Letters from Alvina Krause: Summer 76 journal

Context
One of the students who went to Bloomsburg in the summer of 1976 shared the page of comments Krause wrote in his journal.

Student Journal
What does Gaev do when he says "He smells of the henhouse"? What is his olfactory sense like? What did he buy after the sale of the cherry orchard --
Do you hear his voice?

Whenever you make a discovery about a character, immediately ask: How is this expressed by eyes? Spine? Voice? What is Gaev's basic rhythm?

Yasha -- Draw a picture of him. How does he wear his hair? What is his vocal tune? Do you see his smile? Describe his eyes.

Every time you make a discovery, tell how it determines character -- For instance, look about at people today -- How do we express our age, our Watergate era?
What has happened to our spines? Why is the American voice what it is? Have you looked into people's eyes lately? What do you see? What is our rhythm of speed? of movement? Why?

Get into development of character and its physical expression. Can you hear Gaev's voice, its quality, its pace, its rhythm, its diction? How does Yasha's differ?
Sit in a library for 8 hours reading bad print, taking notes -- What happens to your spine? And you have forgotten to eat since yesterday -- Now what are your eyes like? What do they see? -- but you have an idea you must get on paper -- Now describe this Trofimov.

****

Context
I kept detailed notes of each class session with Krause that summer. Her comments clarified or expanded on my notes. This is what she wrote at the end.

Journal Note
Tell me how you will make all this information yours --
How will you go about getting total response --
Know what you are after and Never be Afraid.

Letters from Alvina Krause: Spring 1976

Context
Winter quarter 1975 I directed Winnebago, a one-act play by Frank Galati. It played in the Benson Street Lab. In the lab winter quarter 1976 I directed Entertaining Mr. Sloane by Joe Orton about which Frank Galati said that he had missed the sex and the violence.
It was not unnoticed by me that sex and violence are central to Entertaining Mr. Sloane.

Letter
Dear David,
When a production closes never, never dwell on what was wrong. The result of such contemplation is despair. Always 1) recognize the wrong 2. immediately seek the why 3. Plan the approach to the next production. Always go on. Never dwell in the past. What must you do now? Where is the gap in your work? Why? It seems to me -- and from this angle I could be wrong -- your weakness is in character motivation. If your people had been truly motivated they would have responded to each other and to their world in such a way that Frank would have got from your production -- inevitably the sex brutality which he felt was lacking.
This aspect is latent in the first meeting with the cast. 1) Create the world in which these people live. Don't think because the drama is modern you will not have to focus on the elements which make this modern world. In a sense for this reason, a modern drama is more difficult than a classic: your people think they know their world. They don't. Bring newspaper stories to their attention -- stories in which your drama may be rooted. Get them out of the college classroom into the world of Mr. Sloane. 2. Establish the dramatist viewpoint on this world. Does he see it from the comic, objective viewpoint? from the tragic? The realistic: comic and tragedy? 3. Improvise your characters in this world until their character spines develop, until their responses are clear and habitual. Lead your characters into the playwright's viewpoint: in this moment of dramatization, what did the playwright, through character, say about his world and sex?
In fact, what I have written should be the subject of the last quarter of B43. [The three-quarter beginning acting class -- DD] If you no longer use the novelist to create character, you, yourself, will need to take on the attributes of the novelist. What is the world that created the people in Virginia Woolf? Maybe that's a good beginning -- Bring in a character study of a professor -- in a classroom -- after a movie, in a bar, in a faculty meeting, alone with TV, reading the morning paper, at commencement, etc -- etc -- His wife, ditto. Don't use one word from the play until the contemporary academic world is set up: money, promotion, honesty, success, failure, sex freedom, sex restriction, intellectual integrity vs. academic promotion, need to create an imaginary world, natural instincts vs abortion. Abortion of ideas, of ideals, etc ad infinitum. Maybe "Virginia" would be good background for your last quarter, But do not let them use one word from the play until near the end of the course. What becomes important to each person? What motivates him? What price education? What is a "character"?
You have much to learn -- that is wonderful -- you must grow and grow and grow. There is no end to growth in theatre. That's the wonder of it, the frustration of it, the amazement of it: you take a giant step and you're at the foot of a mountain. Even if you get to the top of it, there will be a whole range to explore. Climb on!
I have received no letter from [She names a student who wanted to move to Bloomsburg to study with her -- DD]. Let him write again but actually six students is quite enough. Tell everyone the class is complete unless someone has to drop out -- no more.
Muriel Bach [former student who regularly performed one-person shows -- DD] comes here this week with her new program for AAUW. I won't know how we are going to get Lucy to the auditorium, but somehow it must be done. She has not yet been able to get into a car. We have used the ambulance or the van for the aged. Neither are available for entertainment pursuits. No one realizes that Muriel's program is therapy.
Chin up, spine erect, eyes bright, stride into the future like Renaissance Man!
A.K.

Mrs. Winemiller and Her Last Close-Up

Context

This is a minimally edited version of a comment posted by a reader (a former student) to my last posting “Prop Actor” July 22.

Question

I am working on Mrs. Winemiller from "Summer and Smoke". In the most literal sense, many scenes in the play involve props that evoke something much more than their most basic taste, smell, sight, sound - an ice cream, a beautiful hat. Her youth was made up of soft, draping fabrics and ice cream socials, brushed kid gloves and feathered and flowered hats. On some level, attainment of some echo of these things is all she has to look forward to - on another level I see them as symbolic of the small battles she wages every day to maintain a place and maybe control of her family. I am working with material things that made/make me happy - luscious bright scarves, lipstick (no, my lips are not naturally orange), a beautiful hibiscus bloom, etc. And I'm really trying to find the kinesthetic connection to my spine and hers. Because they bring her joy on several levels and take her back to a time in her life that was not bewildering and upsetting and lonely. Getting/winning these things brings back the spine that served her so well in her youth. I am a visual and tactile person. In this case I find it especially helpful, but no matter the case I hope always to be a prop actress too.

Now, I would appreciate your help. I don't see Mrs. Winemiller as "a crazy person". It's too pat for her to be nothing other than a mean old selfish crazy lady. Obviously she is not normal. But she is not "insane" in the stereotypical sense. She is intelligent and selectively lucid when needed. She was a beautiful, young belle once who was loved, pampered and spoiled to the extent that she became a pampered, spoiled adult with no life skills thrust into a life of responsibility. While she retreats into a childish state, it doesn't mean she doesn't love and want to be loved. In my opinion she spends much of the play trying to gain attention/love and to keep her family tied to her. Because what would happen to her if she were left completely alone? So she uses the weapons she has to thwart Alma's struggles to find her own love and demand her husband's attention. I don't believe she understands the real damage she is doing to her daughter. Her mind operates at a smaller level.

I am somewhat stuck on her final scene in the play, Part II, Scene 3. By this point you could say that she has triumphed. Alma's relationship with John Buchanan is not to be and further, Alma no longer occupies Rev. Winemiller's enforced pedestal - the one Mrs. Winemiller used to occupy. She and her father no longer share the "comradeship" they once did. She has re-established/cemented her place in the family circle and drawn that circle tighter around her. As the scene closes, I believe Mrs. Winemiller gets a glimpse of the real depth of her daughter's pain. If there is ever a time that brings back echoes Mrs. Winemiller's life with her beautiful baby girl (and all the sensory images that evokes), this would seem to be it. Those last two lines seem to hold out an opportunity - but I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what the opportunity is. . . I'm exploring several things - but it's not right. What do you think?

Response

Your thinking about Mrs. Winemiller, it seems to me, is clear and sound.

There is a young woman in you who can imaginatively become Mrs. Winemiller.

In your own life, when she/you suffered a devastating experience, she didn’t escape into “a breakdown” as Mrs. Winemiller did. Why? She/you had something Mrs. Winemiller doesn’t have--as you say, “life skills.” 

To create/become Mrs. Winemiller, then, eliminate your own capacity for life skills and animate the young girl in you who could have become a young Mrs. Winemiller.

So, yes, choose some “props” that will help bring back to life that happy, carefree, even pampered, young girl: Select a bright scarf to lift up the spine and let it soar a little and to free the hands and fingertips from practical concerns. Apply the perfect lipstick to put the finishing touch on a young girl who might then just do a 360 degree spin in front of the mirror. Or if that’s getting a little too grown-up, maybe look in the mirror and open your bright eyes very wide and give a great big lip-sticked smile.

Then simply apply these responses to the significant stimuli in Mrs. Winemiller’s life: Choose a chocolate/strawberry ice cream at an ice cream social where you are the featured attraction. Put on a plumed hat that allows you to release and display feminine energies in bouncing, airy plumes.

No need, I think, to get post-adolescent; rather, early energetic pubescent (“Alma’s got a boyfriend! Alma’s got a boyfriend!”)

As you say, she wants love and attention. (Alma comes into the room and Mr. Winemiller immediately turns to her. No matter that it may be to scold her. Do something to get him to turn back to you. "I want ice cream!") She wants to keep her family tied to her. (Do something that will make them keep you close: Take that hat when no one’s looking.)

As Williams suggests, she evaded the responsibilities of later life by slipping into a state of perverse childishness.

As you say, she is not insane, not just a mean old selfish crazy lady. Rather, a woman without life skills. If there is malice, it is the malice of the suddenly-neglected child who fights to win back daddy’s attention from the new sibling who has become the center of attention. (“Look at me! Look at me!”)

And all, naturally, in the manner of a girl of a certain social class at a certain cultural time in the South.

As for the last scene in which Mrs. Winemiller appears, you’re right to want to tie up her thread in the story.

I believe you should make “actor choices” based on what the play needs. You test the fitness of those choices against what the play asks of you. And you create only what audience members will be able to add up moment to moment as they experience the production.

These are simple obvious ideas, but I think actors often have a hard time with them because actors have a hard time actually putting the whole play ahead of all the ideas they have about their individual characters. Actors often have a hard time putting their characters in their proper relationship to the needs of the whole play.

Start with the whole play and let it be your guide:

What is Summer and Smoke about? What is its theme? State it in as few words as possible. And as simple and action-oriented as possible.

Then: What does the playwright say about this theme? Make a simple declarative statement in actor’s terms; that is, in terms of action, of things you can do.

Then: It’s a play. It’s drama. That means a world of forces (social, religious, cultural, geographical, etc.) whose conflict dramatizes the theme and the playwright’s idea about the theme. It also means individual human beings, each the manifestation of one of these forces, and all in opposition to one another.

In this play, the two major forces in conflict (what are they specifically?) are manifested/anthropomorphized in Alma and John. They are the characters in the play with the most complex characters. (What does that actually mean in actor’s terms?) And they experience the greatest change from the beginning of the play to the end. (Why?)

Any good work of art accomplishes what it needs to accomplish in the simplest, clearest way possible. For example, a good play has as few characters as possible.

Why didn’t Williams give Alma only a widowed father to live with? Why does the play need Mrs. Winemiller?

Answer this question as directly and as simply as possible—and notice, the answer has the whole play, not Mrs. Winemiller, as its central focus. This answer will help you answer your question about what happens to Mrs. Winemiller during the last scene she’s in.

The director should give Mrs. Winemiller one final moment during which the audience's attention goes fully to her. You get one action, one response, perhaps one realization, to reveal what the Mrs. Winemiller thread has added up to.

Think of it as the stage equivalent of a film close-up where her leitmotif contribution to the major theme is clinched. Her contribution ends with this close-up, though what the whole play has been dramatizing about what it means to be human will need several more scenes to achieve.

So the question isn’t what is happening to Mrs. Winemiller in this last moment so much as it is what has the theme of the play needed Mrs. Winemiller to be and what has that come to in this last moment. What force underpinning the world of the play is Mrs. Winemiller the humanization of and where does it stand in this last scene? Why is it/she no longer needed in the play?

And by the way, given all that: At what precise moment in the scene should the Mrs. Winemiller close-up come? Why must it not be the last moment of the scene?

Do you see what I’m trying to get at?


[Later note: The writer and I share follow-up comments below.]

Prop Actor

Years ago I was cast in a play that required me to chain smoke and to chain tea drink (It was a British play). Early in rehearsal I asked if I could have cigarettes and matches and teacups and spoons and saucers.
            "Oh, that’s right,” the director said to the stage manager, “David’s a prop actor so he’ll need that stuff.”

Since my goal was simply to get that stuff, I chose just then not to discuss the phrase “prop actor”.

But it has stayed with me.

Not only am I a prop actor during the staging of a play and in working out the so-called “business” of blocking, but I am also a prop actor from the very beginning of the actor’s creative process.

And the creative process begins with characterization.

I am not the character, regardless of what anybody says. But the character needs my authentic, responsive lifestuff if he is to live in the created reality of a production. My first concern is: how do I animate the lifestuff part of me that overlaps with the central lifestuff part of the character?

Well, if you’re a prop actor, you do it with a prop.

So: I want to turn myself, as much as I can, into, say, Gaev from The Cherry Orchard. What part of me utterly comprehends and can fully embody an essential part of who Gaev is?

Well, what’s important to Gaev?

He loves the cherry orchard, he loves his sister, he wants life to be the way it was when he was a child and everything was perfect. There’s that telling moment in Act I when he touches the old bookcase and delivers a heartfelt speech to it.

My childhood was anything but idyllic and closer to Lopakhin’s peasant upbringing than Gaev’s childhood with the gentry. And I have never wanted to escape my adult life to go back to the life of my childhood.

But among my things I still have an excelsior-stuffed cloth marionette that my mother made for me when I was six years old and had fallen in love with puppetry. Clarence. And Clarence has come to represent for me whatever was tender and good about my childhood.

To bring David/Gaev to life, I go to the box where Clarence is kept and my fingers open it gently. He is a precious old thing, home made and faded, and I respond to him with a fingertip touch as I lift him out of his box. That touch lightens my arms and lifts my spine. The eyes and smile painted on his cloth face put a sparkle in my eyes and an uncomplicated smile on my lips, both of which Gaev shares.

As I touch Clarence's little blue pin-striped shirt and matching cap, my fingers become uber-responsive and gentle. I remember the apron my mother cut up to make the cloth tabs that connect the segments of his arms and legs. How simple for me to touch his face, to lift his arms, and then to turn and see my sister Jane watching from across the room. She smiles at me. She knows what Clarence means to me. How easily we share an understanding of childhood when we were each other’s best friend. I smile simply, uncomplicatedly at/with her.  And I am impelled to say, in a voice that Clarence colors and softens, “Dear Old Clarence, you have stood by me for nearly sixty years—my friend, my confidant. You have known my innermost secrets, my never-spoken thoughts. I salute you.”

And effortlessly I look at my own bookcase—from Ikea and without character—and let it become finely carved antique rosewood as my fingers--and Gaev's--touch it delicately and I turn to see Lubov smiling at me, sharing with me our childhood, and I proclaim in Gaev's voice, “Dear Bookcase….”

Notice I’m not talking about feelings and emotions. The David Lifestuff that Clarence touches off/animates/activates is more complex than feelings and emotions. If I tried to think about how important Clarence was to me, or if I tried to feel how much I loved Clarence and my sister, what I would likely get is a jumbled mess of generalized emotion and not direct sensory response to the things of my world. Which is what acting is. I am a prop actor and I want my creative human complexity to be animated in the same way that my actual human complexity is: through senses responding to significant stimuli—through "props".

When I actually take Clarence out of his box and put him on a shelf in a room where there are (imagined) family members to whom I can turn as I touch him, my spine changes, my sense of touch heightens, my heart swells and “escape to childhood” activates within me and through me: I turn this part of me into that part of Gaev.

Through the prop that is Clarence.

Another example with another kind of “prop”:

Alvina Krause taught acting for nearly thirty-five years on the stage in Speech 100 of Annie May Swift Hall. I was hired to teach at Northwestern exactly ten years after her retirement.

Soon after being hired, I walked alone into empty Annie May Swift Hall. I went down the center aisle. Slowly. Generations of her students sat invisible and silent in those seats, watching me. I got to the stage and I walked right to the center of the floor. I sensed myself in the presence of the history of that great school. My feet planted solidly on the same old floor where she had spent her life teaching. My spine straightened, my ribcage lifted. I reached out to the dark wooden doors at the back of the room. And I was fired with determination to become the future of acting teaching at Northwestern.

How to activate in me Macbeth’s driving desire to rule Scotland?

Fortunately, I am a prop actor and Annie May Swift is my prop. So I stand again on the stage of Annie May Swift. I see again the faded blue velvet curtains over the windows. I smell the polished wooden door at the back, hear the banging of old radiators and smell their dusty steam in winter time. Annie May Swift is my “prop” and my heart lifts to meet her and my determination to succeed at teaching grows as my spine straightens. Annie May activates the David/Macbeth part of me that wants to rule that place and to propel it into a future as glorious as its past.

If I stand in my little living room in LA trying to feel like what it must feel like to want to rule Scotland, I will fail for I will generate only a mass of emotion. My job is to turn that living room into that great old room at Northwestern and to let that magnificent “prop” activate the David Lifestuff that can become Macbeth. The details that add up to “Annie May Swift” activate responses in my human totality—which, yes, includes feelings and emotions, but which is so much more complex than that—that I transfer to the Scottish turf my feet are walking on, to the hills of Scotland that I see on the horizon, to that little village of cottages near the lake toward which I reach my arms, to the vast blue sky above the land that lifts my spirit. Until I want to rule Scotland and until I'll do anything to get there.

And all in my small LA living room.

And, by the way, how this helps me come to a deep personal comprehension of the tragedy of Macbeth the man!

Note: Responding to Clarence does not turn the whole human being Me into the whole human character Gaev and Annie May Swift does not activate in me all that Macbeth needs me to be. But they begin the process. These “props” bring the human being who I am directly to the human beings who they are; these "props" root the whole human me in the further work of full human characterization of them. 

And that's why I'm glad I'm a prop actor.

John Gabriel Borkman

Context:

Reading reviews of the Abbey Theatre production of John Gabriel Borkman that played recently at BAM sent me as well in search of reviews of other notable productions of past years. I found similarities in critical attitudes toward the play regardless of the production. This post is not a critique of any production, but rather thoughts stimulated by responses to those productions.

Comment:

Ibsen’s first plays were Romantic verse dramas steeped in Norse legend, history, sagas, culminating in the twin peaks of Brand and Peer Gynt. Mid-career, he switched to prose and to a realism alive with the vibrant tug of war between Romanticism, whose poetry extends experience to the far reaches of the imagination, and Naturalism, which confines drama to the world of immediate perception. Ibsen transformed the Naturalistic elements of the well-made play and the drama of ideas into a “poetry of the theatre", as Cocteau called it. He replaced the poetry of language with a poetry of visual imagery: evocative décor, clothing suggestive of character, objects as extensions of character (Hedda is a loaded pistol), lighting illuminating not only a room but the psychology of character and situation, dialogue sounding like ordinary speech yet carrying layers of meaning—to this day still pretty much the model of theatrical and media storytelling.

In his last plays the poetry of imagery, metaphor, and allusion intensifies the relationship between the world of the five senses and the Romantic world of Norse mythology and sagas.

The demons of the unseen world help fuel Hedda’s passion, trapped in its bourgeois parlor:

Hedda: (nervously, pacing the room) Well, it’s—these things come over me, just like that, suddenly. And I can’t hold back. (Throws herself down in the armchair by the stove.) Oh, I don’t know myself how to explain it.

That world hovers just out of sight in Master Builder Solness’s messianic connection to the other realm of servers and helpers; Hilda Wangel arrives almost as a Romantic agent of the troll world.

In John Gabriel Borkman, Romanticism insists, Naturalism pushes back, and Romanticism insists even more forcefully than in the immediately preceding plays, pushing toward symbolism and expressionism. (The three main characters are among ‘the already dead’.) The struggle of the individual to discover and to free a whole self is a fundamental theme in all of Ibsen’s prose plays, but in this play something of his profound belief in the significance of human lives, of Human Life, leads him back to the grand mythic underpinnings of his early verse plays.

A responsive reading of the description at the opening of each act evokes the theatrical poetry of character, place, atmosphere, and spiritual condition. It is a mistake for a reader of this play to breeze through these descriptions. If the reader is an actor, paying attention to these descriptions is essential.

There are those who profess that good acting has no need for “character” or “characterization”; that if an actor is well-cast all he or she need do is respond truthfully to immediate circumstances and the drama will just happen. But in great plays like this, the necessary character of the character is more complex and specific than any one actor can embody just by being truthful and responding to imaginary circumstances. Character must be created. Storytelling style must be created.

In John Gabriel Borkman the details of character as Ibsen describes them are as evocative as the details of the environment of each act. A miner’s son of medium height, strongly and compactly built, distinguished appearance with chisled profile, piercing eyes, curling grayish-white hair and beard. Does this mean tall actors need not apply? No. But they must ask themselves what is it about Borkman that makes Ibsen want him to be of medium height; what is the “meaning” of this? A miner’s son, medium height, strongly and compactly built: Working class origins; feet planted on the ground; a solid spine settled in his hips; not easily shaken or knocked off balance; a physical power, perceptible even under the suit coat and starched shirt of the banker he became.

His wife Gunhild calls him “a sick wolf”. He paces (Ibsen describes him always with his hands behind his back—why?). He growls (Ibsen is pointed in this).

A lone sick wolf pacing and growling is dangerous--and one with nothing to get his hands on is even more so.

The audience must experience the animal danger in the human movements.

Borkman describes himself as  “a wounded eagle”.  And Ibsen gives the wounded eagle piercing eyes. This eagle longs for restoration to former glory and the freedom to soar once again—which for him means doing what? 

How does this express itself in his behavior, his very animating energy?

Cast Alan Rickman in the role and you’ve cast a good actor who can respond truthfully to given circumstances.

But his sick wolf will likely have a lean and hungry, and probably a slightly effete, look.

The need for freedom and power of the Rickman Borkman eagle with piercing eyes will likely be venal, selfish, cold. And inner.

And will you get the son of a miner, of stocky and compact build? Not likely.

This Borkman might do well to absorb something of Liam Neeson. Or Javier Bardem.

He’s an Industrialist-Capitalist, Robber Baron, Financier. There are lots of Nineteenth Century models for this part of his character. He is driven to power, yes, but power to do what? Is it simple greed? Egotistical Ambition?

He is deeply passionate, with a single-minded obsession toward greatness. He has an artist’s drive, a poet’s heart and soul. I think that’s the most important thing about him. It’s his elemental driving force. And it is precisely what the actor can animate in himself to begin his creative work of characterization: the driving need to create, to achieve, to make a mark.

Through all of Act I we hear Borkman pacing up and down the length of the upstairs salon gallery. When we first encounter him in Act II, he is standing by the piano, hands behind his back, listening as Frida Foldal plays the last measure of the Danse Macabre. (In the following, I’ve combined his first several lines, eliminating the questions Frida asks to encourage him to keep talking.)

Can you guess where I first heard such music as this? It was down in the mines. I’m a miner’s son as I guess you know. And my father took me down with him sometimes, into the mines. Down there the metal sings. When the ore is loosened. The hammer blows that loosen it—they’re like the midnight bell that strikes and sets it free. And so the metal sings—for joy—in its way. It wants to come up into daylight and serve mankind.

This prepares for the soaring poetry of the climax of the play when, from deep within his heart, muscular, visceral poetry finally bursts out:

Ella, do you see those mountain ranges there—far off. One after another. They leap skyward. They tower in space. That’s my deep, my endless, inexhaustible kingdom!

Yes, she answers, but the wind blows ice-cold from that kingdom.

That wind works on me like the breath of life. It comes to me like a greeting from captive spirits. I can sense them, the buried millions. I feel the veins of metal, reaching their curving, branching, beckoning arms out to me. I saw them before me like living shadows—the night I stood in the bank vault with a lantern in my hand. You wanted your freedom then—and I tried to set you free. But I lacked the strength for it. Your treasures sank back in the depths. (His hands outstretched) But I’ll whisper to you here in the silence of the night. I love you, lying there unconscious in the depths and the darkness! I love you, you riches straining to be born—with all your shining aura of power and glory! I love you, love you, love you!

Critics regularly call him mad, talk about his ‘lunacy’. But Borkman is mad only if the play he’s in is social realism. Measured by the criteria of ordinary realism, Medea is mad; she’d escape the death penalty by reason of insanity. 

If Borkman is not mad, it’s because the world of his play is not simply realistic—that it reaches as far and as deep as Romantic poetry can take it.        

In his essay The Memory of Heroism, Robert Brustein writes this of the Greek tragic hero: 

Daring to transcend philosophy, daring to outface Necessity, the hero stretches the outer boundaries of his limitations to their uttermost, and, in the consequent rending and tearing, establishes new boundaries towards which men may strive. Greek tragedy, at the same time that it contains some of the most profound wisdom, is the noblest act of resistance in literature. (1960)

Something of this applies to Borkman and though he may fail to scale the tragic heights to Greek stature, he does everything in his late Nineteenth Century power to do so.

And the play reminds me of Michelangelo’s last sculptures, the captives, and their perceivable struggle to free themselves toward tragedy heights, to resist, to push against monumental forces, to reach to the gods. Romanticism struggling with Naturalism to reach for something else.

For Borkman, there are “the spirits of the gold”.

Ibsen insisted that all his characters are passionate and that implies visceral engagement, kinesthetic involvement, muscles, not simply ‘feelings’, which too often result in shrieking voices and tense bodies in untrained actors and in professionals only well-modulated voices and too controlled, too relaxed bodies. 

There is danger in true passion—the possibility of the destructive unexpected not simply the over-heated emotional. Perhaps a bit of the brawling Russell Crowe of Gladiator needs be added to our evolving Rickman Borkman.

The Romantic tragic beings of all three major characters–Borkman, Ella, and Gunhild--are mythic in their passions. They are Titans. And the force of Norwegian-Lutheran-Victorian strictures combined with the restraints of Naturalism work mightily to rein in Romantic passions that have the power of volcanos, of earthquake tremors, of lava leaping into the night air.

In JGB there are two dramas playing out: The surface Naturalistic conflict and the deeper Romantic mythic clash of Titans. Actors must play both simultaneously. Create these powerful oppositions in spine and human will, in muscles and voice—not just with physical twitches and safe, shallow emotional outbursts, even if, as the New Yorker BAM review describes it, “the trio performs with full braying force”.

I’m thinking more Jason and Medea and less George and Martha.

How to achieve the necessary physical, kinesthetic involvement to create the Romantic-Naturalistic Shapeshifters of this play?

Work at it. Go into action:

Embody Viking heroes and Norse gods storming the universe and then immediately morph into bankers shuffling papers and wives crocheting doilies.

Then back again at the clap of the director’s hands.

Try: The superhero Borkman versus The Superhero Ella. Miner’s Son-Sick Wolf-Wounded Eagle versus Towering Radiant Lava Jet Encased in Black Silk Armor.

Then the Gunhild superhero joins them. She may be ice, but deep within burns a blue-white raging fire—is it love or is hate?

Within scenes, switch back and forth from Naturalistic Human Being to Hero of Norse saga, like The Hulk or Transformers do, while continuing to respond truthfully to all stimuli in the situation.

Borkman might be a Titan of the other world. Like Prometheus he is bound to the upstairs gallery. And Gunhild and Ella are goddesses Ice and Fire that plague him.

Apply all this to the quality of Borkman’s pacing. To the Gunhild/Ella faceoff that starts the play.

The anguish of these people goes deeper than we ordinary folk seem capable of. From the moment Ella comes back into their lives, when the forces working on all three finally burst the surface and reveal themselves to the cosmos--from which Ibsen demands attention (I can see him shaking his fist at the heavens demanding that–pace Arthur Miller--attention must be paid!)--they can speak in such extremes because Ibsen believes their situation reaches into the life of myth, springs from primordial roots and extends to the ear of God himself. Giving voice to that which is beyond ordinary language, their speech reaches for the heights of true poetry.

So the voice must be one with the body. Actors must be able to burst into Wagnerian arias and duets or into elemental vocalized Martha Graham dance without so much as a moment needed to prepare.

Perhaps during a scene, shapeshift immediately from Wagnerian magnificence to John Galsworthy class-conscious smallness, maintaining the force of the Wagnerian within the confines of the Galsworthyesque. And back again.

At a clap of the hands.

What’s the suspense when these gods must further suppress their kinesthetic impulses as they deal with mere mortals: with Mrs. Wilton and Foldal and even Erhart the son?

What happens to Erhart in Act III when he must confront this trio of Titans? When he must become Erhart the Superson?

That Act III confrontation of Borkman, Gunhild, Ella as they vie for Erhart’s soul is the point at which critics blame the play for failing, for falling into ludicrous melodrama. But what does the play ask of its actors so that this confrontation becomes the major crisis rather than a major letdown? How must it play so that it prepares for the elevation to poetic tragedy on the hilltop at the climax of the play in the next act? 

Certainly not the affectless underplaying, or its over-wrought emotional counterpart, of contemporary realistic media acting.

Try creating the situation as a cosmic tug of war: Gunhild on one planet, Ella on another, Borkman on a third, and Erhart in the center of the solar system resisting as each tries to pull him into her(his) own orbit.

By the way, why does Ibsen give Borkman ‘curly grayish-white hair and beard’?

How this story is told is as important to its meaning as what the story is about.

What price Glory? Power? Achievement?

What does the troll of Single-minded, Driving Passion demand in return for its gift?

What will the gods of All-consuming love, of Obsession, exact from the human being captured by their powers?

What claims do we have on one another? What responsibilities? With what result?

What place Restitution Restoration Redemption?

Some critics of the play suggest that all the drama has happened in the past and in the present all we get is discussion, perhaps revelation. Well, what is the drama of revelation?  What is the suspense of Borkman’s waiting to be restored as a champion to the land of the living? What’s the drama of a Titan in the underworld waiting to be admitted back into the light, to ascend the heights of Olympus once again?

And in moments of revelation come moments of extraordinary realization. What does Ella realize in her upper room encounter with Borkman? What must Borkman put to words that he has for years not spoken?

And on and on: Where is the drama?

The fundamental challenge for actors and directors of this play, it seems to me, is to create the reality of people with great Romantic tragic souls and spirits bound by the trappings of a materialistic, post-industrial world. We must believe that the man who paces up and down the upstairs gallery is capable of reaching out into the hills beyond his house and with his own hands wresting iron ore from beneath the mountains; that the woman who sits and crochets in the parlor below could hurl a lightning bolt across the galaxy to fry her sister and her husband; that the sister who for years has accepted her lot could engulf them all in the bubbling lava of her rage and/or her love.

Without these powerful realities, the situations will indeed shrink to creaky melodrama, over-blown dialogue, laughable in its excess rather than profound in its tragic poetry; the verbal and emotional bombast of a shallow reality rather than the vocal and visceral manifestation of a deep, even tragic, primordial experience. 

Since I started writing this, I’ve been imagining working on the play this way with Rickman and Fiona Shaw. That’s a rehearsal process I could get into.

Now if only we could get Cherry Jones to join us.

Staying in Character

Question:

The first time I heard a story about an actor staying in character in between takes on a film set, I rolled my eyes. But the first time I performed in a short film, I suddenly saw some sense in the procedure. It was incredibly challenging to summon the intensity to deliver a good take. In theater, you know when you're going to have to act –curtain to curtain – but on a film set, there's no telling when they'll need you in front of the camera.

What do you think about the whole "staying in character at all times" business? Is it overkill? Is it simply necessary for some actors? Is it self-important nonsense? Or is it something else entirely?

Response:

The easy response is that I think for some actors it is overkill; for some it is necessary; for some it’s self-important nonsense; and for others, it is something else entirely.

What many (perhaps most) people really mean by “staying in character”—especially when talking about television and film-- is “maintaining an emotional state”.  And most film and television actors tend to maintain the appropriate emotional state between takes, though at a lower intensity than the scene usually asks for.  Depending on what that state is, then, it might mean staying aloof between takes or it might mean staying in off-camera situations compatible with the emotional situation of the take. Of course, if the actor is simply doing his well-honed shtick, then there is no need to stay in any state, because if he’s alive he’s already in character.

But let’s not go for the easy answer. Let’s look at something more interesting.

If by character you mean habitual kinds of behavior not the actor’s own; if you mean ways of responding to environment and situation different from the actor’s; patterns of human action as expressions of deep driving passions determined by biology and circumstance that are not the actor’s, then you’re in the realm of film actors like Daniel Day-Lewis and Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep.

Daniel Day-Lewis 

Surely does the “staying in character” thing—some say obsessively so.

My Left Foot

He was always in a wheel chair and had the crew feed him. 
This makes sense to me: He wanted some muscles and limbs to stay unresponsive and inactive so that he could be free to respond while in scene without concern about them. 

Character.

In the Name of the Father

He spent three days and nights in a small jail cell without food and water preparing for the interrogation scene. I think I remember reading at the time that he had the director subject him to harsh abusive interrogations as well, but I can’t now find specific references to this. 

Whether or not this seems obsessive or whether the ole tale about Olivier’s response to Dustin Hoffman’s running himself to near exhaustion before filming a scene for Marathon Man is apposite, the character of Gerry Conlin is true and complex and detailed. And the interrogation scene is pretty harrowing.

Helen Mirren

The Queen

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

I know nothing of Mirren’s creative process, but in these two films alone she creates two utterly different characters and with each, you can’t tell where the actor ends and the character begins. You could easily believe she was type cast in both films. 

Great Characterization.

Meryl Streep 

There is no actor working in film today, it seems to me, who has created more characters more definitively than Meryl Streep. 

I'm not going to parse her individual characterizations nor compare their relative successes. When she’s good she’s very good; when she’s not, it shows. But of what artist can that not be said? I admire her courage and her reach. 

 Julie and Julia

Streep is 5’ 6” ish and curvy. We perceive her Julia Child as over 6 feet and angular—it’s a determining part of her character, her way of looking at life, the kinds of decisions she has made, etc., not just the external physical behavioral quirks of a real person.  And it was not accomplished simply with wardrobe or by standing on boxes.

To create Julia, Streep says she also channeled her own mother’s love of life.

This Julia is not just a crafty imitation of a real person; she’s an embodiment that gives perspective and meaning to the character of the real person.

It’s an artistic creation.

The Devil Wears Prada

I’m fascinated by what the screenplay expected and what Streep created. If you listen to the screenplay carefully, you sense that the writer intended Miranda Priestly to be a shrill, shrieking harridan, loud and overbearing. (Is that true to the novella? I don’t know, I haven’t read it. Perhaps someone can clarify.) 

Streep told David Letterman that all the people in power that she knew never raised their voice because they didn’t have to. Then she added: “Of course, they were all men.”

Miranda Priestly is a character for a purpose.

Doubt

Yes, there’s an accent.  But it’s not simply external surface mimicry. It’s the vocal expression of a parochial mind, of a person of limited experience. 

It’s her character.

Creating a Character That You Can Stay In 

Begin with your self. 

First: What’s important to the character?

Then: What stimuli in your own life can activate the “you behavior” that you share with this deepest driving force of the character?

If you’re an actor wanting to animate the Hamlet “you stuff” in you, you may wish to recreate an experience that animates the you that deeply wants life to be good and honorable and rooted in unassailable principles; then smack it right up against the reality that life is a lot dirtier than you hoped, a lot more corrupt than you were led to believe.

Some Americans are having Hamlet moments with the clash between the purity and clarity of the Obama campaign message and his perceived capitulation to the political realities of Washington life. 

If you were dancing and singing in Chicago’s Grant Park on election night 2008 because the Cheney/Bush nightmare was over and you believed “Yes We Can”, recreate that elated you and then confront that you with the recent realities of a favorite political situation. Progressives who saw the public option disappear from the health care bill have experienced Hamlet sucker punches. And there are people having Hamlet smack downs over the handling of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal process.

If you are among those who think the Bush White House was salvation from the years of Clinton corruption, then you can go there to animate your own Hamlet self. 
The world has no shortage of corruption to touch off your "you Hamlet stuff".

The Gulf oil spill practically literalizes the metaphor of pollution corrupting the world regardless of how true and admirable their leader’s passions may be. There’s something rotten at the heart of Western Civilization. Oil. The very thing that runs our civilization is the source of its greatest corruption. Pure classic tragedy.

And it’s global. It’s almost too theatrically perfect that the BP CEO is British. That the rig was built by a Korean company. That it was licensed in some little island in the Pacific because its regulatory measures are so lax. 

It is an unweeded garden. Things rank and gross in nature possess it merely.

If you care about your country, you can find your way to creating a Hamlet through your responses to today’s political world. 

I stress this public aspect of Hamlet because it is routinely short-changed by actors who would rather plunge into Hamlet’s family life (and I suspect their own private emotional pools)—which always threatens to make of him something of a whining adolescent stamping his foot in rage at mom and step-dad (granted, step-dad did kill dad) rather than a young man facing the tragedy of the corruption of culture and society.

Where were we? Oh yes, Begin with Yourself.

Streep and Mirren had to begin with themselves in order to create great characterizations of Julia and Elizabeth. I won’t presume knowledge of their private creative processes, but take a look at Streep’s Emmy acceptance speech for Angels in America and you get a glimpse of the Streep who loves acting that can be turned into the Julia who loves cooking.

Actors who don’t know themselves and who haven’t learned how to bring the self to character don’t know how to let themselves respond simply, directly, truly. So they act qualities, ideas about a human being, etc. They try to create emotional and behavioral effects that they think will represent the truth their intellects grasp in general conceptual terms.

And so their teachers work hard to get them to understand their "selfs" from the point of view of acting; i.e., in terms of actual direct sensory response to specific stimuli. 

All good acting teaching/learning must address this basic concern. At its core, the Meisner repetition exercise aims at getting actors to discover the answer to the question: Who am I in terms of actual behavioral response? Who am I in terms of literal authentic response to what I see/hear/sense directly before me? Who is the essential, fundamental me and what’s it like when I let that me respond freely and honestly?

Most television and film work hardly asks that of actors and rarely ever more than that. Perhaps those actors need never learn more than that, and truth be told that’s a lot to learn. 

Perhaps they need not concern themselves with dramatic  characterization.

Teachers facing actors who work only for effect and who don't respond authentically may go so far as to declare that character doesn’t even exist. That seems extreme to me, but the reality is that film and television mostly expect actors to “bring themselves" to the script. If character is suggested, it is rarely with more than the most generalized traits.

In television, when a show has a long run, writers change the character over time by writing to the individual actors’ personalities and performing strengths. 
What "character"?

But you aren’t Hamlet and neither is any of those Grant Park revelers.  

Streep isn’t Julia or Miranda Priestly. 

Mirren isn’t Queen Elizabeth or Mrs. Stone. 

The “you stuff” you and they activate is the life stuff that still must be worked into becoming the character.
(This might be an opportunity to mention the moment in Hamlet performance history when Daniel Day-Lewis walked off the stage because he became convinced that he was talking with the ghost of his own father, the poet Cecil Day-Lewis.)

Life studies can help.

Where is the Hamlet in President Obama? Take a look at the 2005 convention speech. Look at the bright gleam of possibility in Obama’s eyes. Listen to the forward-looking power of his voice. Now take a look at recent photos. What do the eyes reveal? Listen to the recent press conference about the gulf oil spill. What do you hear in his voice?

He believed Hamlet-like that he could change Washington, bring transparency to politics, create a climate of bipartisanship aimed at improving America—all worthy Hamlet-like goals. 

But there’s something rotten in the District of Columbia. 

An actor with true empathy can absorb Obama behavior and it will deepen his understanding/creation of his own Hamlet.

For Queen Elizabeth and Julia Child, Helen Mirren and Meryl Streep had life studies indeed to help turn their own “life stuff” into Julia and Elizabeth. Their major task as artists in this regard was to select only the most revelatory behavior and to incorporate it into their characterizations. 
When it works, life model behavior becomes absorbed by muscles and senses with true comprehension; when it doesn’t work, it is at best mimicry of external behavior without understanding. 
In the examples of Queen Elizabeth and Julia Child, it works indeed.

And I love that Streep added her mother’s joy in living. And for Miranda Priestly, there were those men in power.

Note: Streep perceived, absorbed, stored up experiential images of her mother and the men in power throughout her life--perhaps largely unconsciously. And then when she needed those stored-up experiences to create with, they were there. 

What does the actor create with?

Imagination:

Metaphor can clarify and help you to create with objectivity.

Hamlet:

Become a young eagle who has learned to use the muscles of his expansive wings to mount into the skies. Spot a rabbit and dive with accuracy; grasp it with sharp strong talons. Soar, ride the wind currents high above your domain. Sense freedom and power in your entire body.

Then: You're caught in a net, you're thrown into a darkened room. Try to walk, to fly. Bump into a wall.  Stumble into--what is that? Try to find a way out. Try to lift your wings. To find the light.
What’s an eaglet to do?

Note: You’re still you. The eagle images help you to become you if you were the young eagle Hamlet caught in a mad maze of traps.

Julia: 

There’s something of a fish out of water about Julia Child in the kitchen. Or a bony walrus standing upright and miraculously doing a graceful ballet with pots and pans and knives and spoons. Bon appetit! Why is it anomalous for Julia Child to triumph in the kitchen? What should a walrus be doing? 

Elizabeth: 

You try this one.

Photos and paintings and novels and biographies:

Hamlet is an Elizabethan Prince. He’s a poet; he's a scholar; a fencer. He wears clothes that create behavior different from what clothes have asked of the Western male body for the past hundred years or so. What does any actor today do to incorporate these elements? Besides avoiding them by playing the play in contemporary clothes.

Julia is a woman who emerged from a certain time and place in America. Give specific examples to illustrate. What would Mirren have to do to be able to create that American woman besides work with a dialect coach?

Elizabeth is contemporary British royalty. What would Streep have to do to be able to embody this with true understanding in her human totality?

It's true that good casting does most of the director’s work. Especially in television and film, cast an actor with the essential qualities needed for the role and much of the actor’s creative work is done.

In his last years, Jimmy Stewart said that his first question to a director who wanted to cast him was Why do you want Jimmy Stewart? Why couldn’t you use any other old actor? What makes this a Jimmy Stewart role?  If the part didn’t need Jimmy Stewart, if the director wanted him only because of his name, then Stewart declined.

Jimmy Stewart wasn’t asked to create a character; he was asked to bring the recognizable Jimmy Stewart brand to the role. (Yes, even for Vertigo.)

Most television and film actors aren’t asked to create characters; they are asked to play their recognizable characterization affect in various situations.

We expect certain things from such actors as, for example, George Clooney or Julia Roberts. Character creation is not one of them. 

Test it: You can interchange characterizations among the films. Clooney in this film for Clooney in that one. Roberts in this one for Roberts in that one. What accounts for any difference in “character“ is a difference in the emotional or attitudinal state of the Clooney and Roberts brand. 

But you can’t imagine Miranda Priestly singing on a Greek island with Pierce Brosnan or Queen Elizabeth undressing in an automobile to have sex with a young gigolo.

All of which is not to judge either kind of actor as more or less valid or worthy. Their work situations are just utterly different with utterly different expectations of what the actor’s role should be.

And it does suggest something about how deceptively simple the phrase “staying in character” actually is.

Post Script:

I wanted to write about this--and perhaps way too loosely--because I’m hoping readers will post comments, anecdotes, side bars, etc. This topic can be expanded and altered in many ways. So how about trying it?