Longtime actor's career returns to improvisation

Dick Schaal, after working decades in movies and on television, conducts workshops and directs a new improvisation troupe.

By MAUREEN BYRNE

© St. Petersburg Times, published October 8, 2000

CLEARWATER -- Dick Schaal never meant to become an actor. Yet after a fluke meeting with a theater director, he never did anything else.

Acting, especially the improvisational kind, became his passion. He joined Second City, the improvisation troupe in Chicago that gave rise to Joan Rivers and Alan Alda and later John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd.

"Dick Schaal was one of the best of the earliest," said Paul Sills, 72, who founded Second City in 1959 and whose mother, Viola Spolin, is considered the originator of improvisational theater in the United States. "He was one of the great players."

After a career on stage, television (the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bob Newhart, Rhoda) and the movies (Slaughter House Five, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!) that spanned 40 years, Schaal has come out of retirement to teach improvisation to eager students in the Tampa Bay area.

The 72-year-old actor, who traded the rat race in Los Angeles for a home in Indian Rocks Beach, conducts ongoing workshops and directs a newly formed improvisation troupe, the Bawdy Politic.

The 15-member company made its debut this weekend with a presentation of Story Theater, a collection of Grimm Brothers tales and Aesop's Fables performed in the improvisational acting method. The final show is at 5 p.m. today at Royalty Theater in Clearwater.

Thirty years ago, Schaal was a cast member in Story Theater, which Sills directed at the Ambassador Theater in New York. The show, which also starred Schaal's ex-wife Valerie Harper of the Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda, won two Tony Awards.

Improvisation is a form of theater in which no script is used. Instead, actors create the dialogue and action as they perform.

The stage is usually bare except for wooden boxes or chairs. "Other than that, there's nothing else," said Sills, who lives near Green Bay, Wis., and teaches improvisation workshops in the summer.

"The audience will see the invisible," he said. "If you lead them to see it, they'll see it."

The most popular style today is "spot" improvisation in which performers get suggestions from their audience and use them to create short, entertaining scenes.

The current television show hosted by comedian Drew Carey Whose Line Is It Anyway? is an example of spot improvisation.

Schaal said he simply wants his workshops and performances to help bring imagination back into people's lives.

"Our focus is really on transforming the community," he said. "What we have to do is overcome television that robs people of their feelings. We need to get kids back in the yard digging with a soup spoon or playing hide and seek."

Just as Schaal never planned on being an actor, he never planned on teaching theater workshops or directing an improvisation company at this point in his life.

He came to Indian Rocks Beach three years ago to recuperate from a spinal operation. He owned property there and thought it would be a good place to recover.

He never left.

"I was sitting at the window watching the waves and waiting to feel better," said Schaal, who lost use of his legs almost two years ago because of a malformation in his spine.

Then last spring Nancy Whitman, who owns a local production company, paid him a visit. "She was looking for the guy who did Mary Tyler Moore shows," said Schaal, who made occasional appearances on the comedy.

Whitman told Schaal that she needed help with a show she was producing. So he suggested an acting workshop.

"That's the thing that started the ball rolling," he said.

The workshop was so successful that Schaal decided to teach another one. He put an ad in a local paper. People responded, and so far, he has conducted three six-week workshops.

Karen Karvazy, an environmental engineer, answered the ad. The Tampa resident said she always has been drawn to the theater, but never performed professionally.

"I'm so lucky to be able to work with him," said Karvazy, 28, who made her acting debut in Story Theater. "I think as a troupe we all feel that."

Neil Schauer, 41, of Tarpon Springs also responded to the ad. He also never had acted.

"This is it,' said Schauer, a car buyer. "This is the true way to learn acting. Dick is a master at this."

Schauer was not cast for a part in Story Theater, but he plans on being in the Bawdy Politic's next show, Ribald Tales. In January, the troupe will begin performing weekly at Saffron's Restaurant in St. Petersburg.

"You get juiced on this really fast," Schauer said. "It really brings out your senses."

Schaal will begin another workshop Oct. 24. The three-hour classes will be held Tuesday and Wednesday evenings at the Deaf Service Center in Pinellas Park. Schaal hopes to add 20 more people to the improvisation troupe.

"Our goal in this work is to tap the intuition," Schaal said. "We create from nothing."

For information

To learn more about the Bawdy Politics or the upcoming workshop, call Dick Schaal at (727) 596-6246.

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