EXCERPT FROM THE NU 150 YEAR HISTORY

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY: CELEBRATING 150 YEARS.  Available from the Northwestern University Press.  Written by Jay Pridmore, a Chicago writer.

This is on pages 210-211.

ALVINA KRAUSE AND HER STARS

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.

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.

Krause was soon directing productions at the University Theatre.  Her first play, Anna Christie, earned praise in the Daily 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 Uncle Vanya.

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 Uncle Vanya, he said.

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 Richard III, 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.”

Krause stayed calm.  “Now 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.

(This is online at http://www.nu150.northwestern.edu/book/excerpts-krause.html )

CHARLTON HESTON & VERA WARD: CLASSMATES

CHARLTON HESTON, VERA WARD TEAM UP TO PERPETUATE TECHNIQUES OF MENTOR  

(Yankton Press & Dakotan,  April 5, 1969) by Dale Bruget

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.

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.

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.

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.

Visit in Hollywood

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.”

Mrs. Ward, Lydia Heston and Charlton Heston were contemporary students of Miss Krause at Northwestern.

In opening remarks for the video-tape, Heston said:

“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.

“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.

Miss Krause has made three workshop appearances on campus at Yankton College and is slated to return next fall.

“Study of Life”

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.

Appropriately, the series has been named “Acting -- a Study of Life.”  . . .[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.

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.

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.

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.

Among the recipients was 90-year-old Daisy Ward (Mrs. Freeman Ward) of El Paso, an aunt of Dr. Ward.

ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE AK DVD

Acting Lessons with Alvina Krause, 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 Acting -- a Study of Life, 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 “Creating Shakespeare’s World.”  “Theatre of the Absurd,” and “What is Character?”  The legendary Northwestern acting teacher served as BTE’s artistic director from 1978 until her death in 1981.

Copies may be purchased by contacting the BTE box offrice at btetix@ptd.net 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.

NOTE FROM "DIALOGUE" FALL, 2002

REMEMBERING ALVINA KRAUSE

(From the Alumni section of the NU publication called “Dialogue” in Fall, 2002)

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.  [Note: As nearly as I can tell, this doesn’t exist.]  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-hillin@northwestern.edu.  [This address is dead.]

Bill Bergfeld (C 57) [sic] 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.  bte@bte.org

MEMORIES from Bill Bergfeldt

MEMORIES OF ALVINA KRAUSE

Bill Bergfeldt, Speech ’57

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.

SOME MEMORIES:

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.

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.

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.”

Two of my favorite Alvina Krause stories -- which I heard.  Was not there.

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!”

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.”

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.”

(Note:  Bergfeldt was in the Speech Education department and taught high school dramatics for some years.)

THE YANKTON SD TEACHING DVD'S

Over the past few days I’ve watched a set of DVD translations of videos made years ago in Yankton, SD, of Alvina Krause 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.

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.  

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.

At one point she repeats and repeats,  “This means everything: that I am a MAN.”  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?   

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?  “If you are going to be an actor, no human experience can be foreign to you!”

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 Edith Hamilton!)  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 (Pinter, Albee, Becket) 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 Chekhov 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 Stanislavsky with his humanistic version of stimulus and response.

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.

There’s an oddly Victorian quality implicit in AK, declare as she might that she stands with Hedda Gabler and Shaw.  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.  “He’s made it!” she cries.  “He’s published!!”   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.

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 Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, 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 Joe Campbell 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.

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.

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?

(These videos are available through the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.)

THE ACTING REVOLUTION

FRIDAY, JANUARY 04, 2013

My core collection of books about acting starts with my high school “The Stage and the School” which is illustrated with photos taken at Jefferson High School in Portland, OR., in the years I was a kid in Melba Day Sparks’ dramatics program (Class of ’57).  The shelf continues with the texts acquired inAlvina Krause’s acting classes. (Class of ’61).  Now I own textbooks Marshall Mason (classmate), Robert Benedetti(near classmate), David Downs (later AK student) and two theorists, Peter Brook and Richard Hornby.  I’m excluding from this book roundup some arcane stuff about performance and so on that more properly belong to philosophy.

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, Richard Hornby in his book “The End of Acting: a Radical View” (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.

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.

Swept up in this was the end-career of Alvina Krause 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 ofCumnock, was now thrown up against the psychoanalytical émigre mystique of Lee Strasberg.  To her admirers she was the truer teacher of the “Method” theories of Stanislavsky.  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.  

Hornby describes Strasberg’s version of Stanislavsky with these points.

1. Strasberg never studied with Stanislavsky, never met him, nor read him in Russian.
2. What he learned was from the American Laboratory Theatre in New York where Richard Boleslavsky andMaria Ouspenskaya, emigrés from the Moscow Art Theatre, were the teachers.  This was in the Twenties.
3. Strasberg was not an actor.  Stanislavsky was.
4. Strasberg directed very little.  He was a classroom theorist.  Stanislavsky was a stage man.
5. Neither Strasberg nor Stanislavsky was good at  dramatic literature, but the latter had a strong partner,Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was an excellent advisor at the Moscow Art Theatre.  Strasberg had no such partner.  The closest he came was Harold Clurman at the Group Theatre, who pushed Strasberg to appreciate Clifford Odets.  When Clurman left, Strasberg developed an opposition to literature and pursued the personal reality of the actors, more like a therapist.
6. Stella Adler 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.
7. However, the Strasberg Method is more subtle than it is usually portrayed, and for actors who understand it, the results are remarkable.
8. Hornby feels that one Strasberg concept that DOES jibe with Stanislavsky is the necessity of relaxation.  (Krause often asserted this.)
9. 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.
10. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.