Martin de Maat was one of the few remaining improv teachers in Chicago who’d studied with Viola Spolin, the mother of Second City-style improvisational theater. His death last week in New York City left a lot of Chicagoans wondering about his legacy.
De Maat had another secret: he had AIDS. The Second City’s official announcement attributed his death to “complications from pneumonia,” by now a transparent euphemism, which was dutifully repeated in the daily newspapers. “Martin told me and a few others,” says Mick Napier, a former student of de Maat’s and the founder and artistic director of the Annoyance Theatre. “But he didn’t want it generally known. He didn’t want to put it out there, spiritually.”
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De Maat’s parents were working-class; his dad was a janitor, his mother a nurse’s aide. But his aunt, Josephine Forsberg, was an actress, and the Forsbergs and de Maats were close. His cousin Linnea Forsberg recalls spending hours playing with Martin and his older sister Patty. She was roughly the same age as Patty, but “whatever we did, Martin always played along.”
It was Linnea’s mother who first took Martin to the Second City. Josephine Forsberg had helped start the theater and would have been in the first company if she hadn’t become pregnant. Forsberg later introduced Martin to Viola Spolin and the world of improvisational acting.
We talked for two hours, and he packed a lot into the time. He told me about his troubled childhood in Oak Park, though he was vague about why it was troubled. He said he wandered around Oak Park crying.
De Maat began working at Second City as a teenager, washing dishes in the kitchen and imagining a life on the stage. He studied theater at the University of Iowa, but college made him miserable and restless. Returning to Chicago, he began to teach improv at his aunt’s school, the Players Workshop.
I was charmed, and within a year I started taking classes with de Maat, hoping to know him better. I wasn’t much different from most of his students, who constantly sought the approval he was always willing to give. He would tell his classes: “I am giving you permission to succeed” and “You don’t have permission to disrespect yourself” and “I don’t give you permission to fail.” Studying with de Maat was comforting, and his students progressed quickly over the usual hurdles. In improv circles, he had achieved cultlike status.
