Students of comedy improvisation sometimes learn an exercise called “Rashomon,” one of the hundreds of such training techniques invented by Josephine Forsberg over 30 years of teaching. The exercise, like the film for which it is named, involves points of view: Students act out a scene, then they act it out again and then again, telling the same story over and over, each time from a new perspective, each time revealing another aspect of the events.
Lately Forsberg has been playing a private version of her game. She reviews the key scenes in her professional life, turns over perspectives, retraces the steps that have led to her estrangement from The Second City, the seminal comedy theater where her career as a teacher began.
“Realities for everyone are not the same,” Forsberg says. “The reality is [one thing] for me, for you maybe not. And that’s the way life is.”
The occasion for this Rashomon of the soul was an extended, sometimes contentious attempt to clarify the relationship between The Second City, which started its own school for improv beginners in 1992, and the Players Workshop of the Second City, Forsberg’s school, which has taught improvisational acting since 1970. The theater wanted Forsberg to drop the “Second City” from her school’s name, a change she feared would mean financial ruin.
In October a deal was reached. The workshop’s name remains intact, with both sides making certain guarantees to keep the schools distinct. But for Forsberg a larger issue remains unresolved: How could the theater she helped nurture into a multimillion-dollar business try to cut all ties; how could one of improvisation’s parents and the mentor of scores of successful actors end up so far removed from the ancestral home?
“[Second City] became my life,” she says. “I never knew this would happen.”
An Oak Park native and DePaul graduate, Forsberg had been acting for 15 years when she and her then-husband, Rolfe, joined the budding Second City family in 1959 at the invitation of co-founder Paul Sills. She soon met Sills’ mother, Viola Spolin, who had developed hundreds of improv games for the children she worked with at Hull House. Spolin was a brilliant teacher and a charismatic personality; Forsberg fell instantly into her orbit and became an unofficial assistant. Pregnant at the time–a son, Eric, was born on Second City’s opening night, Dec. 16, 1959–Forsberg never joined the cast.
“I fell in love with improvisation,” she recalls, “And I thought, what do I want to [perform] for? I’d rather do this.”
Forsberg was one of several teachers kicking around the building, helping the casts figure out what this nascent art form was all about. They were all teaching one another and teaching the audiences, processing Spolin’s lessons, fusing them with traditions of populist theater and political theater and comedy.
“The rivers all came together and started a new thing, and Josephine was part of that,” says Martin de Maat, who is both Forsberg’s nephew and the artistic director of Second City’s in-house training center–and thus a reluctant antagonist in the dispute over her workshop’s name. “I was lucky to be around it. Sheldon [Patinkin, artistic director through the 1960s] was part of that. Paul, Howard Alk, David Shepherd, all those names.”
By the late ’60s, Spolin had left for California and Forsberg inherited her workshops. Not only did Forsberg run classes for the casts and offer loosely organized instruction to the public, but she also founded The Second City’s Children’s Theater, into which she fed her most promising students. She had a handshake deal with Second City’s owners: She taught in the theater building rent-free, and she gave Second City half the box-office revenue from the children’s theater. She found talented people, honed their skills and sent them up to the big leagues.
“Betty Thomas would probably still be waiting tables if Josephine hadn’t pulled her off waiting tables and put her in classes,” says Stephen Roath, a Forsberg student in the ’70s and now general manager of her school. “Shelley Long might still be doing a news program if Josephine hadn’t trained her. Bill Murray would still be painting houses. These people didn’t just come to be at Second City, they were trained by Josephine.”
It is clear to Forsberg that her classes were an important conduit for Second City talent. “[The actors] were in my Children’s Theater,” she says. “From my Children’s Theater I put them in the touring company; from the touring company they went to the resident company.”
But this description of a linear progression, through Forsberg’s program and onto Second City’s stage, is strongly contested by Bernie Sahlins, Second City co-founder and the sole active owner by 1968. “What you’re describing,” he says, “is a kind of structure. There was none of that. We didn’t run our business like IBM.”
To Sahlins, it was never important where the actors came from; they learned what they really had to know by performing. The important thing was that they could cut it on stage, whether they were sent from Forsberg’s workshop or walked in off Wells Street. “I don’t know statistics of how many came from [Forsberg’s workshops]. I don’t think it’s relevant,” he says.
Forsberg was well aware that Sahlins had little interest in her work; it pained her, and it pains her still. “He said this in an interview . . . ‘You don’t need to be trained to improvise. The audience teaches you,’ ” she recalls. “He put down the very classes that were in his building.”
By 1969 Forsberg had more business than she could handle and began assigning students to her daughter, Linnea, and her nephew, de Maat. The next year she took her activities out from under the Second City umbrella, forming an independent company dubbed Players Workshop of the Second City, a name that earned a shrug of permission from Sahlins. “It was kind of one of those things where you sort of nodded your head and pretty soon it was going,” he says, “and then you didn’t want to hurt anybody, so it just carried on its activities. Almost as if it were in another state.”
Whatever her role in the success of The Second City, Forsberg was for many aspiring performers the only game in town, the only person offering regularly scheduled classes in this audacious new art form. “It was the only place to go to get training,” says Patinkin. “And in particular, it was the only place in town to get the training to be noticed at Second City.” Her classes supplied a steady stream of talent for the Second City stage, including the entire casts of 1967 and 1968, and such luminaries as Peter Boyle, George Wendt, Bill Murray and his brother, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Thomas, best known for her cop role in “Hill Street Blues.”
“I think [she] did sort of intuit what each individual person needed from her to progress,” says Wendt, who studied with Forsberg in the early ’70s before moving to the mainstage and eventually to the cast of “Cheers” as Norm. “For example, I never heard anything negative really for a long time, and the first negative feedback I [got], I would have cut and run back to the South Side and never come back again.”
Forsberg’s curriculum evolved out of ideas she tried out over the years, a sort of New Age pedagogy based on finding a student’s “centers”–sensual, sexual, emotional, physical and mental. It was an environment in which tentative beginners could develop the self-confidence needed to take the stage. Forsberg, who had taken two years of psychology at Wright College and even led group therapy sessions for a year, also stressed the importance of mental health in improv comedy, saying that a cluttered mind makes for a uneven performer.
“I saw their problems, as individuals, and solved them, freed them so they could perform,” she says.
“Studying with Josephine was like working with Mother Teresa or Gaea the earth mother,” says Tim Kazurinsky, who went on to the cast of “Saturday Night Live” and films. “She was very nurturing.”
In the late 1970s, Players Workshop, which now employed a full stable of teachers trained in Forsberg’s approach, moved to a house on Lincoln Avenue, though its graduate shows, the Children’s Theater and occasional classes were still held at Second City. The big change came in 1985 when Sahlins sold Second City to two Canadian businessmen: Len Stuart, a silent partner, and Andrew Alexander, the guiding force behind “SCTV” and the owner of the theater’s Toronto branch.
Alexander surveyed Second City’s operations and began a series of expansions by opening The Second City Conservatory, an in-house school for advanced improv students. It would bring together the desultory classes being taught by various alums in the building, add a revenue stream and reinforce the idea that Second City was the spiritual home to an art form. “We were looking at what we could do to complement [the theater],” recalls Alexander, “and at the same time get back to the roots of making sure that we were in a place of nurturing new talent.”
Forsberg briefly worked as an artistic consultant to the new enterprise, on the invitation of Patinkin, but with little enthusiasm. She was feeling wounded: After all these years, there was a sanctioned training program at Second City, and it wasn’t hers.
At first, the Conservatory was no threat to Players Workshop. Alexander and Forsberg signed an agreement allowing her continued use of the Second City name, and a mutually beneficial relationship developed. “We sent our graduating students to the Conservatory and they sent us their beginners,” says Linnea Forsberg. “They wound up being the professional school and we wound up being the starter school, and it worked out really well.”
That arrangement ended abruptly in 1992, when the Conservatory became the Second City Training Center and expanded to include beginning classes. The Children’s Theater had been cut loose a few years earlier–there were “quality control” issues, says Alexander–and now Players had no remaining ties with Second City. The two, in fact, were suddenly competitors.
It was a blow from which Players Workshop has yet to recover, and for which Forsberg has never forgiven Second City. But for the theater’s managers, it was a business decision they had to make.
“What we were looking to do was create a beginning program that led more clearly into our advanced program,” says Anne Libera, then business manager of the training center. “There [was] discomfort in the idea that you’re sending everyone who calls you to a program that you have no artistic control over.” And from a purely financial perspective, she adds, “If you’re a restaurant and everyone is calling you and saying, ‘We want your chicken,’ you don’t send them to another restaurant.” Those who wanted to study in the glow of Second City’s mystique now found their way not to Players, but to the Second City Training Center.
Hemorrhaging students and bouncing through several locations, Players Workshop also had to compete with newcomers to the scene, notably Improv Olympic and Annoyance Theatre.
In 1997 came a lifeline in the form of Roath, a Players Workshop graduate from the 1970s who became an enthusiastic managing director. He drove student numbers back up and established a division doing corporate gigs. But this corporate division had a downside: It heightened tensions with Second City managers, who claimed that clients were confused about the group’s connection to Second City, even though Roath insists that when out on corporate work he operated simply as “Players Workshop.” More confused are countless would-be students who call one school expecting the other.
Josephine Forsberg, who has retired from full-time teaching, was mostly absent from this year’s discussions about whether Players Workshop of the Second City would keep its name intact. Second City exec Joe Keefe and Stephen Roath hollered at each other on the phone about stolen gigs; Second City co-owner Alexander and producer Kelly Leonard weighed the need to protect a profitable trademark against respect for a member of the theater’s old guard; Leonard and Linnea Forsberg, now Players Workshop president, discussed what kind of safety net the workshop would need to let go of its Second City identity.
But ultimately the prospect of losing even a symbolic connection to the world’s most famous comedy theater was too distressing for Forsberg to accept, and Second City decided not to press its claim.
“It’s a dream of mine to have a peaceful relationship between Players Workshop and Second City,” de Maat said at one point during the months of negotiations, and that has more or less come true: Second City pledged to help Players with marketing, help it re-establish a reputation as a nurturing environment in which to study an often-intimidating art form. Players Workshop promised to take greater pains to keep its identity distinct from Second City’s.
“I’m not looking for a multimillion-dollar business,” says Linnea Forsberg. “We’re looking to have Players Workshop exist, to have it out there. It is offering something different. . . . People have gained whole careers, whole changes in life and attitude from it. I think it still deserves to be out there.”
De Maat has another dream, more elusive than the first: “I want Josephine to be at peace with her history at Second City.”
Forsberg is not at peace. “Do you know how it feels,” she asks more than once, “to have your whole life discounted? People don’t even know who I am.”
But she also has plenty of memories–hours spent developing a new art form, coaxing tentative beginners out of their shells, watching her best and brightest soar on stage–that bring a wide smile to her face.
“Second City . . . really was a beautiful place,” she says, recalling the magic of those early years. “Beautiful things were going on there. I loved it. That’s why I hung on, because I was trying to save the art form.
“We save it here,” she says of the Players Workshop. “It’s saved.”
