The Compass
By Janet Coleman
Knopf, 347 pages, $22.95
Mrs. O`Leary`s cow starting the Chicago Fire. The St. Valentine`s Day Massacre. These are the subjects of the two life-sized models on exhibit in
”Here`s Chicago!” the tourist attraction housed in the Water Tower Pumping Station. Heaven knows why those moth-eaten images of mayhem were elected when there are so many others that more appropriately could have celebrated Chicago`s heritage.
My nomination would be a view of the back room of the Hyde Park bar where, in 1955, a group of enthusiastic young people kicked off a movement that revitalized the American theater. While waiting for the exhibit to be overhauled, I am happy to recommend Janet Coleman`s new book, ”The Compass,” which gives those young people and their groundbreaking enterprise the attention they deserve.
I should interject that my opinion of the importance of this subject is hardly objective. Some years ago, I wrote a book about the Compass and its thriving offspring, the Second City. But there are significant differences between the two books. Mine was an oral history that told the story through the eyes of many of the celebrated alumni of the two companies. Coleman has synthesized these and other perspectives into a chronological narrative. What`s more, she has done a diligent job of research, adding many evocative details to the story.
Despite its importance in American stage history, not many in the theatrical community are familiar with the Compass. Part of the reason for this is that most theaters make their reputations on the plays that originate on their stages, move to New York for national endorsement and are concretized in print. But little of the material that originated at Compass is available as text, and the material that is familiar to a national audence is identified with the comedy acts of Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Berman and Severn Darden rather than the auspices under which it was created.
But the importance of Compass is not so much in the material generated there-though I believe a lot of it would hold up well today-but in the working methods of its actors and directors. In the battles they fought-Coleman is especially good on detailing the dynamics of these-was forged the shape of modern improvisational theater. The discoveries made under the imperative to amuse an audience through a few beers formed the practical and theoretical bases of subsequent companies such as the Second City, the Committee and the Premise, not to mention their scores of offspring.
Coleman spends an appropriately substantial number of pages on the famous performers who began there, but the central figure of her narrative is David Shepherd, who conceived the Compass and came to view the fruits of his efforts much as a committed socialist might view a child who grew up to take over General Motors. He could not help but take some pride in the success, but it was not the sort he wanted.
Shepherd`s objectives were political. He dreamed of putting on plays that would awaken the proletariat to the way it was manipulated and exploited by those who ran society. He hoped that these theatrically induced epiphanies would in turn stimulate the audience to action. To realize his dream, he needed vivid new plays to dramatize these themes. But plays take time to write, and there was no way Shepherd could recruit sufficient playwriting talent to create a steady supply.
Casting about for a faster way to generate material, he turned to a young director with whom he`d worked at the Playwrights Theater Club, an off-Loop troupe dedicated to producing Brecht and other heady fare. Shepherd had observed Paul Sills employ improvisational explorations while staging plays
(explorations based on theories developed by Sills` mother, Viola Spolin, who later formalized them and dubbed them theater games). Shepherd convinced Sills that these techniques could be used to synthesize new material, and so Compass was born.
Shepherd`s idea was to have actors improvise from outlines of stories called scenarios (named for the outlines from which commedia dell`arte troupes developed their comedies in the Renaissance). What he hadn`t quite reckoned with is that improvised material by definition reflects the actors`
experience. In order to have placed the concerns of the proletariat onstage, his players would have had to have been members of the proletariat.
But the workers that Shepherd wanted and needed were too busy earning their livings and supporting their families to fool around for long hours and little pay. The people who could afford to work at the Compass tended to be single, white, childless, college-educated liberals from mostly middle-class backgrounds. Though some scenarios dealing with the subjects Shepherd favored were staged, left to its own devices, the company tended to do parodies of Ibsen, Pirandello and Tennessee Williams and sketches about parent-child confrontations and sexual politics. (Most of the sketches that made Nichols and May cultural icons of the New Frontier and the phone routines that made Shelley Berman a comedy superstar of the late 1950s first saw light of stage at Compass.)
In ”From Bauhaus to Our House,” Tom Wolfe noted that architectural principles formulated in the 1930s to facilitate low-cost housing for ”common people” became the basis for high-rise luxury housing for the well-to-do. Similarly, Shepherd`s principles, formulated to benefit the working class, became the basis for a variety of cabaret entertainment that entertained the middle class. And yes, this rankled the idealistic producer. As Coleman quotes Compass actor Roger Bowen, ”Mike and Elaine were doing these wonderful things, and that was all irrelevant to him because if it didn`t in some way carry forward his concept of popular theater, then he couldn`t really appreciate it.”
Coleman is more successful at bringing to life the backstage drama than in conveying the quality of what was performed onstage. She quotes some funny lines (most of them familiar from the comedy albums of Nichols and May, Berman and Darden) and summarizes the plots of a few of the scenarios, but a wealth of material goes unquoted or undescribed. Also, though she correctly attributes to Compass a considerable influence on American film, theater and TV, she doesn`t support her case with enough analysis of what form this influence took. For instance, what is it about having worked at the Compass that made its alumni such fitting collaborators for the likes of Jules Feiffer, Joseph Heller, Neil Simon, David Mamet, Robert Altman and Herb Gardner? And what about the relationship between Chicago`s improvisational theaters and its later theatrical renaissance?
Still, the satisfactions more than offset the faults. Coleman has produced a valuable account of how the Compass set sail for one destination and arrived at another. Shepherd may have been ”perpetually disappointed” by this change in course, but Coleman`s account re-emphasizes what an important voyage it was for the American theater.
