When it comes to acting, there's one thing Michael Howard is not, and that's didactic.
"A good deal of what I do is based on the fact that I don't want to have a 'Michael Howard approach' to acting. I have an approach to training, developing, and encouraging actors, but it is not a 'way' to act," Howard says.
Starting in the theatre as an actor and director, Howard, an energetic 82 years old, taught his first acting class 54 years ago at New York's School of Performing Arts, now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. A year or so later, he says, he held his first private class, continuing them even as he also taught and directed at the Juilliard School, the Yale School of Drama, Boston University, and elsewhere around the country. He considered himself actively an actor until well into the 1960s as his private classes grew into the Michael Howard Studios (www.michaelhowardstudios.com), which now boasts a faculty of 29, including guest teachers.
"Obviously, there are some basic things that an actor has to be trained to do…to be present, to live off the other actor, to use her or himself generously," says Howard, who lists among his own mentors and teachers Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg.
One way to understand Howard's approach is to consider his twice-weekly scene study classes. These are for experienced actors who enroll from month to month—he sees a flexible schedule as complementing the exigencies of an actor's life. Howard assumes that students already have some command of the basics, so what he looks to do, he says, is enrich and expand the various tools they may need to develop roles in their own individual way with a craft that mixes their own history, their imagination, and—quite literally—their dreams.
Describing a typical class, Howard notes that he starts with an hour of group exercises. First is 10 minutes of physical stretching, muscular relaxation, and breathing exercises. Various other exercises designed to grow what Howard calls "the actor's vocabulary" follow, such as animal work—taking on the characteristics of an animal—or developing an improvisation in clown demeanor, complete with a red nose.
Sometimes within that hour, he also asks students to recall something vivid from their past, such as "the day they were married or when their first child was born." When he thinks they are "concentrated and aware," he asks them to introduce into this recollection a totally imaginary aspect or some new element, such as a change in the weather, to discover their reaction. In dream exercises, students are asked to remember a dream physically, not emotionally—how they moved, what sounds they made, how they breathed. "It's a way to see whether a dream that has stayed with you can be used in the preparation for a play," Howard says. Dreams are "so rich…such wonderful metaphors."
The exercises, he says, "are all games. They're all things to play. It's actors in a playground, exploring, testing." And Howard's students, past and present, say these "games" have enduring value.
"In film and TV," says Los Angeles–based actor Lucinda Jenney, who began studying with Howard in the early 1980s while working in the New York theatre, "you wait around forever and then you're called before the camera and you have to deliver immediately." Howard's sense-memory training, she said, gave her the ability to get quickly to the place she needed to be for a scene. Jenney has appeared in scores of films, such as S.W.A.T. and Thirteen Days, and this fall flew into New York for a two-part episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
Tricia Paoluccio, who has appeared in the current Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof since it opened in February 2004, has studied with Howard on and off for six years and credits his class exercises with keeping her work fresh. "Whenever I walk on stage I always say to myself, 'I have no idea what's going to happen,' " Paoluccio says. "He has encouraged me to be open enough to be inspired by anything and everything." Relaxation is an important part of that strategy, she adds, citing one of Howard's mantras: "You must do what you do without strain." She says she does relaxation exercises in her dressing room before going on stage.
"When I got the role of Chava," she says, "I told Michael it was just like one of his dream exercises, going from present then to the past in the dream ballet, and then back to the present."
The bulk of Howard's class is devoted to scene work. In each class, there will be up to four scenes, each involving two or three actors. Students initially select their own scenes, but as Howard grows familiar with their work, he will suggest material or playwrights for them. Each scene gets about an hour of time, the actual performance taking about 10 minutes, the rest of the time devoted to comments.
The scenes, Howard stresses, are "exercises" or "rehearsals" aimed at accomplishing a specific goal or task within the scene. That task might be one suggested by Howard or by the actors themselves. The work isn't to be judged as a finished product.
Sometimes scenes will be performed unrehearsed. For Jenney, unrehearsed scene work, with the lines memorized beforehand, has been another great tool. As opposed to the theatre, where actors often learn their lines during rehearsal, working on film and television typically demands that lines be learned in advance. In Howard's class, she says, she became comfortable with this process, enabling her to stay open to whatever may happen before the camera.
"Sometimes in scene work," explains New York–based actor Jack Gilpin, who began studying with Howard some 30 years ago, "Michael would say to the actors, 'This time just make it about you.' " Gilpin says he put this understated piece of advice to use just this fall when he appeared in W. Somerset Maugham's The Breadwinner, a co-production of Off-Broadway's Keen Company and Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass.
Maugham's comedy concerns a man's relationships to his wife and children in 1930s England, Gilpin explains, and "those relationships are different than they are now…. But the assurance I got from Michael Howard's training to bring part of myself to the role—the assurance that I have every right to make the role individual to me—kept it from being a formal, external idea of what the character is about…. Of course, when doing a play, you can't make it all about you, but if there isn't something of yourself in the performance, it isn't worth anything. It's the unique thing an actor can give his audience."
After actors have done a scene, Howard borrows what he says is a "leaf" from Lee Strasberg and has them state what it was they wanted to accomplish. Comments from both Howard and the other students then have to relate to how well the actors achieved their stated goals—or, if the scene has been repeated from an earlier session, how they've addressed the things that Howard or the actors indicated they should work on. Students may repeat scenes two or three times.
"The comments can't be about how the observers feel they would do the scene," Howard says. "I want the observing students not to act as an audience but as colleagues." He notes that his own critiques tend to also function on two levels: referring to the specific scene work and also identifying problems or weaknesses that the actors may have in general.
Paoluccio notes that another important lesson from Howard's class is how to release the "inner demons" of fear and uncertainty that might attack an actor during performance. "Michael taught us to get rid of them with a laugh or a sigh or by catching your breath," she says, "and then to go on with your work, rather than keeping those demons bottled up inside, creating more strain and stress. He's a very practical and inspired teacher."