Carol Schindler

Carol Schindler is a New York-based improviser, teacher, director, author, and corporate communication consultant who co-founded Chicago City Limits in 1977, one of the longest-running improv comedy shows in the United States. She trained under both Del Close, the director who developed the Harold at ImprovOlympic, and Paul Sills, the co-founder of The Compass Players, giving her a double lineage connecting the two foundational nodes of American improvisational comedy. Chicago City Limits relocated from Chicago to New York City in 1979 and has performed over 10,000 shows across its history. Schindler has additionally built a parallel career in corporate communication training, applied improv facilitation, and science communication pedagogy.

Career

Carol Schindler is originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin. Before co-founding Chicago City Limits, she undertook an unusually comprehensive training lineage for a practitioner of her generation, studying under both Del Close, who directed at Second City Chicago and would later develop the Harold at the ImprovOlympic, and Paul Sills, the co-founder of The Compass Players, the 1955 University of Chicago ensemble that is generally recognized as the first ensemble to practice improvisational theater as a performing art in the United States. Training under both Close and Sills placed Schindler within the dual formative lineages of American improv: the Compass-to-Second City-to-ImprovOlympic tradition of ensemble long-form and the game-based Spolin-influenced tradition Sills had developed from his mother Viola Spolin's theater games.

In 1977, Schindler co-founded Chicago City Limits in Chicago alongside George Todisco, Linda Gelman, Bill McLaughlin, Paul Zuckerman, Rick Crom, and Christopher Oyen. All of the founding members had studied under Del Close. The group participated in the Del Close Farewell Salute to Chicago in 1978 before departing for New York City.

In 1979, Chicago City Limits relocated to New York City, where it performed at prominent comedy clubs including Catch a Rising Star, the Improv, the Duplex, and Folk City. In 1980, the ensemble established its own theater on West 42nd Street, moving into a permanent institutional home that began the organization's long run as a New York comedy institution. Chicago City Limits subsequently occupied a series of venues: one year on West 42nd Street, fourteen years at Jan Hus Playhouse, nine years at 1105 First Avenue, and nine years at The Broadway Comedy Club from 2004 to 2013. The company returned to Jan Hus Playhouse for more than twenty additional months before concluding its run. Over its history, Chicago City Limits has produced over 10,000 performances, establishing it as one of the longest-running improv comedy shows in American history.

Schindler has appeared in television work, including a role in Encyclopedia, a series produced by HBO and the Children's Television Workshop. She has taught improv in New York for over thirty years.

In parallel with her performing and teaching career, Schindler has built a sustained corporate communication consulting practice spanning more than twenty-five years. Under the name Carol Schindler Consulting, she has worked as a creative director, writer, and speech coach for clients in pharmaceutical, high-technology, and financial sectors, including American Express, AT&T, Canon, Coca-Cola, Dell, Delta, FedEx, Ford, Gerber, HBO, and Mars. She also collaborated with IDOLOGY, a London-based training consultancy, before establishing her own consulting practice.

Schindler co-authored A Doctor and a Plumber in a Rowboat: The Essential Guide to Improvisation with Tom Soter, providing a practitioner-authored curriculum resource in the Close and Second City tradition. She co-founded The Project Connect, a community-based improv workshop initiative, and co-founded EXACT Communication, a communication consulting organization. She has collaborated with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, applying improv-based techniques to science communication pedagogy. She continues to offer the Carol Schindler Improv Intensive in New York.

Historical Context

Schindler's training under both Paul Sills and Del Close gave her access to the two most influential lines of transmission in American improv's foundational period. Sills, as co-founder of The Compass Players and a central figure in the translation of his mother Viola Spolin's theater games into ensemble performance, represented the originating lineage of American improvisational theater. Close, as director of Second City Chicago and later the developer of the Harold at ImprovOlympic, represented the primary evolutionary branch that led from Second City's revue format toward the open-ended long-form structures that would define American improv's subsequent development. Practitioners trained by both figures occupy a distinctive position in improv's genealogy.

Chicago City Limits, which Schindler co-founded in 1977, predates both the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and the Magnet Theater by more than a decade and established a permanent institutional home for ensemble improv in New York at a time when the city had no dedicated improv venue. The ensemble's ten-thousand-performance history across multiple New York venues from 1979 onward gave it a sustained presence in the city's comedy landscape through the period of American improv's national expansion. Its founding cohort's collective training under Del Close documents the close connection between Close's Second City work and the earliest long-term New York improv institutions.

Schindler's early adoption of improv techniques for corporate communication training, which she began developing decades before 'applied improv' became a recognized field with its own literature, organizations, and practitioner community, places her among the earliest practitioners of what would become applied improvisation. Her work anticipated the systematic codification of applied improv that occurred through organizations like the Applied Improvisation Network in the 2000s.

Teaching Philosophy

Schindler's approach to improv instruction centers on authentic presence and interpersonal listening. She has described effective communication as emerging from the state of being present, listening, and willing to engage, and frames improv training as a means of developing those capacities in both performing and non-performing contexts. Her A Doctor and a Plumber in a Rowboat curriculum balances practical exercises with theory oriented toward making improv accessible and engaging. She expresses confidence in people's innate capacity to connect, grounding her pedagogy in a fundamentally optimistic view of human relational potential.

Legacy

Chicago City Limits's more than 10,000 performances across its history give it a quantifiable record among American improv institutions, representing a sustained output of live performance work comparable to that of the most productive regional and national improv organizations. The ensemble's New York presence across four decades served as a training and performance ground for multiple generations of New York improvisers and as an institutional anchor for ensemble improv in a city whose improv ecosystem was subsequently shaped by UCB, iO, and Magnet.

Schindler's co-authored book A Doctor and a Plumber in a Rowboat provides a practitioner-authored curriculum resource in the Close and Second City tradition, contributing to the documented body of improv pedagogy literature that practitioners and teachers use to transmit improv technique across generations.

Her collaboration with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science extended improv-based communication pedagogy into scientific professional communities, contributing to the growing body of applied improv practice in contexts where clear communication of specialized knowledge to general audiences is a professional necessity. Her more than twenty-five years of corporate communication training work represents one of the longest sustained individual applied improv practices in the American improv community.

Early Life and Training

Carol Schindler is originally from Kenosha, Wisconsin. No birth date has been publicly confirmed. Before co-founding Chicago City Limits in 1977, she studied under Del Close and Paul Sills, training in both the Second City tradition and the Compass Players lineage.