This page covers a brief
history of the Chicago Improv Comedy scene from 1958 thru today with an
especially keen look into the early days. Viola Spolin, Paul Sills, David
Shepard, Josephine Forsberg, Del Close, Charna Helpren, Mick Napier and Martin
deMaat will be highlighted as well as the top improv training programs of
PLAYERS WORKSHOP, THE IMPROV OLYMPIC and THE SECOND CITY TRAINING CENTER
Family Life for little baby Josephine
Josephine was born in Oak Park Illinois on January 28th, 1921 just a few blocks from where Frank Lloyd Wright had built his famous houses and a few miles from where her mother and grandfather had a farm. The first years of her life were blessed with prosperity and an active family. Her father, Carmello (Charlie) Raciti was a successful businessman in Chicago, owning many properties, a grocery store, apartment buildings and a movie house. Josephine's mother, Maria was still young and beautiful (in her early twenties at Jo's birth), with a frock of red hair and bright green eyes. She wore furs and drove her own car and she was one of the few women in her community that was actually educated: she had made it through the seventh grade. Josephine (Pepina) had two older siblings, Dominick (Don), and Carmella (Mary) and soon a younger sister came along, Prudencia, who was very sick and almost died a number of times. When the depression hit in 1929, Jo's father lost everything, the houses, the cars, his business. He was destitute and like so many others, turned to drink. Pepina's mother was not kind to him and she lambasted into him for not going out and getting a regular job and support them like a real man. Carmello was a college educated Italian from a well to do family, cultured and built for bigger things than ditches and assembly lines, but his wife, a farm girl, nineteen years his junior didn't understand any of it, and she let him have it on a daily basis. He loved to listen to opera: she hated opera. He planned out big money schemes: she wanted a man who could do a hard days work like everybody else. Carmello was a lost soul and he took it out on his wife and kids until he finally he left them to live on their own with relatives. But before he went he took Pepina by the shoulders and told her that she could be anyone, anything she put her mind to, that she could be the first woman president if she worked hard enough for it, that she was meant for bigger things, like him. He died of a stroke in his mid fifties when Josephine was 16 years old.
Josephine discovers the bard
Pepina's older sister Mary and her mother ran the family, living in River Forest on their grandfather's farm. Josephine was a beautiful and athletic girl, a gymnast and a competitive swimmer at Oak Park High School. She also loved the theater and began acting. She had always loved Shakespeare, first because of the pictures (she got her first Shakespeare picture book when she was five) and then later when Mary read her from Lambs Shakespeare. By the time Jo was in High School she was hooked. When she actually learned about the poetry of the bard in her literature class and then saw an actual production on the stage with costumes there was no turning back for her. Being a Shakespearean actress was all that she wanted to do.
Little Josephine had always had a knack for the theatrical. When she was a kid she used to put on shows in the yard. And later, when she read "Little Women" she was bowled over by the character of "Jo". It was her. A little tomboyish and independent, artistic, creative girl, a woman in a man's life. And "Jo" did shows just like Josephine wanted to. So she joined all of the drama clubs in school and was cast in everything. Unfortunately she was such a good acrobat and dancer that she was always put in the chorus. (Later in life Jo actually danced at Carnegie Hall in New York). Finally she stopped telling the teachers that she could dance and she started getting cast as an actress. After High school she went right to DePaul University and she studied with David Itkin, a Russian who had studied with Stanislavski. Stanislavski was an early explorer of improvisation and this was Jo's first exposure to it. Jo joined The Actor's Company directed by Mini Gallitser, a very famous company in Chicago at the time. Jo was climbing up the acting ladder and it looked like her dream of going to New York and becoming a Broadway actress was going to come true. And her social life was going well also. She had fallen in with a group of dancers including a young woman named Marie Chappy whose brother Bud took Jo out on a date where she had her first rare steak (Jo's mother cooked her meat well done like all the Italian farmers at the time). Jo also had another boy interested in her, Lloyd Swan, a Bohemian. He joined the Marines and proposed to Jo on furlough and Jo accepted. Then he and was sent to Iwa Jima where he died. Jo was horrified and it took her a long time to get over it.
Josephine, Leanaeda and Mary in the late 30s
Jo meets her future husband
Josephine continued her acting at The Actor's Company, honing her craft. A young man, a couple of years her junior joined the company and he was very good. His name was Rolf Forsberg, the 19 year old only son of Swedish immigrants. Rolf had an incredible hunger for performing Shakespeare and he and Josephine hit it off. Before she knew it they were lovers and soon after that they were married and Jo was pregnant. It was a whirlwind. Josephine still lived at home, Rolf still lived at home, neither of them made much money and they had a kid on the way. Rolf's mother, Signe was furious. Her son, her only son, her pride and joy had married an Italian, a Catholic, an older woman, and poor. Signe looked at Jo like the enemy 24 hours a day. And Signe encouraged her son to still pursue his dream. Rolf was only too happy to oblige and he went off to be in a show while Josephine was working in Wisconsin about ready to deliver her first child. She was riding on a train trying to get to Chicago when the labor pains started, two months early. She got off in Green Bay, Wisconsin, alone and frightened and checked into the nearby hospital. The next day. November 25th, she gave premature birth to a little girl, barely able to survive, Linnea Alexandra. If things weren't already complicated enough, Josephine would have to raise a daughter, almost by herself, on an actor's salary. And her starting point was Green Bay.
On the Road with the Traveling Toby Shows
Josephine and Rolf figured out how to make ends meet with the help of a lot of people. For some of the time little Linnea lived with Signe and Rolf's father Fritjov in their four floor walk up on the north west side, the old German neighborhood. Some of the time they lived in a communal apartment on the west Side of Chicago with the Italian relatives under the watchful eye of the self appointed family patriarch, Harry Pusateri, their 3nd cousin: who had married Mary and later became Mayor of Hillside, Illinois.. And some of the time they lived together in a theater commune called the Art Circle, where each artist couple had one room and they all shared a kitchen. Eventually the Art Circle would attract quite a group including Paul Sills, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris and many others. But most of the time Josephine, Rolf and Linnea were on the road.
One of the biggest shows that they were in was Good Night Ladies. It toured for 2 years, eight shows a week. The actors traveled in a huge caravan but often times Jo would have to take a train from place to place with little Linnea because the show didn't have insurance for a child. One time in Indiana the hotel wouldn't let Jo check in because her name was Forsberg and the hotel didn't allow Jews. Jo refused to tell them that she wasn't Jewish and simply sat there in protest until the entire cast arrive. The producer (who was Jewish) set things straight and they got their room. I guess the hotel didn't allow Jews, unless the Jews were paying for thirty rooms.
This went on for years with Rolf and Jo and some of the other cast members home schooling Linnea in French, English, the arts and history. This gave Linnea quite a taste for the stage and also made her quite the center of attention and the cutest thing around. She even joined in on some of the shows as a child actress. Linnea's best friends were her cousins Patty and Martin deMaat, both a little younger. Patty and Martin were the children of Josephine's sister, Prudencia (Prudy). She turned out to be a beautiful but simple woman with a vicious temper and her mother's lack of tolerance for people who are a little different. She married a sweet but equally simple Dutchman who had fled the Nazi's and was a janitor. He always tried to help Rolf and Jo by offering them "real" jobs at the candy factory where he worked. Patty was fine with it but little Martin, the youngest and most sensitive of the group felt completely misunderstood and unappreciated by his parents, and especially unloved by his mother. Rolf and Jo had sympathy for the boy and took him under their wing, exposing him to art and theater until he never wanted to go home again. He became their unofficially adopted son and loved Rolf and Jo like he wished that he could love his own father and mother.
Every once in a while their travels took them to New York, land of their dreams. One of these trips was so long that they set up an apartment and Josephine began studies with a famous dance company. It eventually brought her to Carnegie Hall to perform, one of the highlights of her life so far. Rolf too was eager to improve his lot in life and began to work in the larger entertainment industry as a writer and a director. He hung out with the Beatniks in Greenwich Village and smoked pot with the Jazz musicians. He got into alternate religions and philosophies including Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga. Josephine was exploring also with Philosophy and psychology and Theory. In a way their journeys were similar but on completely different paths. Josephine also remembered her father's drive to own property and start a business. She and Rolf talked about opening a rib joint and a chili house in Chicago but as soon as it went further than talk Rolf wanted none of it. He didn't want to be distracted by property and responsibility and ownership. Jo tried to convince Rolf's father to buy an apartment building but Signe refused to let that happen. She wanted a mansion in uptown, or nothing. Rolf and Jo began to live very separate lives. Rolf had a few girlfriends around the country and Jo was angry but tolerant. Money wasn't much better and the whole plan seemed to be in question.
For money Rolf got work with Fred Niles writing for television and also for WTTW the public TV station. This helped. Jo did a lot of modeling and she was spokeswoman for a number of products at conventions and such. Both of them belonged to a company called Playwrights, a group that included their old friends Paul Sills and Elaine May. Rolf had the rep of Chicago's North Side Yoga Guru and was quite a budding personality in his mid thirties. He had his eye on San Francisco and a production of The Tempest staring Ed Asner. Jo threw in more with the Playwrights group and began working with David Shepard and Paul Sills and Paul's mother Viola Spolin on some new theater concepts, especially improvisation. Josephine and Rolf decided to give their marriage another chance and it worked. Jo got pregnant again.
Eric and The Second City is born
Josephine was pregnant and Rolf was in San Francisco with his new hit production of The Tempest. It was a milestone in Rolf's career. Work with Viola Spolin was going well and Josephine was building on her Stanislavski foundation that she learned from Itkin. What had started as a small company of inspired performers doing intelligent material in the upstairs room of a Chinese restaurant was now turning into something really big, a performance group that could afford it's own stage. Playwrights was opening their own theater with a large space on the main floor for Playwrights and a small space in the basement for Viola's and Paul's new improv troupe which they called The Second City. Josephine was the female understudy for the Second City troupe as well as Viola's teaching assistant. The original company included Alan Arkin, Sevren Darden and Mina Cole.
Rolf was into his own thing moving his production of The Tempest from San Francisco to off-Broadway in NYC (Jo raised the cash to do it). It was a great career move for him and would make him a big wig in New York theater, his dream come true. He wished Jo well and moved on to the big Apple. Jo had hoped to give birth long before opening night at Second City but her baby just didn't want to come out. Opening night for the very first show at The Second City was on December 16th, long after the baby was due. But as the 14th rolled around, no baby. Josephine went into the hospital for a caesarian section. Her son was born on December 16th at 11 AM and Jo was going to miss opening night. He was over 10 lbs and the umbilical chord had been wrapped tight around his arm so it took a few days to get home. Rolf and Jo had discussed a name for their son and decided on Tecumseh after the Indian chief. But when the time came to sign the birth certificate they chickened out and instead named their son Rolf-Eric Tecumseh Forsberg. Little Rolf-Eric had red hair and black eyes and loved to smile. He was introduced to the world as Rolf-Eric with a hyphen but soon became simply Eric. Only his cousin Marion (Jo's youngest sister Lee's daughter) called him Rolf-Eric for the first few years. Then simply Eric for all.
So Jo had a new born baby, a 14 year old daughter and a 12 year old adopted son. Time to get a job.
Shakespeare for Children & Early Improv Classes
In the early 1960s Josephine took over Sunday afternoons at The Second City and put a children's theater in the space. The evening shows promoted it as "Sunday Sunday, the Little Bastard's Fun Day".
Some of the shows she mounted were adaptations of William Shakespeare plays. She did a Mexican fantasy version of "A Midsummer Nights Dream", a rugged sea faring version of "The Tempest", as well as "Per Gynt", "Charlie's Aunt" and many more.
Later, as the hip and hippy filled sixties forged on Josephine created some original plays of her own. The first was called "The Christmas Play" and it showed a little girl searching the earth for the answer to Christmas. Her companions were the Sun, the Wind and the Rain. After that Jo created her first huge original hit: The Land of the Stage. It showed how simple creativity exercises can lead to entire stage environments and eventual scenes with characters and plots. At the end of the show the kids were brought up on the stage to do theater games with the actors. This was in the sixties and although by the 1980s most kids theaters had some sort of audience participation, Josephine did it 20 years before anyone else. And as a side note, 8 year old Eric came up with the name for the show. Another bit of trivia is that a young Bill Murray was in the first production of the play. Land of the Stage has been performed hundreds of times in dozens of productions spanning four decades.
By the early 1970s Jo wrote her second bit hit, "Comedia", a play about animals an people. It was actually a musical and it too had dozens of productions and won a number of awards.
By the mid 1970s the kids shows began to go to Josephine's followers, the most prominent one being her daughter Linnea, who created such shows as "On the Road to Canterbury", "Greetings from the brothers Grimm", and "Tales to Tremble by". By the early 1980s, Eric began doing shows at the Second City on Sundays. His early musical offerings included "Tales of Young King Arthur", "Jimmy Sweeter Visits Candyland", "Santa and the Christmas Gnomes", "The Wondrous Tales of Baby Clown Foo" and "The fast paced story of the King some clowns and a couple of bad guys", which was a Comedia Del Arte/Medieval Morality Play version of a Midsummer Nights Dream.
The Childrens Theater of the Second City celebrated over 30 years of excellent family entertainment, then in the mid 1990s it was given to a couple of students who changed the name to The Emerald City Childrens' Theater and that was the end. All things must pass.
Jo creates Players Workshop
In 1971 Jo officially opened the doors of Chicago' first school of improvisation: Players Workshop of the Second City. It was to last for 33 years. The business began with Jo as the only full time teacher (Martin flew in from New York to teach in the Summer). Linnea was living with Ronnie in Carbondale but she taught when she could. Eric lived in Sierra Madre California with his father until High School when he returned to live in Chicago with his mom.
lft 2 rt: Bob McGuire, Jo, Eric & Rolf at Eric's 8th grade commencement
A Brief History of Viola, Improv and the rise of Josephine Raciti Forsberg
Viola Spolin is the creator of Theater Games & author of the definitive text on improv, "Improvisation for the Theater". Her son, Paul Sills took his mother's work and expanded on it, co-creating The Second City which opened on December 16th, 1959 in Chicago's Old Town.
Viola in the late 1960s
Paul Sill's friend and associate at Playwright's (an experimental theater commune in the late 1950s), Josephine Forsberg was invited to join the cast of the Second City and also to be trained as Viola's extra teacher. By the mid 1960s Paul had left The Second City to open his new project, Story Theater. Viola had also left, moving to Southern California where she continued to teach and write. Bernie Salins took over as the owner and director of The Second City and Josephine Forsberg took over all of Viola's classes as well as her Children's Theater. As Second City's popularity grew, Josephine Forsberg's classes filled up and overflowed. She began renting space outside of the Second City to accommodate the hundreds of students and she trained her daughter Linnea and her nephew Martin deMaat to teach as well. In 1971 Josephine incorporated her growing school as Players Workshop of the Second City. During this time she trained almost every person who was cast in a Second City show including Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Betty Thomas, Shelly Long, George Wendt, Dan Castaleneta, Brian Dolye Murray, Brandon Tartikof, and even a stint with David Mamet. A former Second City alum, Del Close also began teaching and directing at this time. Del and Bernie directed the main stage shows while Josephine founded and directed the touring company. By the late 1970s Josephine Forsberg's Players Workshop was the largest school of improvisation in the country. Many of the graduates of Players Workshop went on to form local theater companies and comedy troupes, seeding the massive growth of the Chicago Theater scene that happened in the 1980s and 90s. In 1982 Josephine brought her old friend and improv guru, David Shepard to Chicago to help him develop his idea for an Improvisational Olympiad. At the time, Josephine's son, Eric was producing a late night improv competition and it packed the house. David drew on this to transform his vision of the Improv Olympiad into a score based team competition. One of Josephine's students, Charna Helpren joined the first Olympiad team and soon became David's producer. The Improvisational Olympic opened at Players Workshop later that year and was an instant hit. David and Charna eventually moved the Olympic to a nearby night club and then into larger and larger spaces until it was a city wide phenomenon. Eventually David Shepard returned to New York and Del Close came on board with Charna, introducing the Harold to the IO format. Almost everyone who studied improv in Chicago either trained at the Improv Olympic with Del and Charna or at Players Workshop with Josephine and Martin. Second City also had classes, mostly taught by Del's former students, Michael Gelman and Don DePollo, or Josephine's former students Jeff and John Michelski. In the mid 1980s the new owner of the Second City wanted to expand the training program and so brought Martin deMaat in as the head of the newest school in town, The Second City Training Center. One of the students that emerged from this program and eventually came to teach it was Mick Napier (founder of the Annoyance Theater). During this period stars like Bonnie Hunt came from Players Workshop, Mike Myers came from the Second City and Chris Farley came from the Improv Olympic. Players Workshop reached its peak in the mid 1990s with over 500 active students and tens of thousands of graduates in every walk of life. But with the retirement of Josephine Forsberg in 1995 the Players Workshop was unable keep it's foothold as the Chicago theater scene and it quickly shrank to under one hundred students. But the mantel had passes to Martin deMaat who built the Second City Training Center from a few dozen students in the mid 1980s to over one thousand by 1998.
Jo with student Kim Todd and
nephew Martin deMaat
Even though Josephine retired in 1995, Del died in 1999 and Martin deMaat died in 2001, Chicago is still the place for Improv.
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Last edited 01/14/2008