Chicago Compass Players wrote the modern improv rulebook
Improv theatre invents dialogue, action, story, and character live, often for comedy, without a fixed script. Western documentation reaches Atellan Farce in 391 BC and Italian street commedia outlines from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Chicago’s Compass Players and Second City still define many comic rules.
Stanislavski and Copeau folded improvisation into actor training; applied improv later jumped into classrooms and workplaces for communication skills. Early-twentieth-century progressive education, including John Dewey’s 1916 influence, fed drama games for children. Viola Spolin’s exercises shaped Chicago’s first modern wave: her son Paul Sills and David Shepherd launched The Compass Players, then Sills founded The Second City. Elaine May, Mike Nichols, Ted Flicker, and Del Close helped harden premises and games in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Second City alumni filled early Saturday Night Live casts and later stars from Tina Fey to Stephen Colbert. Keith Johnstone’s Theatre Machine, born in London, seeded Theatresports after he moved to Calgary. Dick Chudnow founded ComedySportz in Milwaukee in 1984; by a 1988 national tournament ten teams competed, and today’s CSz Worldwide lists dozens of cities. San Francisco’s Committee (1960s) splintered into companies that kept Close’s Harold form alive.
Political and experimental lines run through Grotowski, Peter Brook’s happenings, Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre, and San Francisco Diggers work. In Britain, Joan Littlewood used rehearsal improv heavily, yet was prosecuted twice for letting actors improvise in performance under Lord Chamberlain script rules until 1968. Annoyance Theatre, opened in Chicago in 1987, became known for longform and a musical improv run lasting eleven years.
Western comic improv now splits into two families. Shortform strings brief scenes built on a set game and an audience prompt; many of those games began with Viola Spolin, who drew on the recreational-games expert Neva Boyd. Longform links scenes through shared story, characters or themes and can stretch to a full play or an invented musical such as Spontaneous Broadway. Beyond comedy, Ruth Zaporah's Action Theatre gives movement, voice and language equal weight with nothing planned, Lucien Bourjeily's 66 Minutes in Damascus premiered at the London International Festival of Theatre in 2012, and Rob Wittig and Mark C. Marino devised netprov, which unfolds live on social media.
Source: Improvisational theatre
