Saving the Evening

There is not a single reference to militants or marijuana, the Indians, inner cities, the pill or the generation gap. The cast of characters (Goosey Poosey, Turkey Lurkey) reads like a Howard Johnson's children's menu, and one of the show's most dramatic confrontations occurs between a fisherman and a flounder. Still, the Sfory Theafer (TIME, Nov. 9) playing at Broadway's Ambassador Theater, is more than mere children's fare. The program of fairy tales, cleverly told, demonstrates again that popular theater can be something more out of the ordinary than Hello, Dolly! Which is precisely what Director Paul Sills set out to do.

Sills has invested over half of his 43 years, and all of his considerable intellectual stock, in the basic belief that it is ideas and the spoken word that keep the theater from declining into a minor art form. His mother, Viola Spolin, was an early pioneer in children's improvisational theater in Chicago; Paul hung around backstage as a five-year-old curtain puller. At the University of Chicago in the 1950s, he founded his own experimental theater, "Tonight at 8:30," and followed it off-campus with the Playwrights Theater Club. "We weren't one of those arty little groups," Sills remembers. "The plays we did --The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example--scored on their own dramatic merits, not on intellectual pretense."

Dramatic merit, however, does not a legal theater make--at least not in Chicago, where a court order closed the Playwrights Club for not having a proscenium arch. After that, Sills took off with a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Bristol in England and to teach improvisational theater at the Bristol Old Vic School. Back home again, he founded the Compass Players, from which the celebrated Second City troupe evolved. The performers were not so celebrated then; mostly they were Chicago undergraduates. Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin, Zohra Lampert, Fritz Weaver and Shelley Berman--all took direction from Sills. One, Barbara Harris, took up marriage with him; it ran for three years.

Not Strasberg. "I would not be in the theater today," says Mike Nichols, "if it were not for Paul. Nor, I think, would any of us." Sills sometimes used his actors mercilessly, prodding them through scenes again and again, zeroing in on gestures, inflections, and always on the words themselves. Stanislavsky, not Strasberg, is his hero. "American method schools," he says, "require a reliance on inner actions--what they call 'private moments.' Our improvisations are 'public moments.' The spoken word is the source, not just the psychological meaning behind it."

With his current wife Carol and three daughters, Sills moved from Chicago to the Yale Repertory Theater in 1969. There, one of his improvisations saved the evening last spring when a production of Sam Shepard's Operation Sidewinder had to be withdrawn because of black protests that the play was racist. Sills' substitute, a hasty but hilarious dramatization of ten of Grimms' tales, won high critical acclaim, a contract to play the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, and a TV airing.

But commercial success was not what Sills was after. His friend, Producer Zev Bufman, offered to put Story Theater on Broadway this fall, but Sills refused, and went back to Chicago the following morning. Bufman finally won him over by agreeing to establish a nonprofit theatrical company committed to invest its income in future productions.

The Rub. Story Theater on Broadway is not much different than it was at Yale or in Los Angeles: eight actors tell ten fairy tales, by narration and body movement, on an essentially bare stage to occasional rock music. Laughs --of self-recognition and sheer amusement--envelop the audience about every 30 seconds. Sometimes the music lends the tale another level of meaning--as when, in the show-stopping Henny Penny, the troupe troops off to meet its doom to the strains of Country Joe's antiwar Fixin' to Die Rag. But for the most part, the entertainment turns on nothing more than a delightful rendering of familiar fables by highly skilled performers. In a 1,095-seat theater.

There's the rub. For although Bufman insists the show would work "any place in which we can create an atmosphere of magic," Sills admits, "If it had been in a 300-seat house instead of a full-size theater, it would have run forever." As it is, some of the most inventive and tantalizing theater now in Manhattan does heavy business on weekends when children are out of school. Week nights, "there's a sort of resistance to fairy tales," Sills says. And fondly he remembers the man in the lobby during the Los Angeles run "who said he was there because 'What do you want--I should stay home and read to the kids?' "

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