The Globe and Mail (Canada) August 30, 2003 Saturday Lessons from a master; Film veteran Alan Arkin is taking a break from his Cape Breton summer home to lead a master class at Second City. MICHAEL POSNER caught up with him BYLINE: MICHAEL POSNER The distinguished American character actor Alan Arkin arrives in Toronto this week from his summer home in Cape Breton. With his annual excursions north - he lives the rest of the year in Sante Fe, N.M. - and with his frequent appearances on Canadian film sets over the course of his more than 40-year career (Indian Summer, Joshua Then and Now, Varian's War, Heck's Way Home), Arkin might reasonably make a claim for honorary Canadian status. His stay in Toronto should lend further support to that campaign. He is conducting a three-day master class in improv at Second City, part of a scheduled week-long agenda of festivities in celebration of the company's 30th Canadian anniversary, complete with guest appearances by various S.C. alumni during the evenings. The Toronto company, of course, is the child of the original troupe, founded in Chicago more than a decade earlier. Although Milton Berle and Sid Caesar were essentially doing sketch comedy on U.S. network television, they were always working from scripts, which had to be vetted by network executives and advertising sponsors. Second City was the first to take the improv format into the nightclub, where the censorship gloves could be largely taken off, leaving the actors free to satirize the straight-laced, buttoned- down, sexually repressed America that emerged during the post-Second World War period. By the time Bernie Sahlins exported the concept to Canada in the early seventies, Second City was an established presence in Chicago. But Toronto proved a tougher sell and, within months, the local company was out of business. As it happened, a young Torontonian named Andrew Alexander, working in marketing in Chicago for the Ivanhoe Theatre, had fallen in love with Second City, then starring John Belushi, Brian Doyle Murray and Joe Flaherty. On a napkin, he agreed to buy the Toronto rights from Sahlins and, borrowing $7,000 from a friend, relaunched the company in the Old Firehall Theatre. The first company included Jayne Eastwood, Valerie Bromfield, Gilda Radner, Dan Aykroyd, Gerry Salzberg, Murray and Flaherty. Alexander's troupe also struggled in its early years. Financial stability did not arrive until the late 1970s, after he and new partner Len Stuart - threatened by the appearance of Lorne Michaels's Saturday Night Live - created the hit comedy series, SCTV. Today, at 58, Alexander and Stuart preside over a mini-empire, with other clubs in Cleveland, Detroit, Las Vegas and two in Chicago (all of them profitable), and training facilities in New York and Los Angeles (as well as Toronto) that now accommodate 3,000 students a week. Some of them are signed up to attend the master class offered by a genuine master. Arkin, a still vigorous 69 (best known perhaps for his work in Glengarry Glen Ross, Wait Until Dark - in which, he jokes, that he set a world record for a lunge by a male performer wearing a wig - and his Oscar-nominated performances in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, and The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter), has been teaching for several years. "I was originally approached a dozen years ago by the Omega Institute [a personal development organization] to do something, but I felt unequipped. Then my alma mater Bennington College [in Vermont] asked me to teach acting, and I had no interest in that, but I thought I could teach a course in improv. So we did a 10-day course and it was very successful." Since then, Arkin has taken the workshop on the road to various venues, including Omega. The central objective, he insists in a promotional prospectus, is not to produce material for sketch comedy. It's "not about being clever, or funny, or reinforcing the techniques the participants already have. It's about remembering how to be authentic . . . utilizing improvisation as a method for deep and important self- exploration." Arkin calls it "bridging the chasm from theatre to life . . .. But I make it very clear. It's not about getting your chops up or developing material for sketch comedy." And he makes no apology for insisting that even trained actors routinely return to acting fundamentals, including breathing. Some years ago, Arkin was asked to direct a commercial with golf legend Arnold Palmer. It was an odd match, if only because Arkin has no appreciation of the game of golf. He regards it, he says, as "a waste of space, a way of having a business meeting on grass. But it occurred to me that this is a game with no margin for error, where a millimetre can determine a million dollars." Arkin asked Palmer what he does when confronting so much pressure. "And he said what every wise professional, unafraid of humility, would say. He goes back to basics." It's the same for actors, Arkin contends - or it ought to be. "It means having the courage to start over again from the beginning each time we go on stage, and letting the characters dictate where the work wants to go." Arkin seems almost to have been born to acting. At five, he asked if his father, an art teacher in New York, if he could keep a secret: "I'm going to be an actor." At eight, he vividly recalls, a friend of his mother's became hysterical and he remembers being unmoved by her tears. When he asked himself why, he concluded, "she was overacting." But after studying in Los Angeles and at Bennington, Arkin found himself in the mid-fifties in a folk group, The Tarriers. The first trio to have a hit single (The Banana Boat Song) on the Billboard pop charts, they toured the world on the back of it. It was in Paris that Arkin, still just 23 years old, walked out after a concert at the Olympia Theatre asking, "what the hell am I doing here?" He quit the group and moved to Chicago, joining Paul Sill's Second City. At 28, he did his first Broadway play, Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing, and won a Tony Award. He was back on the boards five years ago, acting with his son Tony, Elaine May and her daughter Jeannie in Power Plays. Today, Arkin wants no part of stage acting. It's the repetition he can't tolerate. His son Tony captured the essence of this sentiment one night during their New York run in 1998: "Look you asked me the same questions last night and I gave you perfectly good answers. Did you have to ask them again tonight?" But Arkin loves making films, and says he has no trouble occupying himself happily in the long intervals between takes on the set. Pending his next acting assignment, he's hoping to make a one-hour film out of the material generated by his master classes. "I want to see if there's enough material from the last four workshops to be seen professionally, mostly using people who are amateurs. It's an experiment, but it's very exciting."