ALVINA KRAUSE REVISITED
by William H. Wegner
William H. Wegner is Associate Professor of Speech Communication and Theatre at Trenton State College. He studied acting with both Alvina Krause and Lee Strasberg. His article “The Creative Circle: Stanislavski and Yoga” appeared in ETJ in March, 1976. This is retyped with his permission.
In a subject as controversial as the teaching of acting, where proliferating theories seem only to compound confusion and convert uncertainty into anxiety, it seems vital to attempt to analyze the art of teachers who have demonstrated the effectiveness of their approaches. Alvina Krause is certainly one of these. At Northwestern University, at the Eagles Mere Playhouse in Pennsylvania, and in private classes she has directly influenced a remarkably number of actors and directors distinguished in the professional and educational theatre.
Yet she has published little. This is largely due to the nature of her teaching which is improvisational and based upon the interaction of teacher and student and does not lend itself to expression in formula or aphorism. Yet, as Burnet Hobgood has observed, “Certainly both teachers [Alvina Krause and Lee Strasberg] do their most brilliant work with the student present before them. But it would be a shame for these great teachers to end their careers without summarizing statements for the rest of us.”
Efforts have been made. A 1972 doctoral dissertation by David Press
provides extensive documentation of her career and teaching strategies, and a series of teaching films made at the University of South Dakota in 1966 preserves much that cannot be captured in print.
In 1975-76, as a former student at Northwestern and Eagles Mere, I visited Krause, “retired” in her home in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, and found her teaching a private class in acting to a group of advanced students. I returned several times to observe the classes and make sound recordings, and I concluded that more could be said.
I understood more clearly that hers was an art and not a system, and that Hobgood was quite right; her best work is done with the student present. David Press elaborates:
The spontaneity added to the excitement of working under Krause. It also helped assure that what was said was relevant to the needs of each particular class or to a particular student. The disadvantage lay in the fact that all but the best students would be hard pressed to restate, at least in an organized fashion, what they had been taught.
What follows is my restatement and summary of some essential features of her teaching. I will begin at the center by reproducing the activities of a class I witnessed, a class which, in my experience, is exemplary. I will then analyze it and give it context by comparison with -- inevitably -- the approaches of Stanislavsky.
The class takes place in the lower level of Krause’s home: a large, comfortable, lived-in room replete with books, antique furniture, assorted desks, chairs, several clocks, a fireplace, French doors opening into a wooded yard -- a perfect setting for Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shaw, intimate, and congenial to improvisation. There is no stage area. The actors work in and out of chairs, sofas, desks, sometimes making entrances and exits from the yard or from the kitchen to the rear. Students can almost always find an object which, with a little imagination, can become a “prop” without the problems of miming imaginary objects.
The play is The Seagull, scenes from which the students have been rehearsing and improvising during the week. Approximate rehearsal costumes are used. The atmosphere is informal but intense. The class begins with vocal exercises; Krause checks for posture, urges an “arching of the tones,” with “crisp consonants,” and, always, “open vowels.”
The scene work begins. Medvedenko and Masha enter. They play the first scene without interruption, pausing at Sorin and Treplev’s entrance. A rather heavy silence follows. Finally, Krause asks, “Where did they take the play?” Another silence. The students are groping: finally one volunteers that the scene seemed heavy and oppressive, and that one would be due for a “long evening” in the theatre. Krause: “Now you’re talking in negatives. What should they do?” More probing, volunteering. Finally Krause asks Medvedenko about his school teacher’s uniform. “How does it make you feel? Stiff, conformist, unbending? He lives by the rules but he is now in love. Go up to Masha and demand a kiss. Do the rules allow it? What would his supervisor say? Now give an arithmetic lesson to Masha: “Class repeat after me, 2 X 2 is 4, 3 X 3 is 6.” [Krause is acting now, by her voice and facial expression.] Now the actor picks up his cue and transposes the arithmetic lesson to Chekhov’s dialogue, keeping the same tone and rhythm. “I get twenty-three rubles a month . . . and out of that the pension fund has to be deducted . . .” Now as the actor returns to the script, while he is speaking, Krause quietly reminds him that Medvedenko is also in love and desperate to gain Masha’s approval. But, still, the methodical manner of the arithmetic lesson, a slight nodding of the head, a very serious expression. Suddenly, laughter, a comic lover -- in the rueful Chekhovian manner.
Treplev and Nina enter, partly improvising, partly employing the dialogue. Krause: “What is it that stops you?” Nina seems uncertain about her objectives in the scene. Krause: “Oh, people, didn’t you once dream of the theatre . . . how you would make people cry, and they would bring you armfuls of roases. And what is she doing now? Not thinking of Treplev’s play but visualizing . . .” [A rhetorical pause; a student finally supplies the answer, “A great love scene.”] And the terrible irony of it is that Treplev is working toward a new form and she’s living back in Arkadina’s world! Now tell me, ‘it’s hard to act in your play’ -- just as you’re thinking right now.” [The student has been lost in a private reverie, but Krause’s comment makes her self-conscious again.] “Oh, why did you change it? Don’t you see, you had it in yourself? Now, think again what you were thinking. Tell me again, ‘it’s hard to act in your play.’” But the student is confused; “I don’t get what I’m supposed to be doing.”
Krause turns to the class. “Her problem is how to get identified completely with the scene. She’s constantly doing what? . . . directing herself in emotional terms. You don’t need to; Chekhov is right here in this room.
Now Pauline and Dorn enter. Pauline’s line is simply, “It’s damp outside and you’re not wearing your galoshes.” Krause stops them immediately. “Now wait a minute; this, too, should be a nice little love scene. She wants what? . . . Give your arm, give me your recognition; something. He smiles and says ‘ye ...es’ . . . We need a sense of hurt. What would Dorn be thinking about?” [Krause begins to act Dorn with her voice.] “He’s had a pleasant dinner. They’ve been listening to music, and now they’re going to listen to Treplev’s play. As a doctor he should be concerned with many things. But he isn’t concerned with anything. Surely you must have had in your short life one grief, unhappy love. Now let’s see how you come in. What she’d hoped for when they left the house was that he’d take her arm and give her a little kiss, but all she says is, ‘It’s damp outside, have you got your galoshes?’ Now, you’ve got to think.”
Pauline and Dorn enter again, but there is still no subtext. Suddenly, Krause steps forward and slaps the student playing Pauline hard on the cheek. Then, with some ferocity . . . “what does it do to you, people; what do you do when the person you love --” The student, having allowed herself a gasp of surprise and with tears welling from the shock of the slap and the real pain, at Krause’s urging begins the scene again, suppressing her tears. “It’s damp outside and you’re not wearing your galoshes.” Suddenly, the sense of hurt and yet, somehow comical. Krause: “Now, we’ve got her, now don’t you fake it! Now what’s the difference between going through this routine and -- don’t try to remember what you did [the external actions]. Don’t try to remember what you did. It has to happen. And Dorn is wondering what on earth she is sniveling about. So what do we have here? A love affair which has ended, and he’s likely to go off on another one, and he will. All right -- come in again now. Why do you make me hurt you?” The students repeat the scene with considerable effectiveness, although Krause must remind Dorn not to “care too much, to listen to Pauline with only half a miind.” And she suggests an activity for him. “Look, there’s a bird, a nighthawk.”
Arkadina enters, with Trigorin and Masha, Sorin and Medvedenko. Krause reminds the student playing Arkadina that she must interrupt Treplev’s play and “steal the scene” deliberately yet subtly, so as to gain sympathy for herself; that as a stage actress, she knows exactly when to cough, and that a wagging ankle will “take focus.” At the point of Treplev’s outburst, “that’s enough, the play is over,” the student stops and breaks character. He realizes that he is “faking” and complains that Arkadina is not helping him: “I just get this high-pitch voice from her.” Krause turns to the girl who had been playing Nina earlier: “Do you see, she’s trying to make it happen, but she has lost her objective, so she can’t let it happen. And so the affected tone. For example [to Arkadina now] you missed the fact that Trigorin leans forward watching Nina. That’s why she says ‘we’re in for something decadent.’ You see, you people tend to do just one thing in a line, when actually they are all double. [One of the students interjects a subtext for Arkadina. “Get your eyes off that girl!” That’s right, when you’re playing just one thing in Chekhov, something is wrong.
“But you’ve made good progress in the way you approach the play. And I’m not saying that just to be nice. It’s a difficult thing. Chekhov is brilliant with a group scene like this -- all the cross-currents. Trigorin is drawn to the pretty girl, of course. She is lovely, but he is also subservient to Arkadina; he settles back in his chair, but then he is drawn in again. [Krause is acting now, suggesting Trigorin’s subtexts in the movements of her body.] And Masha, standing alone in the background -- and notice the loneliness, if you’re going to play it right . . . and notice this little silence, that’s a good Chekhovian silence; you were all off in your own thoughts. [A long pause; then one of the students breaks the silence with a kind of self-conscious giggle.] Oh, that’s good. She came in with a giggle at that moment. This is Chekhov, the way you are now. . . All right, go home!” [And the class is dismissed.]
Two features seem salient. First is what Charlton Heston, in his introduction to the South Dakota films, calls Krause’s “enormous vitality.” He is recalling his student days at Northwestern and admiring the same vitality evident in the 1966 films.
This charismatic vitality is integral to her teaching art. It is an energy channeled and focused by tremendous concentration, the components of which must surely include her “passion for teaching” and what Heston calls that “expectation you could be great” -- the belief that the next moment in class would be inspired, and the corollary expectation that one would not dare come unprepared to class or settle for shoddy or careless work.
Gerald Freedman has described the result: “She is a catalytic agent: something has to happen when you come into contact with her. You suddenly realize you have collided with something that demands you take full measure of yourself.”
A small woman, Krause always seems much taller and she uses her voice, fully resonant and under exquisite control, with maximum effectiveness, sometimes to reassure, often to challenge and provoke.
But the crucial component of her teaching is Krause’s coaching ability, what one might characterize as her skill in working “co-consciously” with the student actor.
There are, for example, in the above transcription, four moments when the students seem to achieve breakthroughs into the subtextual world demanded by Chekhov’s script: when Medvendenko gives his arithmetic lesson to his beloved, when Nina dreams of curtain-calls with roses, when Pauline experiences the slap of rejection, and the final Chekhovian “pause.”
In each case we can see how Krause precipitates these experiential understandings by acting-with-thinking-with the students as they probe for the character.
This co-consciousness might be subdivided into four levels. On the first level, as the above transcription should demonstrate, her knowledge of the play and scene is exhaustive, and her analysis is both critically penetrating and amplified by years of teaching and directing experience, of testing the inherent performance values of the script before classes and audiences.
The script is ever the basis for interpretation, but her experience of the play is more than literary and still more than directorial. On a second level, using an actor’s subtext derived from this intimate knowledge of the play, Krause is covertly, proprioceptively acting out the character. Hers is not a directorial idea of character, but an actor’s experiential one, with tasks, images, and objectives. Out of this private subtextual flow arise the small gestural moments of what we might call “side-acting.” Krause will at times suggest “actions” to the student, at times overtly act out her own subtext but so subtly that the alert student will not imitate her, but incorporate her acted suggestions into his own subtext. The beat of the scene is scarcely altered; while the rest are watching Treplev’s play, Krause-arkadina will gain student-Arkadina’s attention and wave sulphur fumes away with an artful but attention-getting gesture that insures that all will watch her and not her son’s play, and which thereby sets up and helps motivate Treplev’s outburst “The play is over!” and Arkadina’s carefully exaggerated surprise. The student-Arkadina (and others in the class alert to the fine points of her teaching) absorbs the gesture with her peripheral consciousness and tries to link her subtextual process with Krause’s.
That Krause does not “plan” her teaching because she feels she must respond to the needs of the individual actor and of the moment, is emphasized by an example reported in Press’ dissertation. The play is again, The Seagull, and Press is quoting Krause:
“His first line [Medvedenko to Masha] is ‘Why do you always wear black?’ And she says, ‘Because I am in mourning for my life.’ I am not going to tell them how to say that . . . I let responses evolve, let them discover their characters . . . I’ll say, ‘Masha, where are you standing?’ ‘Well, I think right here beside Constantine’s stage.’ ‘What is your feeling towards that stage?’ . . . I’m asking her to make a relationship there which is nonverbal and if I’ve done it right, I will suddenly see that hand go out and touch Treplev’s stage . . . She doesn’t say aloud what she thinks, that Nina is going to play Treplev’s play here. I say something like, ‘It’s evening,’ and I say, ‘Brush that mosquito away. Why do you always wear black?’ ‘I’m in mourning for my life.’ And suddenly it comes.’
Clearly, the practice of this co-consciousness contains a third level, an intimate knowledge of the student’s general state of mind as well as his thought processes at the moment of rehearsal. Krause was sometimes criticized for involving herself too deeply in the personal lives of the students; certainly, from her teaching standpoint, such involvement was necessary. She would spend two full days a week, Press records, reading the daily journals her acting-class students were required to keep. If this personal, almost parental interest is unusual today, it has precedent in the more ancient relationship of master teacher to chosen student.
“One of A.K.’s students” meant something more than taking classes with her; it meant to be the object of such scrutiny and to accept fully the fact that the content of one’s own experience was the material of the actor’s art. Her intimate knowledge of the student provided the basis for what was the more crucial intimacy, her ability to sense the moment-by-moment state of mind of the student during scene-work in order to make those quick, intuitive decisions as to when to let the scene continue, when to suggest and/or side-act, and when to stop and start over.
All this can be absorbing to the observer and fellow-classmate as well as to the student directly involved in the scene-work. This is one key to what might be seen as a fourth level of the co-consciousness. As Krause generates her own character sub-text which she engages with both the student’s personal and character stream of consciousness, she also keeps the entire class (or cast, if in rehearsal) in the range of her attention. an example is the moment described above, where Krause doubles back to point out to the student who acted Nina -- now an observer -- how the student-Arkadina has lost her objective, just as “Nina” had previously. Krause uses the onstage scene-work to teach the nonparticipating students in the class, who in fact may be more relaxed, and therefore, more able to distinguish the subtle tones and gestures which are the signs of subtextual activity than the on-stage actor himself -- at least until he has time to reflect upon the class session.
One final word about this co-consciousness of four levels, and the apprehension some may have about the intimacy it requires of teacher and student. In Krause’s teaching, as intimate and inter-subjective as it is, emotional self-indulgence -- a tendency of the “method,” some say -- is not encouraged. The interpretation of the text, the first level, is the primary consideration. The personal hurt of the actress who is slapped, for example, is immediately (indeed almost ruthlessly) applied to the needs of the scene and play. With her “personal” tears still in her eyes from the shock and sting of the slap, the actress must continue; gradually the magic of the “Magic If” begins to take hold, and she adapts the personal emotion to the needs of the character. This is what electrifies the class, not the sensation of the slap, but the dramatically truthful response which emerges -- Pauline’s sour-faced, clumsy attempt to coerce her ex-lover into a show of affection or at least attention. Juxtaposed with Dorn’s genteel indifference, the scene is suddenly funny -- in the Chekhovian mode. The class laughs, at the play, and partly in exultation at the power of the actor’s craft.
In interviews, Krause tends to discount the direct influence of Stanislavsky; at least she does not consider herself to be a disciple. It is true that her initial training and first teaching assignments at Northwestern were in the field of oral interpretation.
Needless to say, the S.S. Curry think-the-thought approach, which precedes Stanislavsky, dominated her theory and practice. Nor is she a narrow “method” practitioner; her career, spanning the great transition in acting theory from the external to the internal, includes both aspects of performance.
But the analogies with Stanislavsky are undeniable. In both teachers we note the energy, the charisma, and the semireligious dedication to the act of acting. And as for the co-consciousness, we might quote from Stanislavsky [as reported by David Margarshak]: “Before, a producer planned his mise-en-scenes and the nature of the inner feelings of the dramatis personae in his own study. He then went to rehearsal and told the actor to carry them out . . .But when I arrive at a rehearsal now, I am no more prepared than the actor and I go through all the phases of his work with him.” Or, an example of what I have called “side-acting”: “He would no longer show the actors how to play their parts, but would help them instead to find the inner dramatic movements of the scene or act. He would use hardly any gesture or movements or mimicry. Just a slight change of posture and his huge figure would suddenly become transformed.” And, quoting Stanislavsky again: “It is very difficult to share one’s experience in so complex an art as the creative work of the actor. In personal communication with students it is possible to convey and to represent what cannot be so easily formulated in words.
And from another source: “If a director foists upon an actor his own, the director’s thoughts, derived from his own personal emotional memories, if he tells him ‘You must act precisely so,’ he does violence to the actor’s nature. Does he need my emotional memories? He has his own. I must cling to his soul like a magnet and see what it contains.”
Norris Houghton describes the typical techniques used by Moscow Art Theatre directors in 1936 which seem to reflect these convictions: “Instead of thinking about it . . . it is suggested to the actor that he try certain actions and then from the doing of them, he discovers their meaning. . . He walks about with them on the stage, whispers suggestions to stir their imaginations. If the actor wishes to make movements of which the director does not approve, he is allowed to try his way.”
According to Aristotle, acting ability is a natural gift (phuseos) and cannot be taught; it is “a-technos,” not subject to systematic and rational procedures. By this definition, if we insist on forcing also the teaching of acting into expression in discursive modes, then the teaching of Alvina Krause is private and not communicable. Then we are uneasy, when, for example, Krause’s vocabulary seems to vary and shift and we are suspicious of her refusal to commit her ideas to print. If, on the other hand, we describe her teaching not as systematic, but as the guiding of the student through her honed co-conscious skill to the self-discovery of the “moment-by-moment action,” then linguistic abstractions are not so relevant. It is probably for this reason that the mature Stanislavksy abandoned his earlier “table work” and taught by driving directly for the “physical actions.” As one penetrates to the realm of subatomic particularizations in the search for these actions, one abandons the realm of generalization, of “techne,” and in the teaching of acting.
- * * *
Alvina Krause has read the above part of this article and had some reservations and amplifications which it seemed best to include here in a separate section rather than in footnotes or possibly confusing alterations in my text. These comments were spontaneous responses by letter, and not intended for scholarly publication. However, with her permission, I include them in the form of direct quotation both because she explains herself better than I can (despite her disclaimers) and in the hopes that the quotations convey something of her personality and oral style.
First she was concerned that I might be exaggerating the degree of “side-acting” she does.
You use the term “acting” in describing my teaching. It’s a dangerous word, has too many misleading connotations. Might lead to the conclusion that I taught, directed through inculcation. You know I think I never gave anyone a “line reading” nor an action pattern -- I believe so strongly that coaching is a creative process that I shunned limitation, did everything in my power -- stopped at nothing! -- to stimulate, awaken that creative faculty -- to make the actor discover within himself the material with which he creates . . . so if I am teaching Hamlet, there he is before me and I am moving into his world, seeing with his eyes, responding with his spine: I may fall into “Now I am alone” -- but only if I sense my class is creating with me. There, you see how impossible it is to write about what I do. You see I fear labels. “The Krause method” -- I can’t bear the term! It is a violation of the freedom of the creative process. Of course there was design, purpose, discipline in my work but -- you tell it. I can’t. I saw Dick Benjamin and Paula in Norman Conquests, two of my “devoted” students. And there was nothing of me in them except their resolution to master that art. Yes, they are “Alvina Krause students” but only in the sense that I helped them learn to observe, perceive, understand the “astonishment of living” which is the core, the source of drama. You see I learned early: the “spine” of teaching (for me) was not to have all the right answers. The important thing is to ask the right questions, the questions which touch off the creative process, the questions which provoke, stimulate . . . you say it!
Remember Billy Budd? [Northwestern and Eagles Mere, 1952] . . . I gave you [the cast] virtually no stage directions. Realize? (Which doesn’t mean that I did not know exactly where you should be every second.) But I believe -- and it worked -- that every actor finds the right movement at the right moment by being truly motivated, by responding in character to the total situation. Yes that means I do identify with every actor and above all with Melville. No, I’m not “play-acting” every role. I do everything, anything to to stimulate the creative mind of every actor to create Melville’s drama . . . the work you saw in class was always an attempt to awaken the imagination, the creative mind. And it gets more difficult in these days for something has stifled the creative impulse. Is it that observation is inactive and we have nothing stored up with which the imagination can work logically and creatively?
It seems that here Krause is not contradicting but supplementing the idea of the “co-consciousness.” It is true that her side-acting is not a primary technique; a sharp question, a slap, a pointing to an image or an object was sometimes sufficient. And yet because she is herself such an empathic actor, inevitably -- perhaps more than she herself realizes -- her attitude, body, voice, her “thinking body” would provide clues for the alert student to an appropriate subtextual process. Moreover, as she says, she would act Hamlet “only if I sense my class is creating with me.” Again, the co-consciousness of four levels. Her reference to the art of blocking the play through the actor’s discovery of the inevitable movement illustrates how in her teaching the art of acting and directly were organically related, the effectiveness of such a blocking technique depending of course upon the authentic motivation of each individual actor. it also resembles the Moscow Art Theatre practice of 1936 as described by Norris Houghton.
Another of Krause’s comments relates specifically to the co-consciousness of the second level, that of the student’s state of mind and to the habits of introspective self-use of the creative actor. It is occasioned by the brief reference to the use of student journals in acting class.
The journals were not diaries in the personal sense of that word. Students were instructed to put down on paper what they had discovered about the acting process. An artist needs a certain objectivity; the actor must learn that self-exploration is not acting. The journals were a means to this realization. They were a means of private instruction; through them I could guide, direct each individual. Personal confessions were discouraged. Neuroses were never discussed. The student was directed to discover the artist, the creator within himself . . . With my best students those journals were dialogs. Sometimes in response I wrote back more than the student had written. The journals revealed to the student the answer to the question, am I an actor? Self-discovery was the objective.
Finally, in response to my brief noting of her background in oral interpretation and her ambiguous feelings of indebtedness to the theories of Stanislavsky, Krause writes: “In the beginning I thought the words conveyed the thought and then one day -- as an interpretation student -- I discovered the thoughts, contradictions, mental-emotional processes and responses and a whole new world opened to me -- long before I heard of Stanislavsky. When I discovered him, years later, I felt indebted to him for formulating what I had been seeking.”
In an earlier taped interview I had pressed Krause to describe how, under what circumstances, or under the influence of what teaching or teacher she originally experienced the subtextual process.
Oh dear . . . You see I was taught in interpretation; I never had any actor training. Northwestern [School of Speech] was founded on the think-the-thought approach. And they were so right about that: . . . and it was wonderful the way they were teaching it. And I remember once as a student working on a scene from Macbeth. And I thought, “That’s one scene I can do. ‘And all the house cried sleep no more.’” And I was working in the practice room for hours yet somehow sensing it was wrong. Yet I was thinking the thought. But what thought was I thinking? of the line itself. And I knew exactly what that meant. And I knew the state he was in. And yet it was false. And suddenly I thought, ‘I’m giving up. I’m through. I’m no good.’ And it was terrible . . . Then I heard myself say “Sleep no more” and I thin that’s when I found that the thought was back of the line.
You mean at that moment you gave up, despaired?
That became the subtext. With that background, that horror. And from that moment on I knew I was after something else. I couldn’t formulate it. I was too young. I didn’t discover the word subtext till many years later. But I think that has always been in my work, the sense that words, no matter how elegant, are . . .[a pause] and I revere Shakespeare -- but then I went to Chekhov. You’ve got to.
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