Musings on theater. Seven million G.I.s returned from World War II
and went to college on the G.I. bill, paid for by the government. This
led to the establishment of hundreds of new colleges lusting for
students in a competitive marketplace. Liberal Arts
proliferated, and by the late 1960s, the college theater departments had
usurped the role of theater companies in the training of actors. A
formerly disreputable profession, except for stars, that made mothers
suffer when their pride an joy studied acting,
suddenly was semi-respectable when offspring graduated with a B.A.
Unlike the other performing arts, which require high skills,
training and discipline, acting is the least structured art and most
students don't participate until college, unlike dance, for example.
Which invariably starts when children are very young. Colleges also use the grading system,
which inhibits the exploration of extremes, often a sloppy, chaotic
process, yet vital to,the development of stagecraft. So bright young
people who wanted to be actors went to college by the thousands, yet the
colleges never told them there was only work
for a few hundred, almost none of it paying. In general, the same thing
happened to directors, many of whom were encouraged to deconstruct the
classics, their professors blissfully unaware that the classics are
class documents, that lose stature when Macbeth
becomes a mafia don and Hamlet becomes a
Mental patient.
Regional theaters spread and Off-Off Broadway teemed with hastily
and frequently casually produce plays of varying quality, that attracted
small audiences. Broadway productions of the classics became fewer and
fewer, mostly with a Hollywood star and a
weak supporting cast that was contra the needs of a classical drama
consequently not thrilling the audience, resulting in poor returns for
the producers. Like the other performing arts in America, theater was
beginning to lose its greying out audience.
I started my own theater company in the mid-70s and quickly learned
the talent pool for Off-Off Broadway was quite limited and the few with
high abilities wanted to be paid union scale. No one seemed cognizant
that 97% of the union membership never worked
in theater and were mostly waiters and bartenders. My ambition to
profoundly move audiences compelled me to develop an ensemble training
process that was so demanding that only a few capable performers
persevered. The rest were peculiar misfits who were never
appreciated before.
I began a long term company process doing Italian Commedia del' Arte, using
scenarios translated and adapted from the I Gelosi, the first
professional theater company, that traveled Italy and France in the 16th
century with many wild adventures, and presented low and high theater,
opera, ballet, not the stereotypical low comedy,
with actors playing the same roles for life, as asserted by college
theater departments. This troupe earned a living with their art, or
starved.
Of course I couldn't demand that commitment from mostly over
indulged middle-class amateurs, but my rehearsal procedure was rigorous
and diverse, using physical, mental and emotional techniques to develop a
working ensemble, the only logical way to present
a play that depicts a small world. It should be obvious that the actors
must live in that world for the duration of the play, or lose the
interest and attention of the audience.
Gary Beck
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