tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19110375727548432162024-02-19T08:52:28.697-07:00THE SILVER COMBUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger58125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-34915050337564918632014-05-02T21:53:00.002-06:002014-05-02T21:53:56.167-06:00SHAKESPEARE GETS PANNED by Valerie Weeks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">REVIEWER CALLS “COMEDY OF ERRORS” LOUSY by Valerie Weeks</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">February 2, 1960</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The program notes for University theatre’s production of <b>Shakespeare</b>’s <i>“The Comedy of Errors</i>” express surprise that it is not played more often. After seeing it, one knows why.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In fact, one wonders why University theatre purposefully selected what is notorious for being Shakespeare’s worst comedy, if not the worst of all his plays.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>It was probably selected because it was felt the comic and slapstick elements in the play could make a successful light production, if not a memorable one. But, without a cast of dyed-in-the-wool, hardened professional comics this is impossible no matter who is producing the play.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In other words, <i>“Comedy of Errors</i>” is a lousy play. It was badly written and poorly constructed and followed through. The comic scenes are repetitious and dull. One is never quite sure, of all the twins, who is on the stage, and one is worn out watching the play without having derived any merriment from it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Shakespeare listed the play from <b>Plautus’</b> “<i>Menechini</i>,” where he should have left it. It is one of Shakepeare’s earliest comedies, and it has all the signs, a complicated plot; stiff, unnatural dialogue; and a peculiar, undeveloped mixing of tragic and comic elements.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>So, given these preliminary problems, there is little a cast of university players can do but bear with the play and try to get around it by using what little they know and rarely get to practice about low, slapstick comedy.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is little desire on the reviewer’s part to continue. The play is a bad one. the players and director did their best but what resulted was not an entertaining production. The only production of the <i>“Comedy of Errors</i>” that ever had any potential was <b>Rogers and Hart</b> <i>“The Boys from Syracuse</i>,” a 1930’s musical saved by the music.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To the credit of the play, it was well-paced and never dragged, a decided possibility in the tedious unraveling of the plot in the second act. The action was good and the players told their story without belaboring it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>In addition, the play looked good. That is, the groupings and movement on stage was quite effectively done by means of different levels and a variety of entrances off and onto the stage. There was a studied effort to place the characters where they would look the best in relation to other characters and to the plot.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Set against a most effective background, built to represent a street in early 19</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> century Europe, the stage pictures were very pleasing. However, the contortions the actors went through to set up these stage pictures not only wore out the actors but also the audience. At once point, the abbess walks across the stage, up some stairs, and turns immediately around and comes back down, while reciting a speech.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the debit side, there is the acting out of the play. It was dull and rarely humorous.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>If there was an outstanding performance, it was certainly that of </b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><b>Paula Ragusa </b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>[later </b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><b>Paula Prentiss]</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>, as Adriana the shrewish wife to one of the twin brothers. She was the perfect shrew with the loud voice and the flaying arms. </b>[sic]</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Paul Hardy</b>, as the twin Antipholus of Syracuse, did a competent job. He gave his lines what life he could, but did his best work in pantomime and silent reaction to situations. Several of the comic bits he and <b>Larry Smith</b>, as his servant Dromio, were the most effective in the play.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Smith, who played both twins Dromio, was most enjoyed by the audience. He resorted to low comedy routines, as he should have, rolling on the stage, falling, doing double takes, and acting generally unaware of much that was going on.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If there was any fault in his performance, it was that he over-played his part without working with anyone else on stage, except Hardy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Bill Pogue</b>, as Antipholus of Ephesus, and <b>Sharon Risk</b>, as Luciana, Adriana’s sister, read their poorly written lines without inspiration, in contrast to Hardy and Ragusa.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>And Robin Deck, as the courtesan, looked and acted the part brassily enough but never stopped moving the entire time she was on the stage, although attention was rarely centered on her.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The costumes were the poorest this season. Although there is no particular objection to doing the comedy in Empire dress, the colors are badly matched (particularly that of Antipholus) and the women’s costumes appeared to have been hastily thrown together, one swatch of material over another.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is too bad that University theatre had to select a comedy like this one to display its talents. At least “<i>Endgame</i>” was a conscientious effort to experiment and “<i>Caesar and Cleopatra</i>” was an entertaining extravaganza.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This play was last produced at Northwestern in 1939. Perhaps it would not be asking too much to wait 40 instead of 20 years before the next production.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span>[Notes: Weeks never does name the director, but -- judging from the cast -- I suspect it was Krause. Perhaps it was also Krause who directed in 1939, maybe to better reviews. But this is speculation.]</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Here's a pre-performance publicity clip from the Daily Northwestern. There was no story. Thirkield's name is misspelled. Paula Ragusa is unnamed. </span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-56978316287406638262014-04-30T17:00:00.002-06:002014-06-17T17:56:39.914-06:00A CRANKY REVIEW OF "DON JUAN" March 1, 1960<div style="font-family: Helvetica;">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Dave Roberts became Tony Roberts</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">DAILY NORTHWESTERN March 1, 1960</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ROBERTS’ GOOD ASSIST SAVES UT’S DON JUAN</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>(D NW Editor’s note: Since the regular Daily reviewer was out of town last weekend, </i><b><i>Norman Mark</i></b><i> was assigned to review “Don Juan” for the paper.)</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Northwestern theatre department is currently presenting a delightful evening’s entertainment, an “Introduction to <b>Dave Roberts</b>,” under the name of<b> Moliere</b>’s “<i>Don Juan.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the role of Sganarettle, Don Juan’s valet, Mr. Roberts carries or participates in nearly everything that comes off right during the evening. Facial reactions to other characters’ dialogue, pauses scattered through his own lines, the bits of humorous business -- all produce the desired comic effect without resorting to slapstick.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The play opens with Sganarelle speaking to Gusman (</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><b>David Cremosnik</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>) about Don Juan’s life and loves. Gusman speaks his lines so lifelessly, in comparison to Sganarelle, that the reviewer is forced to surmise that he is not really interested in the play.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the middle of this scene, Don Juan enters, played inadequately by <b>David Zegers</b>. The seducer of 1,003 women in Spain doesn’t know how to wear his costume or live up to his legend.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Errol Flynn and who cares?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Everything about him tends to enforce this impression -- from the distracting movements of the head and hands to the emaciated bit of peach fuzz under his chin. Someone playing in the legend of <b>John Barrymore, Doug Fairbanks</b>, and <b>Errol Flynn</b> (all past Don Juans -- in films), should at least look like he has some talent in the bedroom arts, rather than a boy caught in the wrong costume party without his I.D.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As soon as Don Juan enters, Sganarelle goes to his knees and from then on the part could have been played by an amputee. With the focus being on Mr. Roberts so much of the time, why did the director choose to have him in a position where it is difficult for the audience to see him?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Don Juan announces that he has found a new love and he is going to give up his present one, Donna Elvire. After she comes in and scolds him, for some unknown reason he has to leave. Then he almost drowns off the coast of Scotland, makes love to two peasant girls, goes through a forest manhandling, saving Spaniards and inviting statues to dinner on the way to the end of Act I.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Gretchen Walther</b> (Donna Elvire) is much more convincing when she returns in the second act to reform Don Juan than in the first when she gives vent to her anger. Holding crosses rather than beating her side with riding crops seem to be her forte.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Marcia Rodd</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Pierrot (<b>Pat Brubaugh</b>), Charlotte (<b>Susan Shanks</b>), and Mathurine (<b>Marcia Rodd</b>), all portray Scottish peasant folk almost too well -- their accents sometime obscure the dialogue. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the technical aspects, the set does not look Spanish. It looks like a set placed on the stage, rather than giving a feeling of Spain. There is so little change from the basic platforms that one is led to believe that someone in theatre must have a decided lazy streak.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In fact the only really Spanish influence in the entire play was Donna Elvire’s brothers, Don Carlos (<b>Laird Williamson</b>) and Don Alonzo (<b>Larry Kamm</b>). Embodying the “pundonor,” or point of honor that bound Spanish noblemen to revenge a family disgrace with the blood of the debaucher, the two brothers help Don Juan with one of his better scenes, when they try to decide whether or not to make him part of a shish-ka-bob.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The second act goes from the wild to the weird, with fathers scolding, tradesmen being outfoxed, a statue coming to dinner and finally a full company of spectres and demons. All of these supporting characters are quite believable in their roles. Unfortunately, they have to deal with Don Juan, who isn’t.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After having dinner with the statue, Don Juan tries a hypocritical reformation and outwardly embraces religion. This deceit precipitates his final downfall and, in the last scene, hell (located immediately under the stage) opens and gives him a bid.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He accepts with reluctance, while demons leap out and run around in tights for the pledging ceremony. There is some static, probably unintentional, is followed by Sganarelle’s last words which left Saturday’s [gap] on the public address and at last Don Juan leaves the stage.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The effect of the acting by the two leads is perfectly summed up in the last lines when Don Juan says that hell is burning his feet and the audience is moved to the extent that one wants to get him a Dr. Scholl's foot pad. This</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This is the publicity on February 18, 1960. I’m surprised to discover I was the assistant director! </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">PLAY TIME</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“Don Juan,” Moliere’s comic tale of the legendary Spaniard who was reputed to have had a thousand love affairs, will be the final winter quarter production of the Northwestern University theatre. The play will be presented Feb. 26, 27, 28, and March 4, 5, 6.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The production will include two scenes generally omitted from printed and performed versions, director John E. Van Meter said. The scenes were cut out after the initial production because the audience misinterpreted them as blasphemous.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A favorite in France, the play has not received much attention in this country. The legend is fairly well known in the United States because of the popularity of Mozart’s opera, “Don Giovanni.” the opera is a more swash-buckling version than Moliere’s play, which concentrates on the comic adventures of the Don.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-75707384616874991992014-04-29T11:52:00.002-06:002014-04-29T11:52:28.480-06:00THE DAILY NORTHWESTERN DISCUSSES WORKSHOP<h2 class="date-header" style="color: #335577; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
TUESDAY, APRIL 29, 2014</h2>
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<a href="http://prairiemary.blogspot.com/2014/04/february-1960-daily-northwestern.html" style="color: #333333; text-decoration: none;">FEBRUARY, 1960, THE DAILY NORTHWESTERN DISCUSSES WORKSHOP</a></h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">DAILY NORTHWESTERN <span style="font-size: xx-small;"> Wednesday, February 3, 1960</span></span></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><div style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; min-height: 14px;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>WORKSHOP IS MOST CREATIVE ACTIVITY ON NU CAMPUS</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>(Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of three articles devoted to the Northwestern speech school’s workshop theatre. We chose to publish such an extensive series on workshop because we feel it is probably the most creative and at the same time least known activity on campus. This first article deals with the organization and development of workshop. the second article will discuss the problems workshop faces. And the third article will be a close look at an original scene by <b>Gary Vitale</b>, now in rehearsal.)</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">by Norman Mack</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The room is dingy . . . there are a few wooden chairs around . . . cracks in the ceiling . . . dust generally and a wooden creaking floor. In the center of the room is a girl, who is ordinarily beautiful, but is now dressed in blue jeans and a sweatshirt with little make-up and unruly hair. She is shouting angry words at a boy while her director encourages her. This is workshop theatre.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The scene shifts. The same girl, in the same working outfit, is in Centennial hall. The same director is encouraging her, only her performance is considerably subdued -- the walls in Centennial hall are hard and echoes result. This, too, is workshop.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now the applause has died down, most of the non-theatre majors have left the speech auditorium. <b>Miss Alvina Krause,</b> faculty sponsor of workshop theatre, stands on the audience’s level and praises the girl’s performance. This workshop bill for the director and the girl has come to a happy conclusion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Workshop is the first arena where the hopes of novice directors, actors, and actresses get tested at Northwestern. It adds more students to the to school education than any other activity on campus and it gives the new blood of the theater a change to present themselves to an audience.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And yet this activity, so important to speech majors that as soon as new tryouts are announced every book containing the new plays disappears from Deering, is nearly unknown to the rest of the school. What is workshop? What is it for? When? Who and why?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">According to Dr. Mitchell, head of the theatre department, workshop started out under the name of Studio Theatre on May 4, 1932, charging 50c admission, paying royalties, running two nights and having publicity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“However, this allowed less freedom in choice of material because recent plays could not be used. We then stopped charging admissions but limited ourselves to plays in the public domain,” he said. “Eventually we drifted into the present way of doing things -- with one performance, little publicity and no admission charge.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“This is the most successful method we’ve had with better performances, larger audiences and a wider choice of material than ten years ago.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Miss Krause states that workshop was instituted “primarily to give opportunities for acting and directing, under liberal supervision. A greater number of of people are studying theatre than are in university theatre productions and workshop keeps them acting and working.”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>It originally was planned to be a practical application for the techniques learned in directing class.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Through the year as many as 18 plays or scenes or cuttings from plays are presented. Two bills, containing three plays of forty-five minutes or less are given each quarter.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the past workshop has presented scenes from<i> “Lysistrata,” “Merchant of Venice,” “Peer Gynt,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,”</i> and <i>“Taming of the Shrew.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Directors are chosen by Miss Krause, usually have attended a directing class, and have had experience in earlier productions.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>In turn, the directors choose the play they want to do (ranging from <u>Shakespeare</u> to <u>Tennessee Williams</u> to originals) and their actors and actresses. While the talent be anyone enrolled at Northwestern speech majors make up the bulk of the people on the state.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The rehearsal schedule is three or four hours a night, five days a week for three to four weeks. This would be an exhausting timetable in any other activity, with accusations of slave-labor being mumbled in the ranks.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The people in these productions are a dedicated lot and it is not usual to hear of Saturday morning, Thanksgiving vacation, and “let’s get together and run through that once more” rehearsals.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The practice sessions take place at 1831 Chicago, Centennial hall and, because of its tight schedule, only twice on the speech school stage.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Currently in rehearsal (to be presented this Wednesday, Feb.10, at 7:30) are an original student written and directed play, <i>“The Love of One Captain”</i> by Gary Vitale and two other scenes directed by<b> Mary Gottlieb</b> and <b>Dan Roth</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the past workshop has produced such stage stars as <b>Gerald Freedman</b>, who is directing “<i>Taming of the Shrew” </i>in New York and who also directed several workshop production here; <b>Charlton Heston; Jim Olson</b>, once actor-director in workshop, now appearing in “<i>The World of Susie Wong</i>”;<b> Inga Swenson</b>, who has played “Juliet” in Stratford, Conn.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That is the basic outline of workshop theatre -- an activity that’s extra-curricular. A great amount of time is spent on it with near professional productions being the result. It is a trainer, a trial by fire and another step on a theatrical ladder.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>INADEQUATE PROPS, SPACE HARASS WORKSHOP THEATRE</b> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Workshop theatre can be compared to the proverbial statue with the feet of clay.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The audience sees a well-acted, near professionally directed play. But if they would look closely at the feet of this statue, the technical end, they would note a paucity of good lighting, little or no scenery, and props that sometimes seem out of place.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>As Gary Vitale, present director of a workshop production, said, “Workshop is a proving ground for actors and especially for student directors, and, in the same way, it should give experience to the technicians in theatre -- the lighting, set, and costume designers.”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">One of the chief reasons for the above mentioned technical problems seems to be the philosophy that workshop is strictly a classroom exercise in directing and that if anything were added to it, it would tend to become a production.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is for this reason that directors are allowed no budget for their plays, and, also, why they often provide costumes such as $25 silk pajamas out of their own pockets.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Workshop seems to hold the unenviable position of being just out of the classroom but not quite in the theatre. It is not allowed to make any props nor to have a budget and yet it is expected to entertain an audience.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the problem gets more complicated when one realizes that even if money were given for costumes, etc., there would be no room to make them. The existing costume shop, about the size of a large guest closet, is just too busy making UT apparel to work on workshop.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A suggested solution to this congestion is to expand and consolidate the far-flung speech school.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This new theatre plant would have to include new shops and a replacement for the ancient stage now used. But this utopia has been planned for the last 15 years. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some say the reason for the delay is lack of endowments, or the fact that the present stage is too old to remodel while a new building is too expensive to build, or that all the money taken in by UT productions does not go back to the speech school.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The lack of proper facilities is felt in many areas. Because of the cramped schedule for the speech auditorium, lighting can only be worked on two days before curtain time. The scene shop, a damp, coldly inadequate place near the lake, is too small to handle any scenery needed for productions. The same holds for props.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A certain amount of the crowded condition could be alleviated if UT moved into Cahn and workshop into speech building. But because of maintenance the the fact that a fireman has to be on duty if the full stage is used, it costs $75 ro rent Cahn per evening. This, and the fact that it is difficult to take flats from scene shop to Cahn eliminates this as a possible solution.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Another complaint stems from the fact that most of the props used in workshop ceom from the university theatre bins under Kresge. Only technical assistants an go down there and, because of this, directors are required to give them a list of what they need.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Problems raise their ugly little heads because the bin won’t have exactly what the director calls for and the assistant has to play mind reader for what’s closest to his wishes.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some of the scarcity of props could be alleviated if basic units, such as windows and doors, were made especially for workshop.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Still, from a technical angle, the technical assistant and not the people in lighting classes design the lighting for the productions. This lessens the possibility of practical experience for people interested in stage lighting.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>To move from behind the scenes, the acting and directing situation seems to be better than the technical end</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Occasionally one hears grumbling about the “star system,” meaning that certain people tend to get more roles than others. Opinion seems to be divided on this matter, with some students saying that “some people are just better than others,” while some calim that directors “don’t take enough chances on inexperienced people.” Most students can justify the latter complaint when they realize that the director himself is usually inexperienced.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Favoritism in casting of directors casting their friends is universally denied. Theatre majors all say that a director would be a fool to jeopardize a production just to cast a friend and that casting is done “amazingly on the basis of merit.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>After looking into workshop theatre from both the technical and directorial angles, one is struck by the multitude of unanswered questions.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Will there ever be a new speech building? Why is it that Northwestern, with such a good speech faculty, is stuck with a theatre plant that is disgraceful?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Why is it that while NU has the foremost teacher of lighting in the midwest,<u> Mr. Theodore Fuchs</u>, students graduate with less practical designing experience in this field than can be had in other schools?</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Why doesn’t workshop have some basic props? When scenery is so scarce for workshop productions, why are old flats stored in Dyche stadium, two miles from campus?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Why can’t directors go into the bins under Kresge?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In short, what is workshop, merely an extension of directing classes or a test of the abilities of everything connected with theatre?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>WORKSHOP WILL PRESENT ORIGINAL, IMPROMPTU DRAMA </b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“You see there’s a beautiful day, a lovely day, with sun and flowers and there’s a path, a winding path, going right through the middle of this beautiful day.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“You want me to marry a twelve year old? Who do you think I am? Bing Crosby?”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The above lines were spoken, completely extemporaneously, at a rehearsal of <i>“The Love of One Captain</i>,” done in the Comedia de L’Arte manner, directed by Gary Vitale, to be given Wednesday, Feb. 10.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This play serves to illustrate what a usual workshop production is like and also, the way workshop can portray unusual ideas.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Drawn from the 15</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> century plays in which townfolk sought to portray stereotyped characters in impromptu situations, this play presents seven personalities going through a plot outline given to them by Gary. The characters, themselves, have to supply the dialogue.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>The cast is representative of every grade level on campus from freshman to grad school. It ranges in experience from appearances in seven school productions to Northwestern audiences and is split 50-50 between independent and affiliated.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The director in addition to appearing in several workshop dramas has been seen as Hamm in <i>“Endgame</i>,” as Henry IV in “<i>Henry IV, Part I,</i>” and in the <i>“Legend of Lovers,” “Sandhog,” </i>and <i>“School for Wives.</i>” He took a directing class from <b>Dr. Schneideman</b> this summer and, last quarter, applied to Miss Krause to direct this play and was accepted.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Joy Hawkins</b>, playing Isabella a typical sweet young thing, is a direct contrast to Mr. Vitale. A freshman, with some experience in musical comedy in high school, this is her first appearance at this school.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For her the most impressive thing about workshop is trying out which is an experience in itself, whether you make it or not. It helps you to get your own interpretation of a part instead of trying to mimic others.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Gary tried to make most of the character types relevant to our own society. for instance Isabella was modeled after a southern belle while Columbine, Isabella’s worldly friend played by <u>Marsha Rodd,</u> is modeled after a New Jersey gun chewing waitress.</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the other hand some of the characters have a long history in theatre. There is Arlecchino, portrayed by<b> Richard Kovara</b>, who is a basic servant type. In the beginning of this character’s existence he was a stupid lout, like the Dromios of <i>“Comedy of Errors</i>.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Through the ages he was transformed into a witty, fast talker, although sometimes given a black mask on stage, <b>Eddie Cantor. Al Jolson</b>and <b>Emet Kelly</b> are modern examples of this character.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Along the same line is Pedrolino played by <b>Bud Beyer</b>, who is a deaf mute in this play but whose ancestors and grandchildren can be seen in Pero in <i>“Don Juan</i>.” <b> Felix Adler</b> and other white faced clowns, and<b>Charlie Chaplin</b>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Bud, a radio-TV major, claims that this part “develops comedy timing and forces quick thinking.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Other characters include Dr. Gratiano, played by <b>William Mumms</b>, a learned, philosophical mind who can ponder for hours the proposition that “if a ship is on the high seas it cannot be said to be in port.” One gets the impression that he is a caricature of a college professor even though he was formulated in the early 15</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> century in Bologna.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There is also Pantalone, played by<b> Tom Foral,</b> a miserly octogenarian who is always ready to enter into “marriage type situations.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">And finally Captain Spavento, played by <b>Doug Dudley</b>, the bragging coward mentioned in the title.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Universally the actors praise the improvisational play as an excellent vehicle, one which every theatre major should participate in at one time or another.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On the other hand the particular part of the workshop theatre that they would pick out as worthy of note raises a multitude of opinions. “The experimental angle is best”; “you see every rehearsal is a performance”; “the close relationship with actor and director -- the freedom to criticize without fear of hurting someone”; or that it “gives a lot of people a chance to do different roles than they are used to. It’s a good training ground.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">While there were several comments about the fact that the audience for these productions is probably one of the more difficult to please. Richard Kovara claimed, perhaps rightly, that this is a good thing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“I usually enjoy going to workshop more than UT because the plays are more for a college audience. The three presentations are on the same wave length with people who come to see and discuss theatre. The specialized audience is a good thing.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Summing up, “<i>The Love of One Captain</i>” will, according to Gary Vitale, be “completely spontaneous the night of performance.” For the director, that night will culminate a successful college career, while for the younger members of the cast it may very well start one. </span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-40694376274989111542014-04-22T08:24:00.002-06:002014-04-22T08:24:30.177-06:00A RADIO INTERVIEW ON KUSD IN 1971<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There’s nothing in this radio interview that would shock anyone or surprise anyone who has heard AK speak before.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://vimeo.com/92083672">https://vimeo.com/92083672</a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> A Krause KUSD 1971 on Vimeo.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She takes her usual shot at the star system that distorts the craft of acting by so celebrating one person that it amounts to congratulating the piano for a gorgeous concerto. I mean, there are a lot of elements involved in theatre and not all of them are garlands around the neck of the player. But I also think that she falls into something like the same trap by speaking of people with “gifts.” It’s certainly true that some people have capacities that others don’t have and that capacities are more easily developed in some people than others and even that some people have no capacity to learn acting in the hard, long-term, sometimes painful ways that are necessary for "high" standards. But maybe it’s as much a matter of desire as of giftedness and AK has always had a firm grip on that. Is desire a gift? It can drive you crazy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Following her thought, I’ve gone ahead into other art forms and the contemporary research on brain function (which is more properly seen as a function of the whole body, which is another thing she fully grasps) to define any art as the management of consciousness. First one learns one’s own “<i>connectome</i>,” which is the system of nodes of understanding and interpretation connected to each other in the brain in something like the way chords can be played on a piano keyboard. These are composed of neurons “who” play memories together to create empathy and evocation, first in the artist and then in the audience.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some people learn this urgently and early. Consider the abused child who must first protect him or her self enough to record what happens and then try to find the pattern in it. When is dad beginning to move towards a drinking binge? When is mom about to run away again, only to return bruised and exhausted? By googling one can find lists of ways to control a child about to have or beginning a tantrum. Some of the same strategies work on adults when practiced by kids or other adults. Check it out. Children don't have to google to find out how to control adults: it is instinctive and learning combined.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The difference is that a child cannot consciously control her or his own </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">connectome</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">: not until there's enough brain power to connect. Otherwise a neuron filament reaches out for a skill or interpretation that’s not there yet or that meets a contradiction.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> A</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">n adult, particularly one teaching acting methods that influence the </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">connectome</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of others, supplies or evokes what’s missing from one's own brain connects -- maybe by supplying information, maybe by expressing confidence that makes enough space and time to figure it out, maybe by being a role model.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">AK did all those things.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She had a powerful need to shift your consciousness into effectiveness.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If everything she tried met a stone wall, for whatever reason, she told you to get out -- that there was nothing she could do for you, and that was true, though most people took it as an insult and the thought didn’t get to them for a while that maybe someone else COULD shift your consciousness to a new place. Or maybe over the passage of time, the needed node would grow in, the nerve axon would reach out and find AHA!! If the desire was there, the person would find a way to learn somewhere somehow.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When AK failed, her attempts to "wake an actor" could be cruel out of her frustration with her limits. She was conscious enough of herself to know it and probably repented quietly alone at night, but she was a very self-disciplined person who could not easily be governed by others. She knew it was collateral damage but felt it had to be done to get to the goal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The interviewer and AK agree that some people have a desire so strong that it amounts to a constant driving need to create forms. <b>Schilpp</b>’s “<i>expression of the relationship between a person and the universe.</i>” But then AK goes on to the necessity of knowing where that desire, that need, comes from in the first place. Is it because of trying to avert attacks, feeling that is a way of evading danger? Is it a conviction that it will confer status and that status is a kind of safety? Is it trying to fill an emptiness? Is it trying to justify oneself to a harsh judge remembered from early in life? Is it boredom? This is the playwright level of need. The level of need at the actor's level had better be invested in the needs of the character portrayed. “How can I show what drives this character?”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The two women agree that the need to touch other people’s lives and make them complete propels art forms, but particularly the art form of teaching. AK uses a phrase, <i>“touching off,”</i> which is like lighting a flame, touching off a fire, somehow kindling the person’s ability to operate their own feeling system. She speaks of blindfolding people to get them to understand what it is to be unable to see. In class and rehearsals we watched her as she experimented, maybe going onto the stage in the middle of the play, prowling around the actors, whispering in their ears, slapping them on the shoulder, tugging at them, all to get them to shift out of being stuck playing chopsticks instead of the melody.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The interviewer mentions the work of group therapy and recalls interviewing <b>Virginia Satir.</b> She feels this work, which is just beginning in this time period, is very much the same sort of thing -- working at “touching off” the right awareness to free a person’s stuck brain. These groups often use movement. Satir’s speciality was family dynamics (nodes and connections) and the paradoxical impact of clumsy efforts at “helping” (secrecy, forcing behavior) becoming greater damage. I think that AK was very much in tune with this sort of work and that her teaching and acting Method were as much informed by it as <b>Stanislavsky</b>’s sense memory. There was a secret, closed, advanced class for only a few invited people. Even now no one will tell me, but I think it was for the exploration of the actor's own inner life. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Hedda Gabler</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But the interviewer focuses on acting and not on how this applies to the play as literature performed to demonstrate something about human beings. AK asserts, “no man [sic] is alien to me” but her examples are nationalities, cultures. As always she goes back to Hedda Gabler. These are well-trodden paths. One wonders what would “touch off” a post-Edwardian consciousness, knock her out of her comfort zone. One had the feeling that it had happened to her at least once when she was young.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I suspect the sudden realization of danger as in her last years at NU "touched off" insecurity and a desire to go underground. She was always circumspect, diplomatic, with authority figures, but I don’t think she had ever really felt vulnerable even after various challenges. Her life had been a continuum of considerable depth and reward but she had mostly played it safe. Even at forced retirement she had a second house, a reliable partner, a body of defenders and other resources, and soon she found her feet again. But just as we are tempted to speculate on the inner life of actors, we are curious about the inner life of teachers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Alvina Krause was a small woman who stood tall, the youngest of sibs, trained as a speaker more than as an actor, and at first protected by powerful people, particularly <b>Dean Dennis</b> of the School of Speech. I think there was always a little edge where she was not that confident of what she might call her “gifts,” (I would call “capacities”), where some things could touch off core vulnerability. Lack of control, for instance. The effects of modernity and surrealism, existentialism. She was essentially American, thus rejected despair and could not get her mind around concentration camps or African heart of darkness --horrific things that are not censored these days. But she doesn’t SAY “nothing human is alien to me.” She says, “An actor must always work on the premise that nothing human SHOULD be alien to me.” In short, she was a universalist, a progressive, a person of her time and place.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-45817727198193334882014-04-05T07:49:00.001-06:002014-04-05T07:49:15.944-06:00ALVINA KRAUSE ON VIMEO<h2 class="date-header" style="color: #335577; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Alvina Krause giving a speech at NU.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">This one is on YouTube. <b> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btUpLkTBAog</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“</span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Vimeo</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">” is like “</span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">YouTube</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">” with slightly different advantages that aren’t relevant here. </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Vimeo has two videos of interest to students who want to know more about the philosophy of </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Alvina Krause</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, a remarkable teacher of acting.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">You can call it “Method” if you like, but there are many acting “methods,” all rooted in the reality of human beings and the art forms that explore that reality.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There are art forms that challenge or ignore reality, contradict it, explode it, and so on.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They still begin with human reality since the only way to leave that is through some form of unconsciousness or death.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course, most art forms can preserve a particular view of reality beyond the death of the creator of it.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://vimeo.com/9415877" style="color: #666666;">https://vimeo.com/9415877</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This video is AK teaching a class in South Dakota after her retirement from the NU School of Speech. If you lose the address, type "Alvina Krause" into the search strip.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="https://vimeo.com/90605707" style="color: #666666;">https://vimeo.com/90605707</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This video is really a sound recording of a radio interview, but it is augmented with photos. The color photo of AK holding a bouquet was taken by <b>Tom Foral </b>on her front porch.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">(Title):<b style="font-style: italic;"> AK KUSD 1</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>from </i><a href="https://vimeo.com/bte" style="color: #666666;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><i>Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble</i></b></span></a><i> </i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Alvina Krause (1893-1980) was the legendary acting teacher at Northwestern University (1930-63) and in retirement was the Founding Artistic Director of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Here, she is interviewed by <b>Marjorie Weeks</b> on KUSD’s program “Concern”,on April 5, 1968. Uploaded with permission of KUSD. </i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>-- Vimeo notes</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Alvina Krause in childhood.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What IS the reality of human beings?</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is in the sensorium of the body, which is our only access to the world outside our skin but far more intense and extensive than just “five senses” and all of which is sorted and “felt” in the brain.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But then, once “felt,” the reality is acted out in reaction, so that it can be seen by others.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes the brain needs a moment to process -- sometimes honoring that pause while the connectome rings and flashes like a pinball machine, but only in the person’s head, is the truest clue to a person’s reality.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It will show what matters to the person, why they act as they do.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">After the pause, the person will be infinitesimally different.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Once in a long time, transformed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The totality of the person’s actions will be driven by a kind of morality, a code. It may be quite individual. This is the pattern that is truly the subject of drama: Antigone’s rule says that family requires honoring kin; Creon’s rule says that a kingdom must be kept in order even if it requires the dishonor of kin. Flash forward and we’ve got “<i>Game of Thrones</i>.” Maybe Russia seizing Crimea. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A performance shows us these patterns. To act as a character in the performance means accepting and believing in the character on the character’s terms, which may or may not be in agreement with family, nation, religion, membership in a group, or any other system outside the person. This is not a matter of judging the person, but understanding the why of who that person is. And letting it show through the person’s body.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Persons may not understand their own “why.” Some kinds of acting only require the expression of the actor’s own personal “why.” The kind of acting AK taught requires that the person DOES know their internal patterns and can enact those of others without destroying themselves. Still, it may be painful and the actor must accept the necessity of that pain. Consider what goes on in </span></span><b style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;">Peter Dinklage</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;"> as he portrays Tyrion Lannister, saying those bitter self-mocking lines about being a dwarf, enacting the restrictions and losses of his </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;">real-life physical form.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What does he find in himself that allows him to somehow project compassion and generosity, a certain nobility? Why couldn’t <b>Hervé Villechaize</b> find these aspects of his own self? There is risk in acting. Which is why some students of AK, exposed to the stripping and reality of self-search, claimed they had been abused. They simply didn’t have the courage and toughness necessary to do it. Dinklage does; Villechaize did not.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Any art form is a combination of seeking, hiding, and finding some pattern in whole or in part.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">How that is done, and to what extent it is controlled by others outside the actor, varies a great deal.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">We do know that one human interior brain connectome is capable of creating parallel personalities with quite different structures and assumptions about the world.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The actor is capable of separating them and “running” them alongside stage directions that say “keep your face in the light,” “stand right here,” “be more angry.”</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The morality or overarching pattern of all this has to be found in the play.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The actor must concentrate to keep the pattern of the character the most dominant while onstage.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On a stage the patterns are generally found in rehearsal, following the guidance and feedback of the director who should not take on the project without some concept. In fact, when AK could not form this concept, she said would not (indeed, probably could not have) directed a specific play. In a film the alternative footage of the actors plus other elements are used by the editor and director to form the pattern, the meaning. If there is none, then the work is aimless and trivial. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A director, like a writer or a psychotherapist, needs to find the deep pattern that drives the work into intensity. Why present something pale, trivial and transient -- to be forgotten tomorrow? And why find a meaning vivid, memorable, and central in order to promote breakfast cereal? But it would be legitimate to produce something as striking and baffling as <i>“Endgame</i>” if it asked a vital question, and so the meaning must be in the questioning.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Jonathan Reynolds, Eagles Mere Actor -- just an example.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The question of audience is not one that AK particularly addressed or could resolve. She did value repertory theatre where the community is the home of a theatre and therefore can learn to understand in a different way than a “one-off” audience. At Eagles Mere where the continuity was the summer people and AK herself, through the productions, the season became a dance in which one partner matched the other. If a specific play crashed, and some did, then clearly something had gone very wrong, but not due to one person who was out of step so much as the basic concept of how to interpret the play. Still, sometimes it seemed that one small element was messing up everything, so once the stage crew had to stay up all night to repaint the set for “Auntie Mame” in a different shade of red, because the first one suggested tomato soup instead of rubies.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Alvina Krause at Eagles Mere in the center.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Nancy Killmer, who played Auntie Mame, in front of her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Arts of all kind are a terrifying trade-off between one’s deepest truest self -- which could be destroyed by revelations -- and one’s constructed surrogate -- which can turn into a trap that won’t let the actor out. AK tried to teach how to bravely go where you have never gone before without drowning in your space suit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">These days the NU School of Communication is a space-age sort of outfit. Very corporation, very international, very theory, very technical. BUT the theatre department remains a humanities place with emphasis on movement, story, and actual performance. If you want more of a feel, go to and watch the faculty vids :</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/theatre/faculty/index.php?PID=DavidBell&type=dept" style="color: #666666;">http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/theatre/faculty/index.php?PID=DavidBell&type=dept</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes when I hear about the way it is now -- so MUCH money, so many more resources, so much younger -- I think about what it was like to work with AK, at eighty full of grace and gravitas, driven and called. Nothing like that at NU now. But maybe there shouldn’t be. Maybe that was armature and today’s work is flesh.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-83769739902821587392014-01-09T12:02:00.002-07:002014-01-09T12:02:40.689-07:00EAGLES MERE, PENNSYLVANIA<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Eagles Mere, PA, is a little resort town in the "Endless Mountains” which are part of the Appalachian chain and near the Catskills. I spent a summer there (1960) as costumer for the resident repertory theatre, which meant I was soon so pressured and exhausted that I hardly knew what was going on around me, much less finding it a magical place to relax! Nevertheless, for many people it was something like the movie “<i>Dirty Dancing,”</i> but we were hardly operating on that scale and didn’t worry about being oppressed because we were so filled with fervor, dedication to the theatre, and high hopes for the future.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The old rooming house where we lived was pretty minimal with plumbing that made strange noises and the only cooking stove an ancient wood range. Next door was the church above where a string quartet practiced during the week and church services included a lot of singing. I couldn’t hear the sermons, but our cook for the second half of the summer was an evangelical Christian who told Bible stories on the porch just out my window. The mostly Jewish actors listened politely. I went home with her at the end of the summer, since I was penniless, and canned her tomato crop for a week of room and board. I can’t remember how I got back to Chicago. She lived near Gettysburg, the battlefield, and I have vivid memories of that broad field and a woodchuck I chased across it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The Sweet Shop on the other side of the boarding house.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The cook for the first half of the summer was a small alcoholic black woman who could not manage the woodstove. In fact, she was barely managing her life at all. Some of the more devilish among us set up a doppler effect railroad simulation in the hallway and turned it on full-blast when she came staggering home from some place only she knew existed. The next day she left forever, which was how we got the Sunday School lady. For a few days we had no cook and survived on the resourceful skills of <b>Jerry Zeismer </b>who said, “I’ll make a pot of chili that will last us a week -- trust me.” He was quite right -- it was so hot that a few bites were enough to drive everyone with the resources over to the Sweet Shop. (Jerry has been a major success in Hollywood.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: x-small;">Street shoot: l.to r. Jerry Zeismer, Stu Hagmann, Maria Moriates, Katina now married to Austin Pendleton.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Normally I wasn’t around the actual playhouse very much. It was a converted barn at the edge of a swamp and the stage was small enough that one had to cross by going outside the building, where one had to be careful of footing. I don’t remember mosquitoes much so there must have been insecticide fogging going on, or maybe there were simply enough bats to control the problem. Stage lighting confused them, so occasionally one dropped onto the stage or the actors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">A red eft</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The distance between the boarding house and the playhouse was a mile or so and few of us had vehicles, so I often carried costumes over via the path along the lake, which was a pleasure except when it was dark because of the many trip roots. The surrounding woods were full of paths but I don’t remember seeing deer -- just tracks. One memorable moment was spotting a red eft, a tiny scarlet salamander. Another was being pursued by an elderly gentleman slashing at me with his cane and accusing me of being up to something immoral! I left too soon to figure out who he thought I was. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">On another day <b>Laird Williamson</b> and I went bushwhacking, nearly losing ourselves in the beautiful but over-thick azaleas, but finally reaching this spectacular gorge, which is sometimes even compared to the Grand Canyon. The summer I was there it rained so much and everything was so damp that a nice crop of mushrooms raised itself in my best Papagallo pumps. The tallest ‘shroom was about five inches.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Lucy and AK went out on the lake on Sunday afternoons, Lucy rowing and AK scribbling. The rest of us mostly slept -- together or apart -- whenever we weren’t onstage one way or another. But once I rose to investigate strange kitchen noises in the middle of the night and found a couple of drenched actors pinning their pocket contents and what clothing they could spare to the lines strung over the woodstove and trying to stir up a fire with very little success. There was no other heat in the place. The actors had a strong sense of order: dollar bills pinned up in order of denomination and so on. But a weak sense of boatsmanship: they had pushed off in the night in an unsound rowboat which luckily sank close enough to shore to wade back.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was a memorable late evening visit from AK in her nightgown with a shawl thrown over it and her hair spread over her shoulders. She’d been obsessing over something about the play in rehearsal and had come over to roust some actors for experiments and information.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Lucy and I wrestled with the compost, which was more like soup. Both of us had only a foggy notion of what ought to happen, but nothing was digesting no matter how much we stirred. Likewise, “plastic steel” would not heal the woodstove in spite of the optimistic copy on the tube. At least we were partners in failure.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The sign shop, where Laird created beautiful silk-screened posters on cardboard, had originally been the ice house and was sunk into a hillside so it was possible to walk onto the flat roof, a perfect place for sunbathing, but we were forbidden to go there because traffic made the roof leak.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When I was so exhausted that there was no possibility of falling asleep, I would walk over in the night to the riding academy where there was a team of big farm horses who pulled hay rides in summer and sleigh rides in winter. Tied into their stalls and busy munching hay from their feed boxes, they didn’t mind if I climbed onto their backs and napped for a while, rocked when they shifted their weight. It was enough physical reassurance and comfort to get me through the season. I have always been grateful for the comfort of horses.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-20534791380942782832014-01-09T12:01:00.002-07:002014-01-09T12:01:11.610-07:00TOM FORAL<h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="background-image: url(http://www2.blogblog.com/rounders/icon_arrow.gif); background-position: 10px 0.5em; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-color: rgb(187, 187, 187); border-style: dotted; border-width: 0px 1px 1px; color: #333333; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; margin: 0px; padding: 2px 14px 2px 29px;">
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<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Tom Foral, 2001</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As an illustration that Northwestern University preparation for acting and other dimensions of the theatre arts can support a career in several arts, I submit the example of <b>Tom Foral</b>, who has been a carrier of spears in the background of Shakespearean drama, but also a set designer, a portraitist, a bricoleur (collage), and a creator of "beefcake" ranging from the semi-realistic to the satirical. After ten years on Broadway in various capacities, he and his spouse, Joey, whose career was in the musical theatre, enjoy various locations as well as keeping a <i>pied a terre</i> in Manhattan. Here is a publicity sheet from a recent successful event.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>Tom's most recent stage role was as the Stage Manager in "Our Town."</div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">Tom in the center</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica;">A very nice article about Tom at: </span><a href="http://www.phillyburbs.com/entertainment/local_entertainment/pioneer-player-returning-to-town-country-for-our-town/article_0d5130cf-6719-5939-bed4-5d33a941c673.html" style="color: #666666;">http://www.phillyburbs.com/entertainment/local_entertainment/pioneer-player-returning-to-town-country-for-our-town/article_0d5130cf-6719-5939-bed4-5d33a941c673.html</a></div>
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The following transcriptions of notes to Tom from <b>Alvina Krause</b> show how much she was an entrepreneur and impresario (impresaria?) as well as an acting teacher and director. Starting from very limited resources and proceeding by hook and crook as well as the passion of her students, which allowed her to make outrageous demands on them, she and Lucy managed to keep the dream of repertory theatre alive in a little resort town west of the Poconos from 1945 to 1965 where people came to escape the heat before air conditioning. There was and is also an active winter-sports scene involving ice-tobogganing, but we were back at Northwestern then.</div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Written into a booklet originally meant to be a journal notebook :</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Tom --</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>My “super-jet” is an hour and a half late so here I am bored to desperation in the Pittsburgh airport.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>So you are Equity/Sc [?] Are we going to bill you as Foral Thomas this summer? I am not wishing that you will not get the big chance, but we would like to see you at E.M. Several of your E.M. fans are asking about you. And I am wondering again whether you could design “Ethan Frome” for our stage. “Gideon” is on the schedule. Want to play God? I am not sure that “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” will be available, but a lot of people are urging me to do it. Do you know “Idiot’s Delight”? It is tempting me; would have to be done in period: 1930’s. What Shakespeare? I know not! What Shaw? Chris has cast “Back to Methuselah” but I am still afraid of it. </i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>No musical picked. Do you know “Boys from Syracuse”? Worth reviving? I don’t know. “Camelot” is not available. <b> Jerry Freedman</b>suggested “Lorenzo”; says bad directing killed it on N.Y.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Forest Inn has just been sold. We do not know what it will mean to us. Owners are two Philadelphia men: Way and Benvegna or something of the sort. The “corporation” went $9,000 into the red last year.</i></span><br /><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: xx-small;">These huge resort inns were the source of the Eagles Mere audiences. There were five of them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>We were tempted to come to see you at McCarter, but Lucy did not have her car and we procrastinated too long.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>At NU things have reached a point beyond endurance. If Fortune does not materialize, I think I shall retire to my rose garden.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Carry your spears with style!</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>P.S. Surprised to get a postscript? Well -- it’s getting important to know whether you will be coming to E.M. because: Van meter will direct "Antony and Cleopatra" for me if Tom Foral is available to play Antony. Of course, he also stipulated that you would have to be letter-perfect in the role before coming to E.M. so that we could start work on it early. Well?</i></span></div>
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<i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If you play </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">Father, Antony</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;">The Lord</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">, I guess you should not play Ethan as I had originally planned -- do you want to direct Ethan? Van Meter says: I hope Foral will design “Antony and C” -- yes? And “Ethan” and . . . I’m still in a fog about a couple of shows. Can Frank not stay for "Antony and C" Aug 7,8,9,10?</span></i></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Unit set again this summer? Two unit sets? Have one promising Sophomore interested in design. Has done some promising work. Use him? If you’re with "Life with Father "can you play Father without pre-season rehearsal? Guest-star-artist ready to go? Can’t think of anyone else who could so directly, authoritatively speak to God! Frank wants a cement floor to build flats on.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>Fortune be with us!</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><i>A.K.</i></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;">__________________</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;">Some samples of Foral work, far from complete, but to give you an idea. </span><cite class="vurls" style="background-color: white; color: #006621; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; line-height: 18px; white-space: nowrap;"><a href="http://www.tomforal.com/" style="color: #666666;">www.<b>tomforal</b>.com</a> </cite><cite class="vurls" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; line-height: 18px; white-space: nowrap;">and <a href="http://www.thomasforal.com/" style="color: #666666;">www.thomasforal.com</a>.</cite><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><cite class="vurls" style="background-color: white; color: #006621; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; line-height: 18px; white-space: nowrap;"><br /></cite><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><cite class="vurls" style="background-color: white; color: #006621; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; line-height: 18px; white-space: nowrap;"><br /></cite><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; letter-spacing: 0px; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;"></span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px;" /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; color: #333333; font-size: 13px; line-height: 18px; text-align: center;">
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-49679517773729560632014-01-07T22:10:00.001-07:002014-01-07T22:10:04.683-07:00from EDWARDIAN to AQUARIAN<h2 class="date-header" style="background-color: white; color: #335577; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0.2em; line-height: 2em; margin: 0px 28px 0px 43px; text-transform: uppercase;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Starting to accumulate information about someone on a blog (or in this case two blogs) is not the same thing as writing a book about them. It’s easy to say, “write a book” which people envision as one waving a magic wand so “poof” it appears on a shelf somewhere. One needs to justify writing a biography. In fact, a thorough search of places and documents means an investment of considerable money and travel.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">These are scans of scans rather than transferred code, so they are a little vague which AK was NOT! </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">They come from Tom Foral and remind us of AK's favorite teaching story which was about an actress who could summon the sense memory of a rose so vividly that the audience could tell what color the rose was. The photos were taken at the Bloomsburg home of AK and Lucy McCammon.</span></div>
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<b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Alvina Krause </b><span style="font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">(January 28, 1893 – December 31, 1981) </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">was an acting professor at Northwestern University who taught her own version of the famous “Method,” which used sense memories from the lives of the actors to evoke realistic acting. That’s not all there is to acting, First one has to learn lines, follow blocking, make sure to cheat towards the audience, project to the back wall of the auditorium, “land” lines and all manner of other technical things that need to become unconscious, intuitive and second nature. Beyond that, an eerie and sometimes frightening magic seizes the actor and audience in a trance of belief.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Krause was considered a “star maker” and that’s the way Northwestern University presents her, with a long list of her “stars.” She herself repeatedly emphasized that to come to her expecting to be made a star was folly. She told a story about a mother who brought her son, demanding that Krause make him famous. The silly woman was turned away. But there were plenty of sons (and daughters) who came on their own, begging to be split open, to get at the heart of their passion or talent or whatever it was inside them that drove them towards this specific art form, a near-sacred vocation. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Google can lead one in and out of many flammable and burnt buildings. I’ve read what dead men wrote, secrets and old black mail, and -- if you know how to read between lines written in invisible ink or decipher codes from past eras -- a lot of nonsense and laughable convictions. For former students none of that has the compelling power of Krause’s handwriting in one of the blue exam books where she scribbled her directing notes. One glimpse and we’re back in some moment, skewered like an insect on a pin, when insight struck us between the eyes. Oh! THAT was it!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">A handwriting sample and clip from Foral. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">She liked a small format as is this page which was evidently from a journal or diary notebook.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve been posting all this on two blogs -- actually there are three if you count a fragment that I abandoned early. They are<a href="http://www.krausenotes.blogspot.com/" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.krausenotes.blogspot.com</span></a> for those handwritten bits. <a href="http://www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com/" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com</span></a> for writing about Krause, much of it mine, I confess, but also notes and articles from others. The fragment is at <a href="http://theplayhouseateaglesmere.blogspot.com/" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://theplayhouseateaglesmere.blogspot.com</span></a> <b>David Downs</b>, a student and working partner of Krause, has also posted on a blog at<a href="http://www.davidgoingon.blogspot.com/" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.David</span>GoingOn.blogspot.com</a>. <b>David Press</b>’ thesis about Krause’s work is available at the usual Ph.D. thesis source, University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, MI, and Krause’s own Master’s thesis is available through the Northwestern Archives. I put notes from them on "The Silver Comb" blog. She did not receive a Ph.D.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">People have wondered why Krause was abruptly and forcibly retired from the School of Speech and why no one has ever explained her work in the way that other famous Method teachers have been analyzed. What is it that made her so effective and meaningful for so many people -- quite apart from any “star system” (an idea that made her snort) and even apart from the theatre, since many of us didn't become actors or directors. U</span><span style="font-family: Helvetica;">nderlying the politics of the School of Speech and the actions of the university are t<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">he dynamics of a great sea-change in the nature of theatre and another deep shift in the assumptions of the larger culture. The theatre went from realism to surrealism (possibly because of film or possibly </span>because<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> of a world gone absurd) and the culture went from prissy to libertine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Krause’s lifespan nearly coincided with the 20</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> century. She began her career as a stalwart orator, Chautauqua-style, declaiming great literature for her rural Midwest small town. Her first teaching job was in Seaside, OR, where she was the gym teacher. Then began a slow progression up through a small college, then Garrett seminary, and to Northwestern University, by that time under the protection of Dean Dennis, a great favorite on the Chatauqua circuit. She was technically a teacher of “interpretation” until almost the end of her teaching career, though by then she was staging plays year-round.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The materials on the blogs I shepherd are mostly from the last few years at Northwestern as they transitioned through Eaglesmere, PA to the Alvina Krause Theatre in Bloomsburg, PA, which is another source of information about Krause and her work. (<a href="http://www.bte.org/" style="color: #666666;">http://www.bte.org</a>) Over the years people tried to question her about her theories and methods, but she was evasive. There were several interrelated reasons for this. One was that she really didn’t have conscious theories and repeatedly protested that she just KNEW, she FELT it. Questions felt like challenges. In an academic setting she justified her presence in a university instead of a conservatory by emphasizing the crucial importance of history and culture, how it affected a character, how it had shaped the playwright. Her conviction was that actors could never learn too much.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: x-small;">The Eagles Mere Playhouse in late days.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Some students were exploring religion, as is natural at this stage in life, and grappling with some very muscular serpents. Questions about the core aspects of life were too much for some and there were accusations that her methods were too rough, damaging and belittling. She was certainly no mollycoddler but the students came begging to be broken open. It was risky in the way that true creation and art must be to have real value. Not a pretty pursuit, an entertainment, but a gut-wrenching transformative experience.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Of course sex was part of it. In those days girls at NU had to sign in and out after dark with a ten o'clock curfew, and the housemother came at midnight to make surprise bed-checks. If a girl married or became pregnant, no matter the sequence, she had to leave. A man caught in a homosexual act meant jail, a felony. Krause was in what is sometimes called a “Boston marriage,” two women in household partnership, a matter of intimacy and trust. Lucy did not come to campus, but in the summer and on long breaks the two women were together, often traveling. No one quite believed in lesbian relationships anyway. But at the other extreme some Method directors and actors at that time felt they had to break barriers and taboos on stage. One was cautious about being associated with them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Today the School of Speech is gone, replaced by the five divisions of Communication Arts: <a href="http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/csd/programs.php" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; font-family: Arial; letter-spacing: 0px;">Communication Sciences and Disorders</span></a></span><span style="color: #303030; font-family: Arial; letter-spacing: 0px;">; <a href="http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/communicationstudies/programs.php" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">Communication Studies</span></a></span><span style="color: #303030; letter-spacing: 0px;">; <a href="http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/rtf/programs.php" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Radio, Television and Film</span></a>; <a href="http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/performancestudies/programs.php" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Performance Studies</span></a>, <a href="http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/departments/theatre/programs.php" style="color: #666666;"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">Theatre (includes Dance)</span></a></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> Debate and interpretation have disappeared, along with the teaching of high school dramatics which was my actual major.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The division called “<i>Rhetoric and Public Culture</i>” would hardly stutter if presented with problems of sexuality, gender, and all that ticklish stuff. So why leave that hidden social aspect of the Fifties/Sixties School of Speech unstudied? What’s still in the closet anyway?</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Former students. Some “out”, some “bi,” some hidden, protecting reputations that control their employment, some just feeling like the Krause years were so intense and so personal that they don’t want them talked about. And there are, bless ‘em, still people who had no consciousness of any of this. We’re old now, our partners may be sick or dead, and life is tough enough without questioning what happened in one’s youth. Some write their own books and include Krause as part of their story.</span><br />
<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Former student <b>Joy Zinoman</b>, founder and director of <i>The Studio Theatre</i>, has already spoken of Krause as a "fierce lesbian" and has been a living example of Krause's other and mostly unremarked major contribution, which is her belief in local repertory theatre like both EaglesMere and Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Maybe there’s no place or justification for a book about Alvina Krause. Maybe it ought to be a play instead. David Downs took a run at it. Anyone else? Or should we just let Alvina Krause fade into the past? (I do not know who wrote the Wikipedia entry.)</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-10836570856388156162013-10-14T10:37:00.001-06:002013-10-14T10:38:10.373-06:00A REVEALING CONTRAST<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Karen Black</b> was in my cohort at Northwestern University School of Speech. Not for the whole time, because she disappeared. At the time I had no idea why -- some people may have known. Some of us assumed it was because <b>Alvina Krause</b> didn’t like her. Maybe AK didn’t like <b>Robert Benedetti</b>, her roommate at the time, either, but he was a big smart guy no one pushed around and he found a way around AK. He was just the kind of man she always tried to press into heroic parts, but he resisted and some thought that was why she resisted Karen Black.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes you can find more insight into someone through their dislikes than their likes. There’s a great deal of information about Karen out there now because of her recent death, and that includes the memorial in Hollywood which can be seen in compilation at this link: <a href="http://vimeo.com/75189301"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://vimeo.com/75189301</span></a> The best parts of the video are the beginning, which is a montage of clips from ALL her movies (quite different from each other) and the end, which is a montage of still photos from birth to death, some of them shocking and most of them seductive. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I was fascinated to see Karen’s sister, who looks much like her. You get a pretty good idea of a well-loved extravagant sweet non-intellectual child-woman who loved sex, cats, and -- well, long walks on country roads, sunsets, kittens, and . . . other corny stuff. She could sing and compose. She wrote plays. She also very shrewdly played scary roles in horror films and was often funny. There’s a good deal of intelligence behind that, which would exasperate some people. It’s hard to know how much she was watching herself.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My basic theory is that AK didn’t like Karen because Karen scared her: she was a person who had abandoned all caution, while AK had staked her life on prudence and discretion in relationships, academic life, and -- well, she wasn’t always cautious when she taught acting. In some ways she was as instinctive and as able to pick up on undertow and subtext as KB was, and everyone says KB was an ace at it. But KB always supported and appreciated those inner springs, while AK wanted to analyze and shape them, which is what she understood to be the task of the actor, especially a traditional realistic proscenium stage actor trained to address tragedy and heroism. Big ideas, subtly expressed.</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Personally, AK had to have respectability because that was her safety. She was a small, ambitious woman who grew up the youngest in a big family on a Mid-West farm and survived with a sonorous voice, a vigorous erect body, and the singlemindedness of a sword. If she had been labeled a lesbian, her career would have ended. She never risked acting professionally. It would be going too far to say that she had a German northern temperament while Karen Black had a Mediterranean Jewish soul. But not much.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Karen was a voluptuous, generously sensuous, man-loving person whose salvation was innocence. She didn’t cling or demand or try to prove anything. So far the only complaint I’ve seen her make is that she was treated badly on the set of “<i>Day of the Locust.</i>” It’s a bitter, punishing piece of madness and somehow that got attached to her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The career of Benedetti was quite different. I haven’t had anything to do with either of them until recently and then only read Benedetti’s books, watched his movies, emailed a bit. KB is on Twitter. The two lives went in quite different directions and yet stayed together in friendship, which was always KB’s policy. Karen’s husband released the story of why she suddenly disappeared from our cohort and why she and Bene stayed such close friends: they conceived a child together at Northwestern. <a href="http://karenblackactress.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://karenblackactress.blogspot.com</span></a> Both biological parents have embraced this woman, who is an artist with family.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It’s hard to imagine either one of her bio-parents considering abortion and in those days it was probably illegal if not life-threatening. The stigma, lack of social support, and theatre dreams of both youngsters made raising a child alone impossible. The two families were local, proud, and who knows how they felt? Or whether they knew. Adoption in those days was rigidly private -- the government SWORE it would be forever hidden information. </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The State of Illinois has opened their adoption records so that the child made right under our noses -- I suppose some of us might have known, including AK -- found her bioparents, Karen and Bene. No doubt results are mixed and such an enterprise is not always well-advised, but in this case all three had known about each other and tried to find each other. It turned out just fine. The Benedetti family, generous and warm Italians that they are, pulled her in -- along with her children and grandchildren. She and Karen painted together towards the end and she helped with Karen’s care. KB refused morphine as much as she could bear so as to absorb this happiness.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Benedetti has a strong social conscience with a special concern for African Americans in the South. Karen was more of a “mom” who took care of everyone, regardless of who they were. Whether the social constriction the two shared as the price of love was part of creating their ethic or whether their natural character saw them through the ordeal, I see it as a triumph in the end. Integrity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I suspect that when KB looked at AK, she saw a path she could never take and wouldn’t want to. All that caution, all that self-discipline and self-denial would have been impossible for her. Conversely, I suspect that when AK looked at KB she saw a life she could never lead: all restraints dropped, all goals surrendered to fate and hard work. I sat in the back of Annie May Swift auditorium, watching, and was more like AK than KB, but appreciated KB anyway. Do we have to make choices? </span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In some ways, AK’s choice betrayed her, because her fame and the emotional pressure she put on her students to break them out of their shells scared the corporate managers of the university apparatus so that they eased her out a little early. She was wise to have the backup of Eagles Mere and then Bloomsberg where all the calls were her own and a certain amount of abandonment was part of the regime, so long as you got to rehearsals on time. She and Lucy spent wonderful summer Sundays out in a little boat (it had to have been pea green) with big hats against sunburn. AK scribbled on a notepad, thinking furiously about the playwrights’ knots to untie for an increasingly savvy audience. All the while Lucy in her faithful, rather stout way, rowed quietly along on the mirroring water. KB’s idea of such intimacy might have meant stripping and plunging in, which would have ended local affection. Except for the stalwarts who would heroically swim out to save her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A writer’s game -- watching, making word pictures, passing judgment on people many have loved -- is a risky business. Maybe more immoral that sharing physical pleasure when the opportunity arises. Maybe more immoral than pressing youngsters against their own psychic thorns in hopes of awakening them.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In a way AK probably had something to do with KB’s development but I don’t know whether anyone ever asked either of them. Sometimes it’s the people who wave us on who teach us most. Like, not to waste our time on a fate that’s not ours. Karen didn’t need Eagles Mere -- she was a natural film personality, not a stage presence, though she did well in New York. It was the California climate that let her bloom, and we are grateful.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-10341560145638456572013-08-20T21:23:00.001-06:002013-08-20T21:23:28.916-06:00EAGLES MERE, PA<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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That's Bill and Kate (Emery) Pogue at the steps.</div>
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Here are Kate and Bill again standing the footprint left when the Playhouse was torn down and trucked away. I don't know whether a photo record was kept. There's one photo of the exterior that shows up on the Internet. It features an awning on the front. Where do the bats roost now? Or are there still bats? Do the ghosts of passionate actors drift through on moonlit nights?</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-42744825596340379782013-08-16T06:41:00.002-06:002013-08-16T06:41:25.767-06:00KAREN BLACK AND AK<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/10233540/Karen-Black-The-face-of-the-counterculture.html">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/10233540/Karen-Black-The-face-of-the-counterculture.html</a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Articles about <b>Karen Black</b> are accumulating on the Internet and probably will keep doing so for a long time. She definitely had an impact on the culture, both the “low” and the “high.” And I’m sure she was pretty vivid in the lives of those around her as well. I think of the Flaubert quote I keep at the top of my computer: “<i>Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”</i> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Among the small cohort that has gotten back in touch via email since the years 1957 to 1961, the reaction to Karen has been helpful in understanding the role and contribution of the legendary <b>Alvina Krause</b> -- not because Karen was a protegée who achieved the stardom some were seeking, but because AK wanted nothing to do with her! Was even mean to her! So why? (That’s what AK would ask, if she were being fair.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Really effective teachers are like heart surgeons: intimate, incendiary, and relentless.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">For some they are life-saving kindlers -- for others, they start conflagrations of identity that may need professional help to recover.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I can think of two -- maybe three -- who landed in hospitals, “decompensated” in the jargon of our times.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The kind of teacher who does incredible things is creating an instrument for acting -- not a star.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What makes such a teacher so dangerous is not so much their methods or intentions, but the hopes that the students bring:</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“Oh, set me on fire, Miss Krause!</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Make me burn with a fine clean flame!”</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In other words, they handed their talent over to someone else instead of exploring it themselves.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She knew this.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She tried to tell them this.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Sometimes she went too far.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">It is a kind of work that can be painful.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But she could not resist taking on a few of the riskier ones. Karen was not one of “chosen”, but <b>Paula Ragusa/Prentiss</b> was. Somehow, mostly because she had a prince of a partner (<b>Dick Benjamin</b>), Paula survived. Her sister did not, but I didn’t know Ann. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Karen also had a strong partner then: <b>Robert Benedetti</b> (Bene to friends) <a href="http://robertbenedetti.com/Biography.htm"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://robertbenedetti.com/Biography.htm</span></a> , a formidable polymath whom AK tried to tempt into her more ambitious productions (“<i>Oedipus,” “Lear”</i>) with no success. Both Karen and Bene withdrew from the AK camp. They thought for themselves, found their own way with spectacular results. Unconventional.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So that’s one circle of this complex. There might be other people in it. I won’t name names for the other circles. There were individuals (writers, observers) who belonged to no group. Given that most of us were not yet 21 and given the slow awakening in the larger culture, it was not too surprising that there were groups based on sexuality, including homosexuality. Perhaps it is more surprising that the gay men shared with “sisters,” who mostly just hadn’t decided. (I was saving myself for Montana cowboys.) Those gays didn’t really know what it meant yet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Another group was a professional set of people whose families were Broadway actors but who for some reason didn’t choose the <b>Stella Adler/Lee Strasberg</b> classes, so they came looking for AK, who was considered an equally good Method acting teacher. This group wasn’t looking at Hollywood. They stayed on Broadway and in the touring companies and summer repertories that spin off from Broadway. Still acting today.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Those with an academic perspective split into two groups: those who were Ph.D. analytical people who could get into trouble if they challenged AK. Of course, challenge is at the heart of a Ph.D. candidate -- questioning is the name of the game. But AK never got a doctorate and never absorbed the ethic. To her it was defiance. Others, who aligned themselves with her more loyally, were sometimes drawn into a kind of family relationship, as though they were the sorts of sons who would become vicars in the estate’s parish.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">People who were invited to Eagles Mere, AK’s repertory company in a tiny Pennsylvania resort town on a pristine lake, were another group, overlapping the previous. Working under the influence of that intoxicating drug No-Sleep, we did what we considered to be amazing work while AK used every trick she had and rejoiced when they were effective. Certainly we learned our limits, which usually turned out to be a lot farther out there than we might have guessed -- even for me, who was only a costumer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Like everything else in the great cultural sea-change that roared through the world in the Sixties and Seventies, theatre transformed, veering into absurdism, dada, spectacle, and shock-performing in the actual laps of the audience, maybe sans costumes.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At the same time on television the series were creating the image of a strange Stepford happy-families way of life that has since boomeranged into vampires and zombies.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">All the while the actual world was far more like </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“Five Easy Pieces” </i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">and </span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“Easy Rider.</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">”</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If we were lucky.</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The “Method” was created in Edwardian times for an Edwardian kind of theatre: prosceniums, realism, mimesis of gentry -- very <i>“Downton Abbey”</i> with an echo of Shakespeare and Greek theatre, which were all the rage in the Fifties when I went to high school. Well, they don’t wear out, do they? I loved the movie “<i>Being Julia</i>,” which hit all the stops in the kind of work AK understood: an elocution base, a comedy skill, and a thread of darkness. No need to get either nude or screwed. At least not onstage. But if Karen Black were persuaded it was necessary, she would. With style. So would Paula -- if she were in the mood. Both women were a helluva lot more intelligent than they seemed. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">This little cohort remembers a lot of indelible moments, mostly hilarious. I would have loved to have seen Karen play a scene with Paula. Both women turned out to be effective in front of a camera. Method acting is really powerful when handled skillfully in close-up acting where the flicker of an eyelash expresses a major realization. AK never addressed film acting, but her Method was effective anyway because it had a sound base. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I think it was important to AK to keep theatre at a genteel cultural level, the sort of respect one once gave to a well-traveled Chautauqua speaker like<b> Dean Dennis</b> who recruited her and supported her career. She was afraid of side shows, burlesque, carnie downscale stuff, because she needed the respectability -- the assumption of Christianity -- in the first place (she was, after all, from a small Midwestern town) to distinguish this acting from the kind that was a euphemism for prostitution. At the same time, her roots were in progressivism, aspiration to the highest level, idealism. In the Fifties film was in love with <b>Bergman</b>, Russian realism, and French Cinema Veritée -- all of them still hanging onto the aftermath of war. Some of the students loved it dearly, but though she never said so, AK was not one to appreciate the gutter. Or even nihilism. Oh, maybe Chekhov. She wanted to be serious and despised <b>Helen Hayes</b> for her sentimentality. And girly curls.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Extraordinary people are generally more many-sided than monolithic, but no one can be all things to all others and much of life is a matter of finding one’s niche. There’s really no NEED to see Karen Black as a protegée of AK or anyone else. But those of us who knew both of them at NU have not forgotten either of them, one way or another. They both knew how to seduce. Far more than just sexually.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-18906892645787254142013-07-25T15:29:00.002-06:002013-07-25T15:29:11.684-06:00NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Kevin Leonard, prompted by David Downs, and fully supported by myself, is collecting and ordering the archive for Alvina Krause, the legendary acting professor at Northwestern University. This is the University introduction:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This service was launched in July 2011 to capture and preserve historically significant web content generated by and relating to Northwestern University. Your archived web site will be accessible via the NUA web site and will be searchable. Additional information on this initiative may be found at <a href="http://www.library.northwestern.edu/webarchives"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://www.library.northwestern.edu/webarchives</span></a>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">NUA will only capture and preserve publicly available materials and will never copy content that is password protected or requires registration or data entry. In addition, all preserved content will be embargoed for at least 30 days before being made public and will then be prominently labeled as an “archived copy for study and research” to avoid confusion with your live website. This process involves no special preparation of the website and is designed to have no negative effects on your web server’s performance. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Please contact Benn Joseph or Kevin Leonard by phone (847-491-3136) or email (<a href="mailto:b-joseph@northwestern.edu"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">b-joseph@northwestern.edu</span></a> or <a href="mailto:kbl767@northwestern.edu"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">kbl767@northwestern.edu</span></a>) should you have any questions or concerns about the Northwestern University Web Archives. For more information about donating materials to the University Archives, please see <a href="http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/university-archives/donating-materials"><span style="color: #0433ff; font-size: 11px; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://www.library.northwestern.edu/libraries-collections/evanston-campus/university-archives/donating-materials</span></a></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is an excellent first step toward translating the mission of your University Archives into the digital age. Thank you for your time and consideration.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In case you are following this blog in order to study AK’s life or are actually on the campus in Evanston, there are materials at Deering Library that include paper and other real world materials. Leonard and Downs want to collect as many as possible of the class notebooks in which AK replied to students’ account of their work. These two blogs, <a href="http://www.krausenotes.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.krausenotes.blogspot.com</span></a> and <a href="http://www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com</span></a> will be archived.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Which raises the question of who deposits what where. Many AK students are famous and courted by major institutions. Marshall Mason’s papers will go to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Other are academics with close affiliations where they teach. My cohort is crossing into our seventies, so we are actually having OUR students archive materials about US. My own work is split among quite different fields so will be scattered. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some people or their executors don’t realize what importance some seemingly trivial materials might have for researchers. Leonard tells me they often get inquiries by people writing histories of performance arts, crucial in the 20</span><span style="font-size: 8px; letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> century when camera acting was just coming to fruition and experimental theatre was taking hold even out on the street. If there’s any question in your mind about it, contact Leonard for advice. Not me!</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-62511897486575500902013-07-02T17:51:00.001-06:002013-07-02T17:51:15.022-06:00MORE IMAGES OF ALVINA KRAUSE FROM JACK PEYROUSE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuslACt7UAUI1IfH_tuV_-9y7cTsaTa0UEocFvW4-0NENRWRYTgutzmGeC7Z6l8jljDpAl40Ciz1YvebURPaQkV13TMY-6h_G2NBiEiWhUWrwfb4kYoIuid2ve7N7vUJsEvn4jPilfbIs/s1600/Alvina+Krause+1.5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuslACt7UAUI1IfH_tuV_-9y7cTsaTa0UEocFvW4-0NENRWRYTgutzmGeC7Z6l8jljDpAl40Ciz1YvebURPaQkV13TMY-6h_G2NBiEiWhUWrwfb4kYoIuid2ve7N7vUJsEvn4jPilfbIs/s320/Alvina+Krause+1.5.jpg" width="225" /></a></div>
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This drawing was done by a student at Doane College.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVz6TAMGntHqGAEuVr0K8ptKhSIcE_lSUBBjJ-mpLOcAT82XaYHhn3yZUeJz7hyR8SpYDjL8N9SsgqQ6_nXmkNuIv63vwYzuy7aSsC06Zl-wWTJYfB5SU0ZgUxiJDJZ8P5xSgHSiD8vyc/s1600/Alvina+Krause+1966+1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVz6TAMGntHqGAEuVr0K8ptKhSIcE_lSUBBjJ-mpLOcAT82XaYHhn3yZUeJz7hyR8SpYDjL8N9SsgqQ6_nXmkNuIv63vwYzuy7aSsC06Zl-wWTJYfB5SU0ZgUxiJDJZ8P5xSgHSiD8vyc/s320/Alvina+Krause+1966+1.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>
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1966 with Jack Peyrouse</div>
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These photos were taken at workshops done at Doane College while Peyrouse was the head of the drama department. She came yearly for three years.</div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-45878613385729373162013-07-02T06:02:00.000-06:002013-07-02T17:52:23.485-06:00PHOTOS OF AK AT WORK <span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These photos come from Jack Peyrouse who was a student of Alvina Krause's in the early Sixties. Doane College is in Crete, Nebraska where she received her honorary</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">doctorate. They show AK at work in rehearsal, moving among the actors to whisper into their ears, put her hand over a mouth, comment on behalf of the character or the playwright, and all the other strategies to evoke total engagement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">AK grew up in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, but I don't know how close that is to Doane College. Still she was a American from the Midwest and felt at home there.</span><br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-91950641464043177812013-05-13T13:08:00.001-06:002013-07-02T06:03:16.906-06:00EIGHT CREDITS, SOME SWEAT -- AND A.K.<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">EIGHT CREDITS, SOME SWEAT -- AND ALVINA KRAUSE</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">by Dan Sullivan</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LA Times, July 29, 1970</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SANTA MARIA. The Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts of Allen Hancock College: It sounds like one of those institutions that take ads in the back of “unglossy” magazines promising you a lifetime career in espionage or cartooning. In fact, the school, named after the Los Angeles millionaire who donated its site, is a respectable member of California’s junior college system. And its summer “conservatory” program for young people who want to go into the theatre promise only the chance to live and work with a busy repertory company.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">But Donovan Marley, director of the college’s theatre department and founder of the summer of the program, has worked to make the Santa Maria experience richer than the old stock-apprentice system it resembles. Eight academic credits go with it. The plant, a $1 million thrust-stage theatre, patterned after the Guthrie in Minneapolis, is first -class. The plays, ranging this year from Anouilh’s “<i>Becket”</i> to “<i>Life with Father”</i> are cast immediately; if you don’t get at least one part, you get your $400 back and can go home. (Or as most do, you can stay and do technical or fronted the house work.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SOLID FACULTY</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Most important, Marley’s staff knows theater and knows young people. Gordon Peacock, directing “Saint Joan” this year, is head of Canada’s largest university theater department, that of the University of Alberta. Set designer Robert Blackman did the scenery for the American premiere of Feiffer’s “God Bless” at the Yale Repertory Theater. The seven young professional actors who form the core of the company (with Equity approval) are young but seasoned. And -- Alvina Krause.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Some readers will not know who Miss Krause is. Others will be surprised to know she is still teaching. Since her retirement -- not, one gathers, voluntary -- from Northwestern in 1963, she hasn’t been teaching on a regular basis. But at 75 she is a busy guest lecturer. has made a series of films for educational TV and very occasionally takes on a guest director’s assignment. Last year she staged “Three Sisters” here (she accepted the assignment, she said, because she had finally decided what the play is about) and this year she is doing “Becket.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Marley wanted Miss Krause because during her 33 years at Northwestern she ha become what is called a legend in her own time, maybe the best acting teacher in the country. Her students have included Patricia Neal, Salome Jens, Jerry Orbach, Dick Benjamin and Charlton Heston. Also, Walter Kerr, whom she had advised not to tecome an actor. (Too earnest.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A mystique grew around Miss Krause in her Northwestern years: she was one of those teachers you have crushes on years after you thought you’d stopped having crushes. Gerald Freedman, director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, put it this way: “You suddenly realized you had collided with someone who demanded that you take full measure of yourself.” Another alumnus wrote: “If Alvina Krause had been born 300 years ago, she would have been burned as a witch.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Watching her rehearsing “Becket” for its Tuesday night opening, you were reminded less of a witch than of a fairy godmother -- an unfrilly one, like Cinderella’s. Miss Krause is tiny, wears sensible shoes and, despite the forbidding portrait above, has in persona a deceptive air of being pleased with the way things are going: as if she were looking up at a six-foot son and telling him he looked just fine. This rather folksy image has its uses -- Miss Krause can issue a zinger so pleasantly that it’s into you and working before you realize it’s not a compliment.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">LEADING HERESY</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Like most directors she complains about having to teach acting as well as get a show together. This is rhetoric. Clearly, she loves to do both. She is on her feet every minute during rehearsal, following the action like a head linesman. Then she goes home and types up notes, which some smart publisher will someday make a book of. The lady is involved.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Marley admires her, because “she makes actors think; and anybody who can do that . . .” she considers the leading heresy of this or any age is that acting consists of saying words emotionally. Rather, with Stanislavsky and Boleslavsky, she sees the actor’s task is to be a matter of re-creating the big and little stimulus and responses that constitute your character’s life (everybody’s life), emotion coming as a natural aftermath. This means that everyone who does a show for Miss Krause, down to the spear carriers, has to know what is going through the nervous system of his character at every moment, and to an extent feel it. It they don’t, they get caught</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Norman priests and barons -- be aware that a Saxon may infiltrate your entourage,” she had warned Henry II’s honor guard in a note early in rehearsals. “Never be unaware of movement behind you.” The warning did not sink in. So, at the rehearsal I watched, Miss Krause had a fellow on the sidelines come bursting into the scene, bowl over the guards, and wrestle Henry to the ground. It was a surprise to everybody, especially Henry (Laird Williamson) but the point was made.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Acting to Miss Krause is believing <i>with your body</i>. Trying to get the right pinking quality into Henry’s and Becket’s reporter, she made Williamson and Vance Jefferis fence their way through the scene. For an intimate moment n a cave during a storm, she flicked the lights on and off in the rehearsal hall for lightning and made those on the sidelines drum their nails on the floor for rain. Automatically the players slowed down, playing the silences as well as the words of the scene.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She prowled the stage like a poltergeist, quietly crooning the thoughts of a character as an actor would speak his lines, suddenly clapping her hand over the mouth of a player who was supposed to spit, making him <i>need</i> to spit.</span></div>
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“You’re using this too much,” she said, tapping Williamson’s head. “Stop thinking <i>How</i>. Let the scene play you.” To capture Henry’s isolation before a Saxon crowd, she had Williamson look around the room “and tell us what it’s like to be stared at by actors who think they can do the scene better than you can.” The actors on the sidelines caught the mood. “Boo, screw it up!” they chanted. “They’re faking now,” Miss Krause said pleasantly. “Should have seen their faces a minute ago.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Forget the words, play underneath the words, she kept telling them. The character says this, but isn’t he really thinking about what he’s going to say next? Now is he really gruff here, or does he know that if he isn’t gruff he’s going to go to pieces.” “Archbishop,” she yelled to a silent player in one scene. “What’s bothering you here?”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“I’m the Archbishop and I’m not used to being kept waiting.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“What are you going to do about it.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“I’ll wait, damn it.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Very good.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She made the extras in a crowd scene tell how exactly how much they had been bribed to cheer for Henry. (“Is that all? I got more.”) She made a girl with three lines picture exactly what it would mean for a peasant girl to go off to the palace as a courtesan. (“What does that mean to her? Ice cream sodas?”) She was the Story Lady, getting everybody into the world of the play, and if she wouldn’t go, she pushed you.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Afterwards she talked, not effusively, about her method. She has always worked this way It <i>is</i> Stanislavsky -- and lots of other people. The state of American acting is “rather sad,” mostly because no one really believes that acting can be taught as music is. She likes Santa Maria. “I like the attitude, the vision. It isn’t flighty. It begins down here.” She points at the floor. Where she begins.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-31867736438391834262013-05-10T23:34:00.002-06:002015-01-30T13:50:56.746-07:00ALVINA KRAUSE, TEACHER by Neal Weaver<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">ALVINA KRAUSE, TEACHER by Neal Weaver</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“She is a catalytic agent; something has to happen to you when you encounter her. You cannot ignore her. You suddenly realize you have collided with someone who demands that you take full measure of yourself.” -- Gerald Freedman</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">If Alvina Krause has been born 300 years ago, she would have been burned as a witch. No other explanation would have served to account for the extraordinary effect she has on young people -- and often on older ones as well.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In thirty-three years as a teacher of acting at Northwestern University, in Evanston, IL, she taught a roster of students which reads like a Who’s Who of American Theatre: Patricia Neal, Charlton Heston, Walter Kerr, Inga Swenson, Jean Hagen, Gerald Freedman, Jeffrey Hunter, Ralph Meeker, Jerry Ohrbach, Martha Hyer, Salome Jens, Paula Prentiss, Joe Bova, Nancy Dussault, Robert Reed, Bill Daniels, Carol Lawrence, Dick Benjamin. And the list goes on and on.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But numbers are not important: that could be luck, or coincidence. The remarkable thing has always been her knack for inspiring the young, her drive, her imperishable idealism, her incredible vitality, and the last impression she leaves on her students.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In June of 1964, she delivered a lecture on an assembly program at the Evanston Township High School. A sixteen year old boy in the audience wrote his impressions after hearing her speak for the first time: </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">[In a composition which reached us via his English composition teacher.]</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“To me Miss Alvina Krause is truth. Truth in the sense that she is exactly what she claims people should be -- alive. She is the perfect example of the being who reacts to every stimulus with all of her sense, with all her body, with all her mind. Even before she began to speak, I noticed how she examined and responded to her surroundings, especially the audience itself. I could have sworn she looked directly at me several times during the awards presentation -- not only looked at me, but noticed me, as if she were saying to herself, “There’s a tired boy in a pinstripe shirt. What can I say to interest him?” And yet I am sure that she saw every single person in the audience, for it is ridiculous to assume that she would notice me especially. when she spoke concerning the “total man” of the Elizabethan Age, my feelings about her were confirmed. She is a great teacher because she teaches not what she has learned, but what she herself is. She shows people how to live.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Starry-eyed? Maybe. But a lot of older and perhaps wiser people would confirm the impression. What kind of woman does it take to be able, at just under seventy years of age, to produce that kind of impression on a teenager today? “<i>The way to her heart is through action</i>,” says Gerald Freedman, the Artistic Director of the New York Shakespeare Festival -- and perhaps that’s the best way to explain her: by describing her in action.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A freshman entering the theatre department at Northwestern usually encountered her obliquely at first. Beginning acting was reserved for sophomores. But if he was wise, he learned quickly that she was willing to permit freshmen to slip into the back of the auditorium and observe her classes, and as often as not, he would arrange to get there at 9:30 AM, even if it meant cutting another class in the process. And this opening lecture was always something of an event that even upperclassmen dropped in to hear. it went something like this:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When the class was assembled, the swinging doors at the back of the auditorium would open, smartly, and she would stride in, often as not dressed in shades of wine or purple, with a handkerchief tucked neatly at her waist, and her hair moored firmly in place by an antique silver comb.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She moved briskly down the aisle, with an expression which was expectant, playful, and quizzical, and greeted the familiar faces in the crowd -- usually with an amiably malicious and intensely “in” remark, which made the old-timers feel superior, if they understood it, and whetted the appetite of the new-comers to belong. Then, taking her seat on the apron of the stage, she would consult her class cards, and call the roll. Once. On the first day. After that she would know them and know who was present and who was not. Then a pause. the smile would be gone, and the class cards laid aside, as she visibly summoned her powers. The class would fall silent and there would be not the faintest rustle of movement. She surveyed them for a long moment, thoughtfully, and then began to speak.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Now we can get down to business.</i>” Tucking her handkerchief into her belt.<i> “First of all, we’d better be sure you’re in the right place. I teach acting. I don’t know why you are here. Some of you want to be teachers. Some, perhaps, simply because you love the theatre and want to learn about it. Certainly off of you will not be professional actors. Thank God. The field is overcrowded as it is. But I’m teaching for the professionals. Those who want to devote their lives to acting. And your work will be judged accordingly. If you are looking for glamour and fun, this is not the place for you. Perhaps we will find both. I hope so. but they are accidental. By-products. Our object is work. I will not teach you how to be successful. I can give you no simple tricks that will make you a star. There are none, and anyway, that doesn’t interest me. I will try to teach you the craft of acting. How successful I am depends on my ability and on yours. I can be patient with slowness to learn. All art is difficult, and it takes time. But I will not tolerate stupidity and laziness. There is a waiting list for this class. I cannot admit more than 20 or the whole class would be useless. If the University would let me, I would have fewer. So long as you are willing to work and learn, you may stay. But if you aren’t, there are others waiting to take your place.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“You say -- most of you, anyway -- that you want to be actors. Do you know what you are saying? Do you have any idea of what it MEANS to be an actor?</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“An actor must be a little more and a little better than anyone else. He must be able to play a genius today and a fool tomorrow and understand both. To have a voice which is strong, flexible, and controlled. To have a body which responds to command, which can handle a Renaissance rapier or a cowboy’s lariat, if need be. He must know something of music, something of art, and a great deal of life. He must have eyes to see, a mind that understands. His senses must be sharper than anyone else’s . He must be able to perceive the world as a king perceives it or a saint, or a stevedore. He must know all places and all times, for he may be called upon to play them. And after you are cast in a role, it is too late to begin preparing for it. if you were cast as Hamlet, tomorrow, what would you do? The character alone is far more than you can master in the four-to-six weeks of rehearsal our theatre allows. You must know beforehand what these people wore, and how they wore it, the houses they lived in and the food they ate. A prince of Denmark who is a swordsman and a poet does not move as we move. Life at court was filled with intrigue, and a man who was not alert and on his guard didn’t live long. This is no room for your slumps and your slouches. You must learn to walk, to speak, to think, to feel. And then you must learn to do it on cue.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Now a word of warning. You come here fascinated with the neurotic artist, in all his picturesqueness and his pose. Don’t be taken in. Kill that illusion now. Neurosis is not interesting. Because it interferes with work, with action, with accomplishment. We have no time for neurosis.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Then, perhaps, the rear doors would open quietly, and some latecomer would try to slip in unobserved.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“I see you, Tom. Come on down.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">He would move self-consciously down the aisle but no one would turn to look at him.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Tom has a way of being late. Be careful, Tom. You miss things that way.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“I overslept” -- </i>in a muffled voice.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Sleep can be an escape they say. . . We were talking about work. And about acting. Acting is not to be learned by sitting in The Hut or Scott Hall Grill. Or by playing at psychology. None of us is perfect -- but we are all capable of improvement. Get rid of your laziness. Of your vices. Of everything that stands between you and work.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Now, if we are going to accomplish anything here, we must get to know each other very well. Acting is not like history. I can’t stand up and read you the rules. Each of us has his own special problems. If we are to work freely we must not be afraid; there is no room for jealousy, back-biting and intrigue -- three things the theatre abounds in. The only way to avoid these things is by understanding. Understanding of ourselves and each other.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“For that reason I am going to ask you to keep a journal. To record your progress, to ask your questions, to discuss your problems. Acting problems, that is. I am neither a psychoanalyst nor a Mother Confessor. But the journal is a means of saying to me things which for one reason or another you do not want to say in class. The journal will be required for the first quarter. After that you may continue it or not, as you wish. . .</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“Your first assignment will be a written one. There will not be many such. But tonight I want you to begin your journals by telling me why you are in this class, and why you want to act. And tell me a little about your past experience, and what it has meant to you. I don’t ask for an autobiography. Your personal lives do not concern me, except as they related to acting. The journals will be turned in on Wednesday, hereafter, and returned to you on Friday on Friday with my comments, if any.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“I will ask you to buy but two books. ACTING, THE FIRST SIX LESSONS by Richard Boleslavsky, and AN ACTOR PREPARES by Constantin Stanislavsky. But that is not to say this is the only reading I expect you to do. Your preparation is something that must go on, every day, all the time. You must read, look at pictures, listen to music -- because these are the keys to people. You must, for instance, be able to know and use in your acting the different, say, in the Vienna of the plays of Schnitzler and the Budapest of Molnar. If you can’t travel, as many of us can’t, these things can be learned only from the books, the music, the pictures of the people who live there.</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>“You must know plays and the theatre, for there are many styles, and you may need any of them at any time. You cannot act Noel Coward in the same manner as Tennessee Williams or Congreve like Shakespeare. You should be reading plays always and you should know something of the history and tradition of the theatre . . .”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She talked on: didactic, visionary, sometimes unreasonable but demanding, demanding, demanding. Her effect was hypnotic. For a group of young men and women of whom perhaps little has been required save tolerable manners and good grades in school, she presented a challenge that was irresistible.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Life quickened, seemed to open out and grow larger, and a sense of purpose grew in them. Ordinary academic classes seemed like an interruption in the work of life. They wanted to read, write, think, act. Her words burst bubbles in their minds, pulled them down to reality in some ways, but at the same time set off flashes of illumination, clusters of revelations about themselves and the life they aspired to. she expected them to be a little more than human, and they did not want to disappoint her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">When the bell sounded to signal the end of the hour, it was an interruption.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In the ensuing classes, the program of study was carefully planned: each quarter of class work was geared toward a particular project, to sum up the work which was done. In the first quarter of beginning acting, the project was a statue: one of Malvina Hoffman’s sculptures of the Peoples of the World in the Hall of Man at Chicago’s Field Museum: to look at the statue, feel it (museum guards eventually grew tolerant), touch it, perceive it in the muscles, empathetically -- and from that physical object, create a character and a scene. Without words. Simply to absorb another creature into one’s muscles, explore it, come to understand it, and then coax them to bring it forth again, intact, and alive. The second quarter took an opposite tack: a character from a novel -- if possible, a big novel: ANNA KARENINA or OF HUMAN BONDAGE, which spanned a life-time, and in which the novelist supplied the background and the local color the playwright would not: the details to be picked over and absorbed and selected to create a performance. Then, at last, in the final quarter, the absolute discipline of the thing itself: tackling a character from a play. (Other subjects and areas were also covered along the way: dialects, vocal exercises, comedy techniques, how to make entrances and exits, and how to fall down or faint convincingly without getting hurt, along with sense memory exercises, and exercises in observation and concentration.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The second year acting course was not acting at all, but officially under the aegis of the Department of Oral Interpretation. ORAL INTERPRETATION OF THE DRAMA. The Greeks, Shakespeare, and selected moderns. But something slightly demented on the first day, like taking the class out of doors to play a game of baseball in The Manner of the Greeks would serve to scare off all the random English Majors and academic types who might have signed up for the course and then she could resume serious work on Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides. (When President Roosevelt’s death was announced, Alvina Krause was shattered: how could she teach that afternoon? By concentrating on Sophocles: “Numberless are the world’s wonders. But none so wonderful as Man.” I have not spoken to her about the Kennedy assassination, but my guess is that Euripides provided the text again. “Never shall the violent man rest at my hearth. Never shall his thoughts be my thoughts.” That undergraduate year led to the real meat. STYLES IN ACTING was Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw (“SHAW IS DIDACTIC”) and Brecht, or any other playwrights the class was especially anxious to tackle.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In addition to her teaching duties, Alvina Krause was also the principal instigator of a theatre workshop program of two evenings each quarter, consisting of 3 plays each, or a total of eighteen plays a year, directed by student directors, and overseen by A.K. herself. (A.K. being the way she signs all communications, and the natural term of reference for her.) This was in addition to teaching, and directing one major University Theatre Production each year.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Still, this was not enough to occupy her fully.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">During spring vacation in the year 1945, when World War II was still in progress, and rationing was still in effect, she went to New York to see plays with a friend, Lucy McCammon, a physical education teacher at Bloomsburg State Teachers College in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Lucy happened to mention to her than an old summer theatre was standing empty in a mountain resort town called Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. On impulse they got on the phone, without taking time to reflect, and within minutes the property was leased, and A.K. and Lucy found themselves proprietors of a theatre. (“I needed freedom -- freedom to put in practice fully what I believe in, the kind of theatre I was convinced COULD exist . . . And students were crying for experience, real experience.”)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A company was assembled of interested and talented students -- among them a young girl from Knoxville, Tennessee, named Patricia Neal -- and in June of 1945, the company gathered for the first time at the Playhouse.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The theatre had formerly been run by Ethel Barrymore Colt, but a war had intervened, and the first chore was to drive out the bats and mice. (The bats always remained a problem, but they had a strong theatre sense, and confined their appearances to murder-mysteries such as MACBETH, though the flying squirrels showed no such discretion.)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Starting out with little or nothing but enthusiasm and determination (Patricia Neal, in addition to playing leads was the company cook and snapped beans during rehearsals, or ran across the road during the breaks to prepare her specialty tuna fish with noodles -- quick, nourishing and cheap), the first season of nine plays was launched, and the theatre continued for twenty seasons, during which it built up an inventory of costumes, scenery and properties any theatre might envy. (At least one Off-Broadway show has been costumed with things borrowed from the costume room at Eagles Mere -- an enticing room full of boxes and bags with labels like: “Troll Tails and Strange Things.”) </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In twenty years at Eagles mere, A.K. produced a total of one hundred and seventy-eight plays, including 18 of Shakespeare, 16 of Bernard Show, 5 of Ibsen, 3 of Chekhov, 4 of Moliere, and 2 of Edmond Rostand. There were seven musical comedies, an opera (with Inga Swenson), an original revue, several original plays, and works by most of the major modern playwrights -- from Noel Coward to Pirandello, from Tennessee Williams to Ionesco.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">They were busy years, lived at a high level of intensity, and the work was constant and hard.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There was also the need for enormous personal discipline: among her students she commanded a degree of respect and admiration that sometimes bordered on idolatry. (Students tended to be categorized as Krauseites and Anti-Krauseites, according to whether they joined the cult or avoided it.) and the strength of her personality was and is immense. Her rampant idealism can make an ordinary high rage seem like divine wrath, and the value placed on her opinions made her praise or blame carry enormous weight. Consequently, she has always been conscious of the necessity to use her power as gently and wisely as possible. It hasn’t always worked -- like anyone, she can give into pressure or become impatient -- and as she would be the first to admit, there is a bit of Ibsen’s “Troll Spirit” in all of us, and given the kind of power she possesses there is always the temptation to use it. But generally, it has been conscientiously administers, and the hurts she inflicted were inevitable: no one can inspire that much caring, and not cause some pain.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Her thirty-three years at the University and the years at Eagles Mere were extraordinarily creative, and considering the economics of the American Theatre, probably as consistently productive as any career could be, though it did not yield her fame or fortune. Then in 1963, at 68, she began to encounter difficulties: she was past the mandatory retirement age. Twice she had succeeded in postponing it, but now she was to be retired -- very much against her will.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The reaction of her former students was one of shocked indignation that A.K. should be turned out of her classroom when it was clear she was still at the peak of her powers. Great and small, they set to work to reverse the University’s decision. Charlton Heston sent off a personal letter stating: “Alvina Krause is retiring, and the School of Speech will be poorer because she is no longer there, just as all those who were there when she was are richer for it. No student went through speech in her time unmarked by her influence or uninspired by her sharp example . . . As one of this group, I’m still vividly aware of all I learned from her.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Two hundred and fifty-six of the old students assembled on both coasts to express their distress at the University’s action -- a group which included stars of stage, screen and television, directors, writers, stage managers, teachers in schools and Universities all across the United States, and many others who were no longer in the theatre but who still treasured what she had given them. A telegram was sent to Northwestern with all of their names appended, containing an urgent request that the University attempt to utilize her enormous talents in special lectures, independent study courses, or however might prove feasible, but the University was not impressed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">A.K. turned to teaching private lessons and preparing lectures and workshops in colleges and high school which proved eager for her services. For two more 1963 and 1964 she continued to operate the theatre at Eagles Mere. Then the blow fell. The property on which the Playhouse stood was sold, and she lost the lease on the theatre, and the loyal audience built up over twenty years.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She then decided, at seventy or thereabouts, that it was time to make a new beginning. With an ex-student, John Van Meter, she booked the Harper theatre in South Chicago, with intentions of setting up a repertory theatre. Three plays were mounted: Pirandello’s SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR, Durrenmatt’s THE PHYSICISTS, and Shaw’s TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD. Critical opinion was generally favorable-- despite some reservations about the youth of the company -- but after three months, money was short, the location had not proved ideal, and there were other claims on the theatre, so the project was forced to fold.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Since then, A.K. has not been idle. She is still a devout gardener (“Tulips, daffodils . . . I have more than fifty roses. Chrysanthemums for autumn. . . How else does one solve problems?”) and her lectures and workshops in colleges and high schools (often booked back to back in a schedule that would have staggered someone half her age) have kept her busy: “From Gallaudet, the Washington, D.C. College for the Deaf and Dumb to Texas University, to Los Angeles State College, to Deane College, Nebraska. . . from Coast to Coast, everywhere but N.U.” She is a little bitter at being banished from the University where she taught for so many years but there are new interests to pursue. On teaching the deaf and dumb at Gallaudet: “They were wonderful. I just talked directly to them. And a young man -- he was very good -- translated everything into sign language. They watched me -- and they watched him -- and somehow it worked. It was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever experienced.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">To sum up her contribution to the theatre in a few paragraphs is impossible, but some things must be said. She is not the kind of precise practitioner of the Stanislavsky “Method” represented by Lee Strasberg and other New York directors and teachers, and she does not claim to be. Her conception of theatre is too all-embracing for that: she wants the grandeur, the STYLE as well as the psychology -- in short, she is after very much the things that Stanislavsky himself was after, but she pursues them in her own fashion.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She has a keen analytical mind, and probably could have made a name as a theorist if she ever could have sat down to write long enough to produce anything more complete than notes and comments on particular productions. She has analyzed and codified the external techniques which every successful actor learns with time, but generally no one can teach, and succeeded in teaching them by creating her own vocabulary for them. In this area is probably unique, because, in this country at least, most teachers who are interested in external techniques know very little about the inner ones, while the “Method” teachers, who are most interested in internal techniques, seldom bother with externals. and she is the only teacher I have observed who could seriously teach comedy, and not kill it in the process: to analyze it, break it down, put it back together again, and still have it come out funny.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">But her greatest achievement is perhaps this: she has the ability to expand horizons. To bring people to a sense of their own potential. To create the vision of what the theatre can be -- and generally isn’t. (You trained us for a theatre that doesn’t exist!”)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In a world where it’s cool to be hip, and hip to be cool, she is neither cool nor hip. She cares too much. It’s impossible for her to remain aloof, to avoid risks. She is opinionated, often arbitrary, sometimes unreasonable, utterly impatient with incompetence, inflexible in her standards, and sometimes absolutely infuriating. But she has the gift of enthusiasm and excitement and -- one of her favorite words --”astonishment.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now, lest I’ve made her sound like a cross between Socrates and Tamara, Queen of the Visigoths, I’d like to repeat one more little story told by one of her students.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">“I was coming down the walk from the library, toward Foster Street, when I saw this adorable little girl running down the sidewalk in her overalls. I had to just stop and watch her. She was so peppy. and bright-eyed, and she was having so much fun just running down the street. Then she got to the corner and I realized it wasn’t a little girl. It was A.K. in her slacks hurrying to drop a letter in the mailbox.”</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-24492535487027176312013-04-20T16:34:00.000-06:002013-04-20T16:34:27.748-06:00CHICAGO SUNDAY TRIBUNE MAG, June 4, 1961<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><i>Stage and Screen Are Ablaze with a Galaxy Discovered by Alvina Krause at Northwestern University</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">By Eugenie Wells</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, June 4, 1961)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Show business centers on Hollywood and Broadway, but many of its great names got there via Evanston, IL, and the School of Speech of Northwestern University.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In the movie capital, the network television studios, the theatre dressing rooms, the name of Alvina Krause is familiar and respected. A professor of dramatics, who has become a “Miss Chips” on the Evanston campus, Miss Krause is retiring this month after 30 years at the N.U. school of speech, but her students will be leaving their marks on the American drama for many years to come.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jennifer Jones was Phyllis Isley, of Tulsa and points southwest when she studied with Alvina Krause. Jeffrey Hunter was Hank McKinnies, of Milwaukee. Charlton Heston was an Evanston boy who met his famed actress wife, Lydia Clarke, in Alvina Krause’s classes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Alvina Krause was and is a tough taskmaster as well as an admired and beloved one. She declares she never “discovered” anyone, she just tried to teach them to discover themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She is loath to offer too much encouragement, even to promising young actors and actresses, for she is familiar with the tragic life of the player who spends a lifetime in grease paint and never wins great success.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“If a student learns at 21 that he doesn’t have what it takes,” she declares, “that’s bad enough. But if he doesn’t realize it until he’s 35, that’s really tough.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“It would be a horrible thing, to encourage a youth, too sure of himself, to go to Broadway, and have him wish, five years later, that he weren’t there. I don’t want to have anyone coming to me and asking, “Why did you let me go?”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">There was one one-year course in acting when Miss Krause came there a generation ago. Today there are three full year courses, with a total of 12 hours’ credit.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">University students used to think in terms of “acting,” she recalls. Now they think and study in terms of “interpretation.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Miss Krause asks her students to keep personal journals in which they take note of every situation, every person they encounter who might contribute to their ability to interpret and project characters. The notes are completely confidential betwen each pupil and Miss Krause, but she doesn’t hesitate to ask them to enact crises, tragic or embarrassing that come directly from their personal experiences.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">On occasions Miss Krause has been known to ascertain that a couple of her students have become involved in a love affair. She is liable to ask them, in classes, to improvise love scenes.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">School of speech grads recall one year when Miss Krause asked a young lady to make up and enact on the spot, a scene set in an ice cream parlor, in which she hears suddenly that her father has just been killed. Miss Krause was aware that, about a month earlier, the girl had been in an ice cream parlor when she received word that her father had just been killed.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Merciless? Perhaps -- but Alvina Krause doesn’t pretend to pull any punches with her students. And, while they fear her stern discipline on the campus, many of them learn to love her, and correspond with her for years. The mail brings an unusual amount of letters from Broadway and Hollywood to the big old house a half block from the Evanston campus where the small, gray-haired lady has lived for many seasons.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">She operates a summer theatre at Eagles Mere, PA, near Williamsport, in wich she employs primarily drama students who are at a level between college work and the professional stage. Life for the players at Eagles Mere is no holiday either, as they play one show, rehearse the next, and study the one after that.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jennifer Jones, who went almost directly from the Evanston campus into Hollywood’s “<i>The Song of Bernadette,</i>” added to her fame with <i>“Duel in the Sun”</i> and other pictures.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Charlton Heston piled up innumerable credits, including those for box office appeal, and his Oscar winning <i>“Ben-Hur</i>” merely marks a peak in a career which has many years to go.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Ralph Meeker was in <i>“Mister Roberts,” “Streetcar Named Desire,”</i> and “Picnic” on Broadway before going to Hollywood for <i>“Kiss Me Deadly,” “The Fuzzy Pink Nightgown,” “Paths of Glory,” “Desert Sands,</i>” and “<i>The Big House</i>.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Cloris Leachman also made her movie debut in “<i>Kiss Me Deadly</i>,” a Mickey Spillane shoot’em up, after playing on Broadway in “<i>South Pacific,” “King of Hearts,” “The Masque,” “A Touch of the Poet,</i>” and other plays.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Billie Lou Watt went from Northwestern into “<i>Kiss and Tell</i>,” which ran for nearly two years in the Loop and then continued on to a Manhattan stage career.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Two of Miss Krause’s girls, Patricia Neal and Jean Hagan (who had been Jean Verhagen at the school of speech), made their marks in Lillian Hellman’s bitter drama, <i>“Another Part of the Forest.” </i> Pat won a New York Drama Critics Circle award in that production, went to Hollywood to make <i>“The Fountainhead,</i>” followed that with film roles in <i>“A Face in the Crowd,” “The Hasty Heart,”</i> and others. Jean was on the screen in <i>“Spring Reunion</i>” and “<i>The Big Knife</i>.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jeffrey Hunter has been a virile hero in everything from <i>“Gun for a Coward,</i>” and <i>“The True Story of Jesse James</i>” to “<i>The Proud Ones</i>” and “<i>The Great Locomotive Chase.” </i>His latest role: that of the Christ in “<i>King of Kings.</i>”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Charlotte Lubotsky became Charlotte Rae, stole the show in “<i>The Littlest Revue,</i>” and came back to star in the Empire Room of the Palmer House. Paul Lynde is in “<i>Bye Bye Birdie.”</i> Carol Lawrence won plaudits in “<i>West Side Story.</i>” Richard Stauffer is in “<i>The Fantasticks,</i>” Georgann Johnson in “<i>Critic’s Choice,</i>” Jerry Orbach in “<i>Carnival</i>,” Nancy Dussault in “<i>Do Re Mi,” </i>Ron Husmann in <i>“Tenderloin.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Jerry Friedman coached Judy Holliday for “<i>Bells Are Ringing</i>,” directed New York’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park last summer, will direct a new Broadway musical, <i>“The Gay Life”</i> next fall. Inga Swenson is understudying Julie Andrews in <i>“Camelot.</i>”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The list of Krause pupils who went directly to Hollywood and made good would run into scores, not forgetting Martha Hyer, one of the most beautiful blondes ever to cross the Great Divide.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Among Alvina’s other graduates who have attained fame in various phases of the entertainment business you’d have to include Andra Martin, Paula Prentiss, and Ann-Margret Olson, the latter two recent additions to the Hollywood star roster; Judy Bement, who went from the campus Waa-Mu show to a featured role in “<i>Medium Rare</i>,” and the old reliable Edgar Bergen.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">All of them can recall the days and nights when they studied under Alvina Krause.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Born at New Lisbon, WI, Miss Krause took her bachelor’s degree in science and speech at Northwestern in 1928. She taught high school for a year at Seaside, OR, and taught for another year at Hamline University, St. Paul.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Her Hamline players came to Northwestern to take part in a festival of one-act plays, and Alvina was invited to stay and join the faculty. She achieved her master’s degree in interpretation in 1933, and was appointed an assistant professor of interpretation in 1940.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">When she retires this month, she will head for Pennsylvania and her 17</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><sup>th</sup></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> season at Eagles Mere. After that, she’ll be back in Evanston, and doubtless will continue to be seen about the campus in an advisory capacity of some kind.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Northwestern’s school of speech has a famed faculty (some of whose members also studied under Miss Krause), and it of course will continue to be one of the foremost university dramatics centers in the country -- but is inimitable “Miss Chips” will be missed.</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-69856303063568143532013-04-20T15:13:00.000-06:002013-04-20T15:13:04.237-06:00EXCERPT FROM THE NU 150 YEAR HISTORY<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY: CELEBRATING 150 YEARS</i>. Available from the Northwestern University Press. Written by Jay Pridmore, a Chicago writer.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is on pages 210-211.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>ALVINA KRAUSE AND HER STARS</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Among the strongest departments at Northwestern at the time was theatre, and among its godmothers was Alvina Krause ’28, one of the legendary acting teachers for more than a generation of American performers. At least three of Krause’s students won Academy Awards -- including Charlton Heston ’45, Patricia Neal ’47, and Jennifer Jones ’40. That distinction was only the most obvious side of her skill as a director and acting coach.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Krause was not involved in acting for the glitter and celebrity. Born in New Lisbon, Wisconsin, she enrolled at Northwestern’s School of Oratory in 1914 and taught high school after graduation. She returned to Northwestern for a bachelor’s degree, than took a position at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. The drama department at Hamline was in decline, but Krause whipped it into shape and brought a one-act play to a theatre competition at Northwestern and won. Dean Ralph Dennis could not help but notice her talent and in 1930 hired her as an instructor in voice and interpretation.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Krause was soon directing productions at the University Theatre. Her first play, <i>Anna Christie</i>, earned praise in the <i>Daily</i> for its emotion and “sincere effect.” And for decades she coaxed actors into great performances, according to Bill Kuehl ’52, who remembered her “help” while getting ready to go onstage in the title role of <i>Uncle Vanya</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Krause approached him backstage, and Kuehl expected a word of encouragement. Instead she slapped him in the face as hard as she could. Kuehl was shocked and his face was stinging, but almost instantly he knew what Alvina Krause was doing. The blow “made me hurt and confused and unhappy, so that I would take those feelings with me on stage” and use them as <i>Uncle Vanya</i>, he said.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Less in need of an emotional jump start was Paula Ragusa ’59, later screen actress Paula Prentiss, who came to Northwestern with abundant talent but, some said, little discipline. Krause could provide this and more, as she did for Ragusa one summer at the Eagles Mere Playhouse in Pennsylvania, a summer theatre directed by Krause and featuring mostly Northwestern student actors. Ragusa, playing Queen Margaret in <i>Richard III</i>, was throwing curses at the court in dress rehearsal when Krause yelled, “Make them stronger, Paula, make them real.” Perhaps frustrated at herself, Ragusa’s reponse was to snap. She pulled half her dress off and snarled, “If you think you can do it better, you wear the dress.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Krause stayed calm. “<i>Now</i> say the Queen’s curses,” she said, which Ragusa did, and the scene was transformed. Also on stage at the time was another future film actor, Tony Roberts ’61, who had the next line. “My hair doth stand on end to hear her curse,” Roberts said with added resonance that was not lost when the play opened to a live audience.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(This is online at <a href="http://www.nu150.northwestern.edu/book/excerpts-krause.html"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">http://www.nu150.northwestern.edu/book/excerpts-krause.html</span></a> )</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-16573184365066762262013-04-10T14:07:00.003-06:002013-04-10T14:07:46.948-06:00CHARLTON HESTON & VERA WARD: CLASSMATES<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>CHARLTON HESTON, VERA WARD TEAM UP TO PERPETUATE TECHNIQUES OF MENTOR</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(Yankton Press & Dakotan, April 5, 1969) by Dale Bruget</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Like bread upon the waters, the philosophy of acting which Miss Alvina Krause instilled in her students at Northwestern University over a period of 33 successful years has borne the fruits of deep-seated respect and sense of purpose which are now coming to her table in her retirement years.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Through the efforts of one of those students -- Vera Ward of Yankton -- the teaching techniques of Miss Krause are being recorded for posterity, perhaps more importantly, for the instruction of coming generations of aspiring young actors and actresses.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mrs. Ward, wife of Dr. Donald B. Ward, president of Yankton College, made a career out of the talents which achieved shape and policy at the hands of Miss Krause, and now with undying love for the theatre and dedication to the task of preserving Miss Krause’s teachings for others, she is engaged in a project involving no lesser a light in the performing arts that Charlton Heston, Hollywood actor of top rank for a number of years.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Heston, who shares Vera Ward’s sense of urgency about making Miss Krause’s genius live on, has paid tribute to her in an introduction and summary recorded for a half-hour pilot film, showing her life, conducting a student workshop in acting.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This recording was made in Hollywood last week, when the Wards visited the Hestons at their home in Cold Water Canyon and were guests of the famous actor and his wife, Lydia, at a ballet performance and evening “on the town.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Mrs. Ward, Lydia Heston and Charlton Heston were contemporary students of Miss Krause at Northwestern.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">In opening remarks for the video-tape, Heston said:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“Alvina Krause’s absolute conviction that you could be better than you were is as close as I can come to singling out the one essential in her method and her person. Perhaps that’s what separates the great teacher from the good teacher. This conviction of potential, and her capacity to communicate it to you, is what I remember most vividly, and is perhaps the greatest part of the incalculable debt I owe her.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">“She is the same (today). . . exactly the same, and exactly as good. Except for one thing, of course. When I studied under her she was naturally older than we were. Now, more than 20 years later, she is, I realize, younger. Much younger.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Miss Krause has made three workshop appearances on campus at Yankton College and is slated to return next fall.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>“Study of Life”</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Vera Ward is spearheading the thrust which hopefully will result in a series of 8 - 10 videotapes to be distributed by the South Dakota Fine Arts Council, at cost, to schools and colleges throughout the state. Mrs. Ward also hopes to initiate and promote distribution of the films beyond the borders of South Dakota as the channels clear.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Appropriately, the series has been named “<b><i>Acting -- a Study of Life</i></b>.” . . .[clipping cut off short] This and other films are to be kinescoped for use in classrooms, everywhere, in addition to uses in educational television and regular programming.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As a feasibility study, a full hour video-tape was made in Sioux City, featuring Miss Krause, Mrs. Ward and students, and this was aired twice in the region. It affirmed the practicality of undertaking the series, and seeking financial assistance through the Fine arts Council. The council’s approval of the project led to the start of the series which will continue with more workshop film sessions when Miss Krause returns in the fall.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Now professor emeritus at Northwestern, Miss Krause looks out upon a constellation of theater stars whom she has taught -- Heston, Patricia Neale, Jeffrey Hunter, Paula Prentiss, Dick Benjamin, Ralph Meeker and others, including Vera Bantz Ward who continues her own stage career with scintillating solo performances throughout the Midwest, with occasional returns to the footlights and legitimate theatre in metropolitan centers.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Dr. and Mrs. Ward returned to Yankton Monday from a trip of two weeks taking them to El Paso, Texas, Phoenix, Arizona, and Los Angeles. They attended Yankton College alumni meetings and made other business contacts, and specifically made the presentation of pins and certificates and statuettes to members of the Joseph Ward Club.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Among the recipients was 90-year-old Daisy Ward (Mrs. Freeman Ward) of El Paso, an aunt of Dr. Ward.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-21639509577883298742013-04-03T17:45:00.002-06:002013-04-03T17:45:17.188-06:00ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE AK DVD<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b><i>Acting Lessons with Alvina Krause</i></b>, a two-hour DVD of excerpts from Alvina Krause’s 1968 master classes at the University of South Dakota, is now available from the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. Originally produced by Vera Ward (C43) as <b><i>Acting -- a Study of Life</i></b>, the documentary was rediscovered through the detective work of William Bergfeldt (C57). Support from BTE and private sources funded the transfer of the master tapes to digital format (there is some audio and video distortion). Featuring the original introduction and closing by alumnus Charlton Heston, the black and white DVD shows Krause working with students on <i>“Creating Shakespeare’s World</i>.” <i>“Theatre of the Absurd,” a</i>nd <i>“What is Character?</i>” The legendary Northwestern acting teacher served as BTE’s artistic director from 1978 until her death in 1981.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Copies may be purchased by contacting the BTE box offrice at <a href="mailto:btetix@ptd.net"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">btetix@ptd.net</span></a> or by calling 570/784-8181. For purchases by Northwestern alumni, BTE will donate a portion of the receipts to the school’s Alvina Krause Fund.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-18538182743366091062013-03-31T13:20:00.003-06:002013-03-31T13:20:39.705-06:00NOTE FROM "DIALOGUE" FALL, 2002<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><b>REMEMBERING ALVINA KRAUS</b>E</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">(From the Alumni section of the NU publication called “Dialogue” in Fall, 2002)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">The creation of the Alvina Krause Fund and the release of a related CD-ROM have met with an exceptionally positive response, and alumni continue to submit memories of Krause as well as archival material. The school will continue to gather such material for an on-line Alvina Krause database. [<i>Note: As nearly as I can tell, this doesn’t exist.</i>] Fund-raising continues for the Alvina Krause Fund, which will support construction of a new wing for the Theatre and Interpretation Center and expansion of the MFA program to include the teaching of acting. For information on how to contribute to the fund and recieve the CD-Rom, contact Anita Hillin at 847/491-4379 or <a href="mailto:a-hillin@northwestern.edu"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">a-hillin@northwestern.edu</span></a>. [<i>This address is dead.]</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bill Bergfeld (C 57) [<i>sic</i>] has been instrumental in helping gather Krause material, including Forward Productions’ six-film series Acting -- A Study of Life (with an introduction by alumnus Charlton Heston) that chronicles her 1968 workshops a the University of South Dakota. Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble plans to issue a complete four-hour edition of the series this fall, with a highlights edition available this winter. For more information, contact James Goode at the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Alvina Krause Theatre, 226 Center Street, Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania 17815. <a href="mailto:bte@bte.org"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">bte@bte.org</span></a></span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-81351624614121605002013-03-30T12:33:00.005-06:002013-03-30T12:33:59.039-06:00MEMORIES from Bill Bergfeldt<span style="font-family: Helvetica; letter-spacing: 0px;">MEMORIES OF ALVINA KRAUSE</span><br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bill Bergfeldt, Speech ’57</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I was at Northwestern School of Speech from 1954 - 57. Though never a student of Alvina Krause (I was a bit afraid of her), I admired her from afar and was taken in by her spell. she was certainly the high priestess of the NU theatre department, and was practically worshipped by some. I heard that the greatly devoted sometimes referred to her as Jesus Krause! Of course, there were other prominent theatre instructors at NU at the same time, such as Theodore Fuchs and Lee Mitchell.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">SOME MEMORIES:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">At NU Workshop Theatre was a big thing -- where segments of plays were produced and afterwards critiqued by Miss Krause. We looked forward to her critiques more than the plays. One time I remember she could not be there and instead the critique was given by Lee Mitchell, Chairman Dept. of Theatre. The audience was so disappointed I believe there were audible groans when they learned that Miss Krause would not be critiquing.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Every year she did a one woman presentation of a play. I saw her cutting of “Tiger at the Gates” and “Teahouse of the August Moon.” She was the best Sakini I had ever seen, which I told her. She said she was never quite sure about her Sakini portrayal.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">While I was at Northwestern she directed “Uncle Vanya,” “The Winter’s Tale,” and “The Lovers,” which was a new play. She always expected actors to bring their own copies of the plays to auditions. I wondered how she would handle “The Lovers” -- but sure enough she wanted to know why actors were not bringing the scripts. They had to tell her, “Miss Krause, it hasn’t been published yet.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Two of my favorite Alvina Krause stories -- which I heard. Was not there.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A girl was having a lesson with AK. Afterward she went on and on to a friend about how wonderful AK was. The friend asked, “Oh, did she like your performance?” The student replied, “No, she hated it, but she is WONDERFUL!”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">A Workshop Theatre production of “Miss Julie” was in rehearsal. Miss Krause did not think there was enough revelry onstage in the dances. She went up on stage, grabbed one of the tallest boys and had him dance with her. Something happened. They tripped and he fell on top of AK -- six foot guy on top of short AK. He was so upset, not knowing what to say and very embarrassed. Miss Krause simply got up, dusted herself off, and said, “Well, at least you could have kissed me.”</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Somewhere I read where Patricia Neal came up to Alvina Krause after a performance of “Twelfth Night.” She realized she had not done a good job. She went up to Miss Krause and said, “I will never act again.” Miss Krause looked at her and said, “Do you call what you did acting?” Of course, some years later Patricia Neal won the Oscar for leading actress for her performance in “Hud.”</span></div>
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(Note: Bergfeldt was in the Speech Education department and taught high school dramatics for some years.)</div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-92027789385878421172013-03-13T23:08:00.004-06:002013-03-13T23:08:38.398-06:00THE YANKTON SD TEACHING DVD'S<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Over the past few days I’ve watched a set of DVD translations of videos made years ago in Yankton, SD, of <b>Alvina Krause</b> teaching acting. Fewer than a dozen students are present, mostly aspiring young men. They distract me -- they are "fullavit." I mean, they are posing for the camera, thinking about themselves, for they are good-looking, smart, etc. Presenting themselves as poetic, attentive, and strong -- worthy. So is AK. She was a remarkable woman and a crackerjack acting teacher, but now she is old and the path is worn. Still, her posture is erect, her voice oratorical. She is dramatic.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">None of us really knew her personal lives. She gives us clues: the ring she has moved from the ring finger of her left hand and is now wearing on her index finger, same hand. We knew then and know now that she had a lifelong relationship with Lucy. Was this a wedding ring? Does moving it mean they are differing, out of sync? She tells us about the ring twice, at different sessions and says that if the students were portraying her, they would have to understand that ring. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The same is true of a twicetold story about a young man’s mother, icy and commanding, who comes to her to demand that AK “make her son an actor.” She compares this to Lady Macbeth trying to make her husband a king. She fails and the boy leaves. She is afraid of that mother. Who are those sons? I know nothing about any mothers who made demands, but I can think of many a son who tried to make a mother of AK. So what is she displacing here? She tells the story twice. The details vary, but she claims this is true.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At one point she repeats and repeats, “<i>This means everything: that I am a MAN</i>.” Of course, at the period it was conventional that “man” was supposed to subsume both genders. (We thought there were only two then.) And that they were the pinnacle of evolution. (Now we wonder what comes next.) She seems to be saying that we as humans should stand up valiantly with erect spines and not accept anything less from life than full value. But is there something more? She could have said “HUman.” It was a point in culture when Skinner was trying to reduce us all to stimulus/response, make lab rats of us. Is this what she meant? That being a man meant being more than being a mammal? </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">At one point she made a strong point about an actor having to include ALL humanity and twice talks about the great value of being “astonished” (her trademark mantra) by the sight of entirely different human beings. She twice uses the example of an Elizabethan seeing a Chinaman for the first time: pigtail, silk jacket, jade. No mention of yellow skin or slanted eyes, but an eloquent demand to understand that person’s world: what makes him what he is? <i>“If you are going to be an actor, no human experience can be foreign to you!”</i></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">As was conventional at the time (my high school teachers were the same age as AK, maybe a half-dozen of them in “Boston marriages”), certain Great Ages were considered to be determiners of character and style, a kind of cultural ecology. (How they loved <b>Edith Hamilton</b>!) So the Greeks, of course, were all about the gods; the Elizabethans were all about the explosion of discovery, including books; and the modern plays considered (<b>Pinter, Albee, Becket)</b> were about the death of God and the ensuing emptiness and lack of meaning. That last didn’t appeal to her much. She talks about how the study of <b>Chekhov </b>opened the door to the culture of Russia -- a little risky given the times, but a way of sidestepping the Cold War to get to <b>Stanislavsky </b>with his humanistic version of stimulus and response.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In these lessons on video AK soon has the student actors striding around flaunting capes, gripping the floor with their feet, chests thrown up and open to receive life itself. There are real capes and rapiers and when the men fence, it’s clear they’ve had lessons. The girls have it tougher: she takes their hands, smacks them in the shoulder, pulls back their hair. The girls are A-students who have gotten good marks because of verbal skills and she wants them to drop those -- go to the sensory world under the talk. Use their own inner life because that’s where they will find the responses that explain what is happening inside them BETWEEN stimulus and response, that which “justifies” words and actions. When the brain is processing, the body stops momentarily. SLAP. STOP.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">There’s an oddly Victorian quality implicit in AK, declare as she might that she stands with Hedda Gabler and <b>Shaw</b>. She may be rebellious and struggle against the current, but twice she tells about receiving a package in the mail. Eagerly she tears it open and finds that it is a newly published book of poetry by a former student. <i>“He’s made it!”</i> she cries. “<i>He’s published!!</i>” Well, she never did like the idea that God was dead. Even less would she like realizing that publishing also died, but she didn’t live to see that.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">She was aware that at in her time there was a great cry that Broadway was dead and Times Square was only a cesspool of porno and drugs. And she was part of the push-back of repertory theatres like the <i>Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble</i>, who accepted the risks of defying the culture, and made a stand practically in her front yard where she gardened to keep her sanity. She probably had not read about the Great Vegetative Principle, which is that if you tear a living thing -- for instance, a god -- into pieces and scatter it, the bits will spring up in a whole new version of the original force. But if <b>Joe Campbell</b> had dropped by to explain, she would have grinned with glee. In a sense, she herself has been cut up into potato eyes (to use a midwestern metaphor since she was from rural Wisconsin) and planted all over the planet.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">All the articles talk about AK’s genius for making stars by teaching them the Method, but that’s the usual media distortion and the usual institutional greed for marketing by boasting about alumni and begging them for money -- all the time refusing the testimony and recommendations of alumni. The bourgeois culture of curiosity, airs and graces (the silver comb), and the conviction that their world-view is true, was dying at the end of AK’s life, along with God. “Good riddance”, she ought to say. But she is aging, has just survived the attempted destruction of her work -- which had originally been evoked and sheltered by the same institution that now swept her away. She is a “man” and she stands like Antigone against the carnage of greed-based culture, commodified fun, enforced mediocrity.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The limitation of these videos, valuable as they are, is that they are not the live presence of a human being with all the richness that “real” can provide. AK’s methods (as many versions as there were students) worked very well for film, but the real heart pulsed on a stage. Until she slapped you into responding, you were not breathing. You had to STOP! THINK! WHAT IN TIME ARE YOU DOING?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small; letter-spacing: 0px;">(These videos are available through the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.)</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-32735158268021020102013-01-04T10:11:00.000-07:002013-01-04T10:12:04.830-07:00THE ACTING REVOLUTION<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">My core collection of books about acting starts with my high school “</span><i style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The Stage and the School</i><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">” which is illustrated with photos taken at Jefferson High School in Portland, OR., in the years I was a kid in </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Melba Day Sparks</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">’ dramatics program (Class of ’57).</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">The shelf continues with the texts acquired in</span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Alvina Krause</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">’s acting classes. (Class of ’61).</span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Now I own textbooks </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Marshall Mason </b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">(classmate), </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Robert Benedetti</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">(near classmate), </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">David Downs</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> (later AK student) and two theorists, </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Peter Brook</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> and </span><b style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Richard Hornby.</b><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"> </span><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I’m excluding from this book roundup some arcane stuff about performance and so on that more properly belong to philosophy.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I include the years because in those decades a Great Shift in theatre was underway, driven by a Great Shift in technology and society as a whole, both triggered by the one-two punch of world war and economic reconfiguration as much as anything else -- unless you think maybe the shift came first and triggered the war. Be that as it may, <b>Richard Hornby</b> in his book <i>“The End of Acting: a Radical View” </i>(1992) describes something I witnessed without comprehending. It wasn’t the end of acting: it was the end of one way of looking at acting. And the world.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Realistic, proscenium-framed, script-based, repertory/ensemble, audience theatre was just ending as the dominant medium of theatre. Rising in replacement was film and valuing of highly emotional, often improvised, acting controlled by editing as much or more than by directing; often a critical (oppositional) witness against authorities and often cross-cultural; watched by individuals in homes; possibly staged in the round or with audience and actors mixing; possibly unexpected street performance. This coincided with a shift from emphasis on groups of actors to individuals, often with a concentration on personal success -- Big Names.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Swept up in this was the end-career of <b>Alvina Krause</b> and her last generation of academic students. The juggernaut of the university, reframed in terms of the Big Money Corporation that values athletics as an essential and research as pursuit of profit, simply eliminated her world, snuffing all objections. AK’s career, which had begun in the semi-religious oratorical world of<b>Cumnock</b>, was now thrown up against the psychoanalytical émigre mystique of <b>Lee Strasberg</b>. To her admirers she was the truer teacher of the “Method” theories of <b>Stanislavsky</b>. Her name still appears on CV’s as a mark of quality and achievement. Privately she disavowed Strasberg whom she felt pushed people towards madness, an accusation sometimes leveled against her! As far as Stanislavsky was concerned, she said that every good actor develops a unique personal method. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Hornby describes Strasberg’s version of Stanislavsky with these points.</span></div>
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<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Strasberg never studied with Stanislavsky, never met him, nor read him in Russian.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">What he learned was from the <i>American Laboratory Theatre </i>in New York where <b>Richard Boleslavsky</b> and<b>Maria Ouspenskaya</b>, emigrés from the <i>Moscow Art Theatre</i>, were the teachers. This was in the Twenties.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Strasberg was not an actor. Stanislavsky was.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Strasberg directed very little. He was a classroom theorist. Stanislavsky was a stage man.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Neither Strasberg nor Stanislavsky was good at dramatic literature, but the latter had a strong partner,<b>Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko</b>, who was an excellent advisor at the <i>Moscow Art Theatre</i>. Strasberg had no such partner. The closest he came was <b>Harold Clurman</b> at the <i>Group Theatre</i>, who pushed Strasberg to appreciate <b>Clifford Odets</b>. When Clurman left, Strasberg developed an opposition to literature and pursued the personal reality of the actors, more like a therapist.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><b>Stella Adler</b> actually went to Moscow and interviewed Stanislavsky, whose theories and methods had gone on developing. When she came back and tried to tell Strasberg, he denied her version. The Strasberg Method did not evolve.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">However, the Strasberg Method is more subtle than it is usually portrayed, and for actors who understand it, the results are remarkable.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Hornby feels that one Strasberg concept that DOES jibe with Stanislavsky is the necessity of relaxation. (Krause often asserted this.)</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Stanislavsky does not go beyond the idea of imitating reality, enlivened by remembered personal details of the actor. Strasberg accepts the entering of personal reality, which is, of course, possible to do on film but not during a stage performance.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In sum, Strasberg’s method is NOT based on stage work. It is classroom exercises, much glamorized by the American star system, the great emphasis on individuals and their daring to be extreme. But it was an energizer for an active theatre scene and served experienced actors, who already had their stage techniques (esp. voice and movement) internalized enough to be automatic.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">Something parallel was happening throughout the humanities: writing, painting, music, dance, and even religion -- a movement towards individual experience and away from technique or tradition; a valuing of emotion over reason but at the same time a great leap in technology and science that exploded the powers of human beings. Stage theatre was confrontive, experimental, jesting, cruel, and spectacular.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">That’s a far cry from the original roots of universities in the teaching of medical and religious dogma. Academia was thrown for a loop until they hit upon the idea of an Master of Fine Arts, a separated stream of learning with its own credentials and ability to generate tuition. The high theatre idealism of the first half of the century -- the valuing of the whole company, the respect for traditional humanities canons and criteria -- was replaced by personal ambition. The NU School of Speech was completely re-organized and re-named the NU School of Communication.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I often think that the most accurate description of the sequence of events we sometimes call “history” is the cautionary tale of Simple Simon who always knew what to do for the LAST thing that had happened though it always turned out to be a disaster for the PRESENT thing happening. You remember? He worked as a farm hand for barter. When paid off with butter, he put it under his hat to keep it safe on his head, but it was a warm day and it melted down his neck and face. So his parents told him next time he should put his barter in a bucket of cold water, but the next time he was paid off with a puppy, which drowned in the bucket. So the next time -- told he should have tied the puppy to a string and led it behind him -- he was paid with a sack of flour which he dragged behind him on a string until a hole wore in the sack and all the flour leaked out. For a relatively short time -- though it included WWI, the Roaring Twenties, the Big Depression, WWII, and the Cold War -- AK’s methods of teaching acting were in sync with stage theatre. Strasberg was (maybe without quite realizing it) dealing with actors for film. It was a kinder revolution than the one Stanislavsky suffered in Russia.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">So what is the present and the near future? A bucket of cold water or being dragged on a string? It looks to me like a mix. For those who are still “middle-class”, theatre is spectacle and escape, the Broadway musical. In some places repertory/ensemble lives on. But I see the world turning back in a chilling reality loop to the theatre of protest-surrealism. IPhone witnessing to the return of oppression and violence. The minority people I know are participating in non-threatening high school dramatics and cowboy movies. But that’s good preparation for something far more intense that they can’t see from here. No script yet. Prepare to improvise.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1911037572754843216.post-36628903279673991732012-12-16T11:48:00.001-07:002012-12-16T11:48:11.521-07:00WEGNER SUMMARY/RESTATEMENT<br />
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">This is a summary of <b>William H. Wegner</b>’s article entitled <i>“Alvina Krause Revisited.</i>” The purpose is to provide a short version for people in a hurry, and also to emphasize the very important points he makes. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">As background, the fact that acting is a process means that teaching acting is also a process, very hard to reduce to a formula. Teaching is an empathic interaction in a context of trust that manages the interaction among the structure of a script (which includes the nature of the character in question), the emotional resources of the actor, and the empathic ability of the teacher to see what might bring the actor to understand and express the character. An audience, even if it is the rest of the cast, participates in these interactions, which can be a source of great excitement and satisfaction when it all becomes congruent.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Wegner identifies four levels of what he calls co-consciousness:</span></div>
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<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> A teacher who truly knows the play and scene.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> The evocation of the actor’s sub-text through tasks, images and objectives.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> An intimate knowledge of the actor so as to know what might work.</span></li>
<li style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 14px; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"> Inclusion of others present vicariously even though they are not actively working.</span></li>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">I take these levels to be the dynamics of empathy, what neuroanatomists call “mirror cells” and which Kelty (<a href="https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/8830"><span style="color: #021eaa; letter-spacing: 0px;">https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/handle/10355/8830</span></a>) calls “the space between”. I take it to be closely related to the “bonding” dyad of mother and infant or between lovers or even between a tortured person and his tormenter. It is mysterious, something emergent from relationship, and very powerful. In fact, I would say the keystone to theatre. We watch and as we watch, our internal selves subtly imitate and feel what happens.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What’s left that Wegner remarks on is AK’s remarkable vitality, which he believes (and I do as well) comes from focus, intense concentration on the job at hand. It’s a basic counseling premise that focus provides power.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">What I’m wondering about is whether the dynamics work differently in relationships of equality. The cases I suggest above are all asymmetrical: one person is transmitting to the other. Onstage, while acting, it seems to me that two or more people can create something quite palpable to each other, shared and apparent to an audience.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">WEGNER RESPONDS:</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">It is a good summary. Important I think to stress that Chekhov's texts especially yield subtexts; hence good actors, imaginative actors are drawn to his plays ( Struggling with Chekhov after all was what gave birth to the "Stanislavsky Method -- which of course was not a Method,reducible to the Formulaic. But how to teach this kind of acting? Only students with a knack for thinking in particulars, not in abstractions, are capable of responding to AK's demanding approach. Uta Hagen was skillful at this too. </span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">So much to think about and try to articulate. Talking about Good Acting is hard ; I look forward to more "discussions"; but wanted to let you know</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">right away that I do endorse your summary.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;">Bill Wegner</span></div>
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THE READER IS WELCOME TO JOIN THIS DISCUSSION.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0