Carol Bleackley Sills 1935-2024

We are saddened to announce that Carol Bleackley Sills passed away peacefully on the morning of Friday, October 11th at the age of 89. She was with her daughter and caretaker, Rachel. Carol led a rich, art-filled life. Please read more about it below. 

Carol Bleackley Sills, 1935-2024

Carol Bleackley Sills was a painter, educator, scenic designer, theater director, poet, and editor. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Gudrun Sigrid Eggertson and Lachlan MacKinnon Bleackley in 1935, she grew up outside of Montreal. She studied from childhood with progressive arts educator and Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). There, she was steeped in his approach to inspiration which regarded creativity as a group process.

After graduating with a degree in painting from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Carol traveled with a group of Canadian students to West Africa where she was inspired by the sculptures she found in Benin. Upon return, she went to Taliesin to study with Olgivanna Lloyd Wright. Soon after, she moved to nearby Chicago.

In 1959, Carol enrolled in a Viola Spolin workshop while waitressing at Second City. There she met Paul Sills, Second City Director and Viola’s son, whom she later married. She was overjoyed to encounter the theater game system that Viola was creating, inspired by sociologist Neva Boyd’s play-based philosophy and which aligned with her earlier training with Arthur Lismer in Canada.

 Carol and Paul, with firstborn daughter Rachel, traveled along with the original Second City troupe to New York. Despite planning a European tour, the assassination of John F. Kennedy urged the family back to their community which was strongly in Chicago.

 In 1965, along with the birth of daughter Polly, Carol and Paul, with Viola and friends in the arts community, opened The Game Theater. There they played games, explored side-coaching during performance, and encouraged audience participation. They held community workshops and actively pursued new forms of artistic thought. Included in this was the creation of The Parents School, a parent-run school with a curriculum based on group practice in theater, visual art, literature, and egalitarian social ideals. The school continued until 1981. At The Game Theater, Carol worked with Paul on a new form they called Story Theater, which opened in Chicago in 1968. Daughter Aretha was born in 1969 and Story Theatre went on to Broadway in 1970.

Subsequently, Carol was a part of creating many innovative theaters including The Body Politic in Chicago, Century Hall in Milwaukee, and The Learning Theater in Chicago.  

With a community of players from Second City, Story Theater, and including daughter Rachel, Carol, Paul opened a space in Los Angeles called Sills & Co. to play Viola’s theater games in performance. They traveled to New York City Broadway bound in 1985. The family, now including Neva, born in 1977, stayed. In 1988, Carol co-designed a graduate level acting program with Paul, Mike Nichols and George Morrison called New Actors Workshop. After permanently moving to Door County, WI in 1993, Carol and Paul returned to the school each season to produce a show with the graduating class. After Paul’s passing in 2008, Carol directed The Tao of Chuang Chou with the school’s final class in 2010. In 2014, Carol returned to directing at Central Methodist University for a production of Story Theatre.

 Along with designing theater and educational spaces and co-developing shows, Carol designed sets, such as for Studs Terkel’s Talking to Myself, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sweet Bloody Liberty, shows created with the American Folklore Theater (now Northern Sky) in Door County, and ten shows created with the Paul Sills Community Players in Door County. Carol’s scenic design employed painted projections and shadow play to allow players the room to explore the stage and find objects in the space. Her minimalistic and innovative approach is outlined in Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows (Applause Books).

 Over the years, Carol, inspired by her work with Lismer and Spolin, created an art curriculum that emphasized group work and utilized story as the impetus for explorations in painting, drawing, and sculpture. She held workshops at The Parents School in Chicago, at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, NY, at Supermud Pottery in NYC and in Door County, WI at her own Mud Lake Art School, and the Peninsula School of Art where she also trained teachers, including daughters Polly and Neva, in her methods for several seasons.

In her own artistic practice, Carol worked in painting, drawing and sculpting in clay. Interested in the abstraction of painting space, she used landscape and still life to explore the formal relationships of line, shape, and color. She also used art as a means of social change and worked with a group of mothers to paint revolutionary murals during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Carol’s civic engagement continued throughout her life, including her work on the board of the Door County Environmental Council.

Carol was a collaborating editor of the writings of both Spolin and Sills. She edited the second and third editions of Viola’s Improvisation for the Theater, Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director’s Handbook, and Theater Games for the Lone Actor (all Northwestern University Press) along with Paul’s Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows (Applause Books). In her own writing, Carol was an active participant in the Word Women, a group of Door County poets.

 Carol was director of Paul Sills' Wisconsin Theater Game Center in Door County where she was the administrator of summer theater game intensives to players from all over the world for nearly forty years. With Paul, she created a method of teaching Story Theater which she presented in workshops in Los Angeles and annually at the Wisconsin Theater Game Center. Daughters Rachel and Neva assisted her on many of these workshops. As director of Sills/Spolin Theater Works, with assistance from daughters Rachel and Aretha, she worked to maintain the improvisational theater tradition of Paul Sills and Viola Spolin and to preserve and share all their unique vision of American theater.

Carol Bleackley Sills is survived by sisters Heather Darden and Linda Christine Bleackley; daughters Rachel Sills, Polly Sills, Aretha Sills, and Neva Sills; grandchildren Nadia Sills, Katrina Sills, Rocklan Lohrey, Make Keene, Freya Christianson, and Anna Watkins; great-grandchildren Rylan Locke and Jameson Lohrey, Juwaan Santana, Matteo and Cairo Stewart; and is preceded in death by husband Paul Sills, Paul’s son David Michael Sills, and her brother Lachlan Bleackley.