Word: formers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...coffeehouse's décor has received few updates since the day it opened 50 years ago - Dec. 16, 1959 - in a former Chinese laundry on North Wells Street in Chicago's Old Town neighborhood. The club, and the troupe that shares its name, was opened by three theater veterans and University of Chicago grads, Bernard Sahlins, Paul Sills and Howard Alk. They took the name from the condescending title of a New Yorker article about Chicago by A.J. Liebling, and the idea - an improvisational comedy show - from theater games developed by Sills' mother, actress and theater teacher Viola Spolin...
...Sills, a Fulbright scholar and former merchant marine, honed the Second City formula - an ensemble ethic and a focus on audience participation - with previous performance groups the Playwrights Theater Club and the Compass Players. Sills and Sahlins' professional relationship began while producing shows at the Playwrights Theater Club, and Alk had worked with Sills at Gate of Horn, a folk-music club in Chicago. When the three came together to build Second City, they stepped into an uncharted territory of comedy: improv did not exist outside of Sills and Spolin's projects. Comedy shows of that era were mostly rehearsed...
...center at Second City in Chicago, where its principles of improv technique were formalized and taught. (While all actors are chosen only after a rigorous audition, most of the troupe's younger stars are products of the training center; Steve Carell, Rachel Dratch, Chris Farley and Fey are all former students.) But not all attempts at expansion worked out. Second cities in Pasadena and Santa Monica, Calif., and Edmonton, Alberta, soon shuttered, while theaters in Las Vegas and Detroit meandered along for years without attaining the fame of the Chicago and Toronto venues. (Read about Tina Fey in the TIME...
...Several former officials of the Ecuadorian government had ties with Colombia's Marxist guerrillas, a commission named by President Rafael Correa conceded Tuesday. The announcement is sure to stir up new questions about how deeply South America's political left, including Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, has aided a rebel force condemned worldwide as drug traffickers and terrorists. And it raises the risk, said the commission's coordinator, Francisco Huerta, that Ecuador is "becoming a narco-democracy...
...cocaine in Ecuador rather than just smuggling it. Ecuadorian police have discovered numerous drug labs near the borders with Colombia and Peru as well as on farms deep inside the South American country, including one just west of the capital, Quito. René Vargas Pazzos, a retired general and former ambassador to Venezuela, rented a farm to a FARC commander, the report says. As a result, Huerta warned that Ecuador faces the same corrosive influence from the drug trade that neighboring Colombia has suffered for decades...