When ImprovOlympic producer Charna Halpern met improv legend Del Close, the dialogue went like this:
Halpern had launched her company two years earlier with another legendary innovator, David Shepherd, who’d coined the name “ImprovOlympic” with an eye to the ancient Greek celebrations that included theater, dance, song, and sport. Their partnership was over almost as soon as it began, with Shepherd continuing his work on the east coast and in Canada. But last week Shepherd materialized, in town for the 50th anniversary of the Compass, a troupe he also cofounded, and still going strong at age 80. In the early 80s Shepherd had already held improv competitions in New York and elsewhere; Halpern, then a student at Second City’s Players Workshop, suggested that they get some teams together here. They started out in what is now the Second City E.T.C. space in Pipers Alley and soon were creating teams based on jobs or other “affinities”: a bunch of rabbis was dubbed the God Squad, a clutch of psychologists was called the Freudian Slippers. But for the politically oriented Shepherd, who wanted to revolutionize theater, improv was not about comedy. “It was satirical, but serious and psychological,” he says. They split, he adds, when “Charna went off on sheer comedy.”
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With the help of former students like Noah Gregoropoulos and IO West’s James Grace, Halpern’s prospered since then, but she’s about to face an identity crisis. In the mid-80s, when the owner of a stand-up comedy club threatened to sue because he’d trademarked the word improv, she put up a fight. But after forking out $72,000 last year to settle a discrimination suit for hosting a weekly ladies’ night in LA, she says she has no intention of going head-to-head with the International Olympic Committee, which has also been on her case for years. “I could see it if I was calling myself the Olympics and causing confusion, but I’m not,” she says. “No one comes here with a javelin trying to sign up for classes.”
