Second City takes shots at Atlanta
Troupe sees red meat in cream-puff slogan, budget shortfall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Chicago — They’re gathered around a piano inside an empty theater, six actors on a wet morning rehearsing a satiric mash note to Atlanta. They cover familiar ground — traffic, transplants — before belting out two bouncy lines about Atlanta’s civic slogan.
“They say every day is opening day/but what the hell does that mean?!”
Stacie Freudenberg/AP
Second City performers (from left) Amy Roeder, Tim Stoltenberg, Michael Lehrer and Anthony Irons rehearse in Chicago for their Atlanta revue. Its title, ‘Too Busy to Hate … Too Hard to Commute,’ is based on an old Atlanta slogan. But the new slogan, ‘Every Day is an Opening Day,’ takes its lumps, too.
"The Second City: Too Busy to Hate... Too Hard to Commute." Hertz Stage at the Alliance Theatre, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St., Atlanta. Sept. 19-Oct. 26 (previews through Sept. 23, opening Sept. 24) $30-$40. 404-733-5000, www.alliancetheatre.org.
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They move on, finish, get notes from the director. Then the woman at the piano, looking puzzled, peers over her glasses and asks, “What is ‘opening day’? Is it about baseball?”
An Atlanta actor in the sketch-and-improv troupe explains that the city coined the tag “Every Day is an Opening Day” to brand itself for tourists and businesses.
“But what the hell?” Lisa McQueen asks again, not so much repeating the lyric as sincerely wanting to know, “does that mean?”
The befuddlement that greets a catchphrase devised to define Atlanta is at the heart of the often brutally loving send-up created for the Alliance Theatre by Chicago’s famed The Second City comedy group.
Titled “Too Busy to Hate … Too Hard to Commute,” the revue is intended as both a funhouse mirror and as a community Rorschach test for a town long in search of just what it is.
The show begins its six-week run with previews starting Friday in the Alliance’s 200-seat Hertz Stage.
Skits take aim at Atlantans’ affection for Shirley Franklin while the city faces a $140 million budget shortfall; Clayton County’s school dysfunctions; Diddy trying to unload a suburban mansion in the middle of the foreclosure crisis.
It also confronts issues of race in a place where Martin Luther King Jr.’s gravesite is a short drive to a Stone Mountain gift shop that sells Confederate mud flaps.
Even the Piedmont Driving Club gets its own ditty — one not likely to be re-purposed as a recruiting tool.
The added weight behind any Second City production is its decades-long list of alumni who’ve gone on to shape American comedy: Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner … the list goes on.
“We dare to offend,” says Beth Kligerman, Second City director of talent and talent development. “We’re OK if someone walks out on a given night — though we don’t necessarily want that for our friends in Atlanta.”
What is Atlanta?
Two writers were dispatched from Chicago to Atlanta for three days in June to absorb the local zeitgeist. They were chauffeured around town by an Alliance staff that cobbled together a list of must-sees for a visitor wanting an Atlanta experience.
The list included the Varsity, Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza malls on a Friday night, and the Clermont Lounge and its flock of aging strippers (“They seemed to hire women on their internal beauty,” says writer Ed Furman).
“Ask any five people at a gathering, ‘What is Atlanta?’ and you might get five unique answers,” says Susan Booth, the Alliance artistic director who moved to Atlanta seven years ago from Chicago. “They also did a lot driving from one place to another. It was purposely meant to land people in rush-hour traffic.”
Traffic, race and the influx of transplants became repeating themes for the writers. They stopped to talk with locals, finding them willing to open up on almost any topic. More often than not, after extolling Atlanta’s virtues, a local would then add something like, “But I just moved here from Baltimore.”
A Stone Mountain mom-and-pop store selling Confederate knickknacks brought home for the writers a historic aspect of race in Atlanta that distinguishes it from racial issues in places like Denver and Pittsburgh, the two other towns where Second City has tailor-fit shows.
“Being a short drive from a major metropolitan city, it was wild,” says T.J. Shanoff, who wrote the revue’s music. “Put it this way: You couldn’t sell some of that [stuff] in Detroit. But it became understandable why things like the Michael Vick incident would take on so much weight there.”
Shanoff then adds of Vick, “Unless it comes up during the improv, we guarantee no Michael Vick references. Not that we didn’t try. Everybody said, ‘It’s been done to death. Forget it.’ But I was like, ‘Are you sure this isn’t relevant anymore?’”
Race also became important to the show’s casting. During much of Second City’s 49-year history, sketch and improv comedy was often, Kligerman allows, “the sport of white guys in chinos.”
But while casts have diversified in the last decade, they remain predominantly white — a situation deemed unacceptable for Atlanta. Two African-American actors based in Chicago are part of the six-player troupe.
“The history of Second City is mostly a white history until the ’90s,” says Kelly Leonard, Second City vice president. “We did tons of race material from a white liberal perspective, or making fun of liberals and race, or of racists from white eyes. It wasn’t until we had black people on stage that we were able to talk about issues from that perspective, and it gave us way bigger permission to deal with those issues.”
The Alliance and Second City also wanted to include Atlanta actors. Auditions were held in May at the Alliance. More than 100 actors with improv experience showed up.
Two were hired: Tim Stoltenberg, improv director at Dad’s Garage in Atlanta; and Amy Roeder, third-year theater graduate student at the University of Georgia.
Another actor from the Chicago cast, Anthony Irons, is from Birmingham. He moved to Chicago from Atlanta four years ago.
“You have to be here 10 to 12 years before you transcend carpetbagger status, so I’m profoundly aware of not being a native Southerner when I’m making programming choices,” Booth says. “This could not be just a bunch of Chicagoans and non-Southerners from the outside saying, ‘Oooh, that’s funny.’ That would be deadly.”
A ‘formula’ for laughs
Yet the draw of any Second City show remains Second City.
“I think a lot of stuff is going to shock Atlanta a little bit,” Stoltenberg says. “Which is good. I don’t think Atlanta gets enough of that. Atlanta is ready to laugh at itself and say, ‘Yeah, that’s us.’ And by laughing at ourselves we can identify what makes us special.”
How Atlanta audiences will react to an out-of-town institution whose alumni dominate the country’s comedic discourse remains an open question.
“They’re Mark Twain for the entertainment age,” Booth says. “They’re political jesters. They don’t hold themselves out as cultural anthropologists who tell us who we are. They tell us how we think and what we’re talking about.
“Part of the beauty of the city is we don’t have a finite definition,” Booth adds. “Not only are there personal variances on what constitutes Atlanta history, there’s widely different comfort levels with those histories.
“But we’re disarmed by laughter and music. One of the smart things Second City has done is deploy these style tactics. They keep you off whatever your soapbox or high horse might be. People say, ‘It’s a song. How dangerous can it be?’ “
That “formula,” says Kligerman, is simple and unchanging, no matter what the material or where it’s performed.
“It’s six actors, chairs and a piano,” she says. “That’s all this is. You don’t need anything else.”
