A Chicagoan with decades’ experience is creating a new forum for local comedy. He spoke to Pat
OF the innumerable legacies left by Barney Simon to South African theatre — his words, his work and the many talents he nurtured — surely the most unusual has to be an energetic, ebullient theatre- maker from Chicago called Bernard Sahlins.
Warm, witty and erudite, with an extraordinary fund of knowledge about theatre, music and literature, about people, places and politics, he has an anecdote for every situation and a smile never far from his lips. But taking the mickey, pricking holes in pomposity and pretension, looking at the world with a fine sense of the ridiculous is not only an integral part of his personality. It is the way he has spent his professional life for much of the past 36 years. Now he hopes to teach South African actors and audiences how to do the same.
And if Sahlins hopes, there is every chance that it will happen — for, make no mistake, beneath the easy wit and the ever-ready smile there is a layer of steel and a formidable determination. It emerges when he believes people are making excuses; when they are falling back on the wrongs of the past in order to excuse the failures of the present; when they are simply not trying hard enough.
Then, for just an instant, the pleasant voice develops an edge, and the hard-nosed businessman takes over. The man who speaks lyrically about the perfect performance of a piece of music, who reads poetry and plays and has a passion for medieval drama can also talk bottom lines and management and organisational needs. For, steeped in theatre as he is today, Sahlins did not start off that way. First, he made enough money manufacturing tape recorders to be able to sell his business and devote the rest of his life to what he really likes — theatre and more particularly, comedy in cabaret.
It is that which brought him to Johannesburg, to create a theatre company which could revolutionise attitudes among actors and theatre goers and bring a whole new audience into the Market precinct.
Sahlins is one of three founders of a unique form of cabaret which, under the name Second City, has been pulling in audiences in Chicago since 1959 and has offshoots in Detroit and Toronto. Hopefully, now it will be Johannesburg’s turn. After two weeks of intensive auditioning, he has found his first company. What remains is the acquisition of an appropriate space (a 350-seat venue in the Market precinct is a strong possibility) and funding.
And what does Barney Simon have to do with this? Sahlins, a director of the Market Theatre Foundation (USA), met Simon a decade ago and it was instant rapport. For 10 years, the two of them had discussed the possibility of Sahlins coming to South Africa and, he says sadly, “I finally cleared the time, and he died”.
But the shared vision didn’t, and Sahlins decided to come anyway and try to realise that vision. South Africa, he believes, is ready for the kind of work Second City has to offer — theatre without heroes, slices of life without angst, comedy without jokes.
It is, he believes, the right time and the right place for what he calls the “humour of behaviour not the humour of gags”, the humour of recognition, the “laugh which is not ‘ha ha’, but ‘oh yes!’ We all live lives that are filled with ironic mishaps, the truth is always funny.” Second City was conceived during the McCarthy period when Americans were definitely not laughing at themselves. “There was no political or topical humour, it was all mother-in-law jokes.” It was the dawn of the hippy era, coffee bars were big and Sahlins and a group of out-of-work actors (he mentions names like Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Alan Arkin and Ed Asner ) decided to start their own coffee bar. And they thought they might just put in a little stage and offer customers some comedy with their coffee.
And so a phenomenon was launched. It could, Sahlins muses, probably only have happened in Chicago, the city he calls “the risk capital of the world”. “Chicago’s a blessed city where you have a right to fail.” But it didn’t fail. Second City in its original venue (a hat shop and a Chinese laundry knocked together, in an insalubrious part of the city) opened in 1959. On the first night 200 people queued for 120 seats and Second City never looked back.
Okay. But what exactly is it? “It’s a form which puts a premium on writing and demands excellence in acting and in scene structure. It’s not silly-assed comedians. The assumption is that audiences are at least as smart as we are and we’d better know what’s going on — in the world, in history, in music, in literature…”
And that is why actors auditioning for Bernie Sahlins are asked what they are reading now, where Bosnia is, what Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk quarrelled about …
Material is created by the director and actors in rehearsal and, once the script has been improvised, it is fixed, each show running until audience response begins to wane, whereupon it is time for the next.
Every new show will be entirely different, dependent for its personality on the personalities and preoccupations of cast and director. In South Africa, it will be, he believes, the perfect successor to the theatre of protest which, he warns, can so easily become ingrained as the only theatre a country can produce.
It is time for South Africans, too, to learn to laugh at themselves and Bernard Sahlins intends to teach them how to do just that.