Janet Coleman

"YES you need this book, AND you are a fool not to get it."

"For anyone who is interested in theatre, underground theatre, improvisational theatre, and the sheer madness of trying something new with a repertory group, The Compass will prove a welcome history with fascinating details."
"Janet Coleman has cone a spectacular job of capturing the history, the almost alarmingly diverse cultural influences, and the extraordinary people who made up The Compass."
"Engrossing... An open window on a part of the theater that should be known."
"I was thrilled and delighted. The book is steeped in all the people I knew and love and hate. I couldn't put it down."
"This book is pinnacle to your success as an improvisor. Understanding the evolution of improvisation as well as the tried and true tactics are mandatory to being a good performer. Please do not hesitate. You will never forgive yourself! Really! This is endorsed by really big improvisors."
"You'll love this book."

A Short Excerpt from Chapter One:

The great gray neo-Gothic buildings of the University of Chicago wee the gift of a Baptist, John D. Rockefeller. The spires of this gloomy medieval fortress provided the backdrop for an almost miraculously long and bright interlude in American education from 1931 to 1959, the official life span of Robert Maynard Hutchins’s “Chicago Experiment,” described in the official annals as the “Chicago College Plan” and popularly called “The Hutchins Plan.”

One of the great exponents of liberal education in the tradition of John Dewey, Chancellor Hutchins’s strategies for exposing students to the glories of the contemplative life were inspired by the medieval university of Saint Thomas Aquinas. By incorporating the scholastic principles of the Thomists into the Chicago Experiment, Hutchins hoped to produce an intellectual community of scholars capable of achieving enlightenment through a common body of ideas and information and by sharing the divine revelations of knowledge.

Like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the Greeks he and Saint Thomas so admired, Hutchins had no distrust in youth. (He himself had become president of the University of Chicago at the age of twenty-nine.) Hence, he reorganized the entrance requirements for students seeking a B.A. Students who could pass the entrance exam wee encouraged to enter the University of Chicago after their sophomore year of high school, at fifteen or sixteen, but the entrance age was considerable lower for some whiz kids.

Hutchins felt that there was too much pressure on the American student to specialize. Prematurely habituating students to succeed in the job market, he argued, was resulting in “a trivialization of our lives.” A college education, he maintained, should focus solely on the acquisition of knowledge, not on training for a vocation in an economic environment that would be completely different by the time the trainee entered it.

According to the Hutchins Plan, all undergraduates read the same great texts, including Plato, Kant, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Marx, Dante, Goethe, Aristotle, Dostoevski, Max Weber, Machiavelli, and William James. Even science was treated like a humanity: instead of clocking hours in the lab, students were required to read Archimedes, Mendel, Newton, and Einstein. It was a grueling program. An advanced course, Observation, Interpretation, and Integration (O.I.I.) was referred to by students as “Oi, oi, oi.”