1935-2024

Carol Bleackley Sills was a painter, educator, scenic designer, theater director, poet, and editor. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba to Gudrun Sigrid Eggertson and Lachlan MacKinnon Bleackley in 1935, she grew up outside of Montreal. She studied from childhood with progressive arts educator and Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). There, she was steeped in his approach to inspiration which regarded creativity as a group process.

After graduating with a degree in painting from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Carol traveled with a group of Canadian students to West Africa where she was inspired by the sculptures she found in Benin. Upon return, she went to Taliesin to study with Olgivanna Lloyd Wright. Soon after, she moved to nearby Chicago.

In 1959, Carol enrolled in a Viola Spolin workshop while waitressing at Second City. There she met Paul Sills, Second City Director and Viola’s son, whom she later married. She was overjoyed to encounter the theater game system that Viola was creating, inspired by sociologist Neva Boyd’s play-based philosophy and which aligned with her earlier training with Arthur Lismer in Canada.

Carol and Paul, with firstborn daughter Rachel, traveled along with the original Second City troupe to New York. Despite planning a European tour, the assassination of John F. Kennedy urged the family back to their community which was strongly in Chicago.

In 1965, along with the birth of daughter Polly, Carol and Paul, with Viola and friends in the arts community, opened The Game Theater. There they played games, explored side-coaching during performance, and encouraged audience participation. They held community workshops and actively pursued new forms of artistic thought. Included in this was the creation of The Parents School, a parent-run school with a curriculum based on group practice in theater, visual art, literature, and egalitarian social ideals. The school continued until 1981. At The Game Theater, Carol worked with Paul on a new form they called Story Theater, which opened in Chicago in 1968. Daughter Aretha was born in 1969 and Story Theatre went on to Broadway in 1970.

Subsequently, Carol was a part of creating many innovative theaters including The Body Politic in Chicago, Century Hall in Milwaukee, and The Learning Theater in Chicago.  

With a community of players from Second City, Story Theater, and including daughter Rachel, Carol, Paul opened a space in Los Angeles called Sills & Co. to play Viola’s theater games in performance. They traveled to New York City Broadway bound in 1985. The family, now including Neva, born in 1977, stayed. In 1988, Carol co-designed a graduate level acting program with Paul, Mike Nichols and George Morrison called New Actors Workshop. After permanently moving to Door County, WI in 1993, Carol and Paul returned to the school each season to produce a show with the graduating class. After Paul’s passing in 2008, Carol directed The Tao of Chuang Chou with the school’s final class in 2010. In 2014, Carol returned to directing at Central Methodist University for a production of Story Theatre.

Along with designing theater and educational spaces and co-developing shows, Carol designed sets, such as for Studs Terkel’s Talking to Myself, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Sweet Bloody Liberty, shows created with the American Folklore Theater (now Northern Sky) in Door County, and ten shows created with the Paul Sills Community Players in Door County. Carol’s scenic design employed painted projections and shadow play to allow players the room to explore the stage and find objects in the space. Her minimalistic and innovative approach is outlined in Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows (Applause Books). 

Over the years, Carol, inspired by her work with Lismer and Spolin, created an art curriculum that emphasized group work and utilized story as the impetus for explorations in painting, drawing, and sculpture. She held workshops at The Parents School in Chicago, at the Jamaica Arts Center in Queens, NY, at Supermud Pottery in NYC and in Door County, WI at her own Mud Lake Art School, and the Peninsula School of Art where she also trained teachers, including daughters Polly and Neva, in her methods for several seasons.

In her own artistic practice, Carol worked in painting, drawing and sculpting in clay. Interested in the abstraction of painting space, she used landscape and still life to explore the formal relationships of line, shape, and color. She also used art as a means of social change and worked with a group of mothers to paint revolutionary murals during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Carol’s civic engagement continued throughout her life, including her work on the board of the Door County Environmental Council.

Carol was a collaborating editor of the writings of both Spolin and Sills. She edited the second and third editions of Viola’s Improvisation for the Theater, Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director’s Handbook, and Theater Games for the Lone Actor (all Northwestern University Press) along with Paul’s Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows (Applause Books). In her own writing, Carol was an active participant in the Word Women, a group of Door County poets.

Carol was director of Paul Sills' Wisconsin Theater Game Center in Door County where she was the administrator of summer theater game intensives to players from all over the world for nearly forty years. With Paul, she created a method of teaching Story Theater which she presented in workshops in Los Angeles and annually at the Wisconsin Theater Game Center. Daughters Rachel and Neva assisted her on many of these workshops. As director of Sills/Spolin Theater Works, with assistance from daughters Rachel and Aretha, she worked to maintain the improvisational theater tradition of Paul Sills and Viola Spolin and to preserve and share all their unique vision of American theater.

1927-2008

Paul Sills was the founding director of Playwrights Theater Club, Compass Players, The Second City, and originator of Story Theater. Sills was active in theater all his life.

Born in Chicago November 18, 1927, to Viola Mills and Wilmer Silverberg, Paul grew up on the north side of Chicago. His mother, Viola Spolin, after studying group work with sociologist Neva Boyd, created a series of games to impart theater at Hull House. Young Paul, who sometimes performed in her productions, began a lifelong  journey into improvisational theater.

After graduating from Francis Parker School and serving in the merchant marines and US Army, Sills attended the University of Chicago, where he co-founded Playwrights Theater Club. In 1955, after starting The Compass Players with David Shepherd, Paul went to England on a Fulbright grant, and also studied the Berliner Ensemble productions of Bertolt Brecht. In 1959, Sills opened The Second City with his friend Howard Alk and producer Bernie Sahlins. The first company included Alk, Severn Darden, Andrew Duncan, Barbara Harris, Mina Kolb, Paul Sand and Eugene Troobnick. Steeped in his mother Viola's improvisational games, they created a comedy revue form that based its spontaneous play on audience suggestions. Viola's book, Improvisation for the Theater, first published in 1963, is a classic curriculum for American theater study.

Paul and Carol Bleackley, who met at Second City in 1961, were by 1965 the parents of Rachel and Polly. That year, Paul left Second City and with Carol and Viola opened The Game Theater along with friends in the arts community Mona Mellis, Dennis Cunningham, Mickey Leglaire, Joanne Shapiro, Jackie Kronberg, Mel Spiegel, Carol and others. There, they explored playing theater games side-coached during performance and encouraged audience participation. Workshops were held and new forms of artistic thought actively pursued. The Parents School began there, with a curriculum based on art forms. Then, in Paul's words, "One afternoon in 1967 the breakthrough into Story Theater occurred when I coached players to tell the story of Snow White while acting the roles, eliminating the need for a separate narrator."

In the summer of 1968 in the old Second City space at 1848 North Wells, he presented a group of Grimm’s fairy tales adapted for the stage. This original incarnation of Story Theatre was expanded by Sills for Robert Brustein at Yale University and then at the Body Politic, Chicago, which Sills opened with a stirring production of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in 1969, the year a third daughter, Aretha, was born. Paul Sills' Story Theatre soon played the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles to great acclaim (with Second City veterans Hamilton Camp, Melinda Dillon, Valerie Harper, Richard Libertini, Paul Sand, Dick Schaal and Avery Schreiber) and went on to open on Broadway in 1970, winning several Tony awards. It is published by Samuel French.

For America's bicentennial, Paul's American Revolution played Ford's Theater in Washington DC and his Sweet Bloody Liberty played Chicago's Victory Gardens Theater. Paul could not only adapt literature for the stage, often with the help of Carol and poet friend Arnold Weinstein, but also inspire actors to share his originating vision.  His book, Paul Sills Story Theater: Four Shows, is published by Applause Books.

Paul and Carol bought the century-old Strege homestead in Liberty Grove and moved to Door County in 1970. Their fourth daughter, Neva, was born in 1977. Not until 1987 did Paul begin to coach improvisational theater workshops in their restored barn and found Paul Sills The Wisconsin Theater Game Center. In 1988, the Sills started a graduate level acting program in New York City with Mike Nichols and George Morrison called New Actors Workshop, where for ten years every graduating class acted in a show Paul originated with them. Meanwhile in Door County, since 1994, he staged ten original community theater shows once almost every year, featuring local players Stuart Champeau, Jennifer Easton Erickson, Leif Erickson, Erik Frost, Martha Garvey, Rich Higdon, Rachel Sills, Valerie Murre Schlick, Kurt Thomas and Thor Thoreson. He also over the years directed shows for American Folklore Theater (now Northern Sky) in Peninsula State Park with Jeff Herbst, Fred Heide and the late Fred Alley.

Exploring theater games for performance continued, when in 1983 Paul again gathered many early Second City players in Los Angeles for several years of play as Sills & Co. They opened in New York to good reviews in 1985, and played the Door Community Auditorium in Fish Creek for two years running.

Paul was posthumously inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2012.

1906-1994

Viola Spolin was an actress, educator, director, author, and the creator of theater games, a system of actor training that uses games she devised to organically teach the formal rules of the theater. Her groundbreaking book Improvisation for the Theater transformed American theater and revolutionized the way acting is taught. Originally published in 1963 by Northwestern University Press, it remains an essential theater text. She developed her methods while working as a drama supervisor in Chicago for the WPA, at her Young Actors Company in Hollywood, and as Director of Workshops at The Second City. Her son, director Paul Sills, who is credited with popularizing her work, used her theater games when he co-founded Compass, Playwrights Theatre Club, The Second City, and created Story Theater. The modern improvisational theater movement is a direct outgrowth of Spolin’s methods, discoveries, and writings. Read more about her life and work below.

For a comprehensive biography of Viola Spolin, please visit her official website.

Learn more about Improvisation for the Theater, and Spolin’s other publications here.

Rachel Sills, Associate Director of Sills/Spolin Theater Works’ career began the moment she toddled onstage at Square East in Greenwich Village during a Second City rehearsal. When she wasn't playing around with the original casts of that famed cabaret in either New York or Chicago or sitting next to her father, director Paul Sills, widely known leader of the improvisational theater movement, she was under the watchful eye of grandmother Viola Spolin, who cradled, then coached Rachel in their family's work, while writing Improvisation for the Theater at the Lincoln Hotel and running workshops for the Chicago cast of Second City.

In the summer of '68 Paul was invited by owner Pete Kelliher of 1848 N. Wells, (the old Second City had moved to North Avenue) to use that shuttered space until its demolition in September. This coincided with the arrival of the Democratic convention and on their newly built stage the Game Theater community of players, including Paul, played fairy tales for all age groups free of charge, while Rachel's Parents School met there too. Right through the police riots in August.

In the opening shot of all 26 Story Theater CTV series shows of 1971, originally broadcast in British Columbia, you can spot a young Rachel singing along to the opening credits, the Rolling Stones song "Come Let us Sing This Song All Together."

Rachel attended and observed many workshops with Paul and also Viola, before and during teenage in California. She recalls writing down Viola's thoughts, taking notes (later archived at Northwestern University), accompanying Viola hand in hand, being inseparable.

Thus, no surprise when Rachel became the youngest member of Sills & Co., alongside famed Second City and Committee actors again curated to play Viola's theater games in performance. They did so from 1983, at a wonderful space on Heliotrope Street off Melrose, newly designed by Carol. Their weekend shows became so popular that Sills &Co. had to move from its 99 seat theater to the larger Westwood Playhouse; thence to a highly acclaimed run at Lamb's Theater on Broadway, and finally to Circle in the Square in the West Village until 1987.

After Sills & Co., Rachel attended New Actors Workshop in Manhattan, a two year graduate level acting program originated by Mike Nichols and Paul Sills. Since 2008, Rachel Sills has worked with Carol Sills in coaching weeklong Story Theater Intensives at the Wisconsin Theater Game Center in Door County, WI. In 2017 Rachel co-directed Carol Sills' American Revolution in Minneapolis with fellow New Actors Workshop alumni Kathy Hendrickson and Story Theater alumni Cordis Heard.

Paul also directed Rachel in original shows that Carol designed:

Monkey (Century Hall, Milwaukee, 1976)
Caucasian Chalk Circle (Chicago, 1980)
Talking to Myself by Studs Terkel/Paul Sills, (leads, Northlight Theater, Evanston, 1988)
Rumi (leads, Los Angeles, 1998)
Ovid's Metamorphoses (Door County, 1997)
Paul Sills' Story Theater (Door County, 2007)

Readers can find scripts for Rumi and three other shows in the Applause book, Paul Sills Story Theater: Four Shows, 2000, which Rachel graces the cover of. Edited by Carol, with Theater Games for Story Theater by Viola.

Make Keene grew up watching his grandparents, Paul and Carol Sills, teach theater game intensives in the summer and stage Story Theatre productions over the holidays. The community theater, which included his mother Rachel Sills and several of his friends’ parents, left an impact on him. Carol would teach Viola Spolin’s theatre games to Make and his friends in her summer art classes. Once he was old enough, he started taking the workshops under Carol, Aretha Sills, Kathy Hendrickson, and Sparky Johnson. In 2015 and 2019 he performed in two different Story Theater productions staged by former Sills Community Theater alumni. His first workshop as an instructor was in 2023. His time as a teacher’s assistant at the Nor Door Children’s Center sparked his interest in teaching the work to young adults. This is his first year teaching Story Theater for young adults.