My teaching philosophy

My philosophy of teaching in one sentence: I would like to teach actors in a way that

gives them the security to no longer need me.

The SMU training from the mid sixties was heavily influenced by Strasberg. I think

we instinctively knew there was something wrong with it, but it was the prevailing

acting philosophy of the day – and it was the basis of much of our work. The fact that

so many of us out of that period ended up with careers was no doubt an accident of

timing. What the department nurtured in all of us was a passion for the work and

for learning. After we were graduated, most of us continued to grab onto mentors

and teachers wherever we could find them.

The most profound and provocative teacher I found was Stella Adler. When I took a

Master Class from her, a six-week session in Los Angeles during the summer of

1976, I was like the newly converted. Here was a philosophy of acting that

demanded of us that we bring ourselves up to the size (the cosmic idea) of the plays,

rather than pulling the plays down to our own lives and experiences – as had been

the thrust in our Strasberg training. I moved to New York immediately and began

my studies with Miss Adler.

Much of my teaching philosophy comes from my years of study with Stella Adler.

Stella had a clear, understandable way to work … using the text as a springboard to

create a character in the world of the play – and at the same time help the actor

access exciting, non-clichéd choices. That and my ever-evolving realizations about

teaching actors from one generation to the next based on the world they live in.

In the sixties it was easier to be an actor. We were passionate and angry. There was

an unpopular war going on and we were marching, Dallas was segregated, and a

President had been assassinated. Today human communication has been reduced to

a few words in a text message and it has plummeted actors to a blandness, both in

choices and understanding. I began to understand over my past thirty years of

teaching, that we are not just teachers, we are educators.

A play is about ideas. The author has something to say. Our job as actors is to

understand what the idea is and to interpret it. But … and this is a big “but” … we

have to understand it in an experiential way, not merely a factual, analytical or

philosophical way. It was a problem I found at Yale in their undergraduate theater

studies program. Students had no problem writing essays about plays and their

ideas, but acting was another world entirely. Getting to the experience of everything

we talk about on stage is the challenge of acting. There is a reason we don’t pass out

the script to the audience, let them read it, and then go home. They come for the

experience of these words. The task it to get to this.

The transition from text analysis to performance, of course, requires a thorough

understanding of technique. Or certainly understanding that there are basics of

technique. In the same way a dancer has to understand first position before dancing

Swan Lake, much of the work with actors revolves around clarifying the craft of

acting in its relationship to the text.

Although it’s impossible, I would love to hold off defining the vocabulary of acting

until the actor understood the concept. In the actor’s rush to shove acting into a fillin-

the-blank methodology, there is a crippling tendency to assign vocabulary to

creative concepts. A couple of weeks ago in my class in Los Angeles, an actor was

working on a Shaw monologue. I stopped him midway through the monologue and

asked, “why are you telling us this? … why do we have to know this?” His response

was, “do you mean what is my scene objective?” The tone of his question was dead.

He was searching for a place to slot in an answer. The terminology was killing his

talent.

A quote from a recent book I’ve been reading makes the point, “Stanislavsky had

never envisioned his System as complete. He suggested no final answers, only

various experiments.” I fear that much of actor teaching these days is seeking to

shove actors into believing that answering the question correctly will give them the

key to acting. I never trust acting teachers who speak definitively about “this is how

you do it.” From Stella I learned a very clear, structured collection of concepts that I

believe allowed me and the students I’ve taught and coached to have a solid footing

from which to fly without a net.

I had a revelatory discovery while teaching in South Korea a couple of years ago. I

mercifully had a translator who was a native English speaker – an Australian actor,

who was working in Seoul at the time. The Korean language does not have as many

words as English does and my translator would periodically turn to me and say,

“they don’t have that word in Korean.” It was brilliant. I found myself having to

explain acting concepts in common everyday language.

Strasberg had a great quote: “The problem for the actor is that he is both the piano

and pianist.” I would add to that the actor is also the conductor and the orchestrator.

The actor must be able to take words on a page and turn them into a symphony