She’s never going to be a star. Viki Navratilova is not tall–she’s maybe five-foot-five–and not waif thin. She has a shy smile and wears glasses, faded blue jeans, a T-shirt, and comfortable brown shoes. When she speaks onstage she can hardly be heard.
“Noah Gregoropoulos started taking classes with me in the mid-80s,” Halpern says. “He was very, very shy.” Gregoropoulos was a manager at U.S. Robotics who signed up at ImprovOlympic after he saw a show there in summer 1986. After the performance, Halpern took the stage and hawked her classes. “You should try it,” said Gregoropoulos’s girlfriend.
He redoubled his efforts. He learned to trust his mates onstage. He let go of his ego, his natural inclination to be embarrassed or self-conscious. “A few weeks later he called me and said, ‘All right, I’ve decided I’m ready to be heard,’” Halpern says. She put him on Andy Dick’s team, Floyd’s Toothbrush, where he thrived. A few months later Gregoropoulos quit his $60,000-a-year job. He immediately went into debt and a couple of years later had to file for bankruptcy. But he had a new life. In 1996 he toured the world with a troupe called Modern Problems in Science. In 1998 he became a director at Second City and a staff writer for the sitcom Dharma & Greg. Through all this he was also a teacher at ImprovOlympic.
She took classes under Jo Forsberg at the Players Workshop and Paul Sills at Second City. In the late 70s she started an improv group called Standard Deviation. The group played at little holes-in-the-wall around town, doing two- and three-minute scenarios in response to audience members’ suggestions of time and place, similar to the bits on Whose Line Is It, Anyway?
Shepherd moved to New York to teach workshops, and Halpern remained in Chicago. She ran the show alone for another year. “Then I got bored,” she says. “We were just doing games all the time. Nothing happens; you don’t go anywhere. You start relying on the same jokes to get you out. I wanted a challenge. I loved improvisation, I had gotten my kicks, but I thought, ‘This isn’t enough of a high.’ At that point, I met Del Close.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Most of the 18 people in Viki Navratilova’s class are novices; they’re young and eager. Their stage experience, for the most part, has been in high school or college. But they’ve all got the itch, and when Halpern calls for the first half dozen people to take the stage for the first round of games, most of the students spring out of their seats. “OK, eight people,” she says. “We’ll get the rest of you up here next.”
A guy raises his hand. “What’s the Harold?” he asks.
