Big 'Ol Sensual Pussycat

I had a realization today as I was teaching. Of course it wasn’t a new realization, it was one I’ve had many times before, the only thing that’s different today is that I’m writing about it and articulating my thoughts.

I am repeatedly stunned and amazed at how disconnected this generation of young actors are from their bodies.

I have to be clear and forthcoming in saying that I believe everything is connected (acting, movement, and voice) and that most things start with the body.

This point was driven home to me today in Meisner class. (At UAlbany I am teaching a section of Acting Two, which is Mesiner based.)

Two very lovely young people were working on a scene (yes, it’s final scene time) where they are playing two lovers who have never consummated their relationship. They are in relationships with other people, one of them is very religious and here they are, after three years of sneaking around, finally in a hotel room ready to consummate their affair.

The two lovely actors were like robots. They were in the scene, but behaving like an Amish couple in church.

They didn’t touch each other the whole time.

They also were on a bed they refused to use.

I love beds on stage. I kneel on them, lay on them, roll around on them, and hang off the edge of them. They are my favorite set piece/prop.

These two actors were talking heads of repression.

So I cleared them of the bed and proceeded to roll around on it. I had the actress feed me her lines while he stood beside the bed. I asked the male actor if I could touch him, he consented and then I held his hand. He held mine. Then I asked if I could put my head on his chest, he said yes and he did a speech with my head on his chest. He opened up. The speech lit up. He went places and connected in a way he hadn’t before.

I turned to the class and asked,  “Was there anything we did that was sexual in any way?”

The class, “No.”

“What was it then?”

Silence mixed with looks of confusion on their faces.

“It was sensual.”

I could see light bulbs going off and realizations happening.

“Sensuality and sexuality are two different things. While it certainly helps if they go hand in hand they are not mutually exclusive. Being sensual means being tactile and connected to one’s partner and environment. It means being present in a larger way and being open. It means following impulses and being in your body.”

As I looked around the room at them, I felt sorry for them.

For the most part (and this is a gross generalization) they are a generation that is afraid to touch. Where everything can be construed as something else, everything can be misinterpreted. They are a generation  where everything is litigious and they fear being uncomfortable and they are detached from their bodies. They are a generation of file complaints and ask for it to be easier rather than problem solve and invent. They are a generation where empathy has been replaced by the tweet and they live a life connected to their devices instead of to each other.

So what am I going to do about it? I’m going to give them more assignments in their journals where they have to connect. (And yes I have them do their journals digitally online.)

I’m going to force them to interact with each other and with art. (They had very mixed responses when I had them go to the free art museum on campus and respond to a piece of art that “struck them.”)

In Acting One (which I teach every semester), I am going to do more old school improvisation work and force them to interact physically. I’m going to make sure that every warm-up forces them to be PHYSICAL and IN CONTACT with each other.

We will see how this experiment pans out. At UAlbany we don’t have movement or voice classes. In the show I directed I did voice warm-ups with them. I’m also teaching Acting Three which is in essence a movement class since it is the outside-in, physical theatre class.

But these students don’t have the opportunity to roll around on the floor like a pepper grinder, tumble, paint the wall with their voices, or roll around on the floor with each other like big ‘ol sensual pussycats.

Perhaps in Acting One I will do a round of open scenes where I will set criteria such as, you have to touch each other at three different points in the opens scene in some fashion. We will see if it will make a difference. All I can do is keep chugging along and help them anyway I can.

I frequently say to me students, "It is the artists job to illuminate the humanity of life." I'm going to start following that line up with, "So let's go light up the sky."

Some Thoughts on the Next Generation of Playwrights & Theatre Artists

Some thoughts on the next generation of playwrights & theatre artists.

This past year I’ve had the privilege to work with playwriting students of vary skill levels and educational backgrounds at a variety of places and here are some conclusions I’ve drawn . . .

1.)   Playwrights need to constantly be putting work up in front of an audience, even if it’s not perfect finished etc and putting it up often.

Most of the writers I worked with had no ability to see their work through the audience’s eyes.  I found this fascinating. Whenever I have a show going up or being workshopped, as soon as other people are in the room I “see” the play through their eyes and learn so much, what is over-written, what clunks, what doesn’t fit, what needs another beat etc.  Somehow I learned this skill in undergrad. Maybe it was because we were based on the writer’s workshop model where our work was being read out loud constantly. The University of Iowa was also production heavy. We had No Shame (which in it’s early days was mandatory every week for the MFA’s), gallery shows, readings, workshops plus other departments we would put work up in.

One of my colleagues at this event confided in me that being able to see his play’s through the audience’s eyes was something he had to learn over time and didn’t innately posses and was something he was always working on.

I think being forced to put up your own work all the time is a good thing. The French theatre teacher Jacques Lecoq had his students put up work every Friday in what he called, auto-cours.  Starting in the 1960’s Lecoq had the students at this school devote time each day to working on pieces that they would present to the school at the end of each week.

The pressure of putting up work each week forces you to be okay with failure and learn to create when nothing is truly happening for you creatively.

Through this process you will be forced to wear different hats, that of actor, director, designer etc. I think if more theatre training and education programs adopted some sort of system like this, we would be making better and stronger theatre artists.

2.)   Playwrights need to read more theatre and watch more theatre.

A lot of these playwrights were smart, brilliant young people but I found their depth and breadth of knowledge about theatre and major theatre texts lacking. I found this shocking.  I would reference a playwright or an essayist and I wouldn’t find a hint of recognition on their faces.

The other problem lies in the fact that most art forms, genres etc are self-referential. You can’t build upon and steal from other people’s ideas if you haven’t read it or seen it.

3.)   There is no substitute for solid dramatic structure.

I will probably be crucified for this point, but it’s true. Unless you are Mac Wellman or Erik Ehn I suggest hunkering down and really learning structure.  (I can hear the movement theatre and devisor/collaborators in the world groaning as I type!)

I have one thing to say to you, shut up and deal.

Even when I’m devising a project and putting the pieces together I deal with structure. What is overall story we are telling? Everything on stage must push the story forward.  If it doesn’t move the narrative forward in some fashion it doesn’t belong on stage. Other wise it becomes a cool piece of movement or a pretty monologue or an interesting moment and that is death on stage. It might be cool and you might be married to it, but if it stops the action (and that word can have so many meanings and connotations) than it serves no purpose and must go.  If it doesn’t move the message/politics/action/plot/narrative forward in some manner, cut it.

One of my early playwriting teachers, Thea Cooper, would make us take a red pen to the page and draw shapes around very word that correlated to it’s value. Then we would start cutting. It was a brutal exercise, but brilliant and taught one to let shit go.

Another lesson in structure came from Nilo Cruz. He would have us write scenes in the style of other playwrights. Oh, boy did that teach us a thing or two about structure.

4.)   All playwrights need to act and direct.

Again, I’m sure I’m hearing groans, guess what? I don’t care.

All playwrights need to suffer through more than one acting class and more than one directing class, why? It will make them better. My favorite playwrights all started out as actors. If you suffer through more than one acting class and are forced to act, forced to act in your own stuff, your colleague’s stuff and if you direct your colleague’s plays, you will become such a better writer.

Why you might ask? You will a.) Learn to think visually if you are forced to direct as well as patch holes in other people’s plays and b.) If you act and do it often you will hopefully ever write a character that doesn’t serve a purpose or belong in the scene.

5.)   Show, don’t tell.

I can’t tell you how many classes I’ve heard this in and it’s true. The first 500 times you hear it, you won’t understand it and then finally one day you will and your head will explode.  The simplest way I can explain/describe etc this idea is this. Write a monologue revealing something about a character, then, see how you can relate the same information to the audience through physical action via a scene using as few words as possible. Behavior not exposition is how we learn about characters.

Believe it or not, but film and television writing are great ways to drive this point home, since they are such visual mediums (as is the theatre, hint, hint.)

6.)   I believe in volume.

I was recently at a talkback for one of my plays and an audience member (and budding writer) asked me if I believe in volume.

Yes, I do, to a point.

I don’t believe good writing can be taught. I think someone is either a storyteller or they are not. I can teach someone how to write cleanly, effectively and efficiently but inspiration, creativity and the ability to make people shut up, sit down and listen to you? That can’t be taught. But for someone who has the spark, yes they will get better through everything they write.

Every time you write something you get better at structure, you learn more about your voice, you grow more confident. Thinking about writing won’t make you a better writer, only writing will. So when it comes to theatre (notice I said theatre, not playwriting) I believe in the 10,000 Hour Theory. Directing, acting, producing, stage-managing, designing and writing for 10,000 hours will make you a better playwright.  Notice how really good musicians can play more than one instrument? Theatre artists should be the same way.

Designers should direct, directors should write and playwrights should act: get the picture? Trust me, it will make you better at your primary art.

Also keep in mind that 99.9% of writing is re-writing. So when I say volume I don’t necessarily always mean, volume – perhaps a better way to describe it to say always be creating . . . something.

7.)   Devising, company created work and other popular trends.

No matter how you feel about it, devising and company created work through the ensemble is here to stay. Even the Dramatists Guild is addressing this current trend.

The elephant in the room is the issue that this devised/company created work and the commercial theatre are currently incongruous.

Theatre programs and educational institutions all across the country are flocking to teaching students how to devise theatre and create work as a company. I think that’s great. A class in devising should be a part of every educational theatre’s curriculum. The issue arises when it comes to making money and reproducing this work. It’s hard enough in this business to make a living, have insurance and put into a retirement. Trying to do so with devised/company created theatre is next to impossible.  We don’t have a working financial model for it. Also most companies that create this type of work have a hard time reproducing it.

The way higher education is currently funded through student loans and grants I see a problem brewing. Schools that receive federal funding are now (or very soon) going to have to start posting learning outcomes and job placement rates (in one form or another) on their websites if they want to receive federal dollars.

While company created work is an easy way to claim students are working, I feel an amazing use of curriculum would be a class in producing and navigating the waters of non-profit management and commercial arts management. This will only help a program’s graduates not just create their own work, but able to create a long tem company and learn fiscal responsibility for an arts organization.

What am I saying? Well, I feel any program with a sense of being current, viable and serving the educational needs of it’s students should have as a part of it’s curriculum a class in devised theatre, a class in producing in the arts & arts management and last but not least some sort of on-camera component.

Yup, I said it. Any educational theatre program in the country that does not have an on-camera component is doing its students a disservice. They all need to find a way to start integrating the camera into their various disciplines be it design, writing, directing, stage management or acting. Its where so many of their alumni will end up in one form or another and to not prepare them, at least a little bit is criminal.

Stage managers will work in production, playwrights will write television and actors – well, as a working actor I know how much of my income comes from theatre and how much of it comes from film, television and commercials and I know where my insurance benefits come from.  I would be lost without SAG-AFTRA. Also in this digital age of the Internet there is no excuse for not learning how to tell stories and disseminate it through the web.

There is no excuse for not having it be part of the curriculum, when the Playwright’ s Center puts trailers for plays on its website and videos are an essential part of fundraising through crowd sourcing on Kickstarter educational theatre must embrace the use of cameras, working on camera and recorded media.  To not do so is negligent.

Bringing it back to the point of this post, which is playwrights, I encourage them to put up their work in as many ways as possible, always be throwing something up in front of some kind of audience. I also want to challenge them with learning three things, devising, producing and learning to write for film & television. At least experiment with all three, you will be doing yourself, your career and your talent a favor.