Abstract
In 1984, during my first year in New York City, I was cast in a very odd piece called Chaturanga (Sanskrit for “chess”). The plot was nonlinear, the characters mostly chess pieces, and the text vague and confusing—at least to me. I have particularly strong memories of using our bodies collectively to create an elephant. It was fun, interesting, audiences seemed to like it (whatever it was), and we received a decent notice in the New York Times.1 But I was at sea—I didn’t know what to do. Fresh out of graduate school, where the Meisner technique was taught and the theatre was classic rep, I was completely unprepared—or so I thought. The experience forced me to confront my training, to ask whether it would serve me as an artist in this kind of material. That is the question posed by this chapter: Can traditional actor training in the Method and/or its variants serve the contemporary theatre artist?
Hamlet splits with the ax the heads of Marx, Lenin, Mao. Snow. Ice Age.
—Heinrich Muller, Hamletmachine
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Notes
Portions of this chapter, and the ideas presented herein, were first published in Paul Kassel, “The Four Fundamental Verbs: An Approach to Playing Actions,” Theatre Topics 10.1 (Fall 1999): 181–96.
Viewpoints is a technique for working on stage created by Mary Overlee and developed by Anne Bogart. Instead of action, the Viewpoints emphasize relationships—actor to actor, actor to environment, and so on. See Anne Bogart: Viewpoints, Michael Bigelow Dixon and Joel A. Smith, eds. (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1995)
Harold Clurman, On Directing (New York: Collier, 1972), 147.
The difference between performing and not performing is important but cannot be discussed in a short chapter. I refer the reader to Alice Raynor’s, To Act, to Do, to Perform (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994)
Bert O. States, “The Actor’s Presence,” and Michael Kirby, “On Acting and Non-Acting,” in Acting (Re)considered: Theories and Practices, Phillip Zarrilli, ed. (London: Routledge, 1995).
See Michael Cole and Shelia R. Cole, The Development of Children (New York: Scientific American Books, 1989)
Robert Cohen, Acting Power (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield Publishing, 1978), 68.
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 171.
Arthur Holmberg, The Theatre of Robert Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13.
Laurence Shyer, Robert Wilson and His Collaborators (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1989), 7.
Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 175.
Charles Marowitz, The Other Way: An Alternative Approach to Acting and Directing (New York: Applause, 1999), 174.
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© 2000 David Krasner
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Kassel, P.S. (2000). Random Acts. In: Krasner, D. (eds) Method Acting Reconsidered. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62271-9_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62271-9_15
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