The development of improvisational drama in America is complex, and falls quite outside the pattern we have described so far, which is primarily European. True, the use of applied improvisation derives ultimately from Europe. But it has become so thoroughly neutralized as to have become distinctively American. And there is also a genuine native tradition quite distinct from anything we have met so far in this study.

For convenience (and because there is a geographical as well as metaphorical distinction to be made) we can categorize the former, naturalized tradition as the 'New York' school, while the latter, native impro is associated with the 'second city', Chicago.

Michel Saint-Denis (through his influence on the drama school curriculum, especially at the New York Julliard School) undoubtedly added a great deal to American actor training, as he did to that of Europe. But the use of improvisation in American acting pre-dates Saint Denis, stems more directly from the Russian rather than the French tradition, and is inextricably bound up with the development of American written drama.

Richard Boleslavsky (born Boleslaw Srzednicki in Poland, 1889, and educated in Russia) had trained at the Moscow Art Theatre since 1906. Like Mikhail Chekhov, he had been a leading member of the First Studio under Sulerzhitsky, directing the first production there (Heijerman's The Good Hope) in 1911 and remaining a member of Stanislavsky's company until 1920. Finding himself increasingly at odds with post-revolutionary Russia, Boleslavsky fled, first to Warsaw, and thence in 1922 to New York, where he worked as a director for an émigré revue company.

In 1923, following the celebrated tour of the Moscow Art Theatre to America, there was enough interest in Stanislavskian acting techniques for Boleslavsky to be asked to run a Laboratory Theatre on Russian rehearsal techniques. He was soon joined by Maria Ouspenskaya, one of the MAT's actresses (who had studied with Sulerzhitsky since 1908, and joined the First Studio also in 1911) who had chosen to leave the Russian company and remain in New York after the tour. The new venture was christened the American Laboratory Theatre, usually known as the Lab.

There were three aspects of the total training: (1) development of the actor's body and voice, which Boleslavsky called the outer means of expression; (2) refinement of the inner means of expression which enabled the actor to live through in his imagination -- the situations conceived by a playwright; and (3) enlargement of the actor's intellectual and cultural awareness.46

Specialists in ballet, interpretive dance, eurhythmics, fencing, mime, voice, speech and make-up did the first aspect. The third aspect was taught by specialist teachers in theatre history, art, music, literature and 'ideas of Western culture'. Boleslavsky and Ouspenskaya particularly specialized in the second aspect, and the work was derived from Stanislavskian practice, which was totally unknown in America until this time.

The aim was to train an ensemble for three years before letting them perform publicly, though this ideal was eventually compromised. As the repertory theatre of the Lab took up more of Boleslavsky's time, so Ouspenskaya took most of the responsibility for teaching. Her classes centered on small group improvisations, one-minute plays and character work. Her improvisations, often animal or object characterizations, stressed observation but also tried to use improvisation to explore aspects of characterization alien to the actor's own personality - something the MAT had resisted. Her work was closer to Stanislavskian practice in its use of given circumstances:

Improvised situations, such as waiting at a train station, were often complicated by varying the given circumstances suddenly to force the student to adjust and react flexibly to different situations while remaining true to the basic donnees of his character. During improvisations students were urged to connect with each other - to become sensitive to one another's subtlest changes in attitude or behaviour.47

This is the core of the New York style: derived from Stanislavsky but with subtle differences, used in the development of characterization, and basically a system which functions interactively - between the actors in the scene. The Chicago system, as we shall see, derives from a different, not originally Theatrical tradition, and stresses interaction between the performers and the audience. The New York style, like its Russian original, strives to keep its intentions 'upstage of the footlights', inside the scene. The Chicago style crosses the boundary into the auditorium, both ways. The Lab, which Boleslavsky ran from 1923 to 1929, was profoundly influential. Among its approximately 500 members were Stella Adler, Ruth Nelson, Eunice Stoddard, who studied acting; the critic Francis Fergusson (who was Boleslavsky's assistant for a while); and Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, who studied directing and whose ideas developed from Boleslavsky's teaching rather than directly from Stanislavsky (who had yet to publish) would profoundly affect the development of American acting, writing and drama teaching via first the Group Theatre and later the Actors' Studio. Boleslavsky left the Laboratory Theatre in 1929, and spent the remainder of his life working as a director in Hollywood, where he died in 1937.

Ouspenskaya founded her own school in 1932 and then, in 1936, she too went to Hollywood, where she died in a fire in 1949. Her work is the bridge between Stanislavsky's understanding of the improvisational etude, based on the given circumstances of the play, and the simplified, naturalized version of his work that would later typify the work of the Actors' Studio in New York under Lee Strasberg.

As well as the usual repertoire of improvisation exercises, Strasberg developed Stanislavsky's notion of 'public solitude' into the 'Private Moment exercise' in which the participants explore themselves, and work on their own blockages. Pretending that the audience is not present, the performer does something that she or he would normally do if they were alone. Strasberg stressed the danger of this exercise for emotionally disturbed actors, since the introspective exercise can act as a negative reaffirmation of the original problem. Just as damagingly, the Private Moment at the Studio was not private enough; it was shared with others. Laurence Olivier was present on one notorious occasion when two actors - one male, one female, briefly attired, powdered each other with talc, oblivious to the onlookers, for half-an-hour. Obviously, baldly described like this (as it was) the method sounds appallingly self-indulgent. Yet the mistake is not in the doing of the exercise, but in the breakdown of its privacy. Not what were they doing; but what were we doing there?

This was the New York style carried to an extreme: theatre is never a Private Moment. It is the most public of all the arts. A feeling of exclusion makes the spectator angrier than anything   else in theatre can. Strasberg attempted to overcome the tension           generated by the presence of onlookers, which blocks the release of the actor's emotional flow. Following Stanislavsky, he offers            the actor a way to find his or her still center while on stage under stress 'public solitude'.48 The audience can be perceived, though,               as threatening the fragility of the actor's mood, and the response      is to turn inwards, to close out the spectator. It is something of              great value in therapy, of great value in rehearsal (for example, Mike Leigh's intensive private work with individual actors) and of no use at all in public performance. It denies performance. At its worst, the Method could lead to that denial; at its best, it produced electrifying public acting. Strasberg sensed the blockages in actors indeed; perhaps the Actors' Studio began to attract blocked actors to it, craving liberation in personal psychodrama. In the exercises, that release could be obtained, and creativity made to flow. In the public presentation of the exercise, an irreconcilable and therefore risible contradiction became manifest. And the baby was washed away with the bathwater. This was a confusion that the Chicago school carefully avoided from its inception. The first theatre in Chicago was opened in 1847, and the city has been a theatrical center since the turn of the century. In 1912 the British playwright Maurice Browne and his actress wife Ellen Van Volkenberg opened the Chicago Little Theatre (following the example of the Boston Toy Theatre of the previous year). It was in the vanguard of what came to be known as the 'little theatre movement' that quickly engulfed America:

The influence of the new movement . . . was also felt abroad. Browne claims that Jacques Copeau told him he had found inspiration for the Theater du Vieux-Colombier from accounts of the Chicago experiment.49

 Be that as it may, Chicago was and is still the source of a uniquely American dramatic energy, and the Chicago style of improvisation has its roots in the work of a number of different people, some of whom had little or nothing directly to do with the theatre. Neva L. Boyd was a teacher, sociologist and educational theorist. In 1911 she organized the Chicago Training School for Playground Workers. From 1914 to 1920 she was Director of the Department of Recreation in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy. Then, in 1921, she founded the Recreational Training School at Chicago's Hull House. From 1924 to 1927 she had Viola Spolin as a student living in her house. Spolin writes:

I received from her an extraordinary training in the use of games, storytelling, folk dance, and dramatics as tools for stimulating creative expression in both children and adults, through self-discovery and personal experiencing. The effects of her inspiration never left me for a single day.50

From 1927 until she retired in 1941 Boyd worked as a sociologist on the faculty of Northwestern University (at Evanston, Illinois), teaching play theory, leadership and group organization. After retiring she became a consultant to the Activity Therapy Program of the Illinois Department of Welfare, working in the State School system. She continued to teach, and to use play in teaching, virtually until her death in 1963. Essentially, Neva Boyd's work was similar to Caldwell Cook's 'Play Way' (at the Perse School in Cambridge at about the same time5l). In the Foreword to a collection of children's games published in 1945 she writes: The educational value for so-called normal children of games dynamically played is unquestioned; their therapeutic value for hospitalized children has been demonstrated beyond doubt; their use as therapy in the treatment of mental patients has proved effective; and their corrective value in the re education of problem youth has been repeatedly demonstrated in schools and custodial institutions.52

While the book in question deliberately does little more than list and describe about 300 children's games, Boyd is in no doubt about the sociological, physiological and psychological bases of games theory. Jean Piaget and Margaret Lowenfeld would, in various ways, continue to develop the educational and psychological theory: the dramatic use of games was to be developed chiefly by Viola Spolin and her pupils in America, and Naftali Yavin, Albert Hunt and Clive Barker in England.

Viola Spolin, having been trained by Boyd, began as a teacher and drama supervisor on the Chicago WPA (Works Progress Administration) Recreational Project during the New Deal years, developing a 'nonverbal, non-psychological approach'53 to help train students to use drama in community work - a remarkably advanced project for its time. Her greatest single contribution was the development and systernatisation of Boyd's insights about the use of games. Working with illiterate immigrants and their children, she devised many nonverbal improvisations. Also Spolin, working primarily with children and amateur adults, was the first deliberately to open up improvisational work to include audience suggested material. This would, in later years, become a feature of what we are calling the 'Chicago style'. Spolin, like Roddy Maude-Roxby, uses the term 'player' in preference to 'actor' with regard to this kind of developmental work. The method (which grows out of Neva Boyd's work, parallels Suzanne Bing's, and which anticipates Clive Barker's) centers on games; so much so that her definition of the term 'Improvisation' begins 'Playing the game'.54 In 1946 Spolin moved to California where, with her assistant Robert Martin, she ran the Young Actors' Company in Hollywood until 1955. It was during the eleven-year period of this group that Spolin began to write down her work; but the final draft would have to wait until he was able to return to Chicago for a visit in1959. Her book, Improvisation for the Theatre, first published in 1963,was the first to attempt to codify and to teach improvisational acting. It was reprinted in 1987, evidence perhaps that interest in impro is growing around the world?

The final draft of Spolin's book had to wait until she was given the opportunity to observe at first hand the workings of America's first fully professional improvisational theatres. The central figure in the creation of both, back in Chicago, was her own son, Paul Sills.

Sills entered the University of Chicago as a student in 1948. Many gifted actors were attracted to the artistic environment blossoming around the University during the immediate postwar years; among the best known would be Edward Asner, Fritz Weaver and Mike Nichols, while Elaine May and David Shepherd were among the many performers informally associated with the University Theatre.

Paul Sills joined the University Theatre group; then, in 1953, he was instrumental in setting up the Playwrights' Theatre Club, which, as its name implies, was intended to produce the works of great playwrights. Twenty-five plays were produced in two years, a lot of them Shakespearean or modern classics. The Playwrights' Theatre Club lasted until 1955, when Sills teamed up with David Shepherd to found the first performance group solely dedicated to improvised work: The Compass. Shepherd's original idea was for a theatre derived (in inspiration) from the commedia dell'arte. Both he and Paul Sills were heavily influenced by the theories of Bertolt Brecht (Sills later studied briefly in East Germany and ran classes in Brechtian theory and practice). Shepherd wanted Compass to be a working class theatre for culturally deprived groups in industrial centers of America, such as Gary, Indiana. In the end it was decided that Chicago University had its own cultural deprivation problem, and Compass settled in Hyde Park. The Chicago school adopted Brecht as its mentor, much as the New York school had appropriated Stanislavsky. Compass and its many successors derived their cabaret style from Brechtian 'Smoking Theatre'. Compass's political aspirations, though, were short-lived. An early associate, Andrew Duncan, describes the Compass clientele as 'lumpen bourgeoisie"55 and Shepherd himself quickly became frustrated that the group seemed more concerned about fighting their Jewish intellectual parents than about fighting McCarthyism.

From the start it was agreed that Compass was to have no playwright, and no scripted play: its work would be based upon scenarios, which could be hung up backstage like the 'platt' in an Elizabethan theatre. The first Compass production was The Game of Hurt, from a scenario devised and directed by Paul Sills. Like the commedia, this wasn't imagined as totally free improvisation:

The original idea was to have a scenario, which was as we fondly imagined the Commedia dell'arte idea. We wrote a story out, usually eight to twelve scenes written out on a sheet of paper, and we'd follow through the scenes by rehearsing.56

In addition to the main piece, the group also performed short 'Living Magazine' pieces (of a rather more superficial sort than the 'Living Newspapers' developed by the Federal Theatre Project in the 1930s) and, most significantly considering Paul Sills's early training in his mother's TIE work, audience requests.

The audience request, or the immediate incorporation of suggestions from the audience, is the most distinctive feature of the Chicago style. Mike Nichols and Elaine May, for example, astounded audiences and critics in 1960 by their virtuosity in using audience determined material. (John Monteith and Suzanne Rand do exactly the same kind of act today, and this style now also forms the basis for the popular radio and television improvisation game, Whose Line Is It Anyway?) In particular, the audience request characterizes Sills's next venture, the famed Second City, established (by Sills, Bernie Sahlins and Howard Alk) in 1959 and still, thirty years later, an important breeding ground for all that is best in American acting. A New York spin-off of Compass, Ted Flicker's The Premise (which would later be involved in a row with the British censor), tended to concentrate mostly on one-line jokes, but Second City, under Sills's guidance, allowed 'long, complicated scenes, whole plays, to evolve . . . whole scenaria, all sorts of parodies and operas and musical versions"57 while Alan Myerson's spin-off troupe, The Committee (1963-73) would develop a yet more serious, politically involved type of improvised theatre in San Francisco. The Second City format involves the presentation of a main show (which has been built up and rehearsed over a number of months). This is then followed by audience suggestions, which the players are allowed to think about and discuss for a short while. Or they may do 'spot improv suggestions acted on immediately, without reflection, which are treated by actors and audience alike as virtuoso feats (when they work). At regular intervals, the best of the resultant material is then selected out, discussed, refined, rehearsed, and will form part of the next main show. The 'Chicago style' (obviously no longer confined to that city) bifurcates into comic strip performance (typified by Shelley Berman, Joan Rivers, the late John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner), and quiet, totally credible naturalism (Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Alan Alda, Betty Thomas). The division has always been present in American acting, to some extent, with the conflicting Broadway paradigms of the musical and naturalistic drama. But the conflict was also part of Second City's make-up. In its early days, many of the actors were university intellectuals, excited by the boundaries of their new form. But there were also those for whom improvisation was only a means of generating and developing performance material; they saw it as a form of play? or rather revue construction. Impro was a product of the great period of satirical comedy, the era of Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl. Second City became increasingly a prisoner of its own success. Young talent was attracted to the theatre not so much because it was the home of improvised drama, but because it was an excellent platform from which to launch a career in comedy or, increasingly, in television. Clever caricatures began to replace the more thoughtful 'people scenes' of the early shows.

Paul Sills left Second City in 1967; cofounder Bernie Sahlins took over and ran the company until 1984, when he, in turn, sold his interest to Andrew Alexander, the producer of the Toronto Second City. Sills and Viola Spolin opened The Game Theatre, which was followed in the early 1970s by Sills's highly successful Story Theatre. The Game Theatre was centered primarily on Viola's exercises. Leaving revue behind, the idea was to have the audience play the impro games, becoming their own performers. The technique of Story Theatre was related to impro though it usually used preexisting narrative and textual material. Sills moved to Los Angeles and set up a small company under the title Sills and Company, which continues to play the theatre games devised by his mother from Neva Boyd's work. The company includes his daughter Rachel, a fourth generation improviser. In 1986 the company mounted a five-month off-Broadway tour, which was widely acclaimed by the New York critics.

For David Shepherd, the original conception had been political, derived from Brecht. He has since continued to experiment with proletarian theatre forms. Currently, he is the mastermind behind the growth of 'theatre sports' - 'Impro Olympics’ in the USA and Canada. But for Paul Sills and Viola Spolin, the work passes (like Grotowski's) beyond the borders of the theatre, into the para-theatrical world of self-discovery and self-actualisation, the creation of 'free space' in man.

All the people who have worked with improvisational theater know that there's a free space they can come back to and they like to come back to. I'm not interested in improvisational theater per se. I'm interested in the establishment of those free spaces where people can do their own work, and I'm interested in the forms, which begin to emerge in these free spaces.58

The basic difference between the New York and Chicago styles is that the giants of the New York theatre world confined improvisation, seeing it only as a rehearsal tool or play-writing device. The actor was confined, too; like Saint-Denis they imagined the actor to be primarily the interpreter (in Greek, hypokrites) of a written script. Paul Sills is the inheritor of another tradition. An irascible and difficult director, by all accounts, and occasionally uncommunicative, he is nonetheless inspired by the idea of communication. In Chicago, improvisation games were a way of communicating between people, especially those disadvantaged and without a social voice, long before they were borrowed by the stage.