Make a shared story visible through play.
Life and work
Paul Sills (1927–2008) was an American director and teacher who helped develop improvisational theatre through ensemble work. A cofounder and the first director of the Second City, he brought Viola Spolin’s theatre games into performance making and later developed Story Theater. His teaching focused on what players can discover together.
Approach and technique
In his interview with Laurie Ann Gruhn, Sills describes finding a theatrical form for a tale without turning it into conventional dialogue. Players could make a forest, a well or a change of relationship appear through their use of space. You can move between narrating an event and participating in it, while the other players help the audience see the changing world.
The work asks you to share a specific focus with the group. An imagined object has a place and takes time to travel; a new relationship changes how you meet another player. You are attending to what becomes visible between you. Sills also describes the choral possibilities of Story Theater: performers can remain present, sometimes speaking together, rather than treating each change as a conventional exit and entrance.
From improvisation to Story Theater
You can follow Sills’s work through several Chicago ensembles. With David Shepherd and Eugene Troobnick he helped establish the Playwrights Theatre Club in 1953. The Compass Players followed in the development of Chicago improvisation. In 1959 Sills cofounded the Second City with Howard Alk and Bernie Sahlins and directed its early revues. You meet a theatre maker building structures in which a group can discover material together.
As Viola Spolin’s son and collaborator, Sills carried theatre games into the making of performances. His later Story Theater work gives you another use for ensemble invention: narrative becomes action before you, with performers moving between telling a story and inhabiting it. You can study the relationship among narrator, character and shared space in his published Story Theater material, as well as in accounts of his directing.
The actor as teller and participant
You encounter the distinctive form of Story Theater in Sills’s interview with Laurie Ann Gruhn. A tale can remain a tale, with its narrative language intact, while performers make its events visible. The telling and the enactment occupy the same theatrical space. You can move between addressing the audience and participating in the story without requiring every sentence to become conventional dramatic dialogue.
This gives narration an active theatrical job. It can supply a change of place, compress time or bring the audience to an event that the ensemble then embodies. The players’ use of space makes the words perceptible as a world. A forest or a well can have a shared location and influence the action without needing a literal scenic construction.
What holds the form together? You can see the importance of a common focus. When several performers attend to the same imagined place, object or event, their coordination makes it available to the audience. The work depends on more than individual imagination. Your partners must be able to receive and extend what you establish, and the audience must be able to follow the changing relationships.
Sills also describes choral possibilities. Performers may remain present and speak together, allowing a company to carry the story rather than disappear whenever a single character stops talking. You encounter an ensemble form whose resources include shared rhythm, simultaneous presence and rapid shifts of function. The theatrical convention can be simple enough to understand and flexible enough to carry a complex narrative.
Spolin’s contribution remains central to this history. Her games supplied structures for play and shared attention; Sills brought those resources into the making and directing of performances. You can value both contributions without giving the same authorship to every part of the work. For an actor, the result is a wider understanding of what participation can mean: you may play a character, sustain the world around another character, and help tell the whole event.
Applications for actors
You take ensemble attention and imaginative transformation into improvisation. Give the group a clear event to accomplish. Let space, sound and the partner’s contribution help you tell it, then notice what the audience can actually follow.
Rehearsal exercise
Invent a short, simple story with three people: someone loses a key, someone finds it, and someone needs it urgently. Tell the story once in plain language. Then play it with one narrator and two performers, using an imagined key with a consistent size and location. Let the narrator enter the action when needed.
As you repeat the story, exchange roles. Ask a watcher when the key and the changing relationships became clear. Keep one useful discovery while allowing the next telling to be fresh.
Books and further study
Read Sills’s published preface and account of Story Theater alongside the interview. The preface is dated 1999; the site identifies the second edition of Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows as 2023. The collected scripts let you examine how narration and enacted events fit together. Keep the script’s words, the players’ discoveries and a director’s later explanation distinct as you study the form.