The Second City

Bill Murray?  Tina Fay?  Stephen Colbert?  Heard of ‘em?  Sure, you have, but what you might not have known is that they launched their careers right here in Chicago at The Second City.  Called “Improv’s Harvard” by Vanity Fair, The Second City is a venue for comedy and improvisational theater.  


With Terry and Cathy in town this week we decided to take advantage of catching a show.  I’ve been thinking about Improv lately, partly because I am taking a class in Theater & Improvisation at the Piven Theater in Evanston, but also because I am interested in why people find things funny and what is the attraction of live theater.  Why do we laugh so hard when we see comedians reflecting normal life? Why do we enjoy wandering through art museums and gazing at famous paintings?  The day after we laughed at a Second City Improv show,  I sat in front of a well known Monet painting at the Chicago Art Institute thinking, “I know exactly what that mist feels like.  I’ve seen that.  I’ve lived that moment by a river- in Oregon instead of France- but I’ve experienced that too.”  The “I’ve been there too” experience that overwhelms us in the theater, in comedy, or in a quiet moment with a painting or sculpture is the deeper emotion of connecting with other human beings and feeling that we are not alone in the created world.  The “Ah Ha! somebody else gets it and feels what I feel” moment solidifies our humanity, confirming to us that somehow there is a deeper significance and connection to our lives than the mundane feeling of living it.

I signed up for an acting class with Bernard Beck (Al Capone’s lawyer in the TV series The Untouchables!) partly for some creative stimulation, partly because taking an acting class was on my ‘do before I die’ list, and partly because I wanted to embrace something uniquely special about living in Chicago.  What I didn’t imagine is that it would be much more than an acting class.  After years of teaching Sociology at Northwestern and being involved in the theater in both Chicago and New York, Beck is a seasoned observer of people.  So, it was a bit unnerving last night when he critiqued an improv skit I performed with two other students and gave a more accurate description of my personality (faults and all) than months of counseling could have discerned.  I won’t divulge all that he said in fear that blogging is already an indulgent emotional catharsis for me, but some of his insights are applicable to all of us.  He challenged me to the following:

-stop trying so hard to ‘do it right’ and live and respond more to the moment

-stop planning ahead so much for the future because you are missing what your other actors are doing that might lead you down a completely different improvisational path

-you will be lighter and more in the moment with the freedom to explore, ramble, and fail if you give yourself permission to let life tell your story

-life throws things at us all the time just like improvisational theater.  will you adapt and discover that in adapting to what you did not expect lies the secret to great creative invention?

In acting, writing, painting, preaching, etc... there is great personal vulnerability. How did Beck see into all my struggles of the past year in a moment of an improvisational exercise?  Perhaps we are not as mysterious as we think we are!  Let your life tell its story.  Stop judging it or reacting so hard to the bumps it brings.  These very bumps, trials, and new paths might be an opportunity for your story to take a direction you never would have imagined...