Paul Sills taught approach to improv theater that influenced many

Paul Sills, a founder of the Second City theater company and the godfather of modern improvisational sketch comedy, died Monday in Sturgeon Bay, Wis. He was 80.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, said his wife, Carol Sills.

As a founder and resident director of a series of small theater companies that began in bars, former bakeries and Chinese restaurants in Chicago, Mr. Sills taught an approach to theater that later would feed directly into the creation of "Saturday Night Live" and influence a range of artists including David Mamet and Richard Foreman. Under Mr. Sills' direction, performances were based on games, audience suggestions and bare-bones scenarios, the basic building blocks of improv comedy.

Mr. Sills learned many of these techniques from his mother, Viola Spolin, who had used them as a drama teacher with the federal Works Progress Administration from 1939 to 1941 and later codified them in her influential book "Improvisation for the Theater."

But while Spolin, who worked closely with her son throughout his career, might have developed and refined the theater-game approach, Mr. Sills spread the gospel, starting the careers of such comedy giants as Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris, Alan Arkin and Paul Sand.

While his influence spread, Mr. Sills continued to stick with the basics, moving on to his next opportunity as a teacher and director, and remaining mostly obscure.

In 1968, Mr. Sills created the story-theater form, in which actors on a bare stage narrate, mime, sing, dance and create plays based on existing stories from the Brothers Grimm, Ovid and others.

In Jeffrey Sweet's book "Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of the Second City and The Compass Players," Mr. Sills explained his approach this way: "Theater is concerned with reality. Reality is shared. And reality of the moment can occur only with spontaneity."

Paul Silverberg was born in Chicago on Nov. 18, 1927. His parents separated when he was young, and he moved with his mother to a rented mansion on Lake Michigan, where she and her friends lived communally. They relocated to California in 1943, but Mr. Sills returned to Chicago to finish high school. After graduating, he was in the merchant marine and the Army and then enrolled at the University of Chicago.

During and after college, he began developing his directorial skills in theaters such as the Playwrights Theater Club, which he helped to create and where he staged plays by Bertolt Brecht, who strongly influenced him and whom he later met. But in 1955, he and a friend he met at the University of Chicago, David Shepherd, created the Compass Players, an improvisational cabaret theater, where they put on revues based more closely on the Spolin approach.

At the Compass, actors would speak in gibberish, perform sketches in languages they could not speak and generally create plays from scratch while an audience was watching. In 1959, after the Compass had dissolved, Mr. Sills, along with Howard Alk and Bernard Sahlins, created Second City, at which they were joined by many of the actors from the Compass.

Second City, which turns 50 next year, would go on to become a comedy mecca, performing a revue on Broadway under Mr. Sills' direction, setting up satellite theaters in Toronto and Detroit and grooming alumni including Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Mike Myers, Gilda Radner and Tina Fey.

But before Second City became ensconced in the comedy establishment, Mr. Sills had moved on, starting theater companies and teaching workshops using theater games. In 1988, he, Nichols and George Morrison created the New Actors Workshop in New York, where Mr. Sills for 15 years taught and directed productions based on the idea of story theater.

Mr. Sills spent more and more of his time in Baileys Harbor, Wis., where he lived with his wife. His survivors also include a son, David Michael; four daughters, Rachel, Polly, Aretha Amelia and Neva; four grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a brother, William.