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
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