The Players Workshop

Foundation by Josephine Forsberg (1971)

The Players Workshop was founded in 1971 by Josephine Raciti Forsberg, who had been present at The Second City since its 1959 opening night, when Paul Sills and Viola Spolin hired her as a female understudy and Spolin's teaching assistant. By the mid-1960s Forsberg was conducting most of the improvisational workshops at Second City's main stage and had developed a curriculum that drew on Spolin's theatre games while incorporating her own exercises. The school operated from rented space near the Second City building in Old Town before establishing a permanent home.

Affiliation with The Second City

Although the Players Workshop was an independent institution, it operated in close institutional proximity to The Second City and was commonly referred to as the Players Workshop of the Second City. Forsberg produced the Children's Theatre of the Second City for more than 35 years, and the school's graduation shows were performed on the Second City main stage on Sunday mornings, giving students performing experience in the company's own venue before they auditioned for the main company.

The Lincoln Avenue Building (1981–2003)

In 1981, Forsberg purchased a three-story building at 2636 North Lincoln Avenue, known as the Theatre Shoppe, giving the Players Workshop a permanent home that allowed it to expand its programme. The school offered a five-term improvisational course specifically designed to prepare students for Second City auditions, with a sixth term focused on creating performance material. Forsberg hired her nephew Martin de Maat and her daughter Linnea Forsberg to teach alongside her. De Maat taught at the Players Workshop for approximately twenty years before becoming director of The Second City Training Center.

Closure (2003)

The Players Workshop closed in the early 2000s as Josephine Forsberg approached retirement and competition from The Second City Training Center and iO Theater grew. By 2003, both competing institutions had expanded to a scale that the Players Workshop, operating as an independent school, could not match commercially. The closure ended more than three decades of training that had been directly responsible for shaping the generation of performers who built The Second City's national reputation.

The Players Workshop's pedagogical approach was rooted in Viola Spolin's theatre games, which Forsberg had learned directly from Spolin and adapted through more than a decade of teaching at The Second City before founding the school. The curriculum was sequential: students moved through five terms of improvisational exercises and scene work before a final term in which they created their own performance material, culminating in a graduation showcase on the Second City main stage.

Forsberg's teaching prioritised preparation for the Second City audition process specifically, and the school's curriculum was calibrated to the competencies that the company valued: ensemble listening, status work, character commitment, and scene economy. The focus on a clearly defined institutional destination gave the Players Workshop a pragmatic orientation that distinguished it from the more aesthetically experimental approaches developing at other Chicago companies during the same period.

The school also sustained a children's theatre programme across its entire history, with Forsberg producing original and classical productions for young audiences. The children's work drew on Spolin's methods applied to developmental contexts and reflected Forsberg's conviction that improvisational games were as valuable for young performers as for professional training.

Second City Graduation Showcases: The Players Workshop's periodic graduation performances on The Second City main stage Sunday mornings gave students performing experience in a professional theatre setting and introduced graduating classes to Second City casting directors. The showcases were a direct bridge between training and professional audition.

Children's Theatre of the Second City (1959–c. 2000): Josephine Forsberg produced the Children's Theatre of the Second City for more than 35 years, staging classical and original productions including A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, The Mikado, and original touring shows. The children's programme operated parallel to the training school throughout the Players Workshop's history.

Improvisation for Speech and Theater: Josephine Forsberg co-authored a textbook on improvisational pedagogy published by Kendall-Hunt Press, making the Players Workshop's curriculum available beyond Chicago and contributing to the spread of Spolin-derived methods into academic theatre training.

The Players Workshop was Chicago's primary independent improv school for more than two decades, training the majority of the performers who joined The Second City between 1965 and the mid-1980s. In that period Forsberg's approximately 61 former students who became Second City cast members included Bill Murray, Harold Ramis, Peter Boyle, Betty Thomas, Dan Castellaneta, George Wendt, Shelley Long, and Bob Odenkirk. The school's alumni pipeline shaped the generation of Second City performers who produced the most widely seen Second City-derived television comedy of the 1970s and 1980s.

Martin de Maat, who taught at the Players Workshop for approximately twenty years before leaving to direct The Second City Training Center, became one of the most beloved teachers in Chicago comedy before his death in 2001. His influence at both institutions represented a direct transmission of the Players Workshop's pedagogical approach into the institutional successor that eventually supplanted it.

The closure of the Players Workshop in the early 2000s marked the end of the era in which an independent school had functioned as the primary training pipeline for The Second City. Its successor institutions, The Second City Training Center and iO Theater's school, operate at a scale that reflects the expansion of improv training as a commercial category that the Players Workshop had helped create.