Letters from Alvina Krause: Spring 1976

Context
I spent the summer of 1976 in Bloomsburg with mostly Northwestern graduates mostly from the first class I had taught the full three-year acting course. This is a letter I got in the spring anticipating their arrival.

Letter
David, could you have copies made of the enclosed material and distribute copies to people who are coming. I feared if I sent it to some member of the group it might seem preferential treatment. I don't want to waste any time getting started. No one tells me the date when they will all assemble here. Can you initiate a response? These are people who are coming:
[A list of seven people -- DD]
I know you are busy, I hate to trouble you, but ----

Lucy insisted I go to NY for one day with a friend who was driving up -- I went, saw two of the Norman Conquests plays [by Alan Ayckborn -- DD] and had dinner with Paula and Dick [Prentiss and Benjamin -- DD] and their wonderful two year old son -- Fabulous!
I find myself in a panic about the summer. On the one hand I welcome the opportunity to work but seven new people and only eight weeks, sixteen sessions, thirty two hours ----- madness! What can be achieved? In the middle of the night a stern voice says "Cancel it! There's still time!"
I wonder about your work, but think of no suggestions. Do teach with joy!
A.K.

****

Enclosed Material
In order to lose no time of our brief summer session come prepared to start work on the first day of our meeting on "Cherry Orchard". Prepare one of the following passages from the play. Avoid making it a finished production; keep it in the work-rehearsal stage. Work alone, or with others.
Trofimov-Anya: end of Act II
Anya-Varya: Act I dialogue
Trofimov-Lopahin: Act IV
Lopahin -- Opening of Act I
Lubov -- Act II "Oh my sins! I have thrown away money -----
Gaev -- Act I, the bookcase
The key to Chekhov is the essential of all true acting: truthfulness of response, of total response (Words spoken are only the vocalized part of the response). To arrive at these responses create the world of the drama, respond to the people of that world, respond to the significant elements of the environment. Bring to the moment the essential associations which are heightened, intensified by the moment of the drama (homecoming, departure, imminence of change).
Through responses to environment, to people, motivate the thought behind lines, overflowing lines, never spoken, more important than the vocalized thought. This unspoken thought, response, carries the drama to its final moment: the sound of the ax.
Every moment must reveal the inner action of the Chekhov drama: a great orchard has become unproductive; the owners of the Cherry Orchard have become unproductive. What happens to their world? To Russia? What similarity do you find in your world (school, theatre). Find life studies from, in, your world (Bring to all drama a concern -- the concern that motivates Chekov.)
The play is a comedy. The dramatist views his world, his people, his Russia from a distance. He loves his people, his country; but from a distance he sees incongruities which are comic. Not farce comedy, not belly-laugh comedy but thoughtful comedy based on love and understanding and concern for the world in which we live. You love your mother but she can't balance a check book; your father is a great guy but putting up storm windows he falls off the ladder, or breaks the glass. Lopahin is a fine man, a highly competent merchant but he can't say "Varya, marry me". Lubov is a lovely person, everyone loves her, but money slips through her fingers, as does life, love, happiness.
These are comments to start your creative minds going in the right direction. Focus on truth. Chekhov drama is realism, but in its high selectivity it becomes poetic realism. Think about it, read about it.

****

Postscript
In this group were the first of those who, two years later, created The Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble which continues successfully today. The BTE is preparing to celebrate its Thirty-Fifth Anniversary.

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.

Anton Chekhov: The Cherry Orchard

Question:

I am writing to see if you have anything on your blog about "The Cherry Orchard?" I have a directing proposal coming up on that play and since you are and always will be the Chekhov expert, I thought I'd go right to the source to brush up a little.

The area that springs to mind is remembering that this play is a comedy and treating it as such - without diminishing what is a tragedy (or at least a melodrama) for those who are loosing their way of life. The moments when things break. When the characters are facing true crises - how to balance that with the comedy (and hopefully creating truly revelatory moments; good god I sound like a director).

I remember you saying in acting class that we didn't know how lucky we were to having the time to work on plays as we did - so I tried to take it all the more seriously. Then I got out of college and found out how true it was... then I got over it but not I'm starting to slip back into a yearning for more time to deeply delve into all these great stories.

I'm grateful for the chance to spend with this script again.

Response:

When I was directing Three Sisters at NU, a visiting scholar watched a rehearsal and afterwards said to me, "Oh, you're going for melodrama. May I suggest comedy? For example, Vershinin could have oversized epaulets and big shiny medals--so we'd know he’s a fool. Go for the farce. Chekhov would love it."

I was pretty sure that Chekhov wouldn't love it. (Though I'm pretty sure he would have loved the character of the visiting scholar.)

Chekhov's comedy comes from a juxtaposition of what characters are capable of--or at least passionate about--and something opposite in their makeup: Commanding the classroom or the theatre, Alvina Krause was Yoda and Gandalf and Mad Madam Mim; standing in front of the salad bar at a local restaurant, empty plate in hand, she was a perplexed and overwhelmed child.

Lopakhin the peasant who has become a wealthy businessman buys a new suit to wear for Lubov's return—How does it fit? What color is it? What's the comedy?

Gaev makes an impassioned speech to the bookcase and then, blushing, pops a piece of hardtack into his mouth--or mimes a really great billiards shot. (When my father found himself in such a moment of public embarrassment, he would mime a putt with his imaginary golf club and then walk out of the room.)

Fiers is so old he can barely stand upright, but he's going to walk all the way out to the Act II spot just to make sure that Gaev is wearing his coat and scarf.
And how old is Gaev? As Fiers makes him put on his overcoat, what does Gaev do that says "child"? What's the comedy?

Gaev and Lubov escape into their childhood—but productions that put huge lollipops in their hands miss the comic point, and the source of the comedy. Not to mention the drama.

Yes, there are farcical moments. Dunyasha mimics a young lady's (Anya's?) mannerisms—but when Yasha kisses her earlobe, she shrieks and drops a coffee cup.

And poor Epihodoff--no matter what he does, it leads to disaster. (He sits down. An arrest as he realizes there was a puddle of spilled coffee on the chair. Beat. Slow turn of the head right to his audience. A look that says 'Awful things always happen to me'.)  And in preparation for the moment when he can no longer face life, he carries a revolver.

Always ask: What is the source of the comedy? What is the human behavior source of the comedy?

What’s the source of the comedy in the scene with Trofimov and Anya that ends Act II? It’s a moonlight night. The two young people are left alone on the stage. What would happen in any other play?

Why is it funny that Gaev says he might get a job in a bank? What does he do as he says this that shows the incongruity and points up the comedy?

What's the comedy of the dance party atmosphere of Act III? Be specific.

Behind it all is an entire class of people who have squandered family wealth their generation didn't earn; who are heading for the cliff and who are unwilling and perhaps unable to take any practical action to prevent themselves from going over.

It's funny and heartbreaking at the same time.