John Stoops

RolesFounder

John Stoops is a Chicago-based improviser, theater executive, and educator who founded The Revival in Hyde Park in 2015 on the site of the corner of 55th Street and University Avenue where the Compass Players had performed in 1955, returning improvisational comedy to its historical birthplace sixty years after it first appeared there. Before founding The Revival, Stoops worked at the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago, performed at iO and Second City, joined Boom Chicago in Amsterdam as a professional ensemble member performing over two hundred shows across five countries alongside Seth Meyers and Jordan Peele, and earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, writing The Revival's founding business plan as his graduation project. The Revival serves South Side Chicago audiences with adult and youth classes, workshops, performances, and scholarship access through its Due South Foundation.

Career

John Stoops began his formal improv training after discovering the form through his employer's benefit program at Leo Burnett in Chicago. He trained and performed at ImprovOlympic and Second City, the two major Chicago improv institutions, before auditioning for Boom Chicago, the Amsterdam-based improv ensemble that had been founded by Northwestern University graduates and had built a professional touring ensemble performing for European and international audiences.

Stoops joined Boom Chicago and performed over two hundred shows across five countries during his tenure with the ensemble. His roommate in Amsterdam was Seth Meyers, who would later become head writer and anchor of SNL's Weekend Update before hosting Late Night with Seth Meyers. Ike Barinholtz was also in the ensemble during Stoops's period. Jordan Peele, who later directed Get Out and Us, took Stoops's spot in the ensemble when Stoops departed. The Boom Chicago ensemble's roster during this period placed Stoops within a cohort of performers whose subsequent careers confirmed the ensemble's role as a European-based improv talent incubator.

After Boom Chicago, Stoops enrolled at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management to pursue an MBA, using the graduate program to develop the business foundation for a theater idea he had been forming. His Kellogg graduation project was the business plan for what would become The Revival, which he developed as an MBA deliverable before moving toward actual implementation.

In the summer of 2015, Stoops purchased a building in Hyde Park at the corner of 55th Street and University Avenue and founded The Revival, a 149-seat cabaret-style comedy club dedicated exclusively to improvisational theater. The location was chosen with historical intention: the Compass Players had performed at that corner in 1955, when David Shepherd, Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May had established improvisation in Hyde Park before the Compass's dissolution and Second City's subsequent founding. The Revival's opening in 2015 came exactly sixty years after the original Compass Players performances at the same site, marking an intentional historical continuity.

Stoops serves as Executive Director of The Revival, overseeing its programming of adult and youth classes, workshops, corporate training, walking tours of the historical improv sites of Hyde Park, and theatrical performances. The theater's programming commitment to the South Side of Chicago distinguishes it from the North Side concentration of iO and Second City, giving the South Side access to dedicated improv training and performance that the geography of Chicago's comedy infrastructure had historically not provided. The Revival established the Due South Foundation to provide scholarship access to students who could not otherwise afford improv training and to partner with Chicago Public Schools in educational programming. In the summer of 2024, The Revival opened a second location in the South Loop.

Historical Context

The Revival's founding at the historical Compass Players site in Hyde Park recovered a geographical and institutional genealogy that the North Side concentration of Chicago improv had caused to become dormant. The Compass Players, whose performances at 1322 East 55th Street in 1955 and 1956 had established the template for improvisational theater performance in an American city, had always been in Hyde Park, and their successor institution, The Second City, had moved to the Near North Side when it opened in 1959, permanently shifting the center of Chicago improv away from the South Side university neighborhood where it had begun.

Stoops's decision to build The Revival at the Compass Players corner represented a deliberate engagement with this historical geography, treating the site as significant rather than incidental and framing the theater's mission in terms of returning the form to its origins. The historical continuity the theater claimed, sixty years after the Compass Players' Hyde Park performances, gave The Revival a narrative identity that distinguished it from other new improv theaters that had opened across Chicago's expanding comedy scene.

The theater's South Side location and its Due South Foundation scholarship program addressed a structural feature of Chicago's improv ecology in which training and performance opportunities were concentrated on the North Side, creating geographic access barriers for performers and audiences living in the South and West Side neighborhoods that the North Side comedy institutions did not serve. The Revival's community engagement model, including its Chicago Public Schools partnerships and civic engagement collaborations with institutions including the University of Chicago, applied the Compass Players' original Hyde Park commitment to intellectual and civic seriousness to a contemporary South Side community context.

Teaching Philosophy

Stoops has described The Revival's programming as fusing the improvisational principles of iO, Second City, and Boom Chicago with the business and organizational thinking he developed at Kellogg, treating the theater as both an artistic institution and a community service organization. The Due South Foundation's scholarship model reflects a conviction that improv training should be accessible independent of financial capacity, and the theater's walking tours of Hyde Park's historical improv sites treat the history of the form as a resource for understanding what improv is and why it matters.

Legacy

The Revival's sustained operation from 2015 through its 2024 South Loop expansion has established Stoops as one of the significant new institutional figures in Chicago improv since the period in which iO and the Annoyance had consolidated the city's comedy ecosystem in the 1990s. The theater's geographic claim on the historical Compass Players site gives it a symbolic standing in Chicago improv history that functions as both an ongoing reminder of the form's Hyde Park origins and as a practical argument for the South Side's continued relevance to the city's comedy culture.

Stoops's career trajectory, from advertising to Boom Chicago to Kellogg MBA to The Revival, represents a model of improv entrepreneurship in which formal business training and international performance experience combined to enable a theater founding with both institutional clarity and organizational sustainability. The Revival's Due South Foundation scholarship model has extended improv access beyond the demographic that North Side comedy institutions primarily serve, contributing to the diversification of the Chicago improv community in ways that parallel other equity-focused initiatives across American improv institutions in the same period.

Early Life and Training

John Stoops graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and relocated to Chicago to pursue a career in advertising at Leo Burnett Worldwide, where he managed accounts including United Airlines, Procter and Gamble, Dean Witter, and Comcast. He discovered improvisational theater through a Leo Burnett human resources benefit that offered employees free improv classes, which redirected his professional interests from advertising toward comedy and theater.

Personal Life

John Stoops graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. He is based in Chicago.