Viola Spolin; Guru of Improvisational Theater Methods

Viola Spolin, whose innovative dramatic training groups date to the Depression and gave impetus to two generations of improvisational performers, is dead.

The creator of Theater Games and author of the celebrated “Improvisation for the Theater” was 88 when she died Tuesday in Los Angeles, a spokesman for the family said Friday.

Originally published in 1963, the first of her several books became a bible of the improvisational theater movement--a movement she shepherded to success in the 1950s, beginning with the Compass Theater in Chicago, where students included Elaine May, Mike Nichols and later Alan Arkin, Peter Boyle and Valerie Harper.

Considered the grande dame of improvisation, she divided her teachings into 222 exercises and gave them such mystical names as “Abstract Where” and “Transformation.” They came from years of work, not just with actors but with children, educators, ministers and psychologists when she directed workshops at Esalen.

“The games emerged out of necessity,” she told The Times in 1974. “When I had a problem (directing) I made up a game. When another problem came up I made up a new game.”

Although little-known outside the theater scene, her training and performance techniques have become valued tools in the United States and England.

She emerged from the drama group Neva Boyd’s in Chicago. She became drama supervisor for the Depression-era Works Project Administration’s Recreational Project in Chicago. It was a period when government supported thousands of unemployed actors throughout the country.

In Chicago, she worked with ghetto children and found that she communicated more easily with those young people by replacing language with action; thus were born her “games.”

She had come to Hollywood in 1946 and established a Young Actors Company but returned to Chicago to found the Compass with her son, Paul Sills, the creator of “Story Theater.” From its ashes rose the Second City improvisational group, out of which came many of the original “Saturday Night Live” crew.

She urged her students not to burden themselves with “someone else’s old material”--meaning playwrights’--but to become detached and aware. “You don’t have time to think about yourself . . . all your senses are involved in playing a good game.”

One critic wrote that her games were “structures designed to almost fool spontaneity into being.”

In the 1970s, again in Los Angeles, she conducted workshops for the companies of the “Rhoda” and “Friends and Lovers” TV series and appeared as the mother in the Paul Mazursky film “Alex in Wonderland.”

Avery Schreiber, a longtime disciple of Miss Spolin’s who continues to teach her drama games on both coasts, said Friday that her work “has had a huge impact on all of us (comedic actors).

“Where (director Konstantin) Stanislavsky taught that there should be conflict in acting, Viola said you couldn’t have conflict without an agreement,” said the former TV comic, who added that members of the old Second City group continue to gather regularly.

Miss Spolin’s techniques are now in use throughout the country in university, community and professional theater training programs and in educational courses unrelated to drama. Even environmentalists employ her games, substituting her “There” with “Where” to point out potential environmental problems.

Besides her son, she is survived by her husband, Robert Kolmus Greene, and another son, William Hall Sills.

Memorial donations are asked to be made to the hospice group at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.