If Chicago’s famed Second City is the slick, mercurial New York Yankees of improv and sketch comedy, Charna Halpern’s ImprovOlympic is the scruffy farm team — replete with a 24-hour improv clubhouse, draft beer, available psychotherapy, a maternalistic coach and a deep-seated culture that the game itself matters more than making it to the majors.
And at I.O., peak game time is unfashionable Monday night.
Around 9, Halpern’s scruffy, slightly chaotic little one-woman, for-profit improv joint — which sits in a building owned by her cousin and shoved amid the garish bars of Clark Street just a few feet south of Wrigley Field — fills to the gills with its typical youthful blend of students and actual paying audience members. They’ve come to see I.O.’s trade-mark “Armando Diaz Theatrical Experience” — a silly title that means nothing to the average person, but to the gung-ho improv student represents something between the ultimate workout and a weekly church service.
Part game, part performance ritual, the show’s structure involves “the Armando” asking for an audience suggestion and then delivering a spontaneous monologue, upon which as many as a dozen improvisers then riff complex new scenes and trajectories. On Monday nights, when Second City performers have the night off, the leading players of the game tend to show up. En masse. And last Monday, Halpern herself played the Armando.
“Wow,” said one young fellow in the second row as Halpern did her thing. “She’s, like, my mother’s age.”
And so it continues for the 53-year-old Halpern after 25 years in this game: a never-ending quest for respect.
For herself. For her theater. For her art.
The tour buses love Second City, the leading brand of live sketch comedy. And when someone from Chicago — say Tina Fey or Rachel Dratch — makes it big on “Saturday Night Live” or beyond, it’s invariably Second City that gets the published credit for their pivotal youthful training.
Halpern thinks that’s unfair.
“Yes, Tina and Rachel did shows at Second City,” she says. “But we were the ones that trained them.”
Dratch and Fey were indeed longtime fixtures at I.O. (the troupe’s name was officially changed from ImpovOlympic this summer after the International Olympic Committee threatened a lawsuit) before they ever showed up at Second City. Andy Richter trained at ImprovOlympic a lot too. And so (at various times) did Andy Dick, “Saturday Night Live” performer Amy Poehler and “Anchorman” director/former “SNL” head writer Adam McKay. And even though his Second City connection is the one that gets publicized, Mike Myers is one of Halpern’s most loyal promoters.
“I think of ImprovOlympic as my alma mater,” says Richter, Conan O’Brien’s former sidekick, brushing over his attendance at both the University of Illinois and Columbia College. “ImprovOlympic was my most formative educational institution. Period.”
Part club, part college
For the last quarter-century or so, I.O. has been part experimental comedy club, part tuition-hungry college for the geeky but starstruck, part guru-driven religion, part improvisers’ frat and sorority house and part boozy emotional support center for the wannabes who never will be.
And you have to pay Halpern to play.
Yet over the past two decades or so, Halpern has built the kind of loyal-at-all-costs, rich and famous alumnae base that any educational institution would covet. Next Saturday night, Myers, Richter, Dick, Poehler and Dratch (among others) are slated to show up gratis at the 3,500-seat Chicago Theatre to celebrate what Halpern has deemed the troupe’s 25th anniversary show, despite having declared the 20th anniversary only four years ago.
Tickets to the 25th anniversary show, says Halpern with a typically intense grin, “sold out in 24 hours flat.” It’s a fair bet that most of the people at the Chicago Theatre (paying as much as $75) will never have stepped inside ImprovOlympic.
Brand-conscious Second City carefully differentiates between its student operations and its public theater. (Training center graduates are not even allowed to say they “performed” at Second City.) But at the much looser and messier ImprovOlympic, training and performing just mesh.
That’s great for the performers. But what about the audience?
“You can go to Second City and see how improv has shaped the show or you go to ImprovOlympic and see it in its raw form,” says Tim Kazurinsky, the Second City alum turned writer-director. “I.O. is like stand-up comedy after you’ve gone past Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor. There are brilliant performers. After that, the rest can be pretty unwatchable.”
So is I.O. a cliquish training camp with too many mediocre shows or a unique, bonafide, overlooked Chicago cultural institution? Maybe all of the above.
“What ImprovOlympic offers the young improv artist is a place to fail,” says Jonathan Pitts, who runs the independent non-profit Chicago Improv Festival. “Second City won’t bring you in until you are ready to play ball professionally.”
Halpern herself is an oversized,controversial personality — she’s known around town as a tough, single-minded defender of her own theater, at times at the expense of others.
ImprovOlympic’s place in Chicago comedy-theater history is similarly complex. (There’s now also an “I.O. West” in Los Angeles.) Ever since improv was born here (allegedly) some 50 years ago, improv and sketch-comedy have been fraught with conflict and at least one great divide. For decades, there have been competing gurus, infamous feuds, opposite philosophies, competing institutions and widespread grudging respect.
Bernie Sahlins, the founder of Second City, argued for decades that improv merely is a workshop tool to create scripted sketches that an audience might actually want to watch. That’s still Second City’s practice and philosophy.
An art in its own right
Meanwhile, the late Del Close, the hard-living improv teacher who was fired from Second City in 1982 and later became the resident guru of I.O., argued vociferously that improv was an art in its own right and should be learned and performed as such. Close and Sahlins were still happily arguing about it just hours before Close died.
“Second City and ImprovOlympic,” Pitts says, “always were apples and oranges.”
And the students? There are many recognizable types at both institutions. Young women with goofy personalities and vulnerable hearts. Middle-aged improvisers overcoming past addictions and newly acquired cynicism. Mavericks who talk their way into big L.A. deals and get more money than respect. Acknowledged masters of the form who still live in Chicago and still don’t make any real money.
But something new is in play. The leading graduates of Chicago comedy-training, such as McKay and Fey, increasingly are in positions to greenlight major projects and hire kindred spirits. That means a huge increase in awareness of the Chicago comedy institutions.
Meanwhile, long-form improv — once an esoteric Chicago entity nurtured by Close at I.O. — is now becoming mainstream thanks to simpatico shows such as HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” That means that demand for classes — always a huge profit center for Chicago’s comedy theaters — has gone through the roof.
At Second City and I.O. alone, some 2,500 students (many from out-of-state) are opening their checkbooks to try and overcome the daunting odds against comedy stardom. Given the potential exploitation in people paying to be trained by companies that only maybe will offer them jobs, it’s not hard to find disgruntled former students from either institution. But they’re usually the failures. The ones who make it typically burst with gratitude.
“Charna did so much for me,” says Stephnie Weir, now a performer on Fox’s “Mad TV.” “I learned so much from her.”
In her formative years, Weir had one foot in both Second City (where she did sketch comedy) and ImprovOlympic (where she improvised). Faced with that choice, a lot of youngsters dreaming of a spot on “SNL” wonder where they should attach themselves.
“It’s the biggest question on a young performer’s mind,” says Ryan Stone, a current ImprovOlympic student.
“When you go to Second City as a student, you know you’re a part of the machinery and there’s a small chance of being pulled out of that,” says Mark Sutton of the Annoyance Theatre (which also teaches people in the field). “At I.O., they create a sense of community. And that’s to the betterment of some people and to the determent of others because your frame of reference gets very small.”
Halpern’s frame of reference always has been improv and Chicago. She says she met Kazurinsky in the late 1970s while drunk at a party, and he used his clout to set up a special audition for her at Second City. Halpern was rejected. But she caught a bug.
“I was interested,” she says, “in seeing what I had blown.”
Taking a few classes
Like many a Second City wannabe, that initial snub led Halpern to cough up some cash and take classes at the Players Workshop of the Second City — a separate institution that was teaching many of the troupe’s quasi-official classes. (Following an acrimonious split, Second City now runs its own.)
Studying at Players Workshop led Halpern to workshops run by improv guru Paul Sills and Compass Players co-founder David Shepard. It was Shepard who originally came up with the name “Improvisation Olympic” while working in Canada, but Halpern persuaded him to let her create a Chicago version. At the time he agreed — although the pair later had one of those famous feuds.
Halpern then took her ImprovOlympic show on the road, trekking from bar to bar and working everywhere from Crosscurrents in Lakeview to Papa Milano’s to bars such as Orphans and Cotton Chicago.
She also saved the notoriously self-destructive Close’s life, offering him both a steady job and an emotional refuge. By the early 1980s, Close, an admitted drug addict with an interest in witchcraft and a vulnerability to severe depression, had become too strange and unreliable for Sahlins’ Second City, and Halpern stepped in after he got fired.
“I said to Del, `How would you like to make 200 bucks and some pot?'” she says. “He said, `What do I have to do?'”
In essence, Halpern and Close decided to marry the short-games format of ImprovOlympic with Close’s interest in the long form. “I became a student,” Halpern says, “and he ran the show artistically.”
Close, beloved by most of the celebrities in Saturday’s show, got someone to take care of him. Halpern got instant artistic respectability and a teacher with whom people were dying to work. “I got him an apartment across the street from me,” she says, “and Del taught me everything he knew.”
Close’s biographer, Jeff Griggs, devotes a section of his recent first-person book about Close to the complex, seemingly platonic relationship between Close and Halpern (who has never married). Griggs recalls Close saying: “She saved my life, you know. If she hadn’t taken care of me the past 20 years, I’d have died in an alley somewhere.”
Following Close’s death in 1999, Halpern had to go it alone in her new theater, which had opened in 1995.
In the past few years, I.O. has produced a good number of sketch-comedy shows as distinct from pure improv shows. Some productions, such as the musical sketch show “Cupid Has a Heart On,” are directly aimed at the same crowd Second City goes after. But nothing irritates a die-hard ImprovOlympic participant more than a suggestion that the theater is wandering from its roots.
At I.O., improv remains the Holy Grail.
Bypassing Second City
Yet Halpern argues that it’s no longer necessary to stop at Second City on the way to “Saturday Night Live.” “Lorne [Michaels] comes here, too, now,” Halpern says. “`Mad TV’ comes directly to me. People call up all the time and ask for my actors.”
As Annoyance’s Sutton points out, I.O. students “don’t learn a lot about working with scripts.” And I.O. may be a nurturing place, but it’s also a for-profit business.
Nonetheless, Halpern argues that I.O. can be both a ticket to fame and a warm community of artists. “The performers believe I.O. belongs to them,” she says. “That’s why nobody ever leaves me.”
Second City owner Andrew Alexander acknowledges that I.O. has expanded Chicago’s talent pool. “It has been terrific for us,” he says. “No question. In our business, people get better when they get more stage time.”
And the famous rivalries?
“There has been a certain level of that over the years, but people make too much of it,” Alexander says. “For Second City, improv always has been a tool and it still is. We’re in the game of creating material.”
So you can make it now from I.O. straight to “Saturday Night Live” or “Mad TV” or movie stardom?
Alexander laughs.
“Sure. But the producers and scouts get a better sense of people’s skills at Second City. I think it can be hard for people to spot what they are looking for when there are a lot of different people on the stage — just improvising.”
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cjones5@tribune.com
