The Second City : Comedy Troupe Opens a Beachhead Near Beach

News of another-opening-another-show hardly rates the flicker of an eyebrow in a city so wired with alarms and diversions. But Second City’s Tuesday opening at Santa Monica’s refurbished Mayfair Theater (they’ve been previewing since Wednesday) offers considerably more promise than the stuff that ordinarily slips in under a cloudburst of hype.

The move--which adds The Second City’s third permanent branch outside Chicago and Toronto--also tacks another chapter onto the history of one of the most influential theater and comedy groups in America. (It adds a trendy franchise chapter as well; new companies in Dallas, London and Sydney, Australia, are also in the master plan.) Their hope is that their move here just might help blast a pipeline through the junk layer of recycled movies and TV shows that separates American audiences from the reality of their experiences.

It also comes bearing a huge question mark: How do you bring a group of young artists whose tradition has been anti-establishment to the center of one of the most ineluctably powerful and insidious establishments in the world--the entertainment industry--without losing the troops?

You’ve heard it before, of course: New theater group (or rock group/film makers consortium/media production company--you fill in the blank) splashes into town spewing manifestos on Bringing Art to Hollywood, and then surrenders all at the first wave of a development deal. Or surrenders all in tiny self-loathing degrees to Hollywood’s infinite capacity for the smothering absorption of talent. Or surrenders by covert design, like the emissary in “The Mouse That Roared” angling for a fat subsidy.

What makes this brave little band of Second City troupers (seven performers, one director, one artistic director, two controlling partners--one of them silent--and a former talent agency exec and TV package developer turned free-lancer) think it’s going to be any different for them? Or, for that matter, us?

There are several reasons. They include pedigree; a certain kind of logical development in the life of an institution; and a clear notion of why they’re here. In other words, they haven’t come to beguile the industry like a coy mistress. Their development deals are already done: Two with CBS, plus a tentative agreement with NBC for a morning variety show; an agreement with Imagine Films for TV production and a first look at any movie proposal, and a TV pilot deal with Second City alumnus, writer-producer-director Steve Kampmann.

Andrew Alexander, who is one of Second City’s co-owners (Len Stuart is his silent partner) explains:

“One of the reasons for our opening in L.A. is to use the stage here to work up ideas to present to live audiences in the Second City tradition. We’re also trying to develop and sell TV ideas. The two deals with CBS include one for a one-hour sketch comedy and the other for a regular half-hour sitcom. Second City/Imagine Films are working together on this. Our part is the creative side, Imagine’s is financing and distribution through Universal/MCA.” (Second City Entertainment’s operating budget is $1 million. Another $1 million has gone into re-outfitting the Mayfair, which they’ve leased for 10 years.)

Alexander, who was born in London but has spent most of his 44 years in Canada, first as a promoter and lastly as a producer (he acquired the Canadian rights to Second City in 1974 for $1), was polishing up his producerspeak--that bulky insider patois peculiar to the entertainment industry--for this, his most ambitious invasion of the industry’s home turf so far. (A Second City troupe held forth in a Pasadena shopping center for a dismal season in 1975, and the SCTV corps holed up in Studio City in 1983 to write what they hoped would not be their last TV show. Their prayers went unanswered.)

“I came to the stark reality that if we were going to continue to grow as a theater company and a production entity, we had to be out here,” Alexander said. He was sitting in his makeshift office aerie as high and as far away as he could get from the hammering and nerve-shattering whine of electric saws remaking the theater below.

“I’ve seen too many of our Chicago graduates come out here and slip through the cracks. I felt if I had a venue here, they’d at least have a roof over their heads.”

Truth be told, this move is also a counteroffensive, a Trojan Horse delivered to Santa Monica. It’s always been open season in Chicago and Toronto for hungry producers and agents on the prowl to bag Second City talent; the memory of Gilda Radner’s and Dan Akroyd’s defection to NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” in 1975 was as fresh as the smell of paint rising through the stairwell.

“Getting into TV was a defense mechanism,” Alexander conceded.

What is it about Second City that makes it such a heavy mother lode for North American entertainment? The answer may be found in its extraordinary capacity for self-regeneration.

If it were possible to yank the trunk and all the tributary roots of the Second City out of the culture, American entertainment would be inconceivably different from what we know it to be. There is no comedic or presentational acting form in America that has been unaffected by Second City, which in turn has its roots in the commedia dell’arte, Brechtian cabaret and the endlessly rejuvenating work of Viola Spolin--which reaches back into the Depression era.

In addition to graduating a hefty amount of prominent alumni who have fanned out through the theater, movies and television (see adjoining list), Second City represents one of the single greatest influences on the tenor and direction of postwar American comedy, including standup.

The Second City debuted in December, 1959, in a Chicago space that was once a Chinese laundry. It was the final incarnation of two other groups--the Playwrights Theatre Club and the Compass Players--that started up and fizzled in the rich embryonic soup of a robust open city and a great university at the height of its experiment with academic freedom.

David Sheperd was its ideologue. Paul Sills (Viola Spolin’s son) was its theatrical facilitator--no other word quite describes his capacity for locating the flash point between impulse and expression.

At the beginning were Bernard Sahlins, Howard Alk, Roger Bowen, Severn Darden, Andrew Duncan, Barbara Harris, Eugene Troobnik and Mina Kolb. Then, as now, the setting was cabaret. Then, as now, formal shows were worked up from improvisations suggested by audiences. Though he had already left Chicago, Sheperd’s credo still echoed through to the present like a Delphic injunction and is quoted in Jeffrey Sweets’ definitive 1978 history “Something Wonderful Right Away”:

“In order for a theater to be an institution, its audience must love and hate it as they love and hate the church and the President . . .the goal of our theater should be a riot in the audience . . . Poetry can’t appear overnight . . . because it’s been dead in us a long time, but a certain excitement can--an excitement we get from speeches, songs, jokes, sales talks and all the other verbal ornaments that the parlor play is too respectable to admit.”

Thirty years later, in a considerably more guarded and less idealistic age, those words retain a certain piquant bravery.

And they haunt the present with the question: What makes this outfit think it’s exempt from the epidemic commercialism of the times, expressed in Mort Sahl’s wry assessment of the young comedic artist: “These kids don’t worry about selling out; they worry about buying in”?

If past is prologue, what suggests an improvement on the number of dumb movies and TV shows we have seen in the last decade or so with Second City alums on their rosters? Will we see the sensibility that was ahead of the country in dealing with Vietnam, or will we get the carload of sloppy grins that brought us “Caddyshack”?

Nobody quite knows. Some think the question is irrelevant. Some, like Alexander, are concerned about commercialism’s contagion. (“We’re not appealing to the industry,” he said of the troupe’s live performances.)

Time will sort the answers, but meanwhile, Alexander may well have made one of his shrewdest moves by enlisting Michael Rollens as co-president.

Rollens, 50, is a Hollywood veteran who has held on to a number of healthy distinctions about art while dishing as an insider--a novel figure in an industry that long ago prefigured the ‘80s credo: The most successful art in America is the art of the deal.

He began his career in the early ‘60s at KHJ as the youngest news director in the country and has worked his way up to media acquisition chief for Josephson Communications Inc., the powerful parent company of ICM, in which capacity he discovered Second City. He also has his own personal management company, in which Second City and Imagine hold an ownership position. “A long time ago I learned that show businesss is not brain surgery; it isn’t life and death,” he said. “Television has atrophied. People work hard, but we’ve created a system where our reference points are recycled TV shows and movies, not real life. Classical theater comes from real life experiences. Television’s reference points now are its own 2-year-old shows. Part of the problem is the immense amount of work it takes to produce TV shows. There are so many competing ideas that you wind up pitching a log line. You use one process to sell, but what makes a show work is usually development--which you can’t sell.”

Rollens thinks that the Second City farm system, through which talent percolates upward, produces a more seasoned performer, someone less likely to slip a “seeking representation” note into the bottom of a program bio.

He explained the system that’s not unlike the paternalistic hold a major league baseball team has on its minor league franchise:

“You have 3,500 students go through five levels of development, taught by Second City-trained teachers and directors. They train for a year, tour for a year, spend the third year at one of three secondary stages, either at E.T.C. or Rolling Woods in Chicago, or London, Ontario, and then go on to the mainstage, seven players (usually four men and three women) doing a polished 45-minute show and then coming back after intermisssion to do improvisations--which in turn will at some point become another finished show.

“With six theaters operating six nights a week in front of people, the amount of input is immense. We’re constantly in touch with current concerns. We’re not looking for the joke; we’re looking for the reality base.

“I saw that here was a group that was unspoiled by the ways Hollywood reduces and homogenizes talent. We’re trying to instill long-range creative goals rather than the short term ‘How much money is in this?,’ which I believe would hurt us. We know that in TV and movies they have to be commercially accepted. But we hope to keep the creative idealism that exists now and create bigger and better commercial things than our competitors.”

Too, the company is taking care of its own. As performers, the troupe works under a standard Actors Equity contract. They are also paid holding fees by the networks for their development labors. If they (meaning the writer-performers) sell a project, they get what Rollens calls “favored nations’ producer’s fees”; that is, a producer’s royalty.

A month before opening, Joe Flaherty--SCTV’s Count Floyd himself--was keeping a low profile in the chilly abandoned store next to the theater that served as a rehearsal space while the cast focused on getting the stage show on its feet (“Military Antiques” read the vestigial sign hanging outside the door). He sipped coffee from a paper cup, watched, kibitzed a little and otherwise didn’t say much.

Flaherty is the artistic director for the company here, but not the stage director (Jeff Michalski is). He was to oversee the creation of the TV material, none of which was yet forthcoming, but he seemed unconcerned. At 46, Flaherty is one of Second City’s most seasoned performers, an old soldier who’s seen more than one campaign fall flat.

The Pasadena debacle of 1975 was one of them. “We bombed,” he recalled later. “Boy was it depressing in that little shopping center. It was Eugene Levy, John Candy, myself. Michael Keaton was an understudy. Sometimes we played to 10 people. It was pathetic. We’d invite celebrities in, and I even felt sorry for them . Still, that’s where Sammy Maudlin was born, in front of 12 people. You never know.”

(Sammy Maudlin is SCTV’s brilliant send-up of a glitzy talk-show host who pullulates with show-biz cliches and bears more than a passing resemblance to comedian Steve Rossi. It is the kind of satirical portrait that not only pillories its subject but renders it instantly obsolete.)

Flaherty isn’t one to pine over Second City’s beginnings with a limp devotional sigh. “Second City bombed when it came to Toronto in 1973,” he said. “You’ve got to find out what means something to people as well as to the actors. The Chicago school had a more political beat, but the best of the old stuff wasn’t political. I got tired of that satiric anti-establishment point of view. It became predictable; it pandered to a segment of the audience, the University of Chicago crowd, the middle class. You lose something when you play to expectations of a certain viewpoint.”

Second City’s Toronto shakedown cruise was so imperiled that Alexander converted the venue to a full dinner theater. “Sometimes the audience would be ticked off because the food wasn’t great, or the steak was cold,” Flaherty said. “We had to deal with that . But we sat down and asked, ‘Is this satire or comedy?’ We decided it’s comedy. We made our social commentary through character, but we worked hard to keep audiences entertained. Any humor is valid if it’s good. The audience was us.” He added, after the briefest of is-this-prophetic-or-not pauses. “Maybe that’s why we never made money.”

The Toronto company then consisted of Flaherty, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Valerie Bromfield and Jane Eastwood. The Los Angeles company now consists of Chris Barnes, Don Lake, Dana Anderson, John Hemphill, Robin Duke, Jane Morris and Bonnie Hunt. They brought their collective midwinter pallor with them, the gloomy off-white color of old bed sheets made gloomier under the raw fluorescent tubes of the office, or the bleak sentry lights of a cold, dusty theater in architectural transition.

They had the low-key concentration of professionals puzzling a group project; on or off stage, you sensed their intangible link, their restless interplay. Someone was always ready with an alert aside, as when Alexander approached the blackboard and wrote out the rehearsal and TV schedule for “logistical compatibility.”

“Logistical compatibility? Who is this guy?” someone asked wryly. Alexander isn’t stuffy, but he’s surprisingly humorless for a man whose business is to know funny. His dark, shoulder-length blow-dried hair is so thick that it wears like a winter hat and further closes off a face partly hidden by nearly translucent eyeglasses. You have to look twice to see that he’s not wearing a beard.

On stage, the cast went through sketches that were now approaching their final form, with musical director Fred Kaz, a grizzled old Feste to this visiting court, noodling on his electric keyboard down front with the abstract, preoccupied air of an old pro killing time. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. A long bluesy pull on “Blue Moon.”

Director Michalski, a dour, no-nonsense young man dressed in work clothes, watched, checked out movement, pondered mechanics; he was the terse antithesis of the languid theorizing auteur.

A sketch on contemporary sexual mores and the hypocrisy surrounding AIDS. A sketch on a TV commercial shoot with Wayne Gretzky and Guy LeFleur in which they, well, contentiously revert. Dana Anderson does the chase scene from “Bullitt” with four chairs. A sketch on drugs in which a 29-year-old brain-fried user is asked, “What do you do for a living, Johnny?” The reply: “Jury Duty.” Enough said. The detail, and many others, make up the Second City’s standard but by no means ordinary comedic approach to a moral topic: indirection and the well-chosen detail. A folk hymn to the Reagan era goes, in part, “We’re gonna stick it to the children/We’re gonna leave it to our heirs to clean up our affairs.”

Jeffrey Sweet is sanguine about the fit between Second City and Hollywood. “I think Alexander is a very clever producer and promoter who sees the potential to generate product,” he said on the telephone from New York. “All those people from Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin and the ‘Saturday Night Live’ crowd, they came and went and Second City never made a dime.”

If nobody talks now of inciting an audience to riot, Sweet doesn’t see a great loss. “Sure Second City has become its own establishment with its own hierarchy, but so has the Village Voice, which doesn’t mean that it still isn’t good. If the Group Theatre were still going, I’m sure people would be railing against its conservatism. It was easier to be anti-establishment in those days--all you had to do was mention the President--and it’s harder to be truly satirical now, to find the majority view and break its code. What are you gonna do, extoll yuppies now? Eddie Murphy’s vulgarity is now establishment.

What Sweet dreads most is the seepage of entertainment values through the culture, in which “we have this coarse corruption where entertainment in the guise of news shows us real blood, like in ‘Geraldo.’ ” The marriage of entertainment with politics, Judge Ronald Reagan presiding, has also been a bad omen. “When Gerald Ford invited Chevy Chase to host his platform, you knew ‘Saturday Night Live’ was compromised.”

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Alexander agrees. Feeling expansive after a trip to Dallas, he looked back on his early restless career as a speak-easy owner, ad salesman, club promoter, theatrical producer. One thing he’s come to understand is the business of show business; the rest is inconstant chance.

“Comedy has obviously changed,” he said. “Over the past 15 years the satirical edge has become harder and harder to accomplish, particularly with the bombardment of the media. Now CNN is doing standup with Braden and Buchanan.

“There’s a growing cynicism over this age of mediocrity. I even sense it in the people who work for us. This is a time when the thing college kids worry about most is how much money they’re going to make. But we still need the audience to give us our cue, to give us something to work with. That’s always been the way with Second City. We’re a social reflection rather than a group that does what society expects it to do.

“Audiences don’t get exposed to live experience in comedy. That should help us. So should the Second City’s internal structure, its support system. We’ve worked hard to strengthen the training programs and to try and keep moving in new directions, which isn’t easy, given the temptations to stay put.”

To Alexander, the greatest challenge of Second City’s move here isn’t just success, it’s resisting the peculiar atomization of the communal spirit that rises over everyone like an acrid inversion layer. Collectives tend to break up, like marriages. Alexander senses this strange endemic atmosphere of perpetual rearrangment, as though life were a series of sets that go up and come down (which, for many, it is).

You could catch the strain of hope in his voice when he said, “This is a town where people go their own way. If we can stay together as a family, despite occasional squabbles, we could make things change.”

The Second City’s cabaret performances consist of a fully scripted show, then a series of audience-inspired improvisations after intermission. The opening show, entitled, “For A Good Time Call . . . 451-0621” plays Tuesdays through Sundays. Tuesday-Thursday curtain times are 8:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday curtains are 8 and 11 p.m., and the Sunday shows begin at 7:30. The theater is dark Mondays. Regular show prices are $12.95 weeknights and Sundays, $13.95 Fridays and Saturdays. A bar and snacks are available. The Mayfair Music Hall is at 214 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica, (213) 451-0621.