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Improvisation & Second City

these young people first opened in the summer of 1955 was in a storefront next to a bar in Chicago's Hyde Park, and the theater they started was unlike anything else in Chicago or anything else in the world. The process used to create a production was what differentiated this theater from others:

Traditionally, a theater presents a cast which, under the guidance of a director, brings to life a playwright's script. these young Chicagoans, however, had disposed of the playwright's services. The words they spoke were their own and they changed from night to night. They called themselves The Compass, and the work they did and the way they went about it proved to be a watershed development in the history of the theater (Sweet xv).

The Compass was based on a concept producer David Shepherd had borrowed from the commedia dell'arte, a theatrical form prevalent in Renaissance Europe:

A commedia troupe was a company of comic actors who traveled from town to town giving shows. they used no formal script. Instead, the cast worked from a scenario--a handful of pages tacked up backstage on which was outlined the plot of a piece to be performed (Sweet xv).

These productions were usually farces, but they were not limited to outright buffoonery. They often had a satiric edge and burlesqued qualities such as stupidity and hypocrisy seen in such figures as doctors, merchants, and military officers:

In their desire to connect with each particular audience, the cast would ad-lib topical references to local figures and issues. The commedia was popular theater in the truest sense (Sweet xvi).

David Shepherd's intent was to create a contemporary version of the commedia. A young Chicago director named Paul Sills joined with Shepherd in this project. Sills had been exposed to the theater since childhood, and his mother, Viola Spolin, worked as a drama supervisor on the Recreational project with the Works Progress Administration...

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Improvisation & Second City. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 02:28, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692747.html