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Once a quiet teen, St. Viator alum developed a talent for doing improv Eileen O. Daday -- Chicago Daily Herald -- Wednesday, May 10, 2006 The St. Viator High School stage is a long way from “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” but that’s how far Palatine native Brian Stack has come. He returned to his roots this week, along with the cast and crew behind the NBC talk show, as one of its wacky writer/performers. “Late Night” airs at 11:35 p.m. today through Friday, broadcast from the Chicago Theatre. “This has been really fun,” Stack said. “I always feel when I come to Chicago that I’m coming home.” Stack signed on with “Late Night” in 1997, bringing his knack for doing improv, which was honed while a member of Second City’s resident company in Chicago. He now is part of O’Brien’s award-winning core of writers, helping craft comedy bits performed during the show. While three writers work strictly on the monologue, Stack helps create the desk piece, as well as sketch bits done in between guests. Stack himself performs such recurring characters as Frankenstein, Hannigan the Traveling Salesman and a 1930s-type Bing Crosby crooner. “It’s fun, experimental stuff,” Stack said. “We’re free to try different things, and we brainstorm with the entire staff or in small groups.” Admittedly, it’s a far cry from his high school days when he describes himself as quiet and somewhat self-conscious. Stack grew up in Palatine and attended St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights, where he played on the tennis team and strummed rhythm guitar in the jazz band, before graduating in 1982. He did little performing, except when he got talked into going out for the musical his senior year, he said, making a rather inauspicious debut onstage. “It was the ‘Pajama Game,’ and I was one of those guys in the background,” Stack said Tuesday, taking a break during rehearsals. “I was pretty quiet. My friend and I thought we’d do it to meet girls.” Back home in Palatine, he remembers his younger sister appeared in a community project of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” When a cast member failed to show up, he was thrown onstage and given a script to read, to help fill out the production. It was his first taste at improvising, he recalls. Stack received a communications degree from Indiana University in Bloomington, and then pursued a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where he experienced the improv scene in Madison and was hooked. “I took a (teacher’s assistant) job at Madison for all the wrong reasons,” Stack said. “I was getting my master’s degree, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do.” He worked in Chicago first for an advertising agency, before ultimately following his passion for improv. Second City hired Stack in 1992 as part of its touring company, before he earned a spot in the resident company in 1994. His wife, Chicago native Miriam Tolan, was part of the Second City company, and the couple now live in a suburb of New York with their two young daughters. |