By Cara Jepsen
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A few years later Seham was artistic director of the Performance Studio in New Haven, Connecticut, and started an improv troupe to perform late-night shows. “Most of the women didn’t last too long,” she recalls. Some of the men were “aggressive and domineering,” which violates the rules of Viola Spolin’s improv bible Improvisation for the Theater (1963). Spolin’s improv games are based on the principle that actors trying to build a scene must support one another; when someone takes the lead, the others should follow. The troublemakers in Seham’s troupe weren’t cooperating, and when she called them on it, they accused her of trying to censor them.
The question hung in her mind for years. By 1994, Seham was earning a doctorate in theater at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and she began driving down to Chicago to interview people for her dissertation, an analysis of race and gender in improv comedy. That work informs her forthcoming book from University Press of Mississippi, Whose Improv-Comedy Is It Anyway: Beyond Second City, and though she now teaches theater at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, she was on hand last week at the Viaduct in Lakeview for Funny Women Fest 2000, a two-day conference of workshops, panels, and performances.
Over the years some groups have created rules to even the playing field; as director of the Second City Training Center, Anne Libera instituted the “honey rule”: whenever a man opened a scene by addressing a female as “honey,” no one but another man was allowed to respond. In the 80s troupes like ImprovOlympic and ComedySportz– what Seham calls the “second wave”–pioneered long-form and competitive improv. But Seham says it was the third wave in the late 80s and 90s that really opened up the improv stage to women and minorities, not only Annoyance Theatre and the Free Associates but identity-based troupes like GayCo Productions, Salsation, Stir-Friday Night!, Oui Be Negroes, and the all-women troupe Jane (which was followed by Sirens and Red). Suddenly, nonwhite, nonmale, nonstraight players could try out their humor on like-minded audiences.
