Well,
I can say that I approached the whole Seminar thing with a lot of trepidation!
Through a credit card glitch I lost the space I had reserved two months before and
had to squander the time I had put aside for final preparations on a frantic
search for a new venue – one that would be both affordable and appropriate to my
needs. I was lucky when Shetler Studios came to the rescue with the Bridge Theatre
– my home for classes and productions back in the beginning of the century!
My
biggest worry was how to fit all the work into seven hours. I kept searching
for a format that would integrate both methodologies. I was sure of one thing; starting
the seminar with what I am now calling ‘sensory meditation’ – a phrase coined
by my student, Vince Bandille (he is kindly allowing me to use it). After relaxation and sensory exercises, the
class would be ready for Meisner
improvisations; ones that deal with ‘objectives’ and ‘activities.’ [If you’re
interested in reading some background for this process, take a look at Blog
entries, #11-#13, in which Total Theatre Lab’s Integrated Acting Process is
introduced along with my views on combining Method, Meisner and other basic
acting techniques.] My concern was whether students would be able to absorb such
opposite approaches in so few hours.
For
some time, I had been preparing for the seminar by training two students in using
both techniques to practice scenes; later we started researching monologues –
both drawn from one play - in the same fashion.
They would prepare with knock-at-the-door-exercises followed by their
characters’ monologues. [Blog entries #49-#52 are a step-by-step chronicle of how
we pursued this work.] So I thought I could do something like that in the
Seminar. But how would I be able to pick the right scenes for everyone, when I
had only briefly met – in person or on Skype - with some of the actors who
would be participating? And what if someone cancelled at the last minute – how
would I pair off the remaining partner with another appropriate scene? And then I had a Eureka
moment!
I
suddenly remembered working on the Spoon
River Anthology in Mordecai Lawner’s class. (Morty trained as an actor and
later as a teacher under Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse.) This
collection consists of over two hundred poems, each written from the point of
view of a different person. They all take place in Spoon River, a fictional town
in Illinois still recovering from the Civil War and deal with the social and
political changes of the nineteenth century as it moves into the twentieth. I’d
forgotten exactly which poem Morty had assigned to me, but recalled how
sincerely I’d labored over the adventures of a very discontented woman,
breaking the verses down into actions, figuring out my objective and
desperately trying to tie it into my own life. All the characters in these
poems are deceased; some were miserable when they were alive, while others
wished they’d had an opportunity to further their experience of life.
For
the life of me, I was unable to think of the author’s name! I searched my
bookshelves for the Anthology; finally discovering it under M for Edgar Lee
Masters, I grabbed the grubby paperback, blew off the dust and began feverishly
reading through all the poems. To my
delight, I discovered that I was enthralled by Master’s richly endowed
perceptions of this mid-Western small town. Although it was published around the time of
the First World War, the focus was more on social and political issues related
to the ravages of the Civil War, and the inevitable changes; a primary one
being more freedom for women. And the backlash it produced.
It
occurred to me that I could use these monologues instead of scenes for the
Seminar! Even though they weren’t characters in a single play, they were often
obliquely or directly connected to each other. Masters’ point of view on
relationships was psychologically sophisticated and deeply human. Sarah Brown
speaks to her lover from the grave telling him to go to her husband and explain
that she loved both of them, and that There
is no marriage in heaven, there is only love. The writing is deft in its
depiction of human foibles and the inescapability of suffering. Mrs. Benjamin
Pantier chafes at her husband’s lack of artistic feeling and odious sexual
advances, but in another poem Benjamin is defined by the love he felt for Nig,
his dog, and how his wife’s rejection caused him unbearable grief. There is
humor too, dry as a bone. For example, Lydia Puckett states that her lover
didn’t run off to the War to avoid being arrested for stealing hogs (!) but
rather because he was told of her affair with a married man. Immediately
following is a poem from the hog stealer’s point of view that says nothing
about the Lydia affair, only that he would have preferred being arrested and
going to prison over dying on the battlefield! I stayed up all night for two
nights reading the poems and picking out three possibilities for each student.
When
the actors arrived for the Seminar, I handed each one a packet, which included
a strongly worded suggestion to pick out neither the most difficult nor the
easiest poem, but the one that attracted them the most. Everyone spoke their
poem aloud, followed by a short discussion, after which the class was directed
to ask three questions. What is this poem about for me? What is my objective and, finally, who am I
talking to? I cautioned them not to hurry into any decisions about the
questions, although obviously ideas were beginning to form. Then I guided them
through a physical relaxation and sensory meditation during which their ideas
became more concrete. The final step of the morning session was a second
reading of the poem. It turned out quite as I had imagined from previous experience
of working in this manner; the results were subjective and mostly held inside.
While
everyone was eating lunch, I divided the group into pairs. In the afternoon, we
put the characters ‘into motion’ through improvisations that followed the basic
‘knock-at-the-door’ exercise: one person with an objective while the other concentrated
on an ‘activity. No one in the group was new to acting although they had
varying degrees of experience with different techniques. To my great relief, however,
they all worked well together. The improvisations were lively; I won’t go into
detail at this point, but everyone threw themselves into their work. And when the seminar concluded with everyone
reciting their poems a second time, it was clear that the partner work had
helped them gain more ‘outward’ focus, while retaining their inner intensity. It seemed that the two methods had been
combined successfully into a unified approach.
