An Assemblage of Quotes

VIOLA SPOLIN

“Reality happens between us.”

AVERY SCHREIBER: Viola Spolin is the unsung heroine of The Second City. She’s the mother of improvisation. 

DAVID SHEPHERD: His mother taught him how people could relate through improvisation in ways that they did not relate in life. Through closer touching, through fuller expression of feelings, through the fuller use of the resources of things around them. Most people cannot make contact in real life.

VALERIE HARPER: I loved Viola instantly, as a person and a teacher. Some people in the workshop had a tendency to treat her like a goddess, but she wouldn’t have it. She would say, “I’m glad you respect my work, but please don’t genuflect, because I’m not like that. I always overcook the ham, my house is in a mess, and I can’t even buy a pair of shoelaces properly. So let’s get up off our knees and go to work.” 

RICHARD SCHAAL: The workshop frees the intuitive in order that spontaneous moments are possible. You have to cross that abyss before you can hit the state of improvisation. It’s only when you don’t know, in your head, what to do that this happens. Only at that moment when there is no alternative but to follow your intuition, and then you just do. That’s the spontaneous moment.

DAVID SHEPHERD: We had no training except for what Viola was able to do, and then we went on from there. 

BARBARA HARRIS: We actors sere seemingly “brainwashed” out of our roles as actors. Our conventional suits cast off. The technique, which was new at the time for us, namely, improvisations, swept us into another realm, another consciousness. 

PAUL SILLS (her son): I think improvisational theatre and my mother’s work are attempts to find that—to go into the possibilities for human development.

ANTHONY HOLLAND: Physical reality is the concept. Really experiencing the place. On her way to the icebox, Viola would walk through rehearsals and say, “remember your ‘where,’ people!”

AVERY SCHREIBER: But The Second City is only one part of what came out of Viola and Paul’s work. There are literally hundreds of groups using improvisation for various things…education and therapy. Viola was into a heavy number when she put her ideas together, and she knew it. She’s pointing the way to the future. Some people don’t have anything to do anymore because machines are taking care of them, so the areas of endeavor they’re going to get into will have to be creative. 

I believe what she and Paul have gotten into will last longer than this country. Thousands of years. Their names will be forgotten, as will all of ours, but what they’ve done really opened up a new vista for communication. 

THEATER GAMES…

PAUL SILLS: If a theater game is presented freely and played freely, it has a gift to give. It’s a theater game. It gives you the gift of an entrance or an exit or a relation on a deeper level than you can ordinarily get. 

AVERY SCHREIBER: I think something happens at the sandlot level. When you’re kids. At first, the boys and girls play together, but there’s a certain point where the girls go off and do girl things, training themselves for the future of being women in society. At least, this is what I remember happening when I was a kid. Maybe it’s different now. But the boys were left alone to compete in team sports. The boys learned about “teamwork.” They understood that moment of chaos just before that mystic thing happens and everyone connects into a cohesive whole for a play. Women used to miss out on a lot of that in physical sports, and I really believe that that was on of the major reasons it was so hard to get when into this kind of theater, to be able to improvise as part of a team. They hadn’t had enough of those game experiences to trust themselves to be able to do it. They wouldn’t understand that crazy moment that clicks together when everything looks like it’s about to go to pieces. 

ALAN AIDA: The games make you more open and more magnetic and more self-confident than anything I’ve ever come across. Because it’s a social experience for one thing. You learn that all there is the other person. That’s a very valuable experience because most people spend their lives learning that they have themselves, period, and that they have to fake their way through and have to disassociate themselves from other people and lie. 

ALAN AIDA: In the games, you’re actually tuned into something that’s inside the actor’s mind and there’s a kind of mental music that’s played and that everybody shares. 

IMPROVISATION

RICHARD SCHAAL: Acting is making it look like, right? Improvisation is–it don’t look like it, baby, this is actually it. It’s happening to you. 

RICHARD SCHAAL: You don’t lead the story, it leads you. 

PAUL SILLS: Improvisational theatre is popular theatre, and popular theater is separate from literary theater. Whereas the image of the popular theatre is the image of the wagonload of players rolling through the countryside, creating theater pieces out of their sense of forms and language and play–like the commedia dell’arte and such. I think the living line of the theater is improvisational theater, that it lies in the possibility of a group of people to construct their own theater independently of a writer. 

VALERIE HARPER: I’ve always found improvisation, the way Paul and Viola guided us all in it, to be close to jazz musicians jamming–you’re really listening to each other, really hearing.

JOAN RIVERS: …Most ladies don’t want to be funny. If you’re pretty, you don’t have to be funny. If you ever look at comediennes, they’re not the most lovely-looking ladies in the world. You have to be attractive of else you have to be a little peculiar to want to be funny. It’s not a naturally feminine thing.

GILDA RADNER: The people who were best at it were mad. It’s madness to begin with. It’s you, writing on your feet, listening to the audience, watching yourself. If you think about it, the concept of creating a reality onstage, and then having to bend that reality to wait for the laugh…it’s schizophrenic.

ROGER BOWEN: The actor’s job is to find behavior that extends the dialogue so that the meaning of the play can be fully brought out. In improvisation, it’s the exact opposite. The actor creates the behavior and the dialogue is an extension of that behavior. The dialogue is not the heart of improvisation. The heart of it is behavior. 

ANDREW DUNCAN: You’ll probably hear me talk a lot about contradictions. The history of improvisation theater is shot through with all kinds of other things besides who creates what and the night so-and-so did something. The anecdotes are fun, but the history also has to do with contradictions between the intentions behind these theaters and what actually happened. 

ANTHONY HOLLAND: So there was the wit group, there was the kind of object-reality group, and then there was the surreal group made up of people like Severn 😍…I’d say the surreal group was much more into the emerging drug culture. 

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

Robert Maynard Hutchins was the most handsome man I had ever seen—the topic sentence by Edward Sihls.

DAVID SHEPHERD: It was a community. An enormous one. There was the most conspicuous assertion of civil rights and tenant rights, and people were into community development in Hyde Park like nowhere in Chicago.

ANDREW DUNCAN: I know when I went to the University of Chicago, they were all over the place–guys who weren’t working for degrees but were there. They couldn’t get into the mold of getting a degree. Or, like me, they got a degree and hung around. I remember meeting a professor one day–a guy I respected who was one of my mentors–and he said, “what? Are you still here? Get the hell out of here!” That and a few other things sort of woke me up. 

SEVERN DARDEN😍: It was the only real Bohemian University in America.

ANDREW DUNCAN: We were kind of misfits. Well, we were enough affected by the fact that we were white and that we were somewhat prone to progressive ideas about growth that we didn’t fall apart. We didn’t take drugs, we didn’t drink, we didn’t commit suicide. In a sense we hadn’t given up hope of finding a way to express ourselves in something that wasn’t a profession or a nine-to-five in an office.

PAUL SILLS: I went to the University of Chicago in order to really comprehend that there was such a thing as direction.

PAUL SILLS

AVERY SCHREIBER: Paul took Viola’s techniques and carved with them. He’s a great technician of the human spirit. He can make things happen. You might not like what comes out. You might not like the hammering that goes into it sometimes, but then…he’s mellowed out lately. 

MIKE NICHOLS: I met Sills in the University of Chicago coffee shop when he was a busboy and I was eating leftovers on the tables. 

BILL ALTON: Paul Sills and I met as students. We were still trying to be intellectuals and we would have heavy conversations. I didn’t even think of Paul as a theater man at that time. He was more of a thinker and he didn’t know what the hell he wanted to do. 

BARBARA HARRIS: He was a serious student of Brecht–his concepts, methods, and ideology. He called us on nights off to lecture about Brechtian philosophy. 

DAVID STEINBERG: …He is the only person I’ve ever seen who can break something down theatrically and say, “that’s bullshit and this is terrible”–do the negative thing–and them sit down with you and work out the positive alternative. He was very constructive.

VALERIE HARPER: When he directs, he makes himself the audience and he wants to be delighted and thrilled.

“Something Wonderful Right Away!” Thank you, Jeffrey Sweet.

BILL ALTON: He’s very sweet, very eccentric and, oddly enough, inarticulate.

SEVERN DARDEN: He was completely inarticulate.

ROBERT KLEIN: Paul Sills is not a great communicator. That was the real crack in the arch of his reputation. Paul knew what to do but couldn’t always communicate it. But the thing with him was really fabulous. The man is unquestionably an enormously important contributor to a lot of people’s success and talent. He’s that proverbial guy who didn’t sell out. 

SEVERN DARDEN😍: Sill suffers with his soul and with God all the time. Rage. He’d go over the Lincoln Hotel and I’d have to go and calm him down. Everyone else was too bored to.

ALAN AIDA: Paul was not an easy person to work with. Everybody gets infuriated with him because he’s relentless. He keeps going after what’s possible even if the person doesn’t seem able to get near it. 

BILL ALTON: He didn’t like to talk about acting, “Just get onstage and do it!” 

FRANK FARRELL: He like Barbara was anti-establishment. If your goal is to have fame and fortune, you’re not going to do the best work because you’re not into the work, you’re into the end result…

MIKE NICHOLS: The most striking thing about Paul is that he’s one of the two people I’ve met who doesn’t stratify people into important people, less-important people, unimportant people, people he likes, people he doesn’t like. He takes everyone equally seriously. 

Another thing Paul would do: Just as everything looked like it was a total mess, he would walk out. This would usually happen a couple of nights before an opening. He would walk out and we would say, “hey, we got nobody but ourselves,” and then it would snap together. It would start to work, then Paul would come back and throw a little polish on it, and we would go on with a great show.

ALAN MEYERSON: He (Paul) thought I was the most morose person he’d ever met and anyone like that would be good at directing comedy.

AVERY SCHREIBER: The Goodman was where I first heard about Paul as a director. Someone on the staff was talking about him, said, “Oh, that foul-mouthed man!” I decided to check him out. I went to see a production he did of Measure for Measure at the University of Chicago. Everybody was laughing uncontrollably…so, I knew I wanted to work with the guy.

TONIGHT AT 8:30

MIKE NICHOLS: Tonight at 8:30 was a “revolutionary” group, which just meant that the guys in Tonight at 8:30 didn’t like the faculty head at the University Theatre very much. All it really came down to was the you had a choice between doing a play at tonight at 8:30 or doing it on a big stage in Mandel Hall. The first thing I directed Idid at Tonight. I directed my roommate Ed Asner in Yeat’s Purgatory. 

ANTHONY HOLLAND: In effect, what happened at the University of Chicago is that, after a short period of working as “Tonight at 8:30” we took over the University Theater. Paul was sort of the head of this takeover, and he then directed a production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle which I was in. It was so successful that Paul and David Shepherd started (?) Playwrights Theater Club with essentially the same production. 

DAVID SHEPHERD: I saw one of his workshops (Sills) at the University of Chicago. There was no structure, and people were creating constantly. Actually, it turned out the structure was the games. But then I didn’t know games. 

DAVID SHEPHERD

DAVID SHEPHERD: A theatre where everybody would come. I mean everybody. Literally everybody.

JEFFREY SWEET: The Compass and, by extension, The Second City, The Premise, and The Committee came about because of his pursuit of the ideal of a truly popular theatre.

JEFFREY SWEET: It was David Shepherd’s idea to create a contemporary version of Commedia, a popular theatre which, working improvisational from scenarios, would deal in comic terms with present-day society.

ANDREW DUNCAN: David really expected people in the troupe to have other jobs. But to have other jobs meant passing up workshops. Or, if you had a night job, you couldn’t perform at night. There was an elitist thing behind his premise, no matter how based it was in Brechtian-Marxist whatever. You had to have money to support it.  

He took his idea to Sills.

At first, Sills was like hell no, but then after seeing a performance of one of the scenarios—Enterprise—he said ok.

DAVID SHEPHERD: When I hired people, I was going on something you could not measure, which was a sense of their insight into what was happening in society and the ability to play a whole bunch of parts–old ladies and cops and crooked lawyers and whatever constellation of characters inhabited the social world of our heads. Our social world included whatever characters Barbara Harris had been studying for years. And she was studying her mother for years. 

ROGER BOWEN: I wrote a scenario called Enterprise which was about four teenage boys who own an auto in common. One day they find under their windshield wiper a notice from a used-car dealer that says, “I have to have one thousand used cars by Friday or I’ll be in terrible trouble. I may even offer you cash plus a new car. Don’t ask me why. I’m crazy.” It was signed “Crazy Jake.” The kids start debating. But they overcome their scruples and they go down and, needless to say, the used car dealer–I played this part–screws them. They end up with a much worse car than they had before plus owing him a lot of money. And then they smash up the car. 

ROGER BOWEN: To get back to the scenario plays, there were about eighteen that were performed during a year and a half, and maybe even more. But they all seemed to have a theme in common–how society molds people into the shape it wants them to take. Now, this is interesting because it characterizes society as an intelligent force with direction. Whereas the kind of picture you got of society at Second City a couple of years later was that society was blind, meaningless, unintelligent automation and people would use get lost in it. Second City was about alienation. It was about “how do I get out of this?” About people talking to machines, machines talking to them, everybody lost, everybody looking for a way out, and how it all didn’t make sense. I like the earlier conception because it suggests that man need not remain a helpless victim. That conception of society as a force that molds people into the form it wants them to take is more appealing to me than the conception of society as a machine that’s out of control.

ANDREW DUNCAN: David’s quarrel with professionalism is really one of the most amusing I’ve ever heard. A Marxist, it seems to me, doesn’t object to the idea that the actor or painter or somebody starts to structure his work procedure into a method to deal with his art. David didn’t see that professionalism is a way of dealing with raw material, relating to your material so you can shape it.

PLAYWRIGHTS THEATER CLUB

PAUL SILLS: We opened with Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, followed by La Ronde by Schnitzler, then Wozzeck, then we would do an original, then we would do Volpone. Well, those are all different, so there was no one technique. So each show was a discovery. We were truly discovering.

ANTHONY HOLLAND: I remember at the time we were opening Playwrights, the Rosenbergs were executed. Chicago had always been, for me, a rather anti-Semitic city. 

ANTHONY HOLLAND: We had to do the janitorial work ourselves at Playwrights. The only way Bill Alton and I could get through scrubbing a lavatory that had not been cleaned in probably twenty years was to pretend we were two very famous Jewish professors who were forced to do this work by the Nazi regime. Rather grim humor. 

ANTHONY HOLLAND: It seemed like everything we liked was always on an old record. So, in a sense, we lived in a fantasy. I know we felt a closeness to European culture as opposed to American. I think this is partially because we had so many refugees as teachers. 

MIKE NICHOLS: You had a group of people who were not actors, really, and didn’t have a lot of theatrical experience, but who were very intelligent and, in some cases, highly educated. And they were thrown in front of an audience with very little help. What came from Shepherd was rhetoric, and what came from Paul were concrete and specific theatrical ideas. But I think what shaped it was the audience.

COMPASS PLAYERS

ROGER BOWEN: Compass was David Shepherd’s personality. And The Second City was Paul Sill’s personality. 

ANDREW DUNCAN: And suddenly there was this place called The Compass. My God, what an incredible opportunity! To suddenly find something that was…not elitist, but still an applied form in which to get up and start expressing the things we were thinking about and feeling at that time, with all those repressed political, social, psychological feelings…I mean, the freedom!

MIKE NICHOLS: And one night, there was this evil, hostile girl in the front row staring at me (Elaine May) throughout the performance, which was in the round. I was about four feet away from her, and she stared at me all through it, and I knew she knew it was shit, and there was no way I could let her know that I knew it also. She hung around school. She sat in on classes. She never registered. She once convinced an entire philosophy class that everybody in Plato’s Symposium was drunk and that was the point of the Symposium. She used to go into classes and do things like that and leave. 

The ability to comment on a character with some humor and a little bit of distance and, at its highest, with genius, like Elaine…Being completely real, saying things for the first time. She’s clearly just thought of them and she’s really feeling the things, but she’s also outside saying, “did you ever notice this about this kind of person?” That’s what I associate with Compass. 

MIKE NICHOLS: Everybody back in Compass had that mentality of a group of…I don’t know what…oddballs who didn’t know what they were going to do, but they knew it wasn’t going to be the theatre because theater was so dumb. We were snobs.

MIKE NICHOLS: Compass was, after all, a cabaret that was designed for a very parochial neighborhood university ingroup.

ROGER BOWEN: The first Compass consisted of two storefronts, side by side. One was a bar, and then you went through a door to the theater next door. The show was always at war with the bar because the guy who started the bar did very well, but we weren’t doing so well selling booze in the theater. He finally got rid of us by the end of the summer.” 

PAUL SILLS: The show usually was about an hour and a half of material. The scenario would have around twelve scenes in it–before we’d do the “Living Newspaper” as a curtain raiser–and after the scenario play, some special scenes. We did this every week, a whole new show. For sheer producing, it’s never been matched, I think.

SEVERN DARDEN: I was just thrown onstage. I still remember the first line I heard spoken there: Adventure is a small town at the mouth of the Essequibo. 

BARBARA HARRIS: It was people listening to people, taking their ideas seriously. If we failed or succeeded, it wasn’t that important. Like a family.

The Second City

ANTHONY HOLLAND: It was a very snowy night. It was the most enchanting atmosphere I’d ever been in. The theater was beautifully decorated. And I saw their first show, which was the funniest thing I had ever seen.

DAVID STEINBERG: Let’s talk for a second about what was before. Eisenhower, the 50’s, Jayne Mansfield, Doris Day. That’s what entertainment was. 

JEFFREY SWEET: If one of the functions of art is to find reason in chaos, then The Second City tended to be a forum for initial assessment of the damages.

JEFFREY SWEET: Whereas The Compass and early Second City people were more likely to tackle Ibsen, Pirandello, or Hemingway, today’s Second City is more apt to take on Jaws, Let’s Make A Deal, and late-night TV commercials for “greatest hits collections.” 

JEFFREY SWEET: I find the scenes created within the past several years to be much more guarded emotionally than much of the early material. I would not expect to see a scene such as “First Affair” on that stage today. First Affair was a very tender, delicate sketch made memorable by Barbara Harris’ deeply affecting vulnerability. In contrast, most of what I’ve seen recently at The Second City is rooted in what one might describe as cheery cynicism. Unlike the “people scenes” in which Harris, Arkin, Holland, Alton, and others played characters “straight.” The Second City stage today is peopled almost exclusively by clever caricatures. They are figures to be laughed at rather than felt for.

JEFFREY SWEET: In First Affair the teenage daughter of a University of Chicago academic (played by Severn Darden 😍) reveals to her father that she has had her first sexual encounter with the son of one of his colleagues. Her father is distressed, not so much at the loss of her virginity, but at her seemingly dispassionate, academically analytical attitude towards the experience. When he asks her what she feels for the boy, she refers him to Erich Fromm. When he talks of Juliet’s passion for Romeo, she characterizes it as a neurotic dependency. Finally, the father gently breaks through his daughter’s shield of jargon, revealing the vulnerable child underneath who, as the lights fade, buries herself in his arms and tearfully confesses her fear that the boy doesn’t love her. 

ANTHONY HOLLAND: I was glad I left The Second City during the Kennedy administration. When Kennedy was assassinated, I could no longer have done political satire. But then, political satire no longer has the kind of meaning it once held for me. You hardly need The Second City to interpret Watergate. The news is so grotesque you don’t need to interpret it satirically. Just pick up the paper and read it.

JOAN RIVERS: When we were in Chicago, all of us at Second City were into Truth and Beauty, and they didn’t want to take the next step because then it became commercial and anything commercial was not Art. We all believed this to a certain extent. But then you look at Mike and Elaine. They haven’t prostituted themselves out. You can make the transition without being ashamed of it. 

JOAN RIVERS: I was known at first as “the girl who replaced Barbara.”

BILL ALTON: What we were going for was a very proletarian idea–the de-deification of the artist, the star. Anyone who wanted to be a star in the company was some kind of shit. 

ALAN AIDA: I mean, you don’t expect Albert Einstein to get off on a few good jokes and drunk martinis with you. Well, they may not be quite in his category, but they’re very close to it in their work.

BILL ALTON: Our conceit was that we were working in terms of society rather than the individual, and were working in service of an idea rather than vice versa. 

DAVID STEINBERG: We’re assuming that we are part of the same community as the audience and that they know what we know. We don’t treat the audience as being above or beneath us. They’re our peers. 

MIKE NICHOLS: The more we became the talk of the town, the more I was afraid to try something new when we had so many things that worked so well. But we finally found that the safest thing was to stick with the set pieces, which changed a little bit anyway, do the improvisation, and then get off with some set thing we had prepared.

ALAN MEYERSON: A lot of the most involving and intricate pieces or work have come out of the tension and turmoil, sometimes the tensions being within the people and sometimes with other members of the company.

And now…a few words from Paul Sills

JEFFREY SWEET: When you started putting together Second City and Compass, what qualities would you look for in the people you’d select?

PAUL SILLS: I worked with who was there.

PAUL SILLS: I don’t form great companies. Just any company is a great company if the people are released to what they can be and do. 

PAUL SILLS: The work of creation is renewable, renewable, renewable. It has to be renewable, I think. So that’s what this is all about. 

PAUL SILLS: I think that theatre comes out of the consciousness of the community. If you look at the theatre of ancient Greece, it came out of the necessity of the Greek community to handle its spiritual reality in a public forum. Theatre is concerned with reality. Now, reality is not to be defined as what is real for you alone. Reality is shared. And reality of the moment can occur only with spontaneity. (Viola Spolin)

PAUL SILLS: Most theater is slave-market bullshit.

PAUL SILLS: It’s not so much the confidence of the self, it’s more the awareness that there is such a thing as the self. 

PAUL SILLS: It’s a paradox that interests me.

SEVERN DARDEN

MIKE NICHOLS: Severn Darden always eats his handkerchief during rehearsal. He claimed once, during a gigantic assembly at the University of Chicago, he stood up at the back and screamed at the top of his voice, “Mike Nichols fucks pigs!” He then managed to get “pigs” into as many sketches as possible. I would say, “where have you been?” And he would say, “I’ve been in Africa–pig-sticking!” And of course, he got me to the point that whenever he mentioned pigs I would break up, which he took as an admission of guilt. He would try to use it as proof to others that I indeed fuck pigs. The way you can tell is if you just mention pigs onstage, he’ll go to pieces.

TROOBNICK: Severn drove a 1930 Rolls Royce around the campus, wore a cape, and became legendary for many of his incredible activities. For example, going into Rockefeller Chapel at the university after hours and playing the organ, and when the campus police came to get him, throwing himself across where an altar should have been–it was a nondenominational chapel so it didn’t have one–and claiming sanctuary. 

SEVERN DARDEN: I used to get hung up on nuns. I used to talk about them all the time. I remember there was a psychiatrist scene I did with Mike. The psychiatrist said: I want you to go back in time. What do you see? And I said. “It’s dark. It’s dark. It’s very dark. He said, “How dark?” “Dark as inside of a nun.” Which is pretty dark. We got a letter from the dean of Loyola University asking me to stop referring to nuns. 

ANDREW DUNCAN

SEVERN DARDEN: Andrew Duncan was the best straight man ever, which is extremely difficult improvising. Straight men have to know what you’re going to say, more or less. They have to psych you out. They have to know where the joke is. A good straight man can set it up so you have only a fifty percent chance of not getting a laugh. In order words, if you say, “yes.” You’ll get the laugh. 

ROGER BOWEN: Straight man creates the reality and the comic plays off it. 

BARBARA HARRIS

MIKE NICHOLS: What is it that she has? I suppose it’s an ear for what’s happening: she is a person who really hears. She’s the opposite of people who can’t hear how they’re coming over–the kind of person who goes on and on at a party, and you say to yourself, “doesn’t he know his wife is embarrassed?” But then there are these people who have a completely accurate ear. They just know what other people are thinking. They hear.

DAVID STEINBERG: She has a duality of sexuality and comedy that was amazing to see.

ALAN AIDA: I remember Barbara Harris and I improvised a lot in the workshop. We did a scene called “Making Out in a Church.” It was very rich in Catholic childhood details. A dance at a sodality. The Sodality of Our Lady. A high school dance where we’re surrounded by nuns yet the two of us are off in a corner trying to dance slow.I kept getting close to the girl but I kept getting stabbed with her crucifix. pg. 327

BILL ALTON: She’s a terrific lady. I love her. She hates public attention of any kind. She. She’s a little like Salinger. I mean, if she could perform without anyone watching, I think she’d adore it. She shrivels up when people start talking about public acclaim. She’s been shit on a lot by journalists, too. She’s had interviews and they tore her apart. She’s very fragile. 

ROBERT KLEIN: Women were always at a disadvantage at Second City. There were fewer of them, though the history is studded with a number of talented women…but they weren’t tough like Zohra Lampert and Barbara Harris were. When I say tough, I don’t mean that in any derogatory sense, but that they could stand up and fight for their share of the pie. They could defend themselves. 

VALERIE HARPER: I remember in the early 60’s hearing people say, “Oh Barbara Harris–she’s not really an actress; she does that other thing.” Wrong! What was happening, I feel, was that this was a new technique and other actors who were into other approaches did what people naturally do, which is to protect what they know by downgrading what they see as challenge to their way.”

DAVID STEINBERG: The downfall of Second City came about as a result of the greed of everyone involved. Once the New York Company became stars–once Arkin opened in Enter Laughing and Barbara Harris opened in Oh Dad, Poor Dad–everyone wanted to be a star.

VALERIE HARPER: Dick and Barbara used to do a fabulous scene called “Catholic Dance.” It was about two teenagers–about fifteen years old–at a dance. She’s the tease and he’s totally hot. They’re standing out in the courtyard together and Barbara says, “Just look at those stars! Just like God’s beady eyes burning down on us.” They decide to trade crosses. pg.316

ANTHONY HOLLAND: One night, I was working with Barbara, and we got “bulldyke” as a suggestion, so Barbara and I went backstage and I said, “Look, I’ll be the bull dyke and you interview me.” 

SEVERN DARDEN: The best work I ever did was with Barbara. She was my favorite after she became unstuck. She didn’t talk for a long time. Mike Nichols was similarly paralyzed. 

MIKE NICHOLS: When we were in Compass, one of the things we would do was that the whole company would improvise a story on the stage. The story would jump from person to person and then at the end, the moderator would say, ‘and what’s the moral of the story?’ We would put up our hands and be called on to give the wittiest moral we could think of. For the first few months, Barbara never said anything. It became kind of a joke in the company. She was very good and we all loved her, but it came to be accepted that she was never going to speak. After months, one night at the end of the story, she suddenly put up her hand. There was a long quiet because we were all so amazed. Finally, the moderator called on her and said, ‘the moral of the story is–?’ Barbara said: ‘Love is the key that opens every door.” It became sort of our theme song. “Love is the key that opens every door.” That’s Barbara.”

BARBARA HARRIS: Mike thought that was so funny. I don’t know why.

Thank you Janet Coleman!

A song that Barbara Harris sang…and I sang the first line to her…she looked at me: how do you know that? I loved the music. There was more…I’ll continue updating it, but here’s a start.

Everybody’s in the know but me…

Knows why Mao and Kruschev disagree.

Knows what’s wrong with education, Malcolm X and segregation. 

Knows why America faces ruin if Russia beats us to the moon. 

Me? 

I’m not so sure myself, 

I’m not ready to make my statement yet

But, if you don’t like this world, 

The next one will be better.

The lights will be brighter, 

The songs will be louder, 

The nights will be shorter, 

The days will be warmer,

la la la la la la…