resources
“Improvising is openness to contact with the environment and each other and willingness to play. It is acting upon environment and allowing others to act upon present reality, as in playing a game.”
Viola Spolin's Second City Class Performs, early 1960s
PaulSills.com is the online home of Paul Sills’ Wisconsin Theater Game Center, which has been offering Spolin theater game intensives since 1987. Also features articles and information about Paul Sills and Viola Spolin.
Read about Viola Spolin at The Second City's website.
Spolin.com is operated by Viola Spolin’s longtime student Gary Schwartz and features many useful resources about her work.
Read about the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which was founded on the teachings of Viola Spolin.
Spolin-ist was created by Ege Maltepe in 2009 with the aim of spreading Spolin improvisation in Turkey. Maltepe leads workshops in Instanbul.
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum serves as a dynamic memorial to social reformer Jane Addams, the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and her colleagues whose work changed the lives of their immigrant neighbors as well as national and international public policy. The Museum preserves and develops the original Hull-House site for the interpretation and continuation of the historic settlement house vision, linking research, education, and social engagement.
Neva Boyd’s papers are archived at UIC. Information can be found here.
FURTHER READING
Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows By Paul Sills, Applause Books. The creator of Story Theater, the original director of Second City, and one of the greatest popularizers of improvisational theater, Paul Sills has assembled some of his favorite adaptations from world literature. Includes: The Blue Light and Other Stories, A Christmas Carol (Dickens), Stories of God, Rumi. Also includes a section called “Theater Games for Story Theater by Viola Spolin. Read more about Story Theater and available scripts adapted by Paul Sills at PaulSills.com.
“The Theory of Play,” the essay by Neva Boyd, can be accessed here.
Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of the Second City and the Compass Players By Jeffrey Sweet. Originally published in 1978, this oral history by playwright and theatre historian Jeffrey Sweet is essential reading about the first improvisational theaters in the United States. Contains interviews with Paul Sills and many early Compass and Second City players. Currently out of print, but can be found used online.
Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater By Mark Larson, Agate Publishing, 2019. Ensemble is an in-depth history of Chicago’s theater scene told through first-person accounts. It explores the early days of the fabled Compass Players and the legendary Second City in the ’50s and ’60s; the rise of ensembles like Steppenwolf in the ’70s; the explosion of storefront and neighborhood companies that began in earnest in the ’80s; and the global influence of the city as the center of improv training and performance. Draws from more than 300 interviews, among them Carol Sills, Ed Asner, Alan Arkin, Barbara Harris, Paul Sand, Joyce Piven, Aretha Sills, and many other people who worked with Paul Sills and/or Viola Spolin.
The Compass: The Improvisational Theatre that Revolutionized American Comedy By Janet Coleman. The Compass began in a storefront theater near the University of Chicago campus in the summer of 1955 and lasted only a few years before its players—including David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Barbara Harris, and Shelley Berman—moved on. Out of this group was born a new form: improvisational theater and a radically new kind of comedian. Currently out of print, but can be found used online.
Ensemble-Made Chicago: A Guide to Devised Theater By Chloe Johnston and Coya Paz Brownrigg, Northwestern University Press, 2019. Assembled from interviews and firsthand observations, Ensemble-Made Chicago is a guide to devising theater for students and practitioners alike, as well as an important archive of Chicago’s vibrant ensemble traditions. The first chapter includes a valuable discussion on the role of Hull House, Viola Spolin, and Paul Sills in the history of ensemble and devised theater in Chicago.
Improv Legends: Into the Unknown with Viola Spolin
Created and produced by Joel Veenstra and Marc Warzecha