BIOGRAPHY BY JAMES GOODE

James Goode manages the Bloomsbury Theatre Ensemble, the resident acting company of the Alvina Krause Theatre, named in her honor in 1983.

The biography is posted at www.bte.org.

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RATIONALE FOR THIS BLOG

Miss Krause was very nice to me.  Those who got from her the full force blast of her personality will know that this meant she didn’t think I had any talent as an actor.  She was quite right.  But I don’t think she would be surprised that what she taught turned out to be an excellent foundation for many other things.  She was teaching HUMANITIES in the largest sense, the kind that was understood in her times as honoring human beings and pushing them to be as worthy as Elizabethans or Greeks, two of her ideals.

Why revisit an acting professor who has been dead for thirty years?  Why bother to talk abut “the Method” which we all “know” now it was about mumbling?  Why talk about a woman who passionately fought the star system, believing instead in repertory theatre companies, when now the star system has taken over everything?  Though today film rules, she had little to say about it.  Isn’t Alvina Krause simply out of date?  My cohort of NU students is in their seventies.  What do they care?

Ask David Downs at DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com  about the people who worked with him as AK’s successor and some who actually worked with AK herself.  You could ask him on Facebook.

Ask Jim Goode in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, should you be so lucky as to attend a production at the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble where the work goes on in repertory as she hoped it would.

Ask David Press, quietly retired professor, whose thesis -- written in collaboration with AK but repudiated by her halfway through -- had roughly the effect of stirring a stick in a wasp’s nest forty years ago.  Few have read it since for fear being stung.

Well, I did read it, (Order from www.proquest.com) and it gave me a lot to think about in many different ways.  These ways have developed out of work I’ve done based on my preparation for the Unitarian Universalist ministry at the Univesity of Chicago Divinity School and Meadville/Lombard Theological School.  Those who are surprised that there would be any connection should consider these things:

1.  For the Greeks religion and drama overlapped so deeply that it was hard to tell them apart.  They are the epitome of agonistic tragedy as well as trickster comedy.

2.  For the Elizabethans consciousness of religious issues raised by the discovery of a New World, the defiance of the Pope, and the need to leave off the destruction of wars over religious dogma and affiliation badly needed to be addressed.

3.  Northwestern University’s School of Communication was the School of Speech when I attended.  When Annie May Swift Hall was built, funded in honor of his dead daughter by Gustavus Swift, the School of Speech had been called the School of Oratory.  The school was actually organized and taught in 1878 by Robert McLean Cumnock, originally closely supported by Garrett Biblical Institute, which shares the campus with NU.  In those days before radio. the importance and power of live speech from the pulpit and the podium were a vital heart of America.  If AK had been influenced in slightly different ways, she might easily have been among the early female Universalist ministers.

4. AK’s life stretched over one of the most interesting and perilous centuries ever.  Born into an American rural Edwardian world, she began her adult education just as WWI was declared and the long shuddering hardship of it eliminated the men of a generation.  Then America roared into recklessness that plunged us back into the Great Depression, and again WWII and -- in the Fifties when I knew her -- a sober consideration of what civilization means anyway.  Sputnik went up in 1957, just as I hit campus and sat down in B43 acting class.

5.  Fifties culture was dominated by the Manhattan Mandarins who had formed from the European (often German and Jewish) immigrants.  Highly intellectual, they knew psychoanalysis, experimental writing, abstract expressionism, and were irresistible, nearly magic, for many people.  Method acting, mostly derived from Stanislavski’s work in Russia, was part of this high-prestige, glamorous, and exotic way that Life magazine admired and touted across the country.

Alvina Krause, Midwestern rural American, had developed “methods” of her own, partly from oratory or rhetoric and partly from physical culture, both athletic and artistic, almost as Eastern as Tai Chi.  Her results were stellar, worthy of Broadway.  How she got them is worthy of inquiry that is not dominated by ideas about the Method.  She was an American original in counterpoint to Manhattan ideas.

6.  At present there is a great deal of attention being given to the idea of gender and the relationship between the two ends of a continuum that had previously been see as binary.  The interrelationship between physical (genetic and anatomical) determiners of gender and the identification of the person with his or her gender role, including the gender assignment of those he or she desires, have preoccupied us all.  When I went to high school in Portland, OR. (not far from Seaside, where AK started her teaching career) -- 1953-57 -- the teachers, mostly women, had been born at the “turn of the century” which meant their opportunities to bond with men were much reduced.  They chose professions (usually teaching or nursing) instead of becoming wives and mothers.  Among those teachers I knew, several were in “Boston marriages.”  That is, two women living together lifelong in a private way.  We hardly thought about it.  One was the head of the NEA for a year.

Because AK and Lucy McCammon were pair-bonded, it would be easy to interpret them in today’s political way as defying convention and being “queer” in a formal sense.  I think this would be misleading.  Certainly at the time we all knew (some of us lived in her house) and none of us cared.  However, because the unique sexuality of individuals was quietly honored, many students found their feet. AK was fond of men.

7.  By now (since the invention of the fMRI and other methods of study) there is a body of neurotheory and counseling that addresses the constantly renewing question of human identity.  The work I’m following accepts the idea that every person includes MANY personas and daemons -- not in the dramatic way of “The Three Faces of Eve” but in the daily way we answer the door to a salesman with one “face” and return to an argument at the breakfast table with another “face” and then go out to our jobs with a third “face.”  I find it fascinating and enlightening to apply these theories to the work of AK with aspiring unformed actors.  There’s a lot of explanatory power that is surprisingly -- well -- “spiritual.”  Victor Turner’s anthropological idea of “liminal space” certainly informs theatre and Eugene Gendlin’s work with “focusing” is the most basic of acting skills.

For a person of my background, the first idea is that this ought to become a book.  Let’s be modern and -- for now, at least -- think Blog.  And in the metaphorical way one says a boat is a sail, let’s call it “The Silver Comb” to honor that anchor on AK’s head.  www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com is in very early stages.

TIME LINE

BORN  JANUARY 28, 1893 in New Lisbon, Wisconsin.

Youngest of five.  Grew up on the family farm.

1912 graduated from high school where she had won a declamation contest.

1912 or 1913 attended University of Wisconsin

1914 enrolled at Northwestern University School of Oratory.

1916 graduated from the two year program and began teaching high school drama in Seaside, OR, where several siblings lived.  Coached the girl’s basketball team to a state championship.

Then taught in Springfield, Missouri.

1925 returned to NU.

1928 received Bachelors in Science.

Taught for a year at Hamline University in Minnesota and produced a play for a college drama competition at NU.  She won and was asked to join the faculty.

1930 appointed Instructor of Voice and Interpretation.

1933  Masters of Science from NU

1941 became Assistant Professor.  Initiated a one-year acting course which developed into a three year program.

1957 became Associate Professor.

1961 retired as Professor Emeritus

Until 1963 continued as lecturer. 

Bloomsburg, PA   Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble

DIED JANUARY 1, 1981

ALVINA KRAUSE 1893 - 1981

After starting krausenotes.blogspot.com  in order to compile the notes written by and about Alvina Krause's teaching and directing methods, it became clear there was a second level of material that was yet to be written.  In fact, I wanted to write some of it.

Partly it was reflection about how she fit into her times.  Born in 1893, she was 21 in 1914 when WWI was declared.  So many of her generation -- mostly the men -- were wiped off the planet amid terrible suffering.  One result was a compensating idealism -- THIS war would end war!  Another was compensating household arrangements.  Like many of my high school teachers who were that age, they quietly adapted to "Boston marriages."

My cohort came into her hands in 1957 and most of us graduated in 1961.