Carol Sills (1935-2024)
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Carol Bleackley Sills — painter, educator, scenic designer, theater director, poet, and editor — passed away on Friday, October 11 at the age of 89.
In 1959, Carol enrolled in a Viola Spolin workshop while waitressing at Second City in Chicago. There she met Viola’s son, Paul Sills, Second City’s co-founder and Artistic Director, whom she later married. In 1965, Carol and Paul, along with Viola and friends, opened The Game Theatre. There, they played games, explored side-coaching during performance, and encouraged audience participation. They held community workshops and actively pursued new forms of artistic thought. Included in this was the creation of The Parents School, a parent-run school with a curriculum based on group practice in theater, visual art, literature, and egalitarian social ideals; the school continued until 1981. At The Game Theater, Carol worked with Paul on a new form they called Story Theater, which opened in Chicago in 1968. Subsequently, Carol was a part of creating many innovative theaters, including The Body Politic in Chicago, Century Hall in Milwaukee, and The Learning Theater in Chicago. With a group of players from Second City and Story Theater, Carol and Paul opened a space in Los Angeles called Sills & Co. to play Viola’s theater games in performance. They took PAUL SILLS’ STORY THEATRE to Broadway in 1985. Carol and Paul, along with Mike Nichols, helped found a graduate-level acting program in 1988 in NYC called New Actors Workshop. After permanently moving to Door County, WI in 1993, Carol and Paul returned to the school each season to produce a show with the graduating class. After Paul’s passing in 2008, Carol directed THE TAO OF CHUANG CHOU with the school’s final class in 2010. In 2014, she returned to directing at Central Methodist University for a production of STORY THEATRE. Along with designing theatre and educational spaces and co-developing shows, Carol designed sets, such as for Studs Terkel’s TALKING TO MYSELF, Ovid’s METAMORPHOSES, SWEET BLOODY LIBERTY, shows created with the American Folklore Theater (now Northern Sky) in Door County and 10 shows created with the Paul Sills Community Players in Door County. Carol also was director of Paul Sills' Wisconsin Theater Game Center in Door County where she was the administrator of summer theater game intensives to players from all over the world for nearly 40 years. As director of Sills/Spolin Theater Works, with assistance from daughters Rachel and Aretha, she worked to maintain the improvisational theater tradition of Paul Sills and Viola Spolin and to preserve and share all their unique vision of American theater. A collaborating editor of the writings of both Spolin and Sills, Carol edited the second and third editions of Viola’s Improvisation for the Theater, Theater Games for Rehearsal: A Director’s Handbook, and Theater Games for the Lone Actor (all Northwestern University Press), along with Paul’s Paul Sills’ Story Theater: Four Shows (Applause Books). In her own writing, Carol was an active participant in the Word Women, a group of Door County poets. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Carol grew up outside of Montreal. She studied from childhood with progressive arts educator and Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts). After graduating with a degree in painting from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, Carol traveled with a group of Canadian students to West Africa where she was inspired by the sculptures she found in Benin. Upon return, she went to Taliesin to study with Olgivanna Lloyd Wright. Soon after, she moved to nearby Chicago, eventually finding her way to Second City and the Spolin Workshop. Carol Bleackley Sills is survived by sisters Heather Darden and Linda Christine Bleackley; daughters Rachel Sills, Polly Sills, Aretha Sills, and Neva Sills; grandchildren Nadia Sills, Katrina Sills, Rocklan Lohrey, Make Keene, Freya Christianson, and Anna Watkins; great-grandchildren Rylan Locke and Jameson Lohrey, Juwaan, Matteo and Cairo Stewart; and is preceded in death by husband Paul Sills, Paul’s son David Michael Sills, and her brother Lachlan Bleackley. |