David Shepherd, 94, Dies; Nurtured Improvisational Theater

His wife, Nancy Fletcher, confirmed the death.

Shepherd and Paul Sills started Compass in 1955 in the rear of a bar near the University of Chicago campus. 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.

“David had a real sense of American culture, where it had gotten stale and how it needed to be opened up,” Janet Coleman, author of “The Compass” (1990), a history of the group, said in a telephone interview.

Shepherd — tall, charming and serious — served Compass as producer, actor and occasional director. 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 May conceived about date rape.

“A lot of improvisation seems to have to do with types — the hippie or the businessman,” Shepherd said in an interview for the documentary “David Shepherd: A Lifetime of Improvisational Theater” (2010). But when the performers gave the one- or two-page scenarios life, he added, “You get a sense of crawling through the culture and you see how families and businesses are composed.”

Even as Compass became popular, though, Shepherd’s vision for it as a consciousness-raising experience receded. The shows became more focused on parodies and satires that riffed on television programs and middlebrow culture — and nurtured the sophisticated Nichols-May collaboration and Berman’s stand-up routines.

“He’d created something that had succeeded, but it contradicted his values,” Jeffrey Sweet, author of “Something Wonderful Right Away: An Oral History of the Second City and the Compass Players” (1978), said in a telephone interview.

Compass was not a financial smash. It moved to two other locations in Chicago before it closed in early 1957. Shepherd revived it for a while later that year in St. Louis and again in 1959 (with a cast that included Alan Arkin, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara); it also popped up in a few other cities in the 1960s. In Hyannis, Massachusetts, Alan Alda and Diana Sands were among the performers.

Shepherd did not join the Second City when its founders, including Sills, approached him in 1959. 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). 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.

Not joining the Second City “was a big mistake,” Shepherd said in the documentary. “It would have assured me of an income.”

But his influence there was significant.

“Simply put,” the Second City said on its website after his death, “there would be no Second City without David Shepherd.”

David Gwynne Shepherd was born in Manhattan on Oct. 10, 1924. 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. David was raised by his father after his mother, Louise (Butler) Shepherd, was hospitalized with schizophrenia when he was an infant.

After attending Phillips Exeter Academy, he studied English at Harvard. His studies were interrupted for nearly three years when he served in the field artillery with the Army during World War II. After graduating from Harvard, he earned a master’s in the history of theater at Columbia University.

By the time he arrived in Chicago in 1952, he had become entranced by the work of Bertolt Brecht, studied at the Sorbonne, taught English at the University of Bombay and produced a play by Molière that toured the Catskills.

Shepherd, Sills — already a successful director in Chicago — and actor Eugene Troobnick started the Playwrights Theater Club, which staged classical and avant-garde plays and brought them acclaim for its innovation. But Shepherd was not happy.

“He was dogged in his devotion to his social and political principles,” Ed Asner, a member of the Playwrights cast, said by telephone. “But Playwrights did not satisfy his desire for a theater of the people. He needed more, so he and Paul created Compass.”

Ultimately, Compass fell short of Shepherd’s utopian social expectations.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Kate Shepherd, and two grandchildren. His son, Evan, died in 2011. His marriages to Suzanne Stern, an actress who appeared with the Compass Players, and Constance Carr, ended in divorce.

For the last half-century, Shepherd returned regularly to improvisation as a form of entertainment and a tool for social good.

He solicited listeners to send in ideas to the New York FM radio station WRVR, where actors in the studio would act them out. He used it in a drug therapy program to help at-risk youths. With Howard Gomberg, a longtime collaborator, he turned improvisation into a competitive team sport — the Improv Olympics, later the Improv Games — that have been staged in various cities since the 1970s.

More recently, he helped his wife, Fletcher, in a nonprofit program in western Massachusetts that builds the self-esteem of adolescents through improvisational moviemaking.

“We were improvising until two days ago,” Fletcher said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “I would walk into rehab and say to him, ‘You come here often?’ and we’d banter back and forth. We did it all the time.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.