Paul Sills gave us Story Theatre and improvisation which continues to influence thousands of individuals and provided a unique awareness about the space we inhabit. He brought these gifts into the world when America was unraveling at the edges. In the interview segment below, Paul explains how Story Theatre came out of a desire to make sense out of a time when abuse of power was rampant. After considering more direct ways to confront this, he decided to pour himself into his art where creating new worlds was possible and natural. Following these instincts led him to tell us some of the most percipient stories at moments we needed to hear them most.
Paul's immeasurable contributions to American culture and our theatrical tradition will be celebrated, taught and honored for generations to come. His achievements were due in no small part to the enormous support he received from family, especially from his wife Carol Bleackley Sills. They collaborated in Story Theatre productions in many ways. His presentations were unencumbered by props and theatrical mechanisms. He coached players to fill the vacant space by creating a collective minds eye
capable of triggering imaginary scenes that held all the production
value a story could need. These were places that invited play and extemporaneous expressions. Carol's minimal yet luminescent and painterly environments offered a perfect context for interplay among the players interpreting their stories. The image below was taken during Paul's presentation of the Metamorphoses in Wisconsin at the Peninsula Art School near the Baileys Harbor farmhouse he and Carol shared.
Excerpt from
Interview: Paul Sills Reflects on Story Theatre by Laurie Ann Gruhn
"[Story Theatre] was an answer to the question of how the theatre could be relevant in 1968. We opened the Story Theatre in Chicago
in July, and the democratic convention nominated Humphrey in August of that extraordinary year, when in the Spring,
first Martin Luther King, then Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Initially we were talking about opening a bar where
we could put the Democratic party on trial for getting us into Vietnam in the first place, but that was just a
desperate idea. Then I happened to read the Blue Light story in the Grimm Brothers collection and I saw it on stage
in the space then and there without the need to change a word. Stage space is capable of transformation-with out
mechanical scene changes-as we knew from working with Viola Spolin at Second City. Playing her game "Transformation
of Relations," the players could change relationship from doctor patient, to flying birds, to robots,
to whatever else emerged, and where they were transformed along with them. As all true improvisation is in pure
stage space (without literal props or scenic devices), transformation of where is implicit. In the Blue Light,
an old soldier who, on account of his many wounds can serve no longer, goes before the King and is sent off penniless
into the dark forest. He limps along until he sees a light and comes to the house of a Witch. She refuses to take
him in for the night unless he promises to go to the bottom of her well and retrieve for her a blue light that
burns brightly and never goes out. She lowers him on a rope. The space shaping player helps the audience see the
forest, the rope and feel the clammy surface of the well, and the quality of the mysterious blue light. As the
Witch winds him up on the winch, be suspects she's not going to let him up and refuses to give her the blue light.
She cuts the rope and he falls to the bottom of the well. There is no escape. He has nothing left but the blue
light and his pipe, which as his last act he lights from the flame. And lo! A little gray man appears and offers
to do his bidding. This is a motif in fairy tales: the power that's given from nowhere, just when nothing seems
possible. In the depths of the despair, there lies the spark: the transformation of reality. The soldier gets his
revenge on the King, replaces him, and marries the Princess and triumphs over soldiers, judges, over all authority
and power. And when the paternal power was overthrown, in the highly charged political situation of'68, the young
people cried, "Right on!" It was just in the air. After all, we were doing the story during the convention.
"As for the other fairy tales in the first Story Theatre show, the audience found those that were relevant to their
concerns and saw them as pertinent to the hour. Later, in San Francisco, in '73, the Blue Light no longer seemed
relevant, and San Franciscans said the show we did there wasn't political at all. To sum up, Story Theatre was
a response to a need I felt to say something in'68, and I found what I had long been looking for, a theatre that
took place in pure space, the space of transformation.
"The alternative way of telling stories in theatre is dramatic form, which inhabits a different space. Even Shakespeare,
who moved closer to pure story in his last plays, does not escape the literal space of drama. Each scene has its
exposition to orient the audience spatially. Both Yeats and Brecht, who came ever closer to story, often seemed
restricted by dramatic form, having no conception of the transformation of space. They used storytellers, as Chamber
Theatre uses narrators, for non-dramatic purposes. But story is different from drama; it intends something else.
Drama may need and use story, as Shakespeare did, but story is primary, and story re-telling, a different act."
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Link to full interview:
Paul Sills Reflects on Story Theatre
Remembrances:
NY Times
LA Times
Chicago Reader
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