Second City getting serious about diversity

CHICAGO -- For years, the Second City has helped funny people find stardom, including Joan Rivers, George Wendt, John Belushi and Mike Myers.

Most have been white; the improvisational comedy troupe has been short on actors of color.

Now, Second City is on a mission to better reflect the cultural diversity of Chicago, where the company has been operating from a North Side theater since it was started in 1959 by a group of improvisational performers that included filmmaker Mike Nichols.

Plans are underway for a Second City training center on Chicago’s South Side.

“Our goal is to see more people in the African American community doing this work,” owner Andrew Alexander says. “We’ve been making the effort for a while, but we wanted more consistency. We realized we needed to be in the community on a more permanent basis.”

The new center would be in a once-thriving and mostly black area known as Bronzeville. And it would be just a few blocks away from the University of Chicago, where a group of politically active students -- Nichols included -- formed a theater club in the late 1950s that morphed into the Second City.

The training center would teach the skills that give Second City its edgy brand of satire, steeped in the arts of improvisation and ensemble acting, and is driven by performers who write and present their own material. It would be similar to Second City’s other local training center, in the mostly white Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, and its centers in Detroit, Toronto, Cleveland, Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles.

Only 15 black members have joined Second City Chicago since Bob Curry in 1966, a time of political and social turbulence when the company needed a black voice.

“Blacks began to join in the ‘70s, but it was not until the ‘80s that we took more aggressive efforts to become more inclusive,” Alexander said.

Second City Detroit, however, has been an incubator for black performers, including Dionna Griffin, now a Second City producer in Chicago, and actors Nyima Funk and Keegan-Michael Key.

“Detroit is a prime example of what I’m talking about doing in Bronzeville,” Alexander said.

Now in Chicago, Funk and Key take on an array of characters while lampooning President Bush, the war on terrorism and other topics in the Second City revue “Curious George Goes to War.”

The audience is usually mostly white, but Funk hopes that will change as Second City finds more minority performers.

The Bronzeville center will probably require about $1.4 million for completion, Alexander said.