1. Even in traditional theater, the Second City’s methods can work.
Whether performing the works of Homer or Twain or Bradbury or developing a play around a deck of tarot cards, Organic Theater routinely strayed from the text. During rehearsals, director Stuart Gordon, who founded the company in 1969, and his cast would improvise until the script felt unforced. As the authors of Scream! Bleed! Take Off Your Clothes! explain, Gordon borrowed the process from Second City cofounder Paul Sills and Sills’s mother, improv mastermind Viola Spolin.
2. David Mamet speaks Chicago.
Long before achieving icon status, Mamet was living on Chicago’s North Side hustling as a waiter, taxi driver, office cleaner, and fledgling playwright when he linked up with Organic in 1974 to stage his Sexual Perversity in Chicago. “Mamet is famous for the brilliant ways he uses profanity in his scripts,” the book quotes Gordon as writing on the arts website Talkhouse in 2016, “but I can tell you that most of it was due to his great ear and how he could capture the way Chicagoans talked and continue to talk today.”
3. Cubs fans inspired a theatrical home run.
In 1977, in part to ease Organic’s financial hardships, longtime company member Joe Mantegna came up with the idea for Bleacher Bums, a play told from the perspective of the Cubs’ most die-hard fans. The actors conducted copious amounts of research in Wrigley’s left field bleachers, secretly recording conversations and tracking the countless, often ridiculous side bets among the titular bums. The show was a smash, touring the country and running off and on for decades.
4. Organic outfitted George Clooney with his first pair of scrubs.
In 1982, the company transformed emergency room horror stories into the play E/R Emergency Room. The show regaled audiences with tales of gruesome injuries, life-or-death decisions, and a gentleman who required a light bulb be extracted from his anus. It was a huge success. Organic cut a deal with legendary producer Norman Lear for a TV show, E/R, that ran on CBS for a single 22-episode season in 1984–85. Clooney appeared as a guest star — a decade before he’d become Dr. Doug Ross in NBC’s ER.
5. The company was a pioneer in better pay.
From Organic’s inception, Gordon strived to offer his actors a living wage — a rarity then and now, especially for off-Loop, mostly non-Equity theater. “The theater [that Gordon] wanted could not be a hobby for those participating,” the authors write. But the company’s efforts weren’t sustainable: In 1984, to cauterize financial wounds, its board of directors sidelined Gordon and decreed that the theater would no longer produce new, untested work, effectively strangling Organic with rigid constraints. The company merged with Touchstone Theatre in 1996, ending its independent run.
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Steve Heisler is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.