Performance

Second City

The Second City : Museum Pieces, Sketches at an Exhibition

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  • ABOUT The Second City

    Founded in 1959, The Second City has established itself as a Chicago landmark and a national treasure. The theater launched the careers of such comic greats as John Belushi, Mike Myers, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner and such recent talents as Tina Fey, Steve Carell, and Stephen Colbert. The theater now has two resident Chicago stages, The Second City Mainstage and the Second City e.t.c., each housing a resident troupe that writes and performs original comedy revue.

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The iconic Chicago comedy troupe The Second City celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this December. In anticipation of this milestone, the Festival and The Second City present a performance of rare gems from The Second City’s archives. Together these sketches trace the evolution of the company’s razor-sharp satire. The performance will feature a group of accomplished Chicago actors and will include the famous “Museum Piece” sketch, originally starring Alan Arkin and Barbara Harris. This sketch focuses on a beatnik’s efforts to woo a college girl whose only previous encounter with 1950s counterculture occurred in her English lit class.

Presented in partnership with The Second City

Dig Deeper

Broader Investigation

Panel

An Incomplete History of Comedy in Hyde Park

Travel from the early 1950s and the Playwrights Theater Club, through the Compass Players of Alan Arkin, Elaine May, and Mike Nichols fame, to the present-day The Second City to learn how improvisational theater forms pioneered in Hyde Park changed the course of comedy.

Lecture

Robert Goff: Kinetic Comedy in Buster Keaton and Ludwig Wittgenstein

Robert Goff, professor emeritus at the University of California Santa Cruz, discusses the connection between the physical antics of silver screen star Buster Keaton and the mental high-wire perambulations of Cambridge don Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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