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Stella Adler once
quoted her father Jacob, patriarch of the Yiddish theatre, on the three
reasons why someone wants to become an actor: “You don't want to get up
early, you don't want to work, and you're afraid to steal.” Joking
aside, Stella characterized the actor as a person for whom “everyday
reality is not enough.” What happens to some people in childhood or high
school is that they get a taste of the stage and it’s as if their blood
has changed. They want to become actors and not much else will do.
My own predilection
for acting erupted in the eight grade when I was cast in the title role
of a play called The Father produced for Girl Scouts. I can’t
recall rehearsals or a director but I do remember the opening night
since my father, seated in the front row, admonished me out loud, “Hey,
get that cigarette out of your mouth,” even though the cigarette wasn’t
lit. My all-girls high school didn’t offer drama classes or
extra-curricular theatre activity, which meant I traveled to Purcell,
the all-boys high school, to join the Queens Men. In an earlier day
Tyrone Powers had graduated from Purcell although his photo had been
removed from the entrance hall when his marriage ended in divorce. The
star of Purcell in my day was not a movie idol but an African American
Catholic priest, Fr. Clarence Joseph Rivers, who directed the Queens Men
in a Shakespeare each fall and a comedy in the spring. So awesome was
Fr. Rivers that I was moved to write a musical revue for my own senior
class of St. Mary’s High, an unprecedented event, in which I also
starred as the Stage Manager/Narrator, a creation likely indebted to
Thornton Wilder.
It wasn’t until
college that I encountered a course in acting, as taught by Professor
Raymond J. Mullins, a graduate of Ohio State theatre studies. Mr.
Mullins’s concept of actor education was scene study, whereby we
students would prepare assigned roles outside of class. I remember
working on the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet with my
boyfriend Bill Watson (who later played the Horseman in Equus on
Broadway under a stage name). We would show our scene to Mr. Mullins in
class, and as soon as a moment of untruth arose, that is, as soon as Mr.
Mullins didn’t believe us, he would jingle a bell. We would stop and try
the moment again, and so on throughout the scene until we could perform
truthfully in the eyes of Mr. Mullins from beginning to end. In my first
year of graduate school at Catholic University I studied acting with
Bill Graham whose method was also scene study, except that the students
would choose the scenes that he would watch, without benefit of a bell,
and would then critique. I remember choosing Brecht’s Jewish Wife
because her monologue seemed enticingly dramatic and sad. Perhaps going
for drama had been a mistake: I recall standing up on a kitchen table as
the Jewish Wife and afterwards sensing that Mr. Graham hadn’t favored my
performance, although his comments were mellow enough; but with Mr.
Graham I always felt I had failed and could never quite figure out why
or wherefore. In the succeeding year at the University of Colorado, I
took a summer course in acting with a man called Edgar who was guest
director at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. He too assigned scenes
with the addition of teaching dramatic scansion.
Throughout my
semesters of college and graduate school the allure of acting was
abetted by experience on stage. I was cast in main stage productions,
playing Daisy in Rhinoceros, Celia in Volpone, Lydia
Languish in The Rivals, and Phaedra in Racine’s Phaedra.
Outside of school, I apprenticed at the Champlain Shakespeare Festival
in Vermont; played a couple of small roles in a revival of The Women
at the Memorial Theatre in downtown Dayton, Ohio, featuring a cast of
glamour girls including Gloria Swanson, Dagmar and Marge Champion; and
was hired to perform the female lead in each of nine shows in ten weeks
of summer stock at the Town Meeting Playhouse in Jeffersonville,
Vermont. But throughout, who could say I ever knew what I was doing? I
had played a ream of parts in class and out of class and I had never
been taught acting.
When I entered the doctoral program in
theatre at the City University of New York Graduate Center, I met in one
of my professors an arbiter of American Theatre, Harold Clurman. I
confided in Harold that I wanted to study acting, that I had never
really learned a technique of acting, and he recommended I take classes
with either Uta Hagen or Stella Adler. Ms. Adler was my choice and for
the first time in seven years of theatre education, I came into the
presence of a bona fide acting teacher. By herself Stella taught two
courses in Acting Technique, two courses in Character and two courses in
Script Analysis. But it was not until the end of their training that
Stella’s students were offered Scene Study, where all the Adler
teachings coalesced and the learning was practiced.
For a few years after Stella’s, I
played roles in New York including Ellie Dunn in Heartbreak House,
the Bride in Blood Wedding, Mrs. X in The Stronger (for
which artist Louise Bourgeoise designed the costumes and publicity
poster) and Princess Huncamunca in Fielding’s Tom Thumb. Then I
went abroad to study Japanese theatre. On returning to the United States
three years later, I took a university position in Philadelphia where I
performed Shen Te/Shui Ta in the Good Woman of Setzuan, Hedda in
Hedda Gabler, and Argia, the prostitute-made-queen in Ugo Betti’s
The Queen and the Rebels, after which I abandoned the stage and
took up directing. That was in the winter of 1990. I have since been
working with actors unremittingly and I have developed an indefatigable
interest in and attention to the elements of acting, but I have not been
acting.
Then in February of this year I played
Catwoman in an equity production of Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats,
directed by Harriet Power, at Villanova University, where the Dublin
playwright is artist-in-residence. Catwoman is a supporting part. She is
blind, a kind of blind seer, maybe a shaman, someone familiar with
herbs, also a bit of a gossip, and loving. She lives with cats, dozens
of them, dresses in a coat of cat fur, drinks from a saucer, eats mice,
and speaks with a Midland brogue. She is of the bog. In preparation, to
build the character inside and out (in respect of my training with
Stella Adler), I watched videos of cats, domestic and wild, and recorded
their sounds. I learned cat voices and movements. I consciously absorbed
cat qualities, as I imagined Catwoman had unconsciously absorbed cat
qualities from living with cats and wearing their skins.
Early on in rehearsal, the efficacy of
my cat endeavors was verified by a visit to the Brooklyn Academy of
Music where I saw Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio in Sam Mendes’
production of Twelfth Night. Mr. Beale revealed himself to be an
actor with the guts, the gifts and the craft to produce mimetic acting:
he is capable of distinguishing the role from himself and delineating
the specifics of the character. He created the psycho/physical nature of
Malvolio by developing a mincing way of walking and a pedantic way of
talking to reflect the superciliousness of the character, and the
boldness of his creation fortified my efforts to establish the
uniqueness of Catwoman. Two weeks into rehearsal I decided not to do the
role with a kind of conventional blindness, that is, wearing dark
glasses or with open eyes dead and staring, but to do the role with eyes
closed, which I did, and it was a revelation.
The only reliable route for connection
with my fellow actors was to listen to them. As if by default, I became
immersed in listening. I also found myself listening to the audience.
There was no danger of having to see the audience -- they surrounded
three sides of a thrust stage -- since my eyes were closed. With my eyes
closed, I was void of self-consciousness. I could hear the audience and
feel them but their invisibility freed me from worrying about them.
Moreover, I could hear and feel them differently each night. I could
almost without thinking include the uniqueness of each night’s audience
in each present moment of Catwoman. One night there was a cougher and I
let Catwoman turn to the cougher and speak in the direction of the
cougher, almost challenging the cougher, and the cougher quieted, and
when I left the stage, I felt the audience lean forward in a kind of
acknowledgement that Catwoman had subdued not so much the cougher as the
cough. I had nothing to fear from the audience. They were not separate
from the performance.
In mainstream modern-day theatre,
especially in America, the audience is considered subordinate to the
performance. The modern actor is encouraged to forget about the
audience, to distance his mind from the audience and become independent
of it. But on the other side of the world in Asian Theatre, in
particular in the Noh theatre of Japan (according to the treatises of
Zeami, master of Noh masters) the actor aspires to “perform in such a
way as to keep always in mind the feelings of the audience.” And why? So
as “to pacify people’s hearts and to move the high and the low alike, to
bring happiness [and] promote long life.” Devoting one’s life to the Noh
style, performing in the Noh theatre year upon year, urges the actor to
“win the love and respect of the audience,” which is surely not the same
as winning celebrity and the lust of the public.
Naturally, only in the theatre, and not
on film or television, can the actor experience and directly affect the
audience. The live audience is what distinguishes theatre acting from
all other. My sojourn as the blind Catwoman revealed a prophetic reason
why someone wants to become an actor, a reason beyond being afraid to
steal or because everyday reality is not enough. A person wants to
become an actor so as to be entirely present, of course to the other
actors, but also to the audience. The actor wants to lose his sense of
self and become fully alive each night. He wants to stop his chattering
mind and become absorbed in the reality that arises then and there on
stage on the spot, embracing the given circumstances of the play and
accepting the now of the evening. The stage and only the stage will let
the actor let the ego go. To enter selfless freedom if only for the
space of a beat and to model this freedom for the benefit of the
audience – that is why someone wants to become an actor. |
