Living in the Moment
BY CARRIE L. KAUFMAN

Charna Halpern lives life by the same set of rules she teaches and which her theatre, ImprovOlympic (IO), has come to represent. She always says yes, then adds something else. She is always giving. She is completely in the moment. And she risks like crazy.

Del Close couldn’t have had a better partner to embody his ideals.

Take the moment she signed the lease on the ImprovOlympic building at 3541 N. Clark.

"Talk about panic attacks," says Halpern. "I’m signing this lease where I’m going to have to pay somewhere around $10,000 a month in rent, and meanwhile I’m working at the Wrigleyside taking home maybe $50 a week and I’m thinking to myself, I’ve never made this kind of money, what am I doing?

"To calm myself down I’d say, if worst comes to worse, you just have to go home and live with your family in Dixon for a while, and maybe you’ll work at your dad’s McDonald’s. You won’t be able to pay off your loan–people claim bankruptcy all the time–but you just have to try this, you just have to jump in.

"And suddenly, we’re a real theatre and suddenly the place is packed. It’s the old if you build it, they will come."

But they didn’t come to the ImprovOlympic in LA when it opened three years ago. At least not at first. The LA theatre bled red ink for two years, but the players begged Halpern to keep it open.

"They needed a place for their community, to go and play. It was their place," she says now. "I was like hopefully next year I’ll lose less money–I just don’t want to drain the Chicago theatre."

Her faith in the improvisers, and her willingness to take a chance, has paid off handsomely. ImprovOlympic LA turned around last year, growing at an impressive rate of about 40 percent. It’s also an important reason why IO’s budget jumped from approximately $600,000 when they first opened the Clark Street theatre in Feb. of 1995 to the current estimated budget of $850,000.

Taking chances is what Halpern seems to revel in, though the people who work for her don’t necessarily agree.

"We keep trying to get her to risk more," yells operations manager Frank Janisch from the office when he overhears praise for his boss’ sense of risk. "We keep working on her," he adds as he strolls into the upstairs theatre.

Halpern shakes her head.

Well, Frank, you could be worse off. How many bosses would call the time when they were sued to change the name of their theatre "the most fun I’ve ever had?" How many bosses would take the most eccentric genius in improv as their partner? How many bosses would find themselves in a small tangle with the mob and come out if it unscathed?

Yeah, you could be worse off.

The lawsuit involved not one, but two entities–the Olympic Committee and The Improv stand-up club in LA. They were suing over different parts of the ImprovOlympic name.

Typically, Halpern didn’t get depressed by the big money of her rivals. She got mad.

"The Improv is a stand-up club," she says. Owner Bud Friedman "doesn’t even do improvisation, and improvisation is an art form. To say that you can’t call it that because I own the word and I don’t even do it was infuriating to me."

The familiar rasp of her northside Chicago accent takes on a higher pitch on those last three words.

"It’s like saying, 'You can’t call that ballet, because I’m doing stand-up at the Ballet Club.’"

But it was the Olympic Committee suit that garnered the most attention from the press. Sports Illustrated even wrote about it, pointing out all the uses of the Olympic name (Olympic Beer, Olympic Cleaners, etc.).

"Clearly, we’re not confusing anyone with the Olympics," says Halpern.

One of the press outlets that latched onto the story was The Reader. And, Halpern says, they took a keen interest in helping her beat the lawsuit.

"The Reader became like my big brother and they hired a lawyer," she says. (We could not get in touch with anybody at The Reader who was there in the mid-80’s who could confirm this.) The suits were dropped, but she felt a sense of let-down that it was all over.

"At the end when I won, I said I’m kinda disappointed, I was going to change my name to Coke™."

That was the first legal gift she got. The second legal gift came around the same time, 1987, when Halpern and Close were involved with actor Michael Douglas and producer Chris Beard in a TV pilot that would consist of improvisational games.

"[Douglas] read about me in the New York Times and wanted me to do a show which was really the "Drew Carey Show" before Drew Carey did it," Halpern says. "I was 13 years ahead of my time."

Douglas was one of the players, as was Rhea Perlman (who was then on "Cheers") and other notable TV actors. Halpern also brought in her own contingent, including a still-unknown Chris Farley, David Koechner and Noah Gregoropoulos.

Both Close and Halpern were signed to options to direct, but when it came time to do the pilot, Close was about to open The Tempest at the Goodman. So Halpern went alone.

"Everything was going great," Halpern says. Douglas’ and Beard’s "people" were laughing hysterically at ImprovOlympic’s players and the show seemed to be heading toward network pick-up. Then, two things happened.

"First, as Del warned me, they fired my best people to put in these dick joke stand-up comics that didn’t know how to do the games," Halpern says. Suddenly, the taping wasn’t as funny as the rehearsals and her partners refused to acknowledge that their last-minute replacements were the reason.

"Then, the night before the taping, they handed me a letter–as they kissed me on the cheek and said good luck tomorrow–saying 'we consider you in breach because Del Close is not here.’

"I said, you’re kissing me and suing me at the same time?"

"No," she says they answered, "we’re not suing you, we’re just letting you know we can."

This time it was Bill Murray whom Halpern says gave her the gift of a lawyer. Close and Halpern had not signed anything yet and her lawyer advised them not to until the breach letter was rescinded. It never was and the show was shelved.

Now, Halpern is involved with two more pilots. Neither of which she’ll comment on except to say that she’s working with producer David Saltzman and that Mike Meyers has consented to be in one of them.

"He has committed to a pilot only," Halpern says. "He’s doing this as a gift to me."

Two legal battles, two pilots, three gifts. One might consider Halpern lucky to receive so much good fortune. But a clue to that good fortune lies not in the gifts she gets, but in the ones she gives.

"The best thing about Charna is boy does she give people chances," says PerformInk freelance writer Jason Chin.

Chin, who runs the training center at ImprovOlympic, says that of the hundreds of improvisers Halpern has cut over the years, "There are thousands and thousands more who don’t realize how many chances she gives them."

Indeed, it was the chance she took on Chin that started their working relationship.

"I had two, maybe three shows there in a row that she really liked, but nobody came to see," Chin says. "Still she took a chance on this musical version of Star Wars." That turned out to be a big hit, running for five months and spawning a sequel which ran both here and in LA.

Eventually, Halpern hired Chin to run the training center and contracted him to write, direct and produce.

"That was mind boggling that somebody was paying me to produce," Chin says.

He’s not the only one Halpern’s taken a chance on. Many improvisers and teachers contacted for this article had their own stories.

Perhaps Chris Barnes, who teaches the master class at ImprovOlympic LA, sums it up best: "There are levels of training, but what makes Charna’s school different is that the student is allowed to know that he’s not responsible for his imagination, that freedom of thought as well as freedom of speech is not only allowed, but it’s insisted upon.

"You won’t find that in any other institution," Barnes says. "You find overbearing structure with overbearing teachers who are afraid of that and Charna has no fear of that. I think she walked in with it. I think that’s what attracted her to Del and Del to her. That’s a very rare commodity."

Halpern’s partnership with Close was indeed a rare commodity. A genius with whom many improvisers (including Barnes) moved to Chicago to study, Close was celebrated for his eccentricity. Halpern is celebrated for her devotion to him.

"Del was my partner in crime and I took care of him, solely. Anything he needed or wanted, he got. And he didn’t want much," says Halpern.

Halpern, with many ImprovOlympic students, helped Close move from his roach-infested apartment across from Second City and moved him to a nice two-bedroom apartment. She had floor to ceiling bookcases built for Close’s impressive library. He couldn’t believe he had a remote controlled TV and wouldn’t have to turn channels with a wrench anymore.

"He was so appreciative of the smallest things," Halpern says. Even laundry. When Halpern first met Close, he never washed his clothes. He didn’t see the use. They just got dirty anyway.

"I finally bought him clothes and we went out for lunch and he got mustard on his new green army pants and he was like, 'Well, there you go, I told ya.’" Halpern then made a deal with the Laundromat down the street and hired a student to pick up Del’s laundry every Wednesday and deliver it.

Halpern also convinced Close to open a bank account for the first time in his life, "assuring him that you can still get your money back if you fall in the lake and you get your bank book wet," she says.

"The man was a genius, but these little things were just too much for him to worry about," said Halpern. "He didn’t want to have a phone because he was afraid he’d get arrested because if he saw the President on TV and the President did something that he didn’t like, he would call the White House and get arrested for making threats because he couldn’t control his temper.

"I brought him into the 20th Century, basically," says Halpern.

She also brought his genius to fruition, providing the business model and safe forum for Close to achieve his dream of long-form improvisation as art form.

"One of the things he said to me on his deathbed was thank you for actually bringing my life’s dream to reality and helping me create what I wanted to create, which was theatre of the heart–theatre where people care about each other and take care of each other to succeed on stage."

Now Halpern–along side some of Close’s students–is taking Close’s teachings and making them succeed all over the world. She recently returned from teaching a week-long improv workshop in Amsterdam and, she says, people in Japan have been asking her for years to come there and teach, but she can’t find the time.

"I’m living an easy life right now because I’ve got these amazing people who are putting up shows. Everyone feels like it’s their theatre, here and in LA. So everyone’s taking responsibility to put up shows and do exciting things, and everyone has the freedom to do that."

Oh, and the mob? When ImprovOlympic was in their theatre on Belmont in the early 90’s, Halpern ordered a vending machine for the students. But the vendors rarely filled it up. Halpern’s calls for supplies went unanswered, so she asked them to take the machine back. Those calls went unanswered, too. Finally, she left a message that if somebody didn’t come and get the machine by the weekend, she would move it out on the lawn.

"They called me back and said, you don’t touch that, you don’t know who you’re dealing with. They knew my address, they knew I had a dog and they’re like, 'if you don’t want to see anybody hurt or your place burned down, then you’ll just leave that machine where it is.’

"I pretended like I wasn’t scared and said fine, just get it out of here."

How did she get out of it?

"I lied and pretended I had a board. I had someone call and say that they were head of the board and I was fired, so please take this machine out, because she’s no longer with us."

The machine was out in two days.

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