough to audition--and every time I had to give my final performance of a scene or monologue I struggled to keep my legs from shaking. But I also learned this is normal and typical for a great many actors and performers. One of my classmates was a young woman who studied improv at iO in Chicago who told me she felt like vomiting every night right before she had to go out on stage. You feel sick and nervous not because you're weak or not brave or not prepared, but because you're doing something that you care about, something that matters to you. You're basically presenting a piece of your creative self to an audience, offering them a gift, making yourself vulnerable, and taking a risk of failure as much as success.
Michael told us from the very first class to not be afraid of failure. Failure is just a part of life. It shouldn't stop you from taking risks. If anything, it should free you. If there's a chance you might fail, then you might as well go for it. Michael would say, "If you're gonna fail, at least fail big." And funny enough, Margaret Hicks, the tour guide of The Second City's walking tour, left us with a similar philosophy. The greatest thing about both The Second City and Chicago, she told us at the end of the tour, is that you can fail here. In New York everyone is looking to get ahead. In L.A. everyone is looking for the agent or producer in the audience who might hand them a great career. In Chicago? "In Chicago, no one is watching you," said Margaret. In other words, get over yourself. We're the Second City, the Third Coast, The City That Works...which means we're the city that gets on with it and keeps trying. In Chicago, life, success, failure, all of it is much like improv. Improv differs from other kinds of theater and from stand-up comedy in that it's unscripted. This means that if you're an improv performer and you have a bad night on the stage, you can at least just let it go and not worry about it again--it's gone. But it also means that if you have a great night onstage, you have to let it go and can't relive it again--it's gone. The glory is in the moment and in the risk. "If you fail, fail again and fail better," Margaret tells us at the end of the tour. The beauty is that you can fail here--in the Second City and at The Second City--Chicago won't hold it against you.
Improv was born in this town for a reason. Chicago says, 'We're all improvising, we're all working off script. We're all making it up as we go along. Win or lose, pass or fail, hit or miss, just embrace it. Live in the moment. Enjoy it." That's your Second City, baby--second to none.
Mozart looks out from the facade of The Second City theater. The genius liked a good laugh.
Can't stop, won't stop. Seen on a Chicago street corner.
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