History Repaints Itself
By Albert Williams
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What a sea change is reflected in these two sketches–and in the shows they’re from. Even the most caustic moments in the leisurely, laid-back 1961 revue are mitigated by a fundamentally optimistic view of life as worth saving, while even the merriest, most lighthearted skits in History Repaints Itself and its new main-stage counterpart, Second City 4.0, are preoccupied with the violent and depraved aspects of human nature. Second City was born in 1959 out of a belief in the value (though not “sacredness”) of life and a desire to celebrate independence of thought and spirit; its sometimes sweet, sometimes stinging satire was a reaction against the sanitized repressiveness of the 50s. Forty years later, a new generation of improvisational actor-writers is hoping to shock a jaded, ultrapermissive culture into laughter by creating comedy that’s brutal, confrontational, and occasionally downright nihilistic. And why not? Think of the events the irreverent young upstarts on the 1961 video–Arkin, Barbara Harris, Severn Darden, Paul Sand, Andrew Duncan, Mina Kolb, and Eugene Troobnick, insightfully directed by Paul Sills–had yet to experience. Still to come in their lives and ours were the Kennedy and King assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, AIDS, the “malaise” of the Carter years, the grab-all greed of the Reagan era, and the sordid spectacle of Monicagate–all disseminated over an endlessly expanding network of high-tech cable TV and cyberspace communications outlets.
No wonder the author-performers of History Repaints Itself seem in such a good mood: they execute the animalistic violence of the 2004 skit with a buoyant goofiness that characterizes the entire production. Under Jeff Richmond’s savvy direction, the six cast members–Craig Cackowski, Martin Garcia, Susan Gillan, Jack McBrayer, David Pompeii, and Angela Shelton–practically bound off the stage. Their infectious high spirits seem to say “Just kidding!” as they portray a procession of vicious, venal, or just plain fucked-up folks. Consider the adolescent mass murderer, a la Dylan Klebold, being interrogated by cops who take sadistic pleasure in aggravating his insecurities (“Your kind makes me sick, with your big words and your calculus”); a seemingly perfect but actually dysfunctional couple (she’s manic-depressive, he’s gay); a pair of shoppers whose argument in a grocery checkout line erupts into a duel to the death complete with fencing foils; a Senate committee whose members toss crude racial slurs at one another as they eviscerate a hate-crimes bill; a woman who invites her eager date home to meet her pet, a murderously jealous 300-pound baboon; a team of lawyers hiring for their firm who reject a highly qualified black woman, deaf woman, and gay man in favor of a ridiculously flaky straight white guy; and an anger-management group for hostile, horny teenagers that explodes into a high school bloodbath just before the show’s cheery closing song, “Please Don’t Shoot Your Classmates.”
America in the 90s is more violent and cynical than it was when Second City was founded, but it’s also far less hypocritical and much more inclusive. This inclusiveness is what gives even the most mordant moments in History Repaints Itself a freshness that in its own way echoes the intelligent idealism of Second City’s early days, pointing the way to the troupe’s continued growth and success.
