THE BLUE BOOK HEIST: WELDON BLEILER

Weldon Bleiler

Info from IMDB:

Born: Weldon Boyce Bleiler

July 14, 1939 in Indiana, USA

Died: August 17, 2007 (age 68) in Simi Valley, California, USA

Weldon was a mysterious figure.  The above is about all I can find online.  He was one of the main sources of notes by Alvina Krause for David Press’ thesis.  I now have an informant who claims Weldon explicitly said he was the culprit who removed the cache of exam “blue books” from her office -- those convenient little booklets in which she wrote notes about performances in class as well as rehearsals.  

The informant says that Weldon showed him the box containing the blue books, but doesn’t say where they were at the time or whether he actually saw the booklets.  The two were not people who socialized outside the theatre as far as I know.  The theft happened about the time David was writing his Ph.D. thesis about AK’s methods of teaching, nearly ten years after both Weldon and the informant had been students at NU.   The informant said that Weldon was a known thief and liar, though I don’t know of any other specific incidents, and does not report trying to recapture the booklets or reporting to AK where they had gone.

One version of the heist is that AK’s office was actually broken into, but if I were writing this story for a BBC mystery I would simply have the thief find the door open (It was normally not just closed but also locked.) and the blue books in plain sight.  I would write the plot as though the culprit knew what they were, took them on impulse, possibly intending to smuggle them back, and then never found the right occasion to do it.

Now -- using my little gray cells -- AK generated what must have been stacks and stacks of filled-up blue books.  They were thumb-tacked to the main bulletin board downstairs, available to anyone and often copied by hand, though most people only copied the parts about themselves or maybe the little essays before a play began, the philosophy of what the play was and how it ought to be framed and executed.  So what motive would there have been if they were not secret?  And there must certainly have been far more than an armload of booklets.  They were written in pencil, not so easy to read.  I don’t have a sense that AK considered them valuable or tried to preserve them over time.  They could easily have been mistaken for exam papers, worthless once the grades were awarded.

I had a bit of a crush on Weldon, but I’m not sure quite why.  There was a variety show where he did a sort of Victor Borge bit with a massive grand piano.  The microphone cord wouldn’t reach all the way over to the piano, so he appealed to unseen stagehands to give him more length.  They didn’t.  Finally, with effort, he pushed the piano over to the mike and bowed to the missing stagehands, thanking them with full seriousness.  Then he played Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 which for me had intensely blissful childhood associations.  I think that was the trigger.  I hardly knew the man, really.

In 1978 when I was attending seminary on the south side of Chicago, I only went back to check out NU once, but could hardly recognize where things were.  When I did locate Annie May Swift, there was Weldon at the bulletin board, reading everything as if looking for more blue book notes, as though he had not left during the intervening seventeen years.  AK was long gone from NU by then and only a few years from the end.  I didn’t talk to Weldon.

He had been married and divorced by the time of his death.  I don’t know about children. I have the impression that something was irregular about the death.  I haven’t seen a proper obit and maybe I ought to search around a little harder for one.  I’ve made a quick pass through Google.  Maybe this post will jog someone.

But here’s the thought that woke me up.  What if AK were keeping “double books,” and the second set of blue books was near-psychoanalytic notes on the students?  It would be logical to make notes about their backgrounds, what approach to them might work, and what talents she thought they had.  The material might include secrets.  She is known to have taken a near-therapeutic attitude towards students and to evoke what was probably “transference” from them, strong emotional response and attachment.  Some classes and individual sessions were closed and confidential.  

If this second set of blue books were known to exist -- and I don’t know that they did -- they would be powerful, intimate, and worth stealing for a person struggling to understand his or her self, especially in the context of classmate cohorts.  They might be reason for the administration to worry about lawsuits.  There were always accusations of starting a cult or complaints from freaked-out students crying “unfair.”

Maybe someone was afraid that AK would share their story with David Press to put in his thesis or maybe she herself invented the story of the theft in order to keep from sharing them.  I think Press may have been suspected of stealing them himself, but at that point he had been out of school for several years.  There wouldn’t be contemporary notes about him.  He considered it a blow and says he recommended that she contact a lawyer for advice in case someone tried to publish them, though there’s no evidence that anyone ever did anything with the material that went missing.  It was the joint appeal from AK and Press in the Daily Northwestern for information about the loss that I had saved and that recently prompted me to order a copy of the thesis to read.  There is nothing in the thesis that is remotely like psychoanalysis.  

What the heist incident reveals most clearly (and this IS the assumption behind Press’ thesis) is the belief that AK’s “magic” teaching could be reduced to written advice or rules or procedures  -- a “Method” -- that there was a scripture or recipe that could be followed to achieve her results.  It’s an academic “conceit” that implies that there is profit or at least ownership in putting things on paper.  In truth, the “Method” was her whole person as she had developed over a lifetime of devotion to the art and craft of acting out a script on a stage.  As surely as an actor “responding” to the other actors on the stage, she “responded” to each student, as though she were an instrument.  She WAS an instrument.  No wonder her reactions were sudden and occasionally extreme.  I think she was a bit of a mystery even to herself.

In the end the loss of the blue books meant nothing, because they were transient -- the means rather than the end -- and specific to the actual persons.  But the time when they went missing was close to when Nixon was sending his plumbers to rifle the files of shrinks treating his enemies.  The idea was floating around.  Among theatre majors that sort of thing soon leads to plots.  Terrific material:  “The Blue Book Heist”!!  Re-set it at Oxford . . .  Inspector Morse?  Or even Lewis?

ADDENDUM:

The more I think about the Blue Book Heist, the less I think it matters, for a number of reasons:

1.  Probably, as David Press points out, the greater loss was at Eagles Mere where AK had traditionally written a short evaluation of the summer’s productions which was typed up, mimeographed, and sold to the company and crew for the cost -- a dollar or two.  These had been thrown into a box in the Eagles Mere office.  But when it was time to get the box and sort it out, it turned out that it was a hodge-podge -- seasons missing, pages missing.  

Maybe there’s someone out there who has a complete set, but no one was at Eagles Mere for ALL the productions.  The point is that it had not been a high enough priority for the mimeos to be properly filed or bound or otherwise protected.  No one thought in terms of a big compilation.  Things were in ACTION, responding to deadlines.  By the end of the season everyone was staggering exhausted anyway.  (I don’t think Weldon was ever at EM.)

2.  It possible that the notes (not just Blue Books) that were stolen from AK’s office were simply thrown out by mistake and the claim of being the person who stole them or even being the person who knew who stole them was meant for dramatic effect.   There was evidently again no attempt to mark them or secure them.  

Some of us think that AK never really thought about writing a book at all until David Press suggested it.  And he was talking about a Ph.D. thesis, which is different, though many books DO start out as a thesis, and writing a book is a way of validating an academic career.

3.  Much of the material was time-bound, that is, referred to specific actors in particular plays, but the theories and constant reminders were repeated over the years again and again, so I don’t think anything was really lost.  

The material is also time-bound in another sense, which is that plays, audiences, actors and all the rest have changed since AK retired.  i’ve been working this afternoon on a thesis about actor communication in which male and female college-aged actors choreograph a vulgar, invasive, near pornographic event that the script asks for.  I can’t imagine AK even considering a play with a scene like that.  Or can I?  These kids are very clear about boundaries, but also quite casual about intimacy.

The thesis is online.   Check out the bib.   I was stunned by the number of “Method” variations the author lists and discusses.  THE SPACE BETWEEN: UNCOVERING THE LIVED EXPERIENCE OF ACTOR COMMUNICATION

https://mospace.umsystem.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10355/.../short.pdf?... -

(I’m using this material as a reference for “liminal space” as in Victor Turner’s construct.)

KATE POGUE & LAURIE MCCANTS: Dramachicks

Kate Pogue says,  “Don’t forget Laurie McCants, one of the co-founders of BTE.  So here’s a start.  Do we need a list of dramachicks?  Would AK ever possibly be considered a “dramachick”? 

And I was wanting a list of ensemble theatres (I think that’s what I mean when I say “repertory” and maybe close to what AK meant when she spoke of them.  So McCants’ interview supplies a link.   http://www.ensembletheaters.net/   and that’s how this blogging stuff works.  I call it “lily padding,” like those birds with big feet who walk across ponds on the lily pads.

(I should note that it looks like “Chicago Fire,” the new Dick Wolf  TV series, is going up in flames.  But television series that take hold ARE like ensemble theatre, aren’t they?  This one just, um, misfired.  Maybe.)

from BENY BENEDETTI

I don’t pretend to have really been one of AK’s students, having transferred into Interp early on, but my dearest friends were, and I did attend some classes, so I think I felt and understood the mystique. Perhaps in some way her example helped motivate me toward my fifty-year career as an acting teacher, and having had the chance to experiment in setting up three professional programs, I have strong feelings about the role of acting teachers and of our profession in general, and as I am right now teaching beginning acting here (at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design) I have a sense of the condition in which kids are coming into our training programs today.

 

I am sure we all taught because we saw teaching as a way of helping to make a better American theatre through the resonance of our teaching in the lives of our students. Like Marshall, I am most proud of my students who went out and started theatres of their own. And I am also proud of those students who went on to significant acting careers and who maintained their dignity, and their sense of purpose.

 

I am least proud of the fact that we support our programs, including the 3700 drama departments in this country, by recruiting and retaining thousands of students who are condemned to frustration and disappointment. I am also least proud that we often fail to prepare the best of our students for the realities of life as an actor today – including our systemic failure to prepare people for the camera. I learned in my years as a producer that acting for the camera can, at its best, be the most demanding and purest test of the spiritual capacity of an actor, and it’s a shame that we don’t teach it in that spirit but instead continue to treat it as if it were mere vocationalism.

 

I am not optimistic about the future. The current crop of kids suffer terribly from a lifetime of TV watching and video gaming. Most of our training institutions are woefully inadequate in voice and speech training at a time when they are most needed. Our kids have had little opportunity and less passion to see live theatre. Their role models are almost all on TV. What would be best would be to consolidate our energies for actor training in a few programs of high quality (that was the motive behind our formation of the old League of Professional Theatre Training Programs.) Such programs should have free tuition, and a stipend for living costs. I taught in just such a system in Australia and it was a revelation. There the three major training programs are federally subsidized, and graduates have immediate entry into the profession. Of course, Australia is a small country compared to  us and it is easier for them to do this, but what they do is rooted in a genuine respect and liking of theatre in the broader culture as reflected in government policy. I never got over that the guy at the gas station was impressed when he found out I was an acting teacher and director! Our political and cultural climate wouldn’t permit us to even dream of such a system.

 

As to the personal relationship of the acting teacher and his or her students, I agree with Stu (was it him?) who said that AK was of her time and that it is no longer possible to be “a walking myth” (perfect phrase!)  In fact, I was always much put off by that aspect of the AK phenomenon, though I didn’t entirely blame her for it. Acting students are often masochistic and I have found that many come into acting out of a sense of unworthiness for attention and love in their lives, and I have always been appalled by the acting teachers who exploit this, of whom we have had too many in our country. I did see instances in which I thought AK was a bit guilty of this.

 

Marshall is also right about the tension between respecting the varying talents of our students and trying to maintain high standards – the problem is, I think, that our profession today offers no dominant model – in the forties and fifties it was still possible to say what constituted a “good” actor in the most general sense, but we have lived since the sixties in a state of stylistic pluralism that makes that impossible. As acting teachers, we have to first of all decide what KIND of actor we believe in and be honest about our values and recognize that we will not be able to serve the general run of students. If we are serious about training actors, then we have to select those students best suited to our personal esthetic – that’s really what AK did – but the American educational system makes that utterly impossible today.

 

I look forward to more of this discourse!

 

Beny Benedetti

GERALD FREEDMAN

Director Gerald Freedman Stricken by Strokes

By 

Frank Rizzo 

on March 11, 2011 

Director Gerald Freedman, who last fall stage "The Diary of Anne Frank" at theWestport Country Playhouse, suffered a major stroke in late February followng a milder one three weeks earlier.

Freedman, 83, has been the drama dean at UNC School of the Arts since 1991.

According to the Winston Salem (N.C.) Journal.

Friends and family members said that Freedman is improving but that it is too early to make a prognosis. "We are grateful that he is now in rehabilitation, and we are encouraged by his progress," John Mauceri, UNCSA's chancellor, said in an e-mail to the school's alumni.

According to the newspaper report, Robert Beseda, an assistant drama dean, said that while there is "still a lot to do" in the rehabilitation, there are many reasons to feel encouraged about Freedman's progress over the last week: He is motivated to recover, recognizes everyone and can swallow food. He has asked several questions about production and class matters.

Freedman was artistic director of the American Shakespeare Theater in Stratford, Conn. in the '70s. Freedman's work as an artistic director or co-artistic director includes stints at the New York Shakespeare Festival, the John Houseman Acting Company and  theGreat Lakes Theater Festival in Cleveland for 13 years before coming to UNCSA. He has also taught at Yale University and the Juilliard School.

He highly regarded internationally for his direction of classic dramas, musicals, operas and new plays. He was the first American to direct at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. 

He has numerous Broadway and off Broadway credits, including the off-Broadway premiere of "Hair," the landmark rock musical, and the Broadway revival of "West Side Story" in 1980.

E-mails be sent to freedmang@uncsa.edu and that letters and cards be sent to School of Drama, UNC School of the Arts, 1533 S. Main St., Winston-Salem, NC 27127

http://blogs.courant.com/curtain/2011/03/director-gerald-frieman-strick.html

TEN POINTS ABOUT AK'S METHOD

Working on the Alvina Krause materials, especially the background material on the development of theatre in the 20th century, has been a bit of a revelation. I wish she were alive to discuss these things but her remembered voice is still strong in my mind.  Here are some of the issues, not all of them theoretical but rather realizations.

1.  Taking acting classes from AK was hugely emotional for most people.  I was coming in sideways from speech ed, aimed at high school dramatics -- or so I thought.  But most people were passionately, whole-heartedly committed to the idea of being actors in the same way as seminarians are devoted to becoming ministers.  It was a leap of faith that they COULD do it and all parties were sharply aware that the price would be high.

2.  At the same time, many people go into acting because are trying to figure out who they are, which meant that there were people there examining their identities, often their sexuality.  The kind of acting training that AK provided came out of a Euro-American cultural surge of thought about how identity is formed, maintained and changed.  Stream of consciousness writing, psychoanalysis, renewed theological reflection, abstract expressionist painting, all came out of this turn to inner examination and drew enormous energy and enlightenment from it.

3.  This turn to examining one’s own “brain” and “heart” included the work of playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov, who began to reflect on their culture and what it did to their inner life.  They were beginning a movement which has grown stronger into overtly political protest and demand for change.  I would say this movement probably went as far as it could go in the post-structuralist, post-modern, post-colonial work of people like Beckett and Brecht.  Some of the Theatre people, esp. those who chose the Interp department as an alternative base, have become strong participants in that approach.  Eventually they began to break the fourth wall, abandon scripts, cast the audience as participants, and other innovations.  Now I’m thinking Grotowski, of whom I had not heard until recently.

4.  Politically, after the enlightened leadership of Dean Dennis, the administration of the “School of Speech” have been men who were threatened by the enormous popularity of AK and who felt they had to contain her.  They used the sea change in contemporary theatre against her.  AK, who was the youngest of five children in a rural family, had learned to stand up for herself and was not inclined to bow her head.  Her strongest ally might gave been Theodore Fuchs, who was equally challenged and unbowed.

5.  “The Method” is not really one method, but a group of various methods with a strong component of “sense memory,” which means finding the key to character by pulling up and re-experiencing one’s own life, including the imprint of the senses at those times.  This is now scientifically endorsed, as it appears that the way nerve cells constitute a brain is based on their ability to store sensory information.  Not only does this hold memory, but also meaning, gathered into neuron nodes of connection.  Even psychological identity comes down in large part to this.  Until the development of ever more accurate and sensitive instruments and methods, the only way the interior life of the actor and the imaginary character could be summoned and matched was through introspection.  

6.  An aura gathered around “The Method,” an almost mystical belief in its power and importance.  When major movie stars were promoted as being “Method” actors and their results (which were in film) were admired, the success was attributed to “the Method.”  This meant neglect of the importance of movement and voice training (thus the accusation of mumbling) and structural importance in scripted live stage work which demands a through line and collaborative interaction with the rest of the cast.  AK NEVER neglected any of this.

7.  But I do not think that AK could say,  “This is “MY” Method” in a way that was accessible to analysis or marketable in a book, which I think was one of her hopes.  (The great mystique of having written or been the subject of a book is almost as grandiose as that of the stage.)  When questioned, she would say it just has to be like that.  I think she herself was frustrated.  When she asked some of her star pupils to explain what she was doing, they couldn’t put it into words either.  She had been teaching acting and directing all her life.  It was embedded in her in a wholistic way, neither analytical nor academic.  She was not a writer.  Her notes were one thing (free association), but her formal articles (like “Forever Beginning”) were essentially orations.

8.  What I saw, sitting there in the back of Annie May Swift watching day after day, was that she would provoke, cajole, flatter, threaten the students until she somehow got them to “do it right.”   She could FEEL this.  Then she would pounce and mark whatever they did, so they could repeat it.  Don’t forget that early in her life she coached the Seaside High School girls’ basketball team to being the state champions.  But she hated the word “coach” because of its connotations.  (On the other hand, she liked me in part because I was from Oregon and knew Seaside.)

9.  Working in the context of educational training is different from the professional theatre.  I’m unable to say much about it.  Others will need to chime in.

10.  At the time AK was crowded out (and there’s no question she was sand-bagged) she could not see how to go on.  She had never taught anywhere else, she had rarely known much of any other kind of life except the one based there in Annie May Swift or at Eagles Mere.  But pretty soon she found a new way, with the help of “sons.”  Interestingly, no daughters stepped in.  But maybe that was a consequence of the times.  In THESE times (AK was always so conscious of the importance of culture, context, even ecology) we are braver (maybe reckless) and my cohort is over seventy.  If anyone is going to create a legacy record, it will probably have to be us and now.  The true home of that record is NOT NU but BTE, on-going repertory scripted live stage..  In the end AK was no so much an individual as a community.

ROBERT BENEDETTI

Robert Benedetti is a particularly useful compass for me, as he’s a witness who is not a close friend.  I never was really in the theatre but avidly observed Alvina Krause’s acting classes and plays for four years.  Half a century later, I try to understand her methods.  The issue of what is or is not Stanislavsky’s “Method” has dominated a lot of discussion about acting.  Benedetti sensibly points out that the man changed his ideas over his lifetime and basing one’s Method on the early ideas will yield quite different theories than those from his later life. To quote directly, “They essentially froze his work at moments of his development and failed to take the essential arc of his search into account.”  I’ll try not to do the same to Alvina Krause.  

I have three acting books by Benedetti:  two editions of “The Actor at Work’ (1970, the first, and 2005, the ninth) and “The Actor in You: Sixteen Steps to Understanding the Art of Acting.” (2012, the fifth).  The latter is a little simpler, an excellent beginning text  I will say this: these books are as useful for a writer of narrative as for an actor.

What distinguishes Benedetti’s work is the stunning amount of it and his attention to personal ethics and social consciousness.  Also, the simple fact that he has continued on for many decades after this “Method” was seen circa 1970.  David Press’ Ph.D. thesis about AK’s version was submitted in 1971.  Downs continued her teaching on beyond her, with her guidance, so remains pretty much in her context.  Mason is talking about directing as much or more than acting.  

Benedetti departed from the AK circle early, transferring from the Department of Theatre to the Department of interpretation between his freshman and sophomore years.  About the same time AK turned away from her origins in Oral Interpretation, not acting.  In practical terms, as AK became more famous and sought-after as a “Method” teacher in the period I was taking notes, she began to have to do triage with her time and energy.  She was aging.  One way to keep class size down was to reject Interp students in the C11 acting class, which they had previously been required to take.  That line had not been drawn so harshly before.  She was throwing her weight around.

Benedetti scared me.  He was very big, very smart and since those days he has become a very big success.  The Department of Interpretation in what was then the School of Speech is now something very different: "Performance Studies."  After fifty years I visit the website and find that some of the classes I valued most highly are missing: notably Dean Barnlund’s “Language and Thought” and “Discussion.”  But then I see that today’s Performance Studies classes are about the interpretation and reconciliation of ethnic cultures, close to the same thing.  Benedetti’s work, esp. the two prize-winning movies (“Miss Evers' Boys” & “A Lesson Before Dying”), has been about the anguished problems of African-Americans and other social justice issues.  Dean Barnlund would have recognized and supported this work as uses of his principles and even some of his methods.  Think what Performance Studies could do with “Miss Evers” dancing!

Many of the Discussion class methods I was taught were the kind used now in Organizational Design and Leadership Training -- bird-caging discussions, brain-storming (before it became a cliché), repeating back what someone said to check meaning, identifying the strategies of individuals.  Most of all, we had the constant awareness that one culture is framed differently than the next.  Benedetti has since met Gestalt Therapy at Esalen.  He describes his approach as “a mix of Buddhist and Reichian principles and processes of discovery and personal growth.”  One might say that AK was teaching Stanislavsky the way Cecchetti taught Russian ballet, while Benedetti was exploring Pilobolus.  The result is that his acting books are packed with self-exploration and partner interaction exercises that support “consciousness raising.”

Every good teacher or therapist is eclectic, searching for what works.  To an outsider the subtle variations in Manhattan Broadway ideas about Method seem to leak in from the psychoanalytic background of that culture.  In my time there were several students who were from high schools and conservatories there, who brought their awe and esteem for it with them.  But as I work with these notes I begin to realize how much AK is based in post-War (both I and II) “American” values which may be projected on Greek and Elizabethan ideals.  The time period was the late Fifties post-Korean War -- an undeclared “brain-wash” war, the Cold War.  The Kennedy Years had not quite begun.  The Demonization of Communism still gripped Hollywood.

The contrast between reading Benedetti and the other writers is rooted in the fact that he went on after those early times.  He accepts those but adds Asian concepts, experimental ideas.   Esalen stands as a kind of Pacific Ocean idea-bank, sort of like the Concord, Massachusetts, Atlantic Ocean idea-bank, reconciling the “we are the greatest” Americanism with “the world is interwoven” of Asian and New Age thinking.  Both accepted the twinship of religion and theatre.  Very powerful stuff and crucial in the “twenty-tens.”

Going in and out of academics, Benedetti has entered the world of professional production, as has Mason, but I don’t know enough to comment on them.  I haven’t read his books about film and television, those variations on the theme of theatre.   They’re on my list.  They would have been beyond AK, not least because they weren’t really developed yet.  Neither do I have ANY idea what Benedetti would think of Cinematheque, the group I work with (sort of -- and from a distance), which is based on edited and computer-altered photography, almost entirely and ambiguously connotative.  Think music vid.  AK would have given it no time.

Yesterday I happily spent reading Benedetti’s first novel:  “The Long Italian Goodbye” which is a gracefully fictionalized memoir of the West Side Chicago neighborhood where he grew up.  Think Francis Ford Coppola.  Very Italian, complete with recipes, curiously echoing Jewish ways (Studs Terkel, Saul Bellow) in the salute to Socialism, the insistence on justice, the awareness of mortality, the valuing of ordinary people.  

In his acting books Benedetti comes back now and then to the ethics of the actual theatre company -- how the cast and crew treat each other.  His advice rings true for Life, period.  This is from the “Afterword” chapter called “Transformation”:

Your sense of purpose grows from your respect for your own talent, your love for the specific material you are performing, and your desire to use both to serve your audience.  It is this drive to be at service through your art that finally overcomes the self-consciousness of your ego and carries you beyond yourself, giving you a transcendent purpose from which come dignity, fulfillment, and ongoing artistic vitality.

http://robertbenedetti.com/index.html

TRAJECTORIES

This happens pretty often.  I find some little topic that ought to be easily dispatched, and instead it becomes a devouring beast that I’m spending hours on every day.  This time it was my old acting notes, which became an Alvina Krause project, which becomes a history of the Northwestern University School of Speech -- now Communication Arts -- which becomes a history of thought around the world.  Not just how this particular version of the study of communication came to be, but a whole philosophical can of worms about what a human being is.  This is particularly acute in a time when the neurobrain theorists are saying that the edge (not so much cutting as tentacled) of evolution is our ability to communicate ideas and get in sync with each other.

So here’s this little ugly duckling of a farm girl who wins a competition for speaking, probably memorized text she may not have written.   (Oratory, elocution, declamation, interpretation -- the name of written and spoken aloud words keeps changing.)  Born in 1893, she is Edwardian.  A two-year normal school education gets her a teaching certificate.  After a few years of seasoning she earned her BS (1916) at what was then the Comnock School of Oratory, later the NU School of Speech, to which she returned for a Masters’ degree (’33).  Dean Ralph Dennis hired her in 1930 and arbitrarily pushed her out of “interpretation” into “acting.”  John Van Meter, who somehow knew her then, said she was “a shy, over-formal woman.”  Gradually she gained confidence and built a world around her method of teaching acting, which is not necessarily the same as the Stanislavsky Method.  Things went on until she began to actively resist “interpretation” which renewed problems when she rejected interp students in acting classes.

The School of Speech -- now School of Communication -- had its own trajectory, beginning in 1878 as the Department of Elocution which later pulled in from Garrett Seminary (which shares the NU campus) the Comstock School of Oratory, becoming the School of Speech in 1921.  When I attended (‘57-’61), there were six departments including Speech Education, Interpretation, Theatre, Audiology, Speech Therapy, and Public speaking.  Obviously it has been technology and the larger culture that prompted adding radio/television/film.   “Performance Studies” separated from theatre on philosophical premises, pulling thought from anthropology and post-mod theory.  This is the list of  current NU “Programs of Study”  someone posted on Wikipedia:

• Audiology
• Communication Sciences & Disorders
• Communication Studies
• Dance
• Media, Technology and Society
• Technology and Social Behaviour
• Performance Studies
• Public Culture & Rhetoric
• Radio/Television/Film
• Speech, Language, Learning
• Theatre
• Writing for the Screen and Stage

Many, if not most, places where one would study acting would group it with “performance” rather than “communication.”  A conservatory.  What was the original impetus for adding the work of the speech therapist or the audiologist, both of which are nearly medical?  If it weren’t for the research aspect, they could be called therapeutic.  NU has an active opera component but it is grouped with music.  The Wikipedia entry for “Communication Studies” says “Part of what makes communication a popular major is its great reputation for being flexible.”  The entry lists fourteen professional associations, but omits the only one I ever joined:  Zeta Phi Eta, women’s sorority for speech professionals.  I lost my pin and regret it, because it was an elegant little thing: a cameo surrounded by “pearls.”  Established in 1893 -- the year AK was born -- the group is still active.  

The Victorian/Edwardian era in the US was clearly a time of blossoming public speech, especially for women.  The first female ministers were making their careers: they preached with their hats on.  And they had wonderful hats.  You see how a bit of simple research can lead all over the map?  But there is no Department of Millinery in the Communication Arts.  Probably enough material for an excellent BBC-type series with an onstage/backstage twist.

On the backstage side is the career of one my other beloved teachers:  Theodore Fuchs, a theatrical lighting designer, engineer and consultant as well as professor of theatre who taught us lighting through the use of ingenious devices he invented in the attic of Annie May Swift.  Just the mention of his name brings back the smell of hot lights, the crinkle of gels, the thrum and thump of the big knife-switch dimmers in the light cage.  I’m told that these days the lighting tech sits in the front row of the theatre with an iPad II and manages the whole thing with fingertips.

Fuchs wrote a book on how to improvise stage lighting out in the boonies and in Browning I did make some of those things: lightbulbs wired in series so you could screw and unscrew them to control the amount of power in the line, big rheostats the size of pizzas you made from winding copper wire and then pouring on plaster.  I think I still have that book.

Fuchs’ personality was as strong as Krause’s, so it was fortunate that they got along.  His idea of “Complimentary Cross Lighting” is the same as used by Charlie Russell in his paintings: that is, warm-colored light from one direction and cool-colored light from the other direction. which creates well-modeled shapes and interesting but subtle contrasts.  

The student directing lab and studio programs were always at risk for being a little too experimental or controversial for the taste of a conservative Midwestern school.  One early version had been cancelled entirely.  According to David Press, who was a “cherub” and therefore around the School of Speech as early as 1952, Fuchs was the head of the Department of Theatre through much of AK’s career and set up the Workshop Theatre (the second version), putting AK in charge of it.  But the blowup that finally ensued took down Fuchs.  Quoting Press:  “Some of the reviews of the campus productions were evidently brutal and Fuchs, as chair, withdrew the privilege of allowing the campus press to attend dress rehearsals and ceased providing free tickets for the performances.  Resentments evidently escalated.

“As I remember the story, the department was producing “The House of Bernarda Alba.”  The Spanish Consulate was invited along with other dignitaries.  There was a reception in the lobby area lounge before the show.  A photographer from the student press showed up to take pictures and maybe snapped some.  Fuchs asked him to leave.  The photographer requested to be allowed to take pictures during the performance.  Fuchs said no.

“The photographer went outside the building, went around to the basement steps, entered and even went up the spiral metal staircase to backstage.  Evidently at a crucial moment, he poked his flash camera through the wings and shot a flash picture.  Imagine Fuchs’ reaction, he being a lighting man.  He rushed from his seat, out the auditorium door, and managed to catch the photographer outside the building.  There was a tussle for the press camera and the photographic plate.  Evidently the camera ended broken on the ground.

“The incident made the national press.  Fuchs was replaced by Mitchell.”  The papers of both Fuchs and Mitchell are at Northwestern.  Given a choice between the two, I’d write a bio of Fuchs.  Lee Mitchell did not like trouble.

In the fall of 1957 there was a second production of “The House of Bernarda Alba” that starred Paula Ragusa (later Prentiss).  The story I know about that production was also dramatic.  At one point Paula’s character was supposed to come onstage from a roll in the hay.  To get the proper Method emotion, she grabbed the nearest stagehand and smooched him before her entrance.  The next night a whole little cluster of hopeful stagehands gathered offstage, just in case.  But some things don’t get repeated.  Sometimes they get swallowed up in larger issues and diversions.