She is considered an important innovator in 20th century American theater for creating directorial techniques to help actors to be focused in the present moment and to find choices improvisationally, as if in real life.
Spolin influenced the first generation of improvisational actors at the Second City in Chicago in the mid- to late 1950s, through her son, Paul Sills.
He used her techniques in the training and direction of the company, which enabled them to create satirical improvisational theater about current social & political issues.
Paul Sills and the success of the Second City were largely responsible for the popularization of improvisational theater, which became best known as a comedy form called "improv."
Viola Spolin's use of recreational games in theater came from her background with the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression where she studied with Neva Boyd starting in 1924.
[4] Viola Spolin initially trained to be a settlement worker (from 1924 to 1927), studying at Neva Boyd's Group Work School in Chicago.
According to Spolin, Boyd's teachings provided "an extraordinary training in the use of games, story-telling, folk dance and dramatics as tools for stimulating creative expression in both children and adults, through self discovery and personal experiencing.
She drew on Moreno's idea of using audience suggestions as the base of an improvisation, which became a hallmark of the Second City's brand of improv and is now universally employed in workshop and performance.
[8] She strongly emphasized the need for the individual to overcome what she called "The Approval/Disapproval Syndrome," which she described as the performer blocking their own natural creativity in an effort to please the audience, director, teacher, peers or anyone else.
Children six years of age and older were trained, through the medium of the still developing Theater Games system, to perform in productions.
Spolin returned to Chicago in 1955 to direct for the Playwright's Theater Club and, subsequently, to conduct games workshops with the Compass Players, the country's first professional improvisational acting company.
"[11] From 1960 to 1965, still in Chicago, she worked with her son Paul Sills as workshop director for the Second City Company and continued to teach and develop Theater Games theory and practice.
In the early-1960s Viola Spolin took on an assistant and protégé, Josephine Forsberg,[12][13] to help with her workshops at the Second City, as well as with her children's theatre that performed there on weekends.
The theater experiment achieved limited success, and it closed after only a few months, but the school continued to use the techniques, alongside a regular elementary curriculum, well into the 1970s.
In 1970 and 1971 Spolin served as special consultant for productions of Sills' Story Theater in Los Angeles, New York City and on television.
[20] Spolin was associated for many years with Jane Addams Hull House as well as other locations where she and her assistant teachers taught improv workshops to children.