“He was dogged in his devotion to his social and political principles,” Ed Asner, a member of the Playwrights cast, said by telephone. Sills - already a successful director in Chicago - and the actor Eugene Troobnick started the Playwrights Theater Club, which staged classical and avant-garde plays and brought them acclaim for its innovation. After graduating from Harvard, he earned a master’s in the history of theater at Columbia University. His studies were interrupted for nearly three years when he served in the field artillery with the Army during World War II. David was raised by his father after his mother, Louise (Butler) Shepherd, was hospitalized with schizophrenia when he was an infant.Īfter attending Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he studied English at Harvard. His father, William, was a wealthy architect whose aunt was Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, a socialite and wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, an heir to the Vanderbilt railroad and shipping fortune. “Simply put,” the Second City said on its website after his death, “there would be no Second City without David Shepherd.”ĭavid Gwynne Shepherd was born in Manhattan on Oct. Not joining the Second City “was a big mistake,” Mr. The Second City turned into a comedy empire and an incubator of generations of comedy talent like the “Saturday Night Live” performers John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Gilda Radner and Tina Fey, as well as Joan Rivers, Shelley Long, Stephen Colbert and many others. He believed it would be a slick, overly commercial imitation of Compass, and he did not want to be part of it (although he did eventually do some work for the troupe). Shepherd did not join the Second City when its founders, including Mr. He also wrote some of the scenarios, which he viewed as critical commentary on political and social issues of the day and central to the shows - even if they were not necessarily comedic, like one that Ms. Shepherd - tall, charming and serious - served Compass as producer, actor and occasional director. “David had a real sense of American culture, where it had gotten stale and how it needed to be opened up,” Janet Coleman, the author of “The Compass” (1990), a history of the group, said in a telephone interview. In a departure from conventional theater, there were no scripts: Performers like Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Barbara Harris and Shelley Berman invented scenes and characters on the spot based on audience suggestions, theatrical games and short written scenarios inspired by the European tradition of commedia dell’arte. Shepherd and Paul Sills started Compass in 1955 in the rear of a bar near the University of Chicago campus. His wife, Nancy Fletcher, confirmed the death. David Shepherd, who played a central role in the development of modern improvisational theater as a founder of the short-lived Compass Players in Chicago, but who declined to join its far more famous and influential successor, the Second City, died on Monday at a rehabilitation facility in Holyoke, Mass.
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