Teaching the ART of Acting

It's 9 a.m., and a select group of acting students is assembled in the basement practice room of the Loeb Drama Center.

"Let's do a few warm-ups first this morning, and then we'll work a little on the resonators," says voice coach and instructor Bonnie Raphael to the students. "Uuuuuuuuuu," they chant in unison as they practice dropping the back of their tongues and using special chest and mouth exercises to project fuller voices.

"I'm adding a little brightness, a little tweet to your woof," she says of the technique she is teaching.

"There's no magic in any exercise," she tells her students. "The magic is in your awareness, so that when you're off during your speech you feel it and can correct it."

Afterwards, Raphael assembles her students in a semicircle and starts to work with each individually. As the others listen, each student practices resonating techniques with abstract sounds or lines from current parts.

Marty Lodge and Dawn Couch recite the lines and practice the form they will use that night as the characters Poot and Brenda in the American Repertory Theatre's (ART) performance of William Hauptman's Gillette.

Other students run through lines from Cabaret Sauvignon, a "presentation of Cabaret selections from the Stone Age to the present," which they will perform later in the week.

The hour goes quickly, and the class comes to an end.

Before this year, a professional dramatics class such as this one had never been held at Harvard University. But this fall the University inaugurated its newest school, a graduate program in the theater arts. Called the American Repertory Theatre Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, the program aims to prepare actors, directors, and theater managers for professional employment.

After conducting a pilot program last year, the Institute received more than 500 student applications for 24 spots, and this year is training 21 actors, two directors, and one dramaturge, or literary manager. Although the school does not offer academic degrees, such as the Master of Fine Arts the Yale School of Drama awards, it does give graduates a certificate and an Equity card which makes them members of the actor's union.

Professor of English Robert Brustein created the Institute after trying unsuccessfully to establish a graduate dramatics program here for the past eight years. Brustein, who is founding director of both the Yale Repertory Theater and the ART, says that in 1979 he proposed "we bring a theater here and a conservatory." He adds, "But President Bok did not want to consider a conservatory because Harvard had no undergraduate courses in theater for credit."

Since then, Harvard has developed an undergraduate drama program, and Brustein says the University became willing to accept the Institute for professional actors.

"A Greenhouse for the Company"

The Institute draws its faculty from the ART, which performs new American plays, neglected works from the past, and classic texts staged unconventionally. Winner of a special 1986 Tony Award for continued excellence in resident theater, the ART is one of the few companies in the country whose actors perform in rotating repertory, meaning they rehearse several different shows at once.

"The acting program at the Institute is taught by actors in the company, directors in the company, and directors who we want to get to know in the company," says Richard Riddell, director of the Institute and associate director of the ART. Riddell says the Institute "not only serves as a training program for students, but it is a lab, a greenhouse for the company, for things to be tried out."

Not only do students study with the theater's actors and specialists, but they also have an opportunity to audition for parts in the ART's productions. Actors like Marty Lodge, who plays a roughnecker working on an oil rig in Gillette, can then practice their lines during class.

"In the show I'm trying to raise the pitch of my voice," Lodge says. "So Bonnie's been trying to help me get rid of my nasality in class. You work on it during the day and you use it at night." And movement coach Annie Loui says, "The students take things they're learning in class and use it in the Cabaret."

Students and faculty at the school say the successful relationship between the Institute and the theater company makes the Institute different from other schools, like the Yale School of Drama, which do not work as closely with professional companies.

"At the Yale School there was a feeling of separation from the Yale Repertory Theater," says Alvin Epstein, a former Associate Director of the Yale theater who currently teaches an acting class on Shakespeare at the Institute. "There was a gap at Yale," Epstein says. "I don't feel that gap here."

Students and faculty also note that while other schools take students right out of college, the Institute requires prior professional experience (the average age of the students is 26).

"We take people who already have experience in the field," says Riddell, who won a Tony Award for outstanding lighting design in the Broadway production of William Hauptman's Big River. "It really is a very selective program, for people who have cut their track in the profession."

Acting student Ed Schloth agrees. "There's a big difference between coming out of college and coming out of the front lines of New York City after working there for five years," he says. And Lodge says the Institute wanted "actors who were professional and not kids who thought they wanted to be actors when they grow up."

Institute faculty and students say the Institute's curriculum is not rigidly structured but constantly adapts to the needs of the company.

"It's an institute as opposed to a school," says Senior Actor Jeremy Geidt, a founding member of both the Yale Repertory Theater and the ART. "The training can change from year to year to accommodate the company."

As acting student John Lathen says, "They put so much in front of us that it is like a theatrical smorgasbord."

Visiting artists at the ART are often incorporated into the Institute's ever-changing curriculum. When Richard Foreman comes to Cambridge this spring to direct The Fall of the House of Usher, a musical by composer Philip Glass which is based on Edgar Allan Poe's classic horror tale, he will also hold an intensive workshop on acting at the Institute, says registrar Barbara Akiba. And European director Andrei Serban has already taught a class on acting using bamboo poles during one visit.

"You get a mixed bag of everything," concurred Stuart Zamsky, also an acting student.

Undergraduates Squeezed Out

But not everyone praises the Institute program. Some students see the unstructured curriculum as a problem. "I don't think the instruction is very good," says one student, who asked not to be identified. And several Harvard undergraduates suggested that the new Institute was merely taking up more space in the Loeb Theatre, denying undergraduate drama rehearsal and production time at the Loeb.

"In fairness, the ART helps students see shows, avant-garde directors, and great actors," says Chad H. Raphael '88, who has performed in both student and ART productions. But "there are far too many people in the Loeb, between the ART, the Institute, and the undergraduates," he adds. "Harvard has to do more building. I think since the ART has gotten here there has been an inevitable squeezing out of students."

Riddell acknowledges that space is a major problem, stating, "We need to address some of the space needs of the Institute."

Still, whether or not undergraduates are satisfied, Institute students are privileged to study with some of the biggest names in the dramatic world. They meet with the ART's voice and movement coaches three times a week, and study for shorter lengths of time with actors from the Company.

This semester Geidt taught a character improvisation class, supplying masks, clothes, wigs, golf clubs, and "lots of just junk" from which students created characters for themselves.

"Characters ranged from club singers to old German frauleins dressed as men to sex maniacs who rumped as much as they could played by men," Zamsky says.

Students wore masks and viewed themselves in mirrors to see how they could develop their character.

"He [Geidt] wanted to show us how the externals of a character feed the internals of a character," says acting student Sheryl Taub, whose character in the class was Mini Affluence, an "obnoxious, gauche casting director."

"You think a mask would constrict, but actually it releases them," Geidt says. "You have to teach the actors to use themselves."

Bamboo Poles and Decapitated Heads

Serban led a six-week workshop in which students worked with six-foot bamboo poles. The poles served as extensions of self, with students learning new ways to move with the poles, as well as ways to switch them with partners. The class was "an exercise in concentration and awareness," according to Lodge. "Serban was trying to get us in touch with our instrument. I really learned a lot about myself in that class," he says.

And Ken Howard led a class in which he instructed his students to present as emotional a monologue as they could find.

"Very often the great roles require great monologues, when you're out there all alone," explains Howard, who has numerous Broadway, film, and television credits including a Tony for his performance in Child's Play. The monologue "is what sets the men from the boys" in acting. he says.

One student in the class played Tom from Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, another portrayed Strinberg's Miss Julie and another played Hickey from Eugene O'Neil's Iceman Cometh. One woman did a piece from a Greek tragedy entirely in Greek and another portrayed "a woman who basically was having sex with a decapitated head."

Once a week the students attend "The Repertory Ideal" with Brustein and Riddell to discuss dramatic issues and meet with guests like director David Mamet. Last week the students had a question and answer session with actress Claire Bloom, who advised them to "keep your eyes open" for opportunity.

Yet classes are only half of the experience. Performances--either at the ART or in student projects at the Institute--make up the other half. Director David Wheeler cast four Institute students in the production of Gillette, which opened last week. Many other students are understudies in the Hauptman study of the good ole' boy. And Cabaret Sauvignon is entirely a student production.

Janitor Genius

Of course, the Institute is not only for actors. David Herskovits and Tina Landau are both studying to be directors, and Mary Coleman is studying dramaturgy, a German tradition of theatrical literary managers which Brustein helped bring to America. Riddell says the Institute also expects to begin a program for designers next year and one for playwrights within two years.

The directing students have no mandatory classes, but are expected to work on ART and Institute productions. Herskovits is the assistant director of Gillette, and Landau is the assistant director of Brustein's production of Luigi Pirandello's Right You Are (If You Think You Are). Landau is also directing the Institute's Cabaret.

Many of the students say that the opportunity to work with world class actors and artists like Brustein, Surban, Geidt, Epstein, Raphael, Loui and the new movement coach Lucinda Childs is the Institute's best aspect.

"Some of the most amazing people I've ever worked with in my life are in this building," Schloth says. "Even the janitors here are the best at what they do."

And after two years, when they are finished here, what do they intend to do? Most say they are not sure, though many would like to join the ART.

"Everyone would like that offer," Zamsky says, "but that is quite a few years down the line for everybody." In the meantime, they argue that the voice lessons, monologues and bamboo stick exercises are worth it.