Right now in Chicago there are about 1,200 aspiring improvisers enrolled at the Second City Training Center, 600 at ImprovOlympic, and 100 at Annoyance Productions. Add them to the legions that’ve already graduated from these programs and you’ve got some 5,000 improvisers in the city, many of whom have come here specifically to study and perform. All of them want what Dan Bakkedahl had.
“There were all sorts of fantastic reasons to stay,” he says. But “the only one that really matters–my heart–wouldn’t let me. And it’s my heart that lets me do any show that I do. It’s my heart with which I improvise.”
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Stroth’s first choice was Karen Graci (who went on to perform with ImprovOlympic’s featured group Baby Wants Candy and tour with Second City), and when she declined he asked Bakkedahl, impressed by his ability to absorb what he was teaching and play convincing characters onstage. It’s something Bakkedahl’s known for even now. “He believes so much in what he’s doing,” says Jean Villepique, his former castmate on the Second City mainstage. “He’s not even ‘acting’ acting–he’s just believing.”
Bakkedahl was ecstatic. Working one-on-one with Stroth gave him intensive training in long-form improv, the medium championed by Close and ImprovOlympic through what they call the Harold, a fixed framework for improv that alternates between games and recurring scenes. One of the notions Stroth emphasized was what he calls playing the piece rather than the scene. “You start with scenes,” he explains, “but once a few scenes have happened, a show is being created. And you start opening your awareness–I’m not only aware of the scenes I’m in, but how they connect to one another and what pattern they’re creating. You start thinking, ‘How can I best fill in the rest of this show?’ You start playing the piece.”
Bakkedahl got to travel around the country and eventually performed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Dubai, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, and Bosnia. The touring company introduced him to performers he’d later work with on ImprovOlympic shows like the boundary-pushing Four Square. In 2001 he was in the cast of the opening revue at Second City Las Vegas.
In early 2003 Bakkedahl and Second City mainstage alum Ed Furman headlined the Tuesday-night show with Trainwreck, a half-hour-long improvised scene. Eschewing the speed and proliferating scenes of Zumpf!, they went for the most stripped-down improv possible: two characters simply arguing, discussing, and brashly emoting.
The cast of six was always in flux. Jean Villepique, who was hired at the same time as Bakkedahl, says, “You have a perception of what the job is, and the reality is very different. The perception is that the ensemble was together all the time. The truth is, people are in and out all the time. The longer we ran the show the rarer it was to have the six people there.” In early February cast member Liz Cackowski was hired to write for Saturday Night Live. Cackowski’s understudy, Maribeth Monroe, was on tour and unavailable. Lisa Brooke had gone home to Toronto. Villepique says the instability is one of the things that make it important for her to keep the mainstage separate from the rest of her life: “If you put a lot of drama into it it’s going to give it right back at you,” she says. “If you keep your life out and just go in and do your work, that can be a smoother ride.”
