What happens when a comedy institution realizes that a punchline is not worth a performer’s pain?
The first time Dewayne Perkins stepped into the Second City, the storied Chicago improv theater, a decade or so ago, he saw a Black actor spinning around in a Speedo onstage and getting big laughs. That was it: his revelation. “Oh, I can do this,” Perkins, then a drama student, thought. “This is a place I could use my skills and be funny.”
He was a Chicago native, but Second City was new to him. “I was excited about the idea that a Black man could make money doing sketch comedy — and do it in my own city,” he said. He signed up.
But while Perkins studied in the same grand building, on North Wells Street in Old Town, that produced John Belushi, and boosted Tina Fey, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, a Steve (Carell), a Stephen (Colbert) and some Amys (Sedaris and Poehler), he did not have the same experience of it as a creative home, he said. It was a job. A traumatizing one.
“Two directors said the N-word” when discussing sketches with him, recalled Perkins, who left the theater in 2017 and is now a story editor and TV writer (“Brooklyn Nine-Nine”). “Second City is so heavily associated with whiteness,” he added. “I felt like it wasn’t made for me, like I was a guest in a space, because they needed me to fill a box.”
For more than 60 years, what made America laugh often sprang from the halls of Second City. Its classes and stages were a pipeline to “Saturday Night Live” and countless writers rooms; its legacy and influence on mainstream comedy today are unparalleled.
But for many performers of color, Second City was not a Valhalla: it was a trial. They tell stories of being demeaned, marginalized, tokenized, cast aside or worse.
This summer, in a series of open letters and emotional town halls, current and former members demanded that Second City reform its organization and culture to correct racial disparities. And though the company has tried and failed to address racist practices multiple times, now it has responded as never before, publicly committing to refashion itself from top to bottom. “We are prepared to tear it all down and begin again,” the theater’s leaders wrote in an open letter.
Second City’s crusade, over the last two months, to turn itself into an antiracist company comes as just about every notable comedy theater in the country is grappling with the same issues while struggling to keep afloat during the pandemic. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing, as Americans protested police brutality and racial inequity, performers at the Upright Citizens Brigade (co-founded by Poehler) and the Groundlings in Los Angeles wrote letters rebuking their administrators for shortchanging people of color. The iO Theater, another influential improv stage in Chicago, was also faced with calls to reform; less than two weeks later, amid financial precarity, it closed its doors.
If any space can survive the unprecedented turbulence of social justice movements and economic collapse, it might be Second City, a $55 million enterprise with outposts in Hollywood and Toronto, a robust corporate and touring business, and extensions like camps and a comedy film school. Operating under an Actors’ Equity stage contract for more than 700 full- and part-time employees, it is almost certainly the biggest live comedy business in the nation.
It’s also been a model for the comedy training schools that have popped up across the country. Now it may be a template for their reimagining.
Credit...Bethany Mollenkof for The New York TimesFor a person of color “it was a path of resistance, of constant questioning — ‘Why am I here? Why am I being treated this way?’”
Dewayne Perkins, Second City cast member until 2017
But in interviews with more than 20 past and present performers, staff members and others, as well as with the leadership, the challenge of making these enormous changes becomes clear. This is at least the fifth time Second City has tried to reconcile the concerns of employees of color. It has turned to diversity specialists and management coaches before, held painful listening sessions, and even floated opening another location in a majority-Black neighborhood. Yet the culture that many found deeply offensive was ingrained for decades.
“It was very clear what the path was, if you were a person of color,” Perkins said in an interview. “It was a path of resistance, of constant questioning — ‘Why am I here? Why am I being treated this way?’”
Undermined Onstage and Off
In June, after Second City posted messages supporting Black Lives Matter, Perkins responded with a thread on Twitter. “You remember when the black actors wanted to put on a Black Lives Matter Benefit show and you said only if we gave half of the proceeds to the Chicago PD, because I will never forget,” he began. (A spokeswoman for Second City said an executive who is no longer at the theater suggested splitting the funds with a police-related cause, but artists and staff rejected that idea. The show ultimately benefited only Black Lives Matter. The theater matched the money raised.)
His tweets prompted others to chime in; within days, at least a dozen Black performers, spanning 20 years at the organization, were gathered on a private Zoom call, airing “our Second City-based traumas,” as one participant, Aasia LaShay Bullock, put it.
A white co-star once told Pip Lilly, “I’m blacker than you because I know more rap songs than you,” he recalled. Meanwhile, directors were open to casting him, circa 2001, only as “a pimp or a rapper or a drill sergeant,” said Lilly, who holds a master’s in acting.
A decade later, for a scene in a conservatory-level class, a teacher instructed Ali Barthwell, now a writer on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”: “You’re just so smart. You’re almost too smart. I’d love to see you play a big mama welfare queen.”
Before a big audition, Ashley Nicole Black was told she wasn’t advancing because she didn’t play “sassy angry Black lady characters,” she said. A director said the perception was that she was denying her identity.
She was dismayed — “I was being myself,” she said — and vowed never to audition there again. She became a writer and correspondent on “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” and won an Emmy.
Even after they were established in a troupe, performers of color sometimes had to scrounge for understudies while their white counterparts were supported with a network of available actors. In the 2015-16 season — the first in which there was an influx of performers of color, thanks to a diversity fellowship program — Perkins and at least four other Black performers were sent to a vocal coach and dialect trainer, to make them sound more palatable to Second City’s majority white audiences, they believe. In several cases, the Black actors from a cast were disproportionately sent for coaching, they said, though they already had training in stage and vocal performance.
The speech pathologist, Kate DeVore, confirmed that she had received a spate of referrals for Black artists one year. “Right around the time that I started to recognize the pattern, and learned that it was problematic for the performers, that cluster of referrals stopped,” she said in an email. (A spokeswoman for Second City said the theater did not have complete records of how many actors received individual training, but that during this period, both white and Black performers were sent to the coach for training including vocal stamina, projection and clarity. Though the theater always had more white performers, DeVore said over the years that she had received an equal number of referrals for white performers and artists of color.)
Many of the theater’s issues were crystallized by “A Red Line Runs Through It,” a 2016 show that was a rarity at Second City — in a cast of six, it featured only one white man. Before its run was over, all the people of color had quit.
A History of White Casts
Second City, founded by three white men, started in 1959, an offshoot of a University of Chicago student group called the Compass Players. In their format, improv was a platform for social satire, and they codified writing and performance techniques, professionalizing the art form.
But from the beginning, equity was almost impossible to achieve for people of color — the very few there were. In a 1978 oral history of Second City and Compass Players, Roger Bowen, an original Second City member, was asked why there were so few Black performers in the field. “Satiric improvisational theater is definitely a cosmopolitan phenomenon,” he said. “But I don’t think most Black people are cosmopolitan.” Black actors, he added, “want to do Black theater.”
In 1985, Andrew Alexander, who had been the head of the company’s Toronto outpost, became a co-owner of Second City. But it was not until spring 1992, as Los Angeles erupted in violence after a jury acquitted four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, that he began to see the limitations of his predominantly white cast. (Tim Meadows was hired for the mainstage at Second City in 1989, but left in 1991 for “S.N.L.”) “It gobsmacked me when I realized, we have to change,” Alexander said.
He turned to Frances Callier, the first Black woman with a management title at the Second City. Callier, who grew up on Chicago’s West Side, started improvising at Second City as a teenager. At Alexander’s behest, she helped create an outreach and workshop program for performers of color, scouting Black comedy clubs.
In the mid-’90s, she became the executive director of the theater’s Training Center, now a lucrative part of the company’s business, and the most-copied part of its model: charging would-be comedians hundreds of dollars for classes, offering a chance to move up to the mainstage.
One day, Kelly Leonard — then a theatrical producer, now the executive director of learning and applied improvisation at Second City — came into Callier’s office after receiving a positive financial report on the center. “He said, ‘Hey, how does it feel to have my white feet on your Black shoulders?’” Callier recalled, suggesting that he was benefiting from her work. She was aghast. “It felt like slow motion,” she said, “like, Is this happening?”
Callier tried to laugh it off, though the moment was so off-putting, she mentioned it to colleagues. Three former Second City employees confirmed that she immediately told them about Leonard’s comment. (Leonard “categorically denies saying this,” according to a spokeswoman for the theater. )
Not long after, Second City, which also had a location in Detroit and was eyeing other cities, began planning to open a 10,000-square-foot outpost in Bronzeville, a historically Black neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. In interviews, Alexander touted it as a place where Black performers and teachers would have an equal stake as owners.
“This is a total commitment on our part to diversify our casts,” he told the Chicago Reader in 2001.
Callier helped secure an empowerment zone grant for nearly $900,000, but the Bronzeville theater never materialized. “We didn’t have the manpower,” Alexander said. Instead, the Chicago stage absorbed talent (including Keegan-Michael Key and the “Veep” star Sam Richardson) from the other locations, some of which eventually closed.
For Callier, the loss of Bronzeville was a staggering disappointment. The point was “to teach African-American people in their own community, in their own voice,” she said. “That’s the deep sadness, that that didn’t happen. Because I believe in this work.”
“For me, Black people improvising is one of the most natural things in the world,” she added, saying, “All Black people do is make things out of nothing, create brilliance out of emptiness, create excellence from nothing.”
Credit...Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times“All Black people do is make things out of nothing, create brilliance out of emptiness, create excellence from nothing.”
Frances Callier, Former Second City performer and executive who left in 2003
Trying to Change a Deeply Ingrained Culture
After leading the theater for 35 years, Alexander abruptly stepped down in June, a day after Perkins’s tweets. Though the theater had tried to become more inclusive under his watch, “it didn’t work,” Alexander wrote in his public apology and resignation. “The Second City cannot begin to call itself antiracist. That is one of the great failures of my life.”
He is selling his stake in the company, he said in a recent phone interview, and re-evaluating the biases that created this turmoil. “I am heartbroken about it,” he said. “It kind of consumes my day, looking back. Did I get this all wrong?”
Tiffany Jana, an expert in diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, and co-author of “Erasing Institutional Bias,” said that diversifying a workplace like Second City involves more than hiring. “Just putting a bunch of Black people onstage doesn’t help,” Jana said, adding: “The intersection of cultural competency and good, wicked humor is a really dangerous intersection if you haven’t actually nurtured inclusion.”
And, for an institution of Second City’s history and size, the challenge is multiplied. “You’ve got deeply ingrained culture,” Jana said. “And the problem is, an organization that is old and large has been successful. Why on earth are they going to change anything they are doing if what they’re doing works? So leadership has to have a very strong, vested interest.”
The scathing open letter born of the Zoom call came after Alexander’s resignation. More missives followed, from Latinx, Asian and Middle Eastern alumni and others in solidarity with their Black colleagues. The original letter had outlined a half-dozen complicated and expensive steps to subvert institutional racism.
Second City chose to act on them.
As interim executive director, it appointed Anthony LeBlanc, a Black actor and director who had arrived at the theater after a previous diversity-minded appeal. It’s the first time a person of color has held that leadership role.
LeBlanc said he agreed with his fellow Black artists’ message. It didn’t come as a shock to management, either. “We all read that letter and it was 100 percent,” he said, adding: “This is just truth.”
So, what now?
In a group interview, LeBlanc, alongside Steve Johnston, president of Second City; Parisa Jalili, its newly appointed chief operating officer; and Maya Bordeaux, a lawyer and human resources consultant who specializes in DEI initiatives, acknowledged that in recent and distant history, Second City had problems with stereotyping people of color onstage, getting them understudies and correcting insensitivities and a culture geared toward whiteness. They emphasized that they are in Phase 1 of what LeBlanc called a “never-ending” process to realign the theater toward equality.
He and other leaders want Second City to be “an agent of change,” he added. When productions are honed in front of homogeneous, majority-white audiences, it rewards their point of view, he said. Now, the theater needs to take stock as an artistic entity: “That’s what those folks find funny. Is that what we want our shows to be? Is that standard a high enough bar for what we need to do?”
The revamp is tangible, starting with the photos of alumni adorning the theater’s lobby — a sea of white faces, to be replaced with a newer, and more diverse, roster of performers.
Then there is the material itself: the company leans heavily on its archives, asking students and touring artists to delve into a catalog of thousands of sketches from its 60-year history. Characters of color are largely absent or rife with stereotypes. “I had nothing,” Peter Kim, the first openly gay Asian man hired for the mainstage, said of his experience as a touring performer in 2014. Now a committee will cull through the archives and reject sketches and scenarios that might be offensive (like those that led white directors to use the N-word, which Perkins experienced).
This is the easy stuff. Because it’s not just about who gets onstage or what they say there, Johnston said, adding that is where Second City had fallen “significantly short” before. Focusing on representation “was far too narrow,” he said.
Now they are considering every facet of their connections: “The interactions between our producing teams and our talent, our teachers and our students, our students and our students, our night staff and our audiences,” he said. “What does the physical environment look like, what are we putting out on the road, how are we diversifying our audiences, how are we coaching up our teachers to deal with a lot of very nuanced subject matter?”
Some of that was acknowledged in previous diversity efforts, but “we didn’t get it through to an operating level, and that is clearly what’s changed,” Johnston said. “That was the gift in the letter we received from our BIPOC alumni,” he said, using the acronym for Black, Indigenous and people of color. The company is planning to spend around seven figures, he said, to make things right.
“DEI will be at the center of everything we do,” Jalili promised.
Listening Sessions and More
Second City has had a full-time outreach and diversity coordinator since at least 2002. In its first 40-some years in Chicago, it had hired just two dozen Black performers, but representation did increase on the company’s stages, if not in its executive ranks, in the last decade. In 2014, it began offering the Bob Curry Fellowship, a tuition-free training course for multicultural artists; it led to a surge in performers of color. (It’s named for the first Black actor to join Second City, in 1966. Curry, who died in 1994, performed one show on the mainstage.)
Even as their numbers increased, performers of color said they often felt stifled or tokenized in their storytelling. “There was a lot of pressure to be like, ‘OK, you guys are the Black and brown people, so say Black and brown things,’” said Marlena Rodriguez, a Latinx actress and writer (“Silicon Valley”) who was at Second City in the mid-2010s.
After years in which, as Ashley Nicole Black put it, Second City had “a narrow view of blackness — and performers were encouraged to fit into that viewpoint to work there,” the theater started putting itself forward as a multicultural institution. In 2014, Christine Tawfik became the first Egyptian-American actress in the mainstage company; her tenure ended a year later. As satirists, “they know that diversity and truthful diverse voices are imperative in the commodity that they produce,” she said, “but I think the institution itself is not prepared for handling diverse perspectives.” She added, without diversity, the satire “becomes all Cubs jokes.”
Credit...Bethany Mollenkof for The New York Times“There was a lot of pressure to be like, ‘OK, you guys are the Black and brown people, so say Black and brown things.’”
Marlena Rodriguez, former Second City cast member
There were moments of potential breakthrough. In 2016, amid a contentious election season, the theater opened a “A Red Line Runs Through It,” a progressive-minded revue with a notably diverse cast: one white man, one Asian man, two white women and two Black women. “It was what Second City could be,” Perkins said. That promise soon soured.
During one performance, one of the stars, Peter Kim, recalled, he turned to the audience for an improv prompt. “What’s a small thing that makes you feel annoyed?” he asked. A white man seated beside a Latino man yelled out, “Sitting next to a Mexican!” It wasn’t an isolated incident. “We were telling our stage manager, our house manager, our producers — we had almost a weekly meeting about this. And they would assure us every single time, ‘We’re on your side, we’re going to police the house better, we’re going to kick them out,’” said Kim, who had also been physically grabbed by patrons. “They didn’t protect us.” He quit the show shortly after the other cast members of color.
They interpreted the crowd behavior as backlash from the theater’s traditional demographic: a “mostly suburban-tourist-white audience,” according to LeBlanc.
“Red Line” led the theater to re-examine issues involving diversity, holding listening sessions with a facilitator for six months. “I was in all of them,” Alexander said. It wasn’t enough.
Theater leaders are now actively seeking out instances of racial friction. As directed by the open letter from Black artists, they have hired independent investigators and allowed current or former employees to anonymously report their claims via a newly created email.
The theater is posting regular updates online about its evolution — for transparency and accountability, its leaders said. Another big push involves elevating the level of “cultural competency,” LeBlanc said, so that all players (teachers or actors, audiences or theater staff) know what is acceptable in conduct or language. And so the burden of trying to teach them doesn’t fall — as it too often did before — on people of color. “It should not be the talent’s responsibility at all,” said Johnston, the company’s president.
For alumni and current staff members, watching Second City step toward change — however belatedly — offers hope that the theater will provide a path for everyone in its community.
“I learned how to write there, how to communicate with an audience,” said Ashley Nicole Black, now a star and writer on “A Black Lady Sketch Show” on HBO. But, she said, “I can’t have any other Black kid walk into these doors until this stuff gets fixed.”
Given all the failed attempts already, amid more than half a century of institutional racism, why should any performer — or audience member, or employee, or student — trust that Second City will be different this time?
“There isn’t a reason for them to outright trust us,” LeBlanc said. “We have to gain their trust back. That’s something that we have to do through our actions.”
“There isn’t another way back.”
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