7-21-06
The Dean of Chicago Theatre
Sheldon Patinkin
But for generations of Chicago theatre artists, the most important teacher in town has been Sheldon Patinkin, the chair of Columbia College Chicago’s theatre department (originally the theatre/music department) since 1980. (The music division branched off into a separate department under the chairmanship of the late William Russo in 1998.)
Long before he took the job at Columbia, Patinkin had been a founder, director, and teacher at Second City, a writer and producer with the beloved sketch television show “SCTV,” and a freelance director, producer and writer on several other projects – theatre, film, and television – in New York, Toronto, Los Angeles and Chicago.
His roots with Second City stretch back to his days as a student at the University of Chicago when, at 17, he began working with Paul Sills in what became first the Playwrights Theatre Club, then the Compass, and finally the Wells Street mecca of improvisational and sketch comedy. According to Patinkin’s 2000 book, “The Second City: Backstage at the World’s Greatest Comedy Theatre,” he moved up from being Sills’ assistant at Second City after Sills pitched a fit during a rehearsal, got on a plane to New York, and simply didn’t return. Patinkin served as Second City’s artistic director from 1960-’68. Ironically, the job of department chair at Columbia was first offered to Sills before it ended up with his one-time protege.
In an interview conducted in his book-and-poster-lined office on the third floor of Columbia’s 11th Street building, Patinkin recalls that he initially resisted taking the job of department chair. “Actually, I turned the job down three times, including when my brother told me I was insane not to take a permanent job. But I was earning more money at the time working as a writer for Second City development projects. And Bernie Sahlins, the producer and director at the time for Second City and my dear, dear friend since I was 17, said something I didn’t understand, but that somehow struck a responsive chord: ‘Take it. You’ll have your own power base.’ And I didn’t know what that meant until I took the job and started work and started hiring poor starving Steppenwolf actors as faculty. Who are no longer poor or starving.”
The enrollment in the music/theatre department when Patinkin assumed leadership stood at about 80. Now the school is gearing up to welcome 800 theatre majors alone for the 2006-07 school year (which includes musical theatre majors, who also take classes in the music and dance departments). “They’re falling out of the windows because we are so out of room,” Patinkin notes with a laugh. The number represents an all-time high for the department, according to associate chairperson Brian Shaw.
Certainly Columbia’s longstanding open admissions policy has played a role in the college’s phenomenal growth across all departments. The college is now, according to Patinkin, the largest property owner in the South Loop. (When I attended theatre classes at Columbia in the mid-1980s, the college had four buildings. Now there are 13, with the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies building on South Michigan Avenue slated to house Columbia’s administrative offices when Spertus moves out.) But for many who have taught or studied under him, Patinkin’s unfailing support and graciousness, devoid of Strasbergian mindgames, has been the key to Columbia’s growing national profile as a theatre institution.
Columbia’s unique educational mission has always called for faculty who are also working professionals, which was important to Patinkin’s decision to take the job. But the emphasis on outside work at Columbia also extends to students. “What also appealed to me, because I knew about it from other places, was that I could set my own rules. I could allow students to audition on the outside and get the work if it didn’t interfere with their school work, which none of the other theatre departments were doing.” Indeed, many conservatory-based training programs still forbid their students from taking on any outside acting jobs, even during the summer.
Says Shaw, “I think the big thing about the department is that because so many of us work outside, there is very little of the internal jockeying for position within the department. It really does replicate the Chicago theatre community in that people are very supportive of each other. The more I talk to people who teach at other schools, I realize that there is a lot of territorial fighting going on out there. Sheldon has gathered a lot of people who want to teach, and who are excited to teach, but they still work outside. We’re not fighting over who gets to direct the next mainstage show. It’s more like, ‘Can I fit this into my schedule?’”
A faculty composed of working professionals and his own impressive network of local connections also helped Patinkin grow the school’s profile in the first year, when, according to Patinkin, much of the 11th Street building was “just a mess. Really trashed.”
In addition to cleaning up the physical infrastructure, Patinkin went looking for a project that would grab attention from local media. “The guys who wrote Grease [Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey] had written a second show called Island of Lost Co-Eds. They had peddled it around and no one would do it. I heard about it, I asked Warren about it, and he and Jim Jacobs really wanted to get it up on its feet to see what they had. And I agreed for us to do it [at Columbia] without reading it. Because I was afraid, because I’d heard so much about it, that if I read it, I’d hate it so much that I wouldn’t want to do it. So I agreed, and we did it. It ended up in the second semester of my first year, 1981. I did it for the publicity. All of the theatre people, newspaper people in town were interested. And they all came, and they reviewed it rather favorably for a first shot. It was an all-student cast.”
Patinkin points to the pair of posters for the show on his wall. “The reason there are two posters up is that we put it up over the summer, it was so successful in its two-week run.”
From the success of that show, Patinkin next devised a season that utilized guest artists, many of whom also taught at the school. The second year at Columbia, the season included Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck, directed by Remains artistic director DW Moffett and featuring William Petersen and Amy Morton; Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding, co-directed by Patinkin and Jeff Perry and starring Laurie Metcalf; and a big-budget (by college standards) production of Clare Booth Luce’s The Women, starring, among others, Steppenwolf members Glenne Headly and Moira Harris and Susan Osborne-Mott (then known as Susan Dafoe), and featuring “a gorgeous Michael Merritt set,” says Patinkin.
“That started the mountain of new students,” Patinkin notes. “We continued the guest artist policy for several years, until students started complaining about not getting big roles, and the critics more and more started comparing the students to the guest actors, invariably at least slightly unfavorably. At that point I said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ We stopped the whole guest-artists thing and the critics stopped coming. By then, we had quadrupled in size and the whole point of doing that had made its point. We were on the map.”
Albert Williams, artist-in-residence at Columbia and chief theatre critic for the Reader, recalls a League of Chicago Theatres retreat several years ago at which Patinkin delivered an address. “He said ‘Most of you know me,’ and I shouted out ‘Most of us WORK for you.’”
Williams notes that what Columbia provides its faculty and students is “a cross-section of Chicago theatre. That is Sheldon’s contribution and legacy. The other thing that is Sheldon’s biggest contribution as a teacher is that he doesn’t interfere. He lets people do what they’re going to do. On the one hand, he observes and monitors very closely. He sees every performance. On the other, he’s very nonintrusive to the teacher. He’s not coming from the world of academia.” (Patinkin’s alma mater, the University of Chicago, has never offered a theatre major, and in a 1998 interview for Columbia’s oral history Web site, Patinkin maintains that “I’ve never had a theatre class in my life that was for credit.”)
Williams further notes that Patinkin’s “biggest commitments outside of school are Steppenwolf, Second City, and the Lyric Opera training program. It doesn’t get much more diverse than that. It says a lot about the diversity of his vision and influences.”
Patinkin, who no longer teaches at Second City, is still an artistic consultant with Steppenwolf; he most recently directed Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited in the Steppenwolf Garage. He also teaches in the School at Steppenwolf, and has served on the acting faculty of the Chicago Lyric Opera Center for American Artists.
Shaw says “It makes a lot of sense with a hell of a lot of students that there should be a wide variety of approaches. There is an increasing range of possible outcomes that are available to students – for students who are interested in community-based practices, or stage combat, or solo performance, or physical theatre, or some forays into industrials and voice-overs. We’re trying to help students recognize that it’s a fairly broad field. We’re not heading toward one outcome – that they will work in regional theatre and earn their Equity card or whatever.”
Estelle Spector, who co-directs the musical theatre program with Williams and also worked with Patinkin when he was artistic director of the now-defunct National Jewish Theatre, says, “The sense of trust and respect for each faculty member gets passed down to the way we deal with students. I have always been of the opinion, having taught in several places, that the school is set by whomever the head is. If that is one of artistic freedom and trust and caring, then it’s all there.”
A personal anecdote in support of Spector’s observations: During my time at Columbia, I was in the cast of a beleaguered production that shall remain nameless, directed by someone no longer on staff at Columbia, who shall also remain nameless. When the director failed to show up for rehearsal one evening, our long-suffering stage manager called Patinkin at home, who came in to calm us down, and to also let us know in no uncertain terms that, no matter how ill-used we felt or what bad blood might exist between us and the director, the show would certainly go on. One of my friends and castmates was still quite upset by the end of this pep talk. He dismissed us all, and asked her to stay. When she emerged a few moments later, she was beaming through her tears. When we asked her what happened, she said, “Sheldon gave me a hug and said ‘Sweetheart, what can I tell you? The man is an asshole. Just do your job.’”
Patinkin, who is now 70, adds another line to his resume in February 2007, when his history of the American musical will be published by Northwestern University Press. Bearing the beguiling title “No Legs, No Jokes, No Chance,” the book came out of the introduction to the American musical Patinkin teaches Columbia’s musical theatre majors. “What other school does the chairman teach the introductory freshman course?” asks Williams, who has taught at Columbia since 1985 and has been with the musical theatre program since its inception in 1989.
Patinkin realized when he began teaching the history of the American musical that “there is no textbook. What I did was get all sorts of books with information and Xeroxed things illegally, and passed them out. I believe that in one semester of classes meeting three hours a week, we might have gotten up to 1950. We still haven’t gotten to 2000, and it’s now a two-semester, twice-a-week, four-hours-a-week-altogether class. But as I started putting all this stuff together I started writing connecting material. And then I figured, ‘What the hell? Why don’t I just write it?’ I wasn’t writing it for publication. I was writing it for my class. And it grew and grew and grew. At one point it was 900 pages single-spaced.”
He originally offered the book to Sourcebooks, publishers of his history of the Second City. Sourcebooks focuses on multimedia versions of books, complete with CDs of music and original broadcast material, and when they found that the cost of getting the musical rights would be prohibitive, they turned Patinkin’s musical theatre book down, in time for Northwestern to pick it up.
Asked if he has a favorite musical, Patinkin demurs, but then quickly says, “The first one that comes to my head whenever anybody asks me that question is Guys and Dolls. That’s probably my favorite musical COMEDY. Because it’s perfect.”
Spector, who estimates that the musical theatre majors alone at Columbia number about 140 students, points out that Patinkin has always been open to innovations that allow more students to get work. “One day I said to him, ‘We need to do more shows. Why don’t we do more concert versions of shows, so we don’t have to worry so much about sets and costumes but can just really concentrate on the process?’ We’ve been doing that for about six or seven years. You go up to him and say, ‘I have an idea,’ and he says, ‘If you want to try it, try it.’”
Columbia’s national profile is about to take another leap forward in spring 2007, when the theatre department inaugurates what Patinkin calls “A year abroad on Wells Street.” For the first time, Columbia and the Second City Training Center will combine forces to teach a comprehensive one-semester program in comedy fundamentals – writing, improvisation, sketch, and directing. “It started with Andrew Alexander,” Patinkin says. “He said, ‘You know, in Toronto there’s this program that teaches improv as a full program, using Second City teachers as their faculty. Why don’t you do that at Columbia?’”
The goal for the program is for at least half the students to be from outside Columbia College. “That way Second City and Columbia don’t lose as much money,” says Patinkin. He and Norm Holly, once the assistant chair of the theatre department at Columbia and a longtime instructor at the Training Center, will co-teach a course on the history of comedy – though Patinkin demurs at saying whether or not he’ll write yet another textbook out of that experience. Students will earn 16 credit hours, with the possibility of adding a second semester down the road.
Patinkin also continues to champion smaller theatre companies, particularly Jefferson Park’s Gift Theatre Company, for whom he most recently directed The Glass Menagerie with Mary Ann Thebus. He will return to Gift next season to direct Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
Michael Patrick Thornton, founding artistic director of the Gift, first met Patinkin while taking classes at the School at Steppenwolf. “We just knew that he was this legend and he was kind of intimidating and we were very scared of him.” Thornton and his Gift cohorts got over their fear sufficiently to call Patinkin and ask him to direct their inaugural production in 2001, Howard Korder’s Boys’ Life. “I got his number out of the white pages,” Thornton recalls. “He came and listened to a reading and decided to direct it, to our amazement.”
“He’s extremely disarming as a director,” Thornton observes. “Extremely kind and he has this childlike enthusiasm. He gets excited about rehearsal and that’s infectious. We never were in the rehearsal room feeling like we had to please him or that we didn’t hold a candle to all the other people he’s worked with.”
Thornton, who has won many plaudits for his own work as a director, says that what he learned from watching Patinkin was “how to streamline a rehearsal process and what a rehearsal process is. Let it go a little bit and let it be a process. He just knows the process so well that he doesn’t have to talk for three hours like we do about a monologue.”
When asked via e-mail if he has any plans to retire, Patinkin’s answer is typically evasive. “I seriously consider retiring as chair several times a month. I was all set to do it year after next, but Brian Shaw, the associate chair, is on sabbatical and I couldn’t possibly allow both of us to be gone, so I don’t know. Also, the provost and dean get angry any time I mentioned the possibility and say they won’t accept my resignation, which is flattering, of course, but which wouldn’t affect my decision if I ever make it. How’s that for a non-answer?”
But perhaps the real answer to why Columbia means so much to Patinkin lies in something he mentions early in our interview. “You need to understand that my first day here was very, very strange and very important in a lot of ways. Because it proved to me something I’d always believed, which is a line in The Zoo Story: ‘Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.’ I was a child opera singer with a group called the All Children’s Grand Opera Company. We did our shows in this building, in what was then the 11th Street Theatre and now the Getz. This was the College of Jewish Studies before it became Spertus. This is where I went to Hebrew high school. It was very weird entering this building my first day. But I liked it. I liked the fact that this is where I had been in those days.”
Above all, Patinkin, who was away from Chicago for 10 years (1968-78) relishes the career he’s had here. “The thing about Chicago, among many other things, is that theatre here is ensemble-approached. Our department demands an ensemble approach of all of the teachers, no matter what they teach. In Chicago, you can fail and still get work. I did Broadway. I did TV. I did film. I hated it all, but I knew I had to try it. Like I said, it’s sometimes necessary to go a long distance out of your way in order to come back the short distance correctly.”
2006 College Issue
Shedding Light on UIC’s “Invisible” Theatre Department
The Dean of Chicago Theatre