Sheldon Patinkin was 17 in 1952 when he fell into what turned out to be theater history. A precocious kid from South Shore, he’d entered the University of Chicago at 15 and was majoring in English lit. But he’d also done opera, plays, even a little radio, and started gravitating toward the student theater club, University Theater. That’s where he met Paul Sills, a charismatic fellow student whose mother, Viola Spolin, had developed a set of theater games she’d been using in workshops with young people. Sills gathered a group around him that included such soon-to-be famous names as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, and Barbara Harris. Patinkin joined them in shows and in workshops during which they used Spolin’s games as a basis for improvisation.
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I agree. Well, at the University of Chicago there were no theater classes, there was no theater department, but there was an after-school dramatics group called University Theater. The 1952-’53 school year was when Paul Sills came back to UT. He had hated the guy who was running it up until then—the only salaried person in the theater, a guy named George Blair—so he’d gone off and started his own theater company on campus called Tonight at 8:30. And in the winter of ’52-’53, Paul offered to teach anyone who was interested the improv games that his mother, Viola Spolin, had created. And a bunch of us took the games. What Paul was doing—with the collusion of Eugene Troobnick and David Shepherd, although none of the rest of us was aware of it—he was thinking of starting a theater company, and this was a way of forming an ensemble that Paul knew would work, because when you play the games together you form an ensemble. There’s no way around it. Even if there are impossible people in it, they become part of what the ensemble is.
The last show we did at UT was [Bertolt Brecht’s] The Caucasian Chalk Circle in its Chicago premiere. Paul directed, I was assistant director. And then we opened Playwright’s Theater Club with Chalk Circle, June 23, 1953, at 1560 N. LaSalle—a converted Chinese restaurant, which had curtained alcoves. I always wondered what went on in those alcoves when it was a restaurant. When it was Playwrights, that’s where some of the people slept.
Why was this going on in Hyde Park at that moment and with those people?
[Long pause] He was filled with theater, and his need to get others to feel the way he did was a constant communication. He was mesmerizing in a lot of ways. He was smart. He was semi-inarticulate, which made it that much more interesting, in a way, to understand what he was saying. You did, because he used body language plus whatever words would come out, and occasionally he would just scream at you until you got it. There were people who would never work with him again, and there were people who would work with him no matter what.
There was an off-shoot of Playwrights on the south side?
That acting was listening and reacting. You can only be as good as how much you are a part of what everybody else is doing. That what’s between produces what’s inside rather than what’s inside producing what’s between.
