“I swore I wouldn’t kvetch when you came up here,” Josephine Raciti Forsberg says, settling into an armchair in her Lincoln Park apartment. “But how many more interviews am I going to have? I wanted to clear the air, get the truth out there.” On May 5, Forsberg will receive a lifetime achievement award from the Chicago Improv Festival in recognition of her 35 years as an improv teacher, most of them at Second City. She learned directly from improv pioneer Viola Spolin and trained a raft of SC players, including the likes of Bill Murray, Shelley Long, and George Wendt. She also directed the first touring company, created the Second City Children’s Theater, and–most important–opened the Players Workshop at Second City, which offered the first improv classes for the public. “I was there 28 years, and I was happy,” she says. “It was family.” But now Forsberg’s concerned about being written out of Second City’s history. There’s no mention of her contributions on the SC Web site, and she doesn’t appear in longtime owner Bernie Sahlins’s 2002 memoir, Days and Nights at the Second City. “Thrilled” with the CIF award, Forsberg says, she’d just like to “make it clear that I wasn’t a nobody there.”
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In fact, Forsberg was there before there was a Second City, as a member of its predecessor company, the Playwrights Theatre Club. An Oak Park native, she fell for Shakespeare when a troupe of British actors visited her high school. Briefly a theater major at DePaul, she dropped out to tour as an actor, marrying another actor, Rolf Forsberg, in 1944. Back in Chicago in the mid-50s with their young daughter, she attended a Playwrights performance in a second-floor theater at LaSalle and North. “I saw Ed Asner in Murder in the Cathedral and talked to Sheldon Patinkin [at the time a crew member] and said, ‘Oh my God, this is what I want to do,’” Forsberg recalls. “I wrote my husband [who was still touring] and said, ‘Come home, I want to join this company.’” Both Forsbergs became part of Playwrights’ summer Shakespeare festival; besides acting, she says, “Elaine May and I were head of the costume department.” Then the theater–housed in a former Chinese restaurant–was shut down by the fire department.
For several years, Forsberg says, she was the only teacher at Second City. When others started teaching there too it got harder to reserve the space she needed. In 1979 she moved most of the Players Workshop activities to a small building she bought on Lincoln and Wrightwood, still calling it Players Workshop of the Second City. She had eight teachers working for her and continued to do children’s theater and some classes at SC. But in 1985 Sahlins sold to Andrew Alexander and Len Stuart. “That was a sad day,” Forsberg says. “The new owner changed everything.” Under Alexander, Second City launched its own training program; Patinkin, who came back to run it, says Forsberg was invited to teach there but declined. A few years later SC began competing with Forsberg directly, hiring away her nephew, Martin de Maat, who’d worked for 18 years as a Players Workshop teacher. Players Workshop went into a tailspin, and in the late 90s Forsberg sold her building and eased into retirement. The workshop’s now being run at the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts by a former student, Greg Winston. Forsberg, who still has a small financial interest, says he’s reviving it.
