A ‘City’ of Survivors : The West’s Second City is in the black despite defections in the ranks

Five months ago, the Second City comedy troupe launched its first major invasion of the West Coast and established a beachhead at the old Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica, bringing with it lots of promise and plenty of questions.

The promise had to do with the troupe’s potential for pumping fresh air into the torpid inversion layer that the entertainment industry here casts over talent, enveloping and invisibly affecting it. It also had to do with Second City’s capacity to offer local audiences a linkup with their experience that could bypass television and the movies.

The main question, simply put, was whether the ensemble could survive.

After five months, it’s still here and still, in many respects--mainly commercial--healthy. But the company has suffered attrition and in its revues hasn’t yet come up with a personal style and point of view--indispensable elements of first-rate work.

What the troupe seemed most concerned about when it arrived in February was defection in the ranks, and that’s happened. Robin Duke, Chris Barnes and Dana Anderson have stayed on, but Bonnie Hunt and Don Lake have left for commercial acting jobs. John Hemphill has gone home to Toronto either to work on a screenplay or take care of personal finances or because he became homesick--it depends on whom you ask. (He declined to give an interview.)

For 30 years, no other comedy group has supplied more major talent to America’s entertainment scene than Second City, which opened its doors in 1959 in what was once a Chinese laundry shop in Chicago. Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Alan Alda, Robert Klein, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Valerie Harper, Tom O’Horgan, the entire SCTV cast out of Toronto and Paul Mazursky are only some of the nearly 300 high-profile veterans who have fanned out through television, movies and the theater.

But even with that pedigree, success is hardly a sure thing. For a performing troupe to catch the Zeitgeist in a revealing way or to penetrate the momentous heart of a matter, the shared frequency of ensemble work is essential. Moliere had it in his Comedie Francaise. Sid Caesar had it with “Your Show of Shows.” Andrew Alexander, who co-owns Second City (with silent partner Len Stuart), has never had it for long and has spent innumerable hours trying to figure out how to keep it. (His creation of the SCTV network was an anguished defensive measure after Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner were spirited out of Second City by NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”)

All along in his Los Angeles designs, Alexander knew there was no way he could bring a small band of his top Toronto and Chicago players to the bosom of the entertainment industry, pay it a subsistence wage while all around were awash in cushy development deals, and not expect at least some of the company to bolt. So he devised a few stratagems.

Rather than try to insulate his company from the flurry of commercial offers that were sure to pile in like junk mail, he enlisted as co-president of Second City Entertainment a veteran industry executive who has worked in media acquisitions and personal management, Michael Rollens.

Rollens is an insider who well knows that the principal art form in Hollywood is the art of the deal. He brought Second City and Imagine Films together as part owners in his management company. In addition to working their regular schedule under Actors Equity, the company was offered holding fees by the networks for the development efforts of its members (who were then individually paid). They were also guaranteed producer’s royalties for anything they sold.

That was the best Alexander could do to ensure that the center would hold. Has it?

“The artistry is coming along,” he said, tacitly conceding that the work has suffered. “There was an awful lot of pressure in the beginning to open the show and then work on TV commitments. I see a much stronger kernel in the sets now.”

Alexander reports that the theater, which operates out of a monthly budget of $155,000, is in the black and that a number of commercial projects are on the verge of being finalized. They include a pilot that’s been financed for syndication; a half-hour sitcom “that’s about to go on its feet” for a major network; a prime-time sketch show that will be offered to two TV networks, and a couple of possibilities for cable outlets. (This doesn’t include in-the-works projects by individual company members. Joe Flaherty, for example, has a development deal with Castle Rock Productions.)

In February, Alexander said that development deals had been signed with CBS and NBC, and an agreement had been struck with Imagine films for TV production and a first look at any movie project (Imagine’s financing and distribution was to be made through Universal/MCA); all this in addition to a TV pilot deal with Second City alumnus, writer-producer-director Steve Kampmann.

Right now, Alexander and Rollens are keeping silent on any details. “I wish I could tell you,” Rollens said, “but the negotiations and the business are at such a delicate phase right now that we can’t afford to say anything prematurely. I can tell you we’ve accomplished a great deal in three or four months. I just can’t be specific. In three weeks from now, we expect to be able to make some major announcements.”

In the meantime, while all these TV deals grind invisibly along in mysterious industry peristalsis, what about the theater?

“I’ve learned from this experience that it’s important to keep people together and not pull them from different groups,” Alexander said. “The Experimental Theater Company in (suburban) Chicago has developed a particularly strong point of view right now. So has our Toronto group. L.A. is a very seductive town. It’s very easy to get drawn into things that aren’t right for you. But an ensemble has to be like an orchestra. You have to take time to learn how to play together.”

Some of the cast is happy staying put. “I got a call for an ‘Adam 12’ (the TV police-series revival) and I told them I don’t drive,” said Chris Barnes, who has found himself a nearly impossible-to-find, two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment in Santa Monica.

“For me, to jump to a sitcom right now is to deny why I came to Second City. You can always jump, but for me there are more things I need to work at, like finding the irony in an issue. Political cartoonists can do it in one panel. I need a panorama. I don’t need to do all the work and study I’m doing in order to wind up playing a wacky neighbor in a sitcom. L.A. is not Hollywood. I have neighbors. They get up in the morning and go to work every day. There’s a hotbed of issues here, just like anywhere else.” (Barnes is at work on a sitcom for CBS--as a writer.)

“I avoid the commercial pressures,” said Robin Duke (who once had a stint with “Saturday Night Live”). “The theater is enough. One day there may be time to do something else, but during the day you have to have a normal life you can draw upon so that you’re not just doing scenes about auditions. The struggle is to make the work you’re doing as strong as it can be.”

“The turnover in Second City has always been high,” said Dana Anderson. “It hurts the process. You miss people, but the work is always there.”

Said Joe Flaherty, the company’s nominal artistic director (who is now on hiatus): “You need time to develop--a year, six months at the least. We made a commitment to present a bunch of ideas to TV, and then, with the show, it just became too crazy. It’s easy to see why people would jump. Patching together a development deal is a lot harder than signing up for a part on a series. There’s no money in brainstorming. It’s very hard to resist the temptation of using the revue as a showcase, to use the stage as a play to get into the movies.”

As for the company’s uncertain artistic focus, he said: “It’s the same thing we faced in Toronto, when we had to borrow a lot of what was being done in Chicago. In the beginning we were always coming up two or three scenes short, and needed to do that. But it was less and less as time went on. We never liked doing it. What you need is an ongoing company. You need to develop your own stuff. L.A. is a city without a pulse. We’re in the era of stand-up now too, instead of the revue-oriented presentation. The greatest challenge is to keep a group together for a year, or a couple of years. The workshops are going well. If they can tough it out, they’ll get and keep people who know what’s happening.”

The workshops to which Flaherty referred consist of an eight-week, 20-class schedule with 15 students working under the tutelage of such Second City alumni as Dick Shaal, Betty Thomas, Severn Darden, Mina Kolb and Jim Fisher. Andrew Alexander hopes to put the best of those young students into a national touring company that would support the main companies.

Co-founder David Shepherd put out a manifesto in the ‘50s that described the Second City’s intentions: “In order for a theater to be an institution, its audiences 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 kind of excitement can.”

And in February Alexander said: “This is a town where people go their own way. If we could stay together as a family, despite occasional squabbles, we could make things change.”

No one in the company begrudges the fate of the people who have left, and Ryan Stiles, Richard Kind and Diane Stilwell have stepped into the breach, as theater pros would.

But no one right now expects the kind of excitement that Shepherd envisioned when Second City was a young, green outfit with no desire or need to accommodate a gargantuan entertainment industry whose watchful operatives seem to be scattered in every audience. And obviously Alexander’s wish for togetherness has turned out to be a late winter hope that vanished with the pilot season of spring.

Very few ideas and changes really start with movies and television. They begin instead with the exchange among human beings, alone together without commercial interruption. That’s why the theater will always have its urgent place, and that’s why Second City hopes to keep on, though it’s won no major battles so far.