Carol Bleackley Sills, a balancing force in the history of Chicago improv, dies at 89

Carol Bleackley Sills is someone you should know in the history of Chicago improv, but maybe you don't.

Ms. Sills was the "gentle giant" and balancing force alongside her mercurial husband Paul Sills, who co-founded Second City, directed on Broadway and opened theaters in Chicago and Los Angeles.

"Carol was the moderating, stabilizing influence he desperately needed," said Jeffrey Sweet, a playwright and improv historian. "He'd come up with brilliant ideas and she was one of the people who made it possible for these things not to disappear into the ether but become practical projects."

Ms. Sills died Oct. 11 in Minnesota from natural causes. She was 89.

She and her husband opened Story Theater in 1968, which, in utilizing improv to tell fairy tales, created a new art form. It resulted in a show entitled "Paul Sills' Story Theatre," which made it to Broadway.

Ms. Sills worked alongside her husband and developed many of the visuals that audiences saw on stage.

"She was essentially Paul's interpreter," said Cordis Heard, who was part of the original group that performed Story Theatre. "He'd have this very kind of raucous tone and Carol would come in and say 'What my friend is trying to say is ...,' because she just implicitly understood."

Their yin and yang worked for decades.

"You can't run a theater movement on explosions; you have to keep an atmosphere in a room where people will try things without being afraid," said Sweet. "And Carol knew the work and taught it well and created an atmosphere of love, and he was very lucky to find her when he did."

"She was very soft-spoken, very gentle in her demeanor, and yet she had a lot of personal authority and clarity. Even if she spoke quietly, we heard her loud and clear," said her daughter Aretha.

Friend Deb Lacusta, a TV writer and playwright, said Ms. Sills made Story Theatre shows "even more magical" with her artistic contributions: "projections with gels, colored liquids, and materials that created an even more transporting experience of theater."

Lacusta and her husband Dan Castellaneta, a Second City alum and the voice of Homer and other characters on "The Simpsons," participated in workshops with Ms. Sills, both solo and with Paul.

"As we rehearsed," Castellaneta said, "she would look at us and say, 'Tell me the story,' reminding us about the importance of making a direct connection with the audience, which sometimes traditional theater does not."

Ms. Sills came to Chicago from Canada as a young woman with a background in the arts to study dance in Wisconsin with Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, the third wife of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

She later worked in advertising until deciding to become a waitress with her best friend at Second City.

It was there where, in 1960, she met her future husband, and married into a family that became known as the first family of improv.

Paul Sills' mother, Viola Spolin, developed the improvisational theater games that formed the basis of the art form.

Spolin started her career studying under sociologist Neva Boyd, who in the the 1920s used play and games as a way for the children of immigrants from all over the world to find a common way to connect with each other, including at Chicago's Hull House.

Spolin's son, Paul Sills, later took those techniques to the next level when he co-founded the Compass Players, often credited as the world's first improv theater group, which got its start in a bar across the street from the University of Chicago.

"This was a family business and Carol came in and learned it from Viola and Paul and became proficient," said Sweet.

She edited Spolin's book "Improvisation for the Theater," which became bible in the industry.

Ms. Sills lived in Los Angeles for a time in the '80s, where her family opened Sills & Co., which held improv performances that included players from the early Second City days like Severn Darden and Valerie Harper.

She and her husband helped found a graduate-level acting program in 1988 in New York City called New Actors Workshop.

"She was the gentle giant behind Paul," said Kathy Hendrickson, a student at the workshop who later helped run the program. "They were a real team. As long as he was alive they did everything together. She was the visual part of everything they did and a formidable artistic force."

Paul Sills died in 2008, and Ms. Sills directed the school's last show in 2010.

The family had a home in Wisconsin since the 1970s, but Ms. Sills and her husband permanently moved there in 1993.

Ms. Sills was director of the Paul Sills' Wisconsin Theater Game Center in Door County, where people from all over the world — actors, improvisors, schoolteachers, therapists — came to learn Spolin theater games every summer for nearly 40 years.

And the family-run theater lives on under the operation of Ms. Sills' children.

Ms. Sills was born June 11, 1935, in Canada, and grew up outside Montreal. Her father, Lachlan MacKinnon Bleackley, developed movie theater equipment and her mother, Gudrun Sigrid Eggertson, was a homemaker.

Ms. Sills studied with renowned Canadian painter Arthur Lismer and graduated with degree in painting from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. As a student she traveled to West Africa, where she was inspired by the sculptures she found in Benin before coming to Chicago.

Ms. Sills is survived by her daughters Rachel Sills, Polly Sills, Aretha Sills and Neva Sills, as well as six grandchildren and five great grandchildren.