Paul Sills

Sills is historically decisive because he made improvisation public. Viola Spolin developed the method in settlement-house recreation and Los Angeles youth theater; Sills demonstrated that the method could generate full evenings of professional performance and anchor lasting institutions with paying audiences and national reputations.

The Compass Players (1955-1958) was the first experiment of this kind in American theater history. No precedent existed for an ensemble that performed improvised scenes for a commercial cabaret audience, and Compass had to invent its procedures as it went. Sills provided the directorial intelligence that made the experiment viable.

The Second City, which Sills co-founded in December 1959, became one of the most significant comedy institutions in North American history. Its first six revues, directed by Sills, established the form: scenes developed through improvisation, refined in performance, assembled into a revue that played in repertory. The Saturday Night Live inaugural cast in 1975 was drawn almost entirely from Second City alumni, a direct downstream consequence of the institution Sills built.

Story Theater added a second historical contribution. By demonstrating that improvisational thinking could produce a Broadway production (245 performances) adapting folk and classical sources, Sills proved that the Chicago tradition was not limited to satire, cabaret, and comedy training. Story Theater gave the field a model for ensemble-based theatrical creation that influenced a generation of devised theater companies beyond improv's comedy context.

His later work at the Wisconsin Theater Game Center sustained a direct connection to the Spolin methodology across more than two decades of annual summer sessions, training teachers and performers who carried Theater Games into educational and community contexts internationally.

Sills directed performers toward contact, behavior, and immediate problem-solving rather than topical joke construction. In rehearsal this meant trusting playable action and responding to what partners actually did rather than executing predetermined moves. The actor's first responsibility was to notice and respond to the living situation rather than to execute a plan.

He treated improvisation as the source of theatrical truth rather than as a substitute for craft. His expectations for performers were high: ensemble members were required to remain alert, embodied, and genuinely responsive, while his job as director was to shape that spontaneity into event, relationship, and theatrical form. The distinction mattered to him throughout his career.

This philosophy connects directly to his mother's Theater Games. Sills saw the games not as training exercises that performers graduated beyond but as the ongoing source of theatrical vitality. His later Story Theater work and Wisconsin master classes both sustained the game as a fundamental theatrical instrument rather than a preliminary technique.

His commitment to folk narrative in Story Theater also expressed a pedagogical conviction: that theater could be renewed by returning performers and audiences to shared stories, told with full physical and vocal presence, without the mediation of elaborate scenery or psychological realism. The actor's body and the storyteller's voice, working in ensemble, were sufficient.

Sills' legacy is institutional, aesthetic, and pedagogical. He co-founded three of the central organizations in improv history: Playwrights Theatre Club, the Compass Players, and The Second City. The Second City became one of the dominant comedy training and production pipelines in North America, and its alumni shaped Saturday Night Live, SCTV, and several decades of American television comedy.

His most direct lineage runs through the performers he assembled and directed at Compass and Second City: Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, and dozens of others who passed through the institutions he founded or directed.

Story Theater, which ran on Broadway for 245 performances and earned the Drama Desk Award, gave the broader theater world a model for ensemble-based devised performance grounded in improvisational process. Productions of Story Theater continue to be mounted by regional and educational theaters.

His marriage to Barbara Harris, a major Second City performer in the company's early years, and his long marriage to Carol Bleackley, produced children who continued his artistic lineage: his daughter Aretha Sills carries Spolin Theater Games work internationally.

The New Actors Workshop in New York City, co-founded with Mike Nichols in 1988, trained a generation of performers in the ensemble method Sills had developed across four decades. The Wisconsin Theater Game Center, which ran annual summer sessions from 1987, sustained direct transmission of the Spolin-Sills methodology into the twenty-first century.

His posthumous induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2011 formally recognized what practitioners had understood for decades: that Paul Sills was among the handful of figures without whom modern American improv cannot be explained.

Paul Sills was born Paul Silverberg on November 18, 1927, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother was Viola Spolin, who would become the creator of Theater Games; his father, Wilmer Silverberg, was a pharmacist. He grew up close to the games his mother was developing and absorbed their principles before they were codified in book form. He had a younger brother, William, born in 1929.

After military service, Sills enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1948, studying under the Great Books curriculum, which emphasized classical texts and philosophical inquiry rather than specialized drama training. That intellectual environment placed him among a postwar student cohort that included future Compass Players collaborators, and it gave his theatrical thinking a philosophical dimension that distinguished his work from purely commercial comedy production.

Sills married actress Barbara Harris in 1955; the marriage ended in divorce in 1958 and produced no children. Harris went on to a major career in theater and film, including a Tony Award nomination and work with Second City. In 1960 he married Carol Bleackley, with whom he had five children: David, Rachel, Polly, Aretha, and Neva. The family eventually settled in Door County, Wisconsin, where Sills taught at the Wisconsin Theater Game Center and where he died on June 2, 2008, from pneumonia complications at the age of eighty. Memorial services were held at The Second City in Chicago on June 29, 2008, and in Door County on July 18, 2008.