Regional Theater Discussion | WNYC Leonard Lopate Show

November 27, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

Leonard Lopate discussed “regional theater in America today, and its contribution to the development of new American plays and playwrights. Director Bartlett Sher is Artistic Director at the The Intiman Theatre Company in Seattle; Kent Thompson is Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company; and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel is a professor at Yale School of Drama.” Mike Daisey made some good critiques. Mike has more experience and can speak into some details about the information that was given.

While I do agree with Daisey when he states this particular conversation seems like a side note conversation of a much bigger discussion that needs to happen. I am also curious in what the conversation would have been like if they were not interviewing artists/administrators at top theaters. Intiman, DTC and Long Warf are probably more exceptions to the rules than what the norm would be for new works in regional theaters. Daisey states, “DTC does develop a lot of new work, which makes their presence on this show clear, but it does unfortunately make all of American regional theater sound like it does a hell of a lot more new play development than it actually does, because DTC is an outlier, not the rule.” It is also interesting that the discussion of new works is done without input from an emerging playwright.

Vogel mentions that she changed jobs because she was offerred Artistic Associate at Long Warf, while teaching at Yale, and like Lucas at Intiman, it gives a playwright a space to be heard and incentive to write their plays. It is disappointing that the only emerging playwright that is mentioned is Jason Grote, who had his new play produced at DTC, yet as Daisy points out Grote lives in New York. I see this as a crux of the bigger discussion. The more we can establish artists within communities and part of the bigger picture within the theater, the more it is going to benefit both the artist, the community and the theater as a whole.

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Review: Acting Class – Take A Seat by Milton Katselas

November 12, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

“The study of acting is the study of life,” Milton Katselas states in his book, Acting Class: Take a Seat. He expounds on this thought with a quote from Stella Adler: “I’m not teaching acting… I’m teaching actors to be people.”

Previously only available to his students at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, this book presents the knowledge and tools that have impacted actors, including George Clooney, Michelle Pfeiffer, Alec Baldwin, Blythe Danner, and Bette Davis.

He wants actors to be able to do anything that is required and go after the roles that would be the best fit of who they are as actors and people. He understands that type casting happens but you can break out of that if you work hard enough. It all comes down to business.

Actors have to believe in themselves before they can get anywhere. They also have to prepare for any situation and script. There is a time and place for improvisation but not in the preparation of one’s acting career. An actor has to get along with others as well as to cut out the gossip. Readers will feel as if they are sitting in Katselas’ classroom, mainly because much of the book is taken from transcripts of his classes. Broken down into three sections, Acting Class addresses everything an actor needs to perfect his craft.

Section one is on acting and begins with lessons on “The Checklist,” what every actor needs to prepare for a scene, including evaluating the character, specific choices that define a character, and how to make the character believable. This section also includes class exercises in song and dance, improv, monologue, audition, relaxation, and the shoot exercise which allows the actors to feel what it would be like to be part of a film or television scene, with little or no rehearsal.

Section two looks at attitude and what it takes to be an actor who others like to be around and directors will want to work with again. Katselas claims that this not only makes the actor a nicer person, but it also actually increases his or her art, as they are willing to take critique and to grow as a person and an artist.

Section three is on administration, which the author defines as the choices an actor makes regarding his career and life, and determination to follow through on these choices. The choices Katselas speaks about in this section are less artistic and relate more to the business aspect of acting, including: networking, developing relationships with people in the industry, practicing old fashioned courtesy, appearance, promotional tools, and continuing to study.

Acting Class is easy to read, approachable, at times funny, at times earthy, and loaded with practical and helpful ideas. The exercises and tools will help actors at all levels of experience improve their craft.

(This review was originally published on Blogcritics.)

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Abolish Undergraduate Art Majors

November 3, 2008 by Dennis Baker 

Article Review
“A Modest Proposal” by Tony Kushner, American Theatre, January 1998
Keynote address to Association of Theatre of Higher Education Conference

I don’t think you earn your income as an artist to be an artist. But if you are an artist, the artist is what you do, whether or not you’re paid for doing it; it is what you do, not what you are. I regard artist not as a description of temperament but as a category of profession, of vocation. What we call education in the arts is mostly training; it is, in fact vocational training.

This being the year of my ten-year high school reunion I could not help but look back to see what has become of my twenty-eight years of living. While the creation of social media outlets like facebook and myspace allows one to easily connect with people from the past, one’s ideals, hopes and goals of days gone might not so easily within reach.

The summer before my senior year in high school I just had been through a “mountain-top” experience at the two-week seminar for high school juniors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. With all the passion and drive of a hormonal seventeen year old, I was ready to enter my senior year and begin my life devotion to the theater. I quit the basketball team to assistant direct the one play that was produced that year and pursued acting and auditioning outside of school.

That January I read the article “A Modest Proposal” by Tony Kushner published in the American Theatre magazine. I was floored by his premise to abolish all undergraduate art majors. Being from a small town in central California, where the cows at times out numbered the people and my total graduation class was a couple of hundred students, I thought maybe this was crazy east coast, liberal arts ideals rearing its ugly head. As I read the article I grew to appreciate the ideas Kushner proposed, specifically the desire for young artists to receive an education and not merely vocational training. I wished I could say I followed his advice, but I fell into the trap of training. I moved to Los Angeles so I could get an undergraduate degree in communication and theater. Like many students I thought it was the best situation. I was able to get a degree, study theater and pursue acting in Los Angeles. Many good things came from that decision, a beautiful wife, life long friends and studying with some great mentors, but looking back I wonder if I sacrificed formative years of education at the alter of vocational training. As I pursue a graduate degree in theater education I decided to re-read Kushner’s article to see what has changed, if anything. Undergraduate art majors are growing more than ever so what can be taken away from the article now?

Kushner’s proposal is simple: abolish all undergraduate art majors. His thesis is wrapped in the idea that the institutions have exchanged education for vocational training, “since the undergraduate arts majors mill is almost as profitable for cash-strapped institutions of higher learning as pesticide development and biochemical warfare research, certainly considerably more profitable than liberal arts departments”. Colleges and universities main goal is to make money and with so many people wanting to pursue the arts, the schools are going to go where the money is flowing. What college would deny eighteen year old students the “right” to pursue a major in theater, visual arts, writing, filmmaking, photography or musical composition? According to Kusher, schools that elevated education over training. “Education, as opposed to training, I think, addresses not what you do, or will do, or will be able to do in the world. Education addresses who you are, or will be, or will be able to be.”

How is one supposed to study to be an artist? Vocational training in of itself is not bad. The article points out there are many graduate programs, conservatories and private schools in all major cities that will be happy to take your money for exchange in how to make it in the profession. Seventeen through twenty-one year old undergraduate students don’t need vocational arts training, they need an education. “Think of the liberal arts, in other words, as meta-Acting Training for Life.”

Kusher continues, “The vocalization of the liberal arts undergraduate education echoes the loss in the world at large of interest in the grand dialectic of life, in all dialectics, in breadth, in depth, in thinking as a necessary luxury, in the Utopian.” Jill Dolan in her book Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre and in her speech to the Association for Theatre in Higher Education entitled “Unhappy Thespians: A Manifesto on Training Theatre Students” continues where Kushner left off. She is a practioner of the idea that education should be the focus and models this at Princeton University where the school’s motto of arts education seems to echo what Kushner recommends.

Believing that the best training for a career in the theater is a broad-based liberal arts education, Princeton does not have a concentration in Theater. Instead, we offer a certificate in Theater and encourage students, should they have the inclination, to make connections in their artistic work between their fields of concentration and their love of the theater. The program offers the kinds of courses and co-curricular activities that will allow the student, upon graduation, to move into the best graduate conservatories to pursue advanced training in playwriting, acting, directing, design, stage management, and dramaturgy. But most students who take courses in the program do not elect to enter the certificate program; they simply enroll in the courses that interest them. Students with a particular interest in and commitment to the arts, however, may want to obtain the program certificate.

This mindset seems to be echoed in the work of Dr. Scott Walters in the writings of his blog Theatre Ideas and his work at University of North Carolina-Asheville. In a recent post he describes the sympathy for the students in trying to embrace this type of arts education.

And so when they arrive in a class like Dolan’s, or in my own, they revolt against the attempt [from teachers] to encourage them to think, to develop their own ideas, their own beliefs, and develop them as part of a rich conversation that has been ongoing for 2500 years — because they know that it is a lie; that once they leave that particular classroom, they will once again be forced to erase themselves. Why go through the pain of developing as a unique individual when one must rejoin the masses again in order to survive, to be cast? I have sympathy for them, because they have been told that there are no alternatives, and those who have revolted against those limited opportunities by college have self-selected themselves into other departments, other field of endeavor.

In a undergraduate performing arts program the mentality is to shape the curriculum based on the industry. The problem is that colleges and universities are not supposed to be extensions of the entertainment industry, but rather they are to produce what Dolan calls artist-citizen-scholars. Artists that question society and through their art speak for those that do not have a voice. Instead performing art students are trained to accept the fact that they are viewed by all in the industry as an equivalent of a coke can, a product that is to make money for agents, managers, producers, advertising firms and production companies and if they are lucky have some money left over for themselves.

As Kushner pointed out ten years ago, “I can say let’s get rid of it and we don’t have to worry that anything will actually happen.” The same holds true now. As long as it makes money the schools will not get rid of undergraduate art majors or offer sufficent alternatives. As an educator what can I hope for is that there will be more teachers like Dolan and Walters who try to change the system from within. Teachers who show the students an alternative so that one or two might see the current form of arts education as a facade and that an education that can truly benefit an artist is much bigger and broader than what is currently being offered. How is this specifically to be done? Kushner’s suggests, “What I would hope you might consider doing is tricking your undergraduate art major students. Let them think they’ve arrived for a vocational training and then pull a switcheroo. Instead of doing improv rehearsals, make them read The Death of Ivan Illych and find some reason why this was necessary in learning improv.”

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