For our annual spotlight on acting schools, Back Stage asked a baker's dozen of top thesps to discuss how their training and technique inform their work, helping them as artists to scale exhilarating mountains or ford treacherous waters. What follows is a host of sound and practical advice, hard won on the field of battle, from a group of actors all working at the top their game.
Stephen Lee Anderson—Concentration is Key
Less than an hour before the first preview of Paul Simon's Broadway musical, "The Capeman," a small bomb was dropped on Stephen Lee Anderson. An actor he was understudying had lost his voice. And Anderson, who also was playing the role of Virgil, was being asked to play both roles that night.
It seemed impossible. At one point only a 30-second interval existed to change costumes and shift into the second role. Still, the actor formed a battle plan. He and the crew worked out the details of his quick-change, and also concealed lines of dialogue inside his personal props, such as a newspaper and a Bible.
Anderson pulled it off—and continued to for several nights thereafter. But the fast planning and steel-plated nerves it took didn't come naturally. Concentration has always been a problem for him. Fortunately, while studying at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London many years earlier, Anderson had been helped to find ways to enhance his powers of focus.
"I had a teacher there who said, 'I want you to do more chess, and I want you to read mystery books.... They could see that my energy was so high that I had a hard time settling down and concentrating. Same with my stiffness. I was very stiff, so they took me out of ballet and put me into jazz—more free movement—and into a swimming program."
At the end of his time at Webber Douglas, his vocal instructor, Patsy Rodenburg, told him that he needed to get into a rep company. Anderson eventually joined the Denver Center Theatre Company, and considers that "rep" stint to be his real training. He learned a great deal watching seasoned actors prepare for a role. For instance, he noticed that many of these veterans could easily feed him his own lines whenever he "went up."
"They knew that text—they knew that scene. Not just their own lines, but what was coming at them. That's something, as a young actor, I had to learn."
In addition to his work with classical text analysis and "basic Stanislavski" scene study, Anderson has polished his vocal and movement techniques over the years. He's continued to loosen up physically, too, through yoga and tai chi study. His early training as a singer has also been helpful. And taking on a teaching role for a time at the Denver Conservatory helped him internally reinforce the techniques he was mastering.
Anderson believes he was wise not to rush too soon to Manhattan: "I had worked over a decade or so in the regional theatre before I even got to New York. I think that's the main thing that really helped me."
In New York, he has appeared in straight plays as well as musicals, both on and Off-Broadway, including "The Kentucky Cycle," "Footloose," and, most recently, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer."
But one of the roles he's proudest of was that of the loquacious Inquisitor in Bernard Shaw's "Saint Joan," back in Denver. For that role, he put all the articulation, breathing, and projection exercises he'd worked on to expert use.
"I was very proud that I got through that, 'cause that was a lot of words.... I felt I did the best I could at that given moment."
Still, Anderson would like the chance to repeat this role, say 15 or 20 years from now, when he has fine-tuned his technique even further.
Mark Dundas Wood
Lynn Cohen—Find Your Objective
Veteran actress Lynn Cohen contends that "any good actor worth his salt never stops training"—a credo that she has lived by. Initially, Cohen studied at Northwestern University with the legendary Alvina Krause, a Strasberg-Meisner disciple, who was "strong in technique and Method." Later, she honed her craft further with the New York City-based Michael Howard (who was Actors Studio-trained). More recently, she studied with world-renowned voice teacher Patsy Rodenburg, who has worked with such notables as Judi Dench and Ralph Fiennes.
Cohen maintains that the major virtue of training—and the more eclectic the training the better—is that it gives the actor options. "Training puts you in a position to make stronger choices and feel confident about them. Perhaps, even more important, training allows for freedom and flexibility. And that's very important if you are working with inexperienced actors or a director who is not very good, or even one who is very good, but has a different approach than the one you are used to."
Most of Cohen's training has emphasized the idea that the best way to achieve truth in a scene is for the actor to find his objective—e.g., what do I want from the other character and then how do I go about getting it? And Cohen emphasizes that she will always go back to that approach, especially when in doubt.
Within that framework, however, there are varying schools of thought, Cohen acknowledges. "Some teachers talk about the importance of finding the character's inner life, including what he or she may have had for breakfast. My feeling is, if it helps, use it. The goal is to make the scene work when nothing is working, and that's where training comes in—whether it's knowing how to recall an emotion or determining what the character had for breakfast."
Cohen is perhaps best known for her recurring role as the crazy Ukrainian on the TV show "Sex and the City." Among her voluminous credits are André Gregory's film, "Vanya on 42nd Street"; the world premiere of Arthur Laurents' play, "My Good Name," at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor; and the current workshop of a musical version of the film, "Dirty Dancing."
One of her more successful moments on stage, she recalls, stemmed from an accident that the director liked so much he wanted to see it incorporated into the performance. "I was playing Paulina in 'The Seagull.' In this version, the doctor Paulina is in love with is on a swing. I come charging in towards him and, this particular time, I crashed into the swing. He fell off the swing and toppled on top of me and it worked—and that's what we had to repeat, nightly. It was a physical bit of business, but it had to become organic, and my training helped."
Training also kicks in when the going gets rough and concentration is called for in order to negotiate the unanticipated rugged patches. "I was working on a soap with a particularly cruel director who doesn't like actors," Cohen recalls. "When a young actor asked him a question, he snapped, 'When you are the new kid on the block, you do not ask questions.' The young actor froze and so did the rest of us.
"I decided the only way to get through this was to listen very carefully to the director, find out exactly what he wanted, and then reproduce it without further discussion. Although I still addressed the questions of what do I want in the scene and how do I get it, I was able to focus and reproduce technically—thanks to my training—what the director was looking for."
Simi Horwitz
Kathleen Early—Accepting the Givens
Recently, Kathleen Early wrote a thank-you note to Susan Shaughnessy, one of her professors at the University of Oklahoma. Shaughnessy's course, "Departures from Realism," included text analysis and scene study of playwrights ranging from Brecht to Ionesco. Students learned to look at any play, however abstract or absurd, on its own terms—to accept the givens in any particular dramatic world.
This training turned out to be peculiarly useful for the Texas-born Early, who this season performed the character of Girl in Off-Broadway's "The Play About the Baby" by Edward Albee. Early credits Shaughnessy for helping her become freer to experiment during rehearsals and to opt for unusual, unexpected choices in a scene. She recalls playing Viola Spolin theatre games in this class, and practicing relaxation and focus exercises. Some of the techniques Early picked up then helped her make the transition from the cocoon-ish atmosphere of educational theatre to the workaday world of professional acting:
"In educational theatre, we would always get together as a group before a show, and we'd always warm up together and we'd always make the connection. There was something wonderful about that—that environment. In a professional environment, a lot of people go out and smoke a cigarette for their warm-up.... So you start figuring out what you have to do in order to carry that over. Can I connect with the actors in another way before the show, without having to do an 'exercise'?"
Early apprenticed at Actors Theatre of Louisville, did both regional work around the country and showcases in NYC, and toured for TheatreWorks/USA. But "The Play About the Baby" proved a breakthrough role. The show provided both highs and lows. As the young couple toyed with and psychologically battered by an older man and woman, Early and David Burtka (Boy) were put in an extremely vulnerable position. They were emotionally (and physically) naked during much of the play. But going through the wringer varied from performance to performance.
"There are times when I feel that it's not up to par," Early remarked, shortly before the play closed. "Every once in a while real tears aren't there. You feel the tears—your body feels the tears—but for some reason they don't come out. It's almost enough to make you cry, the fact that they're not there! There was actually a period of time that was really hard. You get frustrated and think, gosh, what if it never happens again. What if I've lost it?"
Practicing some of the listening exercises she's learned helped Early get back in touch with the emotional reality of the moment. But off-the-wall distractions didn't help. One night, at a point in the play when Early was facing full front, an audience member got the notion to wave at her. "There are tears streaming down your face, and there's somebody cocking their head to the side and waving, like, 'Did she see me?' Yes, I see you! That hurts!"
The highs in "The Play About the Baby" outnumbered the lows, however. Working with Brian Murray (Man) and Marian Seldes (Woman) was a joyful experience and helped make Early's own performances soar. Seldes' ability to avoid judging an audience, even one that seemed fidgety or inattentive, especially impressed Early.
"I feel like I've had a class every day for the past nine months," she says.
M. D. W.
Robert H. Fowler—Using Today's Reality
Robert H. Fowler is currently appearing on Broadway in the ensemble of "The Producers," a very demanding show. Those lucky enough to have seen it may remember Fowler as Officer O'Houlihan. If you caught the public television special, "Recording The Producers," you may have seen his turn as an unhappy accountant singing "Old Man River." Like any Broadway musical, "The Producers" has a relentless performance schedule, and requires performers to show up daily in top form and good voice. Technique is essential to surviving the run.
Fowler studies a technique known as "transformation acting" with teacher Sande Shurin. "Her technique allows me to acknowledge everything that's going on, and turn it over to the role. It keeps me present in the scene. It helps me to create the world of the play, but allows for daily differences. It allows me to bring what's going on today into the scene," says Fowler.
How does that work? In practice, it's about accepting today's given reality—the lousy commute, the head cold, the joyful news—and let your character have that kind of day within the given circumstances of the play. Some techniques offer the actor tools to block out or rise above these daily distractions. On the contrary, the transformational acting technique Fowler depends on offers actors a way to fold these daily events and the feelings they produce right into the role. It's an alternative to the more self-contained techniques that aim to eliminate or insulate the actor's feelings from the character's feelings.
Auditioning with this technique has been the acid test. At no other time does an actor more want to be at his cheerful, relaxed best. Life does not always cooperate. "I had an audition for 'Aida,' " says Fowler, "and it had been a very rough day. I got in there to sing, but I'd forgotten the words! Or so I thought. But I knew the song, so I just started, and the words were there. It felt like a conversation, where I didn't know what I was going to say next. Like it was my song, and I was making it up on the spot. When I finished, the person behind the desk told me they'd heard that song five times that day, and that was the first time they 'got it.' It changed the way I audition. Sometimes I try too hard at auditions. This taught me that I can be with whatever is happening."
Fowler also likes the way his technique helps him to interact with his fellow actors, who may or may not be using anything like the transformational acting methods he uses. "I know it gives them something to work with, as well as giving me something to go on. It makes me more present, as we have to connect to continue. Otherwise, we'd be in two different plays. It helps me listen and makes me want to play ball."
That's the best thing any technique can do.
Catherine Castellani
Arthur French—Make Your Own Decisions
A nimble character actor, Arthur French has played in everything from "The River Niger" to works by Wole Soyinka, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), and Charles Fuller to the Working Theater's recent "Free Market" this past June. The winner of a 1997 Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance describes his training as solid, yet flexible enough to always provide a foundation for his characters.
French's training was never burdened by youthful, starry-eyed images of fame, however. In fact, he came to his interest in performing long after entering adulthood. "I worked for the department of social services," he says. "One day, I'm sitting in front of the TV and looking at the people, and I began thinking, 'Well, I can do that.' But it still took a long time before I really committed to it. When I finally left my job [after succeeding Douglas Turner Ward in 'The River Niger' on Broadway], I would have had quite a career ahead of me."
First, French was a moonlight student of Peggy Feury "who was doing what Strasberg was doing—people like Lily Tomlin and Martin Landau studied with her. But the names never meant anything to me; that wasn't what was interesting to me. The biggest advantage I had was that I knew I knew nothing at the time."
Having initially entered the business without ego or expectation, French made himself available for various non-acting jobs, a wise-before-his-years choice that endowed him with even more perspective on his craft. "I did all the stuff people didn't want to do—I would build sets, I would stage manage. This way, I got more a full sense of what [theatre] is all about."
Soon, however, he began working with the American Community Theatre in Harlem "doing plays, and being thrilled when I got my five dollars." From there, he landed a role Off-Broadway in a play called "Raisin' Hell in the Son" at the Provincetown Playhouse and "much to my to shock and surprise, I was now a professional actor [thanks to an Off-Broadway contract]. I mean, I never thought of it!"
That play, like others written and produced during the civil rights movement and upheavals of the '60s and '70s, provided French with another kind of training, he says. As a Negro Ensemble Company actor, for example, French and his colleagues "worked on new plays with new things to say—and you couldn't separate what was happening on stage from what was happening in the country. You learned to communicate ideas."
Over the years, more roles arrived—from "Death of a Salesman" with George C. Scott to Melvin van Peebles' "Ain't Supposed to Die a Natural Death"—and French continued using his Strasberg-heavy training. "You come up with your own 'method' of doing things, whether the situation is something close or something you have to research or something you understand through 'private moments,' " he says. "A role is something to approach internally."
French currently teaches a scene study class at HB Studio, completing, in a sense, the circle of his journey. "I try to get my students to make their own decisions," he says. "I ask them to figure out what do they want, what are you trying to accomplish—to try, more than anything, to let them make their own decisions. They have to think things through." Ever avuncular, when French says that he encourages his students to "be hard on themselves," his tone is constructive, warm, and guiding. "I ask them, 'Why are you making the choice that you're making?' When you say 'I love you,' do you mean 'I hate you,' and when you say 'I hate you,' do you mean 'I love you'?"
Leonard Jacobs
Anita Hollander—Internalizing Discipline
Anita Hollander blends techniques she studied at Carnegie Mellon University, at the London Academy of Musical and Dramatic Arts, and with individual teachers. She finds the physical aspects of performing—the study of movement and development of the body as an instrument, particularly through the Alexander Technique and tai chi—to be as important as working on one's approach to character development.
Hollander says she would feel this way even if she didn't face unusual circumstances. She lost a leg to cancer during her early years of performing. Nevertheless, she has performed—even danced—with and without her artificial leg, in musical productions and straight plays in New York, regionally, and in Europe, and has many broadcasting credits. She has worked with Joanne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Al Carmines, John Rubinstein, Joseph Chaikin, and Ruth Malaczech, among others, and created the title role in the world premiere of "Gretty Good Time" at the Kennedy Center. She also presented her one-woman show, "Still Standing," at the White House and Off-Broadway.
In terms of character development, Hollander notes that the American and British approaches differ. Here, the tendency is to look into the character first. "I create a road map: Who am I? What do I want? What is my obstacle?" In Britain, "The word comes first. The playwright is more honored. You study the script, then find how your character fits into it." She combines both approaches.
The Alexander Technique—which focuses on re-training one's breathing habits—has proven important for Hollander in strengthening vocal production, physical alignment and control, grace, and balance. Tai chi supplements this. Her teachers, Judith Liebowitz, who had polio, and Troop Mathews, who also had one leg, were particularly helpful in pointing out ways the Alexander Technique could prove helpful.
Hollander has also studied the Linklater Technique and Cicely Berry's approach, both of which focus on using the full body in voice production. "It's important for actors to see what works for them and to find the best teachers of those approaches," she says. "Training can prove invaluable.
"You internalize discipline," she says, "That strengthens every performance. There are nights I've given a great performance and others where I haven't, but even on the weaker nights the discipline of hard practice and firm grounding in technique carries you through."
She laughs upon recalling the most extreme example she ever experienced of this phenomenon. "I once fell asleep on stage, during a performance of 'Death and the Maiden' at the Summerfun Theatre in Montclair, N.J. I think my working on technique so hard during rehearsals kept one part of my mind alert to my cue. I snapped awake and carried on."
While this was one of those freak moments that make for good dinner party stories, Hollander feels that more ordinary versions of this sort of thing happen to performers all the time. "If you have worked hard to perfect your craft and every aspect of the character the script, and the show, it will carry you through." Of course, there are many good nights when the hard work involved does far more than "carry you through." "It all pays off the times when it all goes right," she says. "Exploring, staying open to approaches that work for you, and disciplining yourself to develop those will lead you to give performances you'll enjoy and be proud of."
Esther Tolkoff
Kim Hunter—Keep Growing
Long before winning the 1951 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for "A Streetcar Named Desire," legendary actress Kim Hunter was a Florida high school student studying acting in the apartment of Charmine Lantass Camine.
One of the first of the Actors Studio actors, it was here that Hunter acquired the basics of her craft. From Camine, she learned "overall acting technique—voice and body, even fencing—and the point was that one trains every part of one's self to be able to do what one wants with it. All characters are different, and as an actor you're frequently going to be asked to do a lot of things you wouldn't ordinarily be prepared to do. You have to know how to use your interior, with the tools you have available."
Arriving in California, Hunter became affiliated with the Pasadena Playhouse, putting her craft to work in productions of "The Women" and "Arsenic and Old Lace" (the latter with Raymond Burr) and then segueing into films. That change of medium posed some obstacles to Hunter; all that stage training left her unsure how to act in two-dimensions.
"My first film, 'The Seventh Victim,' was the director's first film also—we were both new to what we were doing. It was very odd to adjust to—the silence drove me crazy, plus you don't rehearse. To have absolutely no sound was very weird."
"It then became clear," Hunter says, "that in film you deal with things more realistically. When you're talking to whomever, it's as if you're in the room talking to them, not on stage projecting to the balcony, yet you still have to reach your audience." Learning to adjust her technique to accommodate the peculiarities of film thus comprised a second phase to her training.
Coming to New York, Hunter then gravitated toward the newly founded Actors Studio, where her all of her training ultimately coalesced. "The Actors Studio was formed as a safe place for actors to work, to explore what they do, to fall on your face, to learn, to not be perfect all the time," Hunter says. Also, then as now, the training is rather less pedagogical than personal. "The idea is you find the part, you choose the scene, then you do it. Then you explain your intentions, and the actors watching give their response as to whether they felt you accomplished what you set out to do."
Finally, the focus would shift to the "moderator," who in Hunter's time was typically her favorite director, Elia Kazan. "I found he would get to know you personally as well as he could, and in all sorts of areas," Hunter says. "So whenever he wanted something in particular—emotionally or whatever—he knew what button to push. It was always private—he never did that in front of anybody. His aim—as teacher as well as director—was to fulfill the play."
Her five years spent at the Actors Studio worked for Hunter because "one is constantly trying to grow, so I always took lessons, voice, and went to dance class—to keep my body functioning as well as I could."
Her extensive training had particular application to a production Hunter prefers to keep nameless that she did Off-Broadway at the Theatre de Lys, now the Lucille Lortel. "There were two of us in it, and I had to play the bitch of all time. I found her and I did her, but it wasn't easy. We all have things we hate and don't approve of, and much of the time we don't express this in our lives, so to do it on stage is very exciting—and remember, it's the training that allows you to do it. Always remember that you learn by doing—you should never forget that."
L. J.
Larry Keith—Looking at Life with an Actor's Eye
Veteran stage and film actor Larry Keith recalls when he was a young performer in the '60s, understudying Henry Higgins in Broadway's "My Fair Lady."
"I learned about how you preserve yourself vocally," Keith remembers. "That guy's never offstage. He has seven songs, and he drives with energy. You had to have your voice placed properly so you could survive. And you didn't have a mike."
So what did Keith do?
"What every actor knows how to do," he responds. "You use the facial mask and vocal resonance. You keep out of the throat and off the chords and keep the focus forward…how you get the voice to sound so it will carry."
Keith—who's currently playing on Broadway as Herr Schultz in "Cabaret"—indicated that his experience has proved that it's not so important looking at a high moment or low moment in his acting career. The value rises from understanding how you meet all challenges through philosophy and preparation.
"I haven't had as much formal training as others," he confides. "I went to the American Theatre Wing and studied after I got out of the service: acting, body movement, voice; I started as a singer. So, vocally, I had pretty good command of my instrument as a beginning actor. I took voice lessons, voice production lessons, voice projection lessons. I took a Shakespeare class with Phillip Burton, Richard's adopted father."
He remembers with particular fondness learning from Bobby Lewis of the Group Theatre. "He was a wonderful teacher and a wonderful man."
Still, Keith emphasizes, "Much of what I learned, I learned by doing: what worked and what didn't; how to break down a part. Really basic stuff: asking myself, 'Who am I in this role? What do I want? How will I go about getting it?' All the questions that begin the analysis.
"A lot of characters I respond to intuitively," he continues. "When it works intuitively, you don't need a technique. You need that when things don't work intuitively; when you want things to make sense, and it helps you get organized."
The key, Keith believes, comes from "a place of understanding and truth inside you. To a young actor, the more life experiences you have, the better. The more you know and read, the better."
That means learning about music, art, literature, and studying everything with "an actor's eye."
"Any terrific actor I've ever seen, I've found to be extremely well-educated in more fields than acting," he reports. "That's the life force you use to fill the vessel that's the actor. You've got to look at life with the actor's eye. Sometimes, when having trouble solving a part, you may find it out there: an experience you never expected. Maybe somebody's behavior at a party, and you say, 'Oh, yeah! That's it!' You never know where it's going to come from."
So this veteran actor advises the young performer to meet challenges by remembering the basics: "Keep physically fit," he prompts. "Be prepared; keep your acting skills sharp; and take responsibility."
When on stage, learn how to use and focus your energy "so it's at your command when you need it."
And always remember that on stage you're involved in collaboration: "Listen," he insists. "Be in the moment. Don't go to the next moment until the moment you're in is finished. And don't play the end of the play until you get there."
Roger Armbrust
Michael McElroy—Working from Physicality
Michael McElroy, currently playing the title character in "Blue" Off-Broadway at the Gramercy Theatre, studied at Carnegie Mellon University, where the philosophy was to expose students to a range of techniques—Stanislavski, Meisner, many others—and to encourage drama students to combine the aspects that suited them and then work out one's own approach. "What I find works best for me," he says, "is to go from the outside in, by which I mean working on a character's physicality first. My teacher, Mel Shapiro, was a major influence on me in developing this approach.
McElroy explains, "In portraying Blue, for instance, my character is an African-American singer who came up in the '40s, '50s, and '60s. There was a certain style of movement, a way of moving his hands, of dressing. Once I have the outward movements down, I find that the words just come out of my mouth naturally, the way that character would say them. I feel as if I've become that person.
Many aspects of his character in the musical, "Violet," which he performed at Playwrights Horizons, were based in large part on McElroy. "I know that from playwrights Jeanine Tesori and Brian Crawley. But the character's actual life was very different from mine. He was a serviceman, and he lived in the racist atmosphere of the South in the 1960s, so he was a much more guarded person than I am. I tend to move quickly, doing many things at once, talking rapidly. What I concentrated on most intensely here was moving more slowly—getting up from a chair more slowly, speaking more slowly. This was hard work, but I felt that the more I mastered that aspect of the character, the more I became him. It worked very well."
McElroy, who has also been seen on screen in "Stonewall," on TV in "Spin City" and "All My Children," and in regional theatre in "Angels in America: Parts I & II," is a strong believer in the importance of training, study, and discipline. He feels fortunate to have studied at Shaker Heights High School in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, which focused on the performing arts and gave him a strong sense of the importance of technique even before he got to Carnegie Mellon.
"Every actor has nights when it's technique and training that get you through. You can't just get up there and give a good performance steadily, night after night, week after week. When I was in 'Rent,' we'd do two shows a day, three days in a row, and then two more evenings with two days off. Inevitably, there are times you're feeling ill—I performed when I had respiratory infections—or you're upset about something that happened to you that day. Sometimes you're in a production where you don't get along well with the person you're playing off of. It's strong technique, a thorough preparation of your work on the character and his movements that gets you through it without the audience being aware of any of these things. I would tell any beginning actor not to minimize for a minute the importance of working hard on one's technique and applying it to your work on the character you're portraying. That will carry you through."
E. T.
Crista Moore—Staying in the Moment
For Crista Moore, acting training (whatever the school) is most useful in navigating "those moments when you feel like an alien on stage, especially in a long run where there's the added danger of becoming stale." She makes the observation that these problems can occur even in a role for which you are well suited. She cites her gig as Louise in "Gypsy," opposite Tyne Daly as Mama Rose, as the classic case in point.
"I really did relate to the material, in particular that emotionally heavy dressing room scene, where Louise declares her independence. It's the showdown between Louise and her mother and it's a wrenching encounter. But there were nights when I was exhausted or sick." She pauses. "Generally, after six months in a show, you may have to find something new to fuel the fires. What was working before no longer is.
"Acting training," she continues, "helps you concentrate, relax, not get distracted, and not push. My training, in particular, has helped me be in the moment on stage and listen. For me, that's always been the key."
Moore was twice nominated for a Tony Award for her work in "Gypsy" and "Big," and will soon be seen on screen in Todd Solondz's still-untitled new film. She played the title role in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" at New York City Opera, appeared Off-Broadway in "Birds of Paradise" and "Rags," and regionally at Geva in "My Fair Lady" and Alan Ayckbourn's "House and Garden," at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in "Substance of Fire," and at the Cleveland Play House in Molnar's "The Guardsman." Her primary acting teacher has been Fred Kareman, with whom she has studied for 12 years. "His approach is Meisner-based. He does not emphasize objectives—what do I want in a scene? Instead, he focuses on listening and answering truthfully. Keeping you in the moment.
"But the actor's major goal, from his point of view, is serving the author's intent. Kareman believes the actor uses his imagination to do any part, whether or not he relates to it personally. That's not to say the actor doesn't personalize the role in order to make it truthful. But the actor's truth must relate to the material."
She offers an example. "If the character is devastated because she has lost her boyfriend and the actress can't relate to that experience, but can relate to the anguish accompanying losing a job, she substitutes that experience."
She has also studied acting with Alan Langdon, who taught at Circle in the Square and was a champion of finding objectives in a scene. "Besides understanding what other actors are talking about, learning about 'finding objectives' is useful when I'm working on classics and the material and language may be a little removed."
Nonetheless, Moore stresses, whatever technique or combination of techniques an actor uses, he always puts his own stamp on it in order to make it workable, to make it his own. "Most actors have techniques that are eclectic."
The place where training is most useful, she asserts, is in the face of those characters "you simply don't understand and/or have limited time to figure it all out. When you're working on TV, for example. There are added problems on TV because so much time is spent just sitting around, waiting. It's so exhausting and so easy to forget your lines. That's when acting training really helps you focus."
S. H.
Donna Murphy—Make It Work for You
"I heard of Stella Adler from somebody from my hometown, Topsfield, Mass.," says Donna Murphy, the two-time Tony winner who began singing at a single-digit age and commenced professional training at just 18. All along, she says, "I knew I wanted to pursue a life in theatre—but I also knew I needed training."
In coming to New York to study with Stella Adler, Murphy says that it wasn't just training that she acquired—she faced one of the biggest challenges of her life.
"Studying with Stella was stupendous and life-changing," Murphy says, "because New York is a complicated place to be for an 18-year-old who's star struck and ready to grab any opportunity to be on stage. She was very intimidating, and saw things in a black-and-white way in terms of what was art, what's the responsibility of being an artist. She felt the actor's work is an ongoing re-negotiation with yourself, that every choice is of great importance, that you need to commit and invest in choices. She used to say, 'Your talent is in your choice,' which is true."
So fond and fervent are her recollections of Adler—legendary for reducing her students to tears—that one might assume the star of such musicals as "Passion" and the revival of "The King and I" remains a confirmed Adler acolyte. Yet because singing was clearly as large a part of her life and ambition as dramatic acting, Murphy had to reconcile various approaches to accommodate her goals, a process she often found bedeviling. Between her freshman and sophomore year, she experienced an "epiphany," realizing that while she had "the capacity" to understand Adler's instruction, she "wasn't ready to go there." Learning how to hear her views and make them work for her was among her first and highest hurdles.
"There was a core of Stella's work having to do with teaching you about your own responsibility to become a certain kind of human being—one aware of the size of issues in the world, an artist who becomes a kind of sponge for humanity. Again, that's a lot for an 18-year-old, and I first found myself a bit paralyzed in studying with her. I thought, 'If I can't be great, then I don't want to do it at all'—and that confusion kept me from taking some risks.
"Then I realized I wanted to know how to go beyond what I thought I might know about a scene. It was a wakeup call: learning how to listen, take extensive notes, dare to fail. I learned the importance of being really awake, really being passionate about being interested in what you're doing, and to get past what you think you're supposed to be interested in."
A self-confessed "research queen" who relishes delving into character—a rarity, perhaps, among some musical theatre performers—Murphy doesn't teach, but she does suggest students be patient while training. More important, she says, is to know that "you're in a new environment" and to check the desire "to show what talent you have" with having everything you thought you knew about your talent "questioned and deconstructed."
L. J.
James Murtaugh—Use a Variety of Techniques
After spending the last 35 years working as a union actor with the kind of regular work that many other performers envy, James Murtaugh still relies on the training he got as a college student (and from a variety of acting teachers he has studied with since he left college, including Gene Frankel, George Morrison, Milton Katselas, and Wynn Handman). Perhaps that is why he is a recognizable face to theatregoers, television viewers, and such respected dramatists as Alan Ayckbourn, Richard Nelson, and Brian Friel.
On television, Murtaugh plays recurring roles on both "100 Centre Street" and "Ed," and in the last year has guest starred on "The Sopranos," "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit," and the forthcoming HBO film of "The Laramie Project." On top of that schedule, he also finds time to participate in an average of five staged readings each year with The Actors Company Theatre, maintain his membership in Ensemble Studio Theatre, and serve on the board of the Players Club.
Murtaugh talked about how he continues to use a variety of exercises he has picked up over the years—some of which come in handy before he gets the job, and some after he gets it.
"Before you go into an audition, you definitely need to relax," he says. "There's such pressure during an audition; it can be terrifying and it can immobilize you. You must keep your muscles relaxed or you'll be overwhelmed and won't be able to audition properly. I do Feldenkreuz relaxation exercises for that, which I learned a long time ago."
Then, once he gets cast, Murtaugh says he uses a variety of techniques.
While he was acting in one long-running Off-Broadway hit, he says he found himself relying on his training more than once. "In any long run, there are things that stop working for the actor, motivations that don't work as well as they did," he said. "During the run of 'Other People's Money,' when something started to not work for me, I could rely on my training to help me find new motivations and keep the show fresh."
Other moments that called for solid grounding came less expectedly in the run, and were the sort of thing that can drive an inexperienced actor to distraction.
"There was one performance," he recalls, "when one of the other actors was having stomach problems. Suddenly she just left the stage in the middle of the scene, because she had to. The rest of us couldn't leave or end the scene until she came back, but, fortunately, we were all grounded and had experience doing improv, so we just, well, vamped.
"We talked, and we talked, and she came back, and we finished the scene. I don't think the audience ever knew."
Mike Salinas
Christianne Tisdale—The 10 Distinctions
Christianne Tisdale has performed on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally. She spent four years at Yale as an undergraduate, but only one in the famous Yale graduate acting program before beginning her career. Finding herself launched as a professional was a mixed blessing. "There I was in 'Beauty and the Beast' with no technique. Just me," says Tisdale, who played Belle. Since then, she has built a flexible and enduring foundation beneath "just me" that has served her well.
Tisdale studies with Sande Shurin, using what Tisdale calls the "10 distinctions" as the steel and cement of that foundation. "The 10 are presencing (or what's sometimes called emotional body), situation, livingness, character, psyche, stylistic and cultural truths, interior monologue, turning points and transitions, intention/action, and taking risks," Tisdale says. As a list, it may not convey much, but as a system of acting it has saved Tisdale more than once. "I was a standby in 'Triumph of Love,' and I got thrown on in previews for Susan Egan. She played four different characters and was always on stage. I kept a piece of paper in the quick-change area (I had lots of costume changes), and on it I wrote the situation, the intention, and the livingness for that scene. It worked so well." Her colleagues, Betty Buckley and F. Murray Abraham, gave Tisdale high praise after the performance, happy to be working with a standby they could rely on to perform.
More than just a tool to keep an actor oriented, the "10 distinctions" have rescued Tisdale in building a character. "I did a beautiful musical called 'Fermat's Last Tango,' a part written for me [by composer Joshua Rosenblum and author Joanne Sydney Lessner]. I played two roles: a kinky television news reporter, and Euclid. The father of geometry—that Euclid. I could not get a key into that character. It was two weeks into a four-week rehearsal process, we were opening in New York, and I had nothing. I'm trying, and it's not working, it's not working, it's not working. I went back to the first distinction, 'emotional body,' and I surrendered. I gave up. And then this little obnoxious character comes out and starts making shapes: Look! I'm a triangle! Look! I'm a rhomboid! Which is a tough one, if you've never tried it. And that became my physical body, Euclid's search for the perfect shape. Oddly, I got more TV auditions out of that, doing this huge physical comedy, than I've gotten doing delicate, fine work!"
A far cry from "just me" and yet still very much herself, Tisdale continues to train in the "10 distinctions" technique and to enjoy her time in the studio. She has yet to find a limitation in it. "I've done four new musicals in a row, and it comes in just as handy doing that as it does doing Shakespeare." Every actor wants a toolkit like that.
C. C.