BACK STAGE WEST

March 16-22, 2006

By Jenelle Riley

Great performances can earn accolades for the actor in the role – worthy praise for an artist willing to dig deep and take risks in the medium – but most actors will be the first to tell you they didn’t get there alone. Aside from writers, directors, and the countless people who contribute to their performance, actors are quick to thank the teachers and coaches who have guided them. Like actors, teachers sometimes get a bad rap; more than one sitcom has poked fun at the idea that acting can be taught, portraying teachers as turtle-neck-wearing, pretentious artistes who couldn’t hack it as actors.

Those in the business know better. A good teacher helps acting look effortless, so it should be taken as a compliment when the seams don’t show. Back Stage sat down with four Los Angeles acting teachers to help demystify the student-teacher relationship. With more than 100 years of teaching experience among them, these instructors were: Milton Katselas of the Beverly Hills Playhouse, an acclaimed stage and film director who received a Tony nomination for the original stage production Butterflies Are Free and authored the book Dreams Into Action; Ivana Chubbuck of the Ivana Chubbuck Studios in Hollywood, author of The Power of the Actor and creator of the Chubbuck Technique; Aaron Speiser of Aaron Speiser Acting Studio, a professional actor for more than 15 years before turning to teaching and directing (such as his feature Talking About Sex, which he also wrote and produced); and Howard Fine of the Howard Fine Acting Studio, who worked for years with Uta Hagen and headed the acting department at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York before relocating to Hollywood. All four expressed not only a passion for their craft but also a genuine desire to help their students connect as performers.

Back Stage: What do you say to people who believe that acting can’t be taught – that you either have a natural ability of you don’t?

Howard Fine: You can’t give somebody a natural ability, there has to be a natural aptitude. But it’s disgraceful to think that acting can’t be taught. Look at any sport, at any other area of the arts. We expect it to be difficult, we expect it to have a technique, we expect it to have a process. Unfortunately, great acting looks easy but isn’t. Because it’s hard to do but should be invisible to the audience, every schmuck thinks they can do it. No one watching the Olympics right now – no one would look at that giant mountain and think, ‘Gee, I think I’ll get some skis and take up skiing tomorrow.’ It’s the same with acting: We don’t appreciate that it’s a true craft and there’s technique. There are certainly people who have more natural ability than others. You can’t create a talent, but you can develop it.

Milton Katselas: He said it beautifully. Anybody can learn to act if they have the desire and the will. A student needs to have a desire. A teacher needs to have a student with that desire.

Aaron Speiser: Some people can definitely act without any training, there’s no question about that. And some people could possibly do brain surgery or play piano without training; many people can do many things without training. But training makes it easier and better, and inevitably you get training somewhere. If it’s not from a teacher, you’ll get it from a director or another actor on the set. Someone will train you somewhere in some manner. We just do it more efficiently, that’s all.

Back Stage: Is there anyone you simply can’t teach to be an actor?

Katselas: Only people who don’t want it.

Back Stage: Is there a particular method you subscribe to?

Speiser: You have to develop your own technique inevitably; you have to make it your own based on your own life experiences. Certainly, Stanislavsky is a huge influence because it just makes sense what he’s talking about. Then you start figuring out: How do you get to creating life? How do you help that student create life in front of the camera? I like improvisation a lot, I studied it a lot, so I added more of that into what I do. It’s not necessarily better or worse; it’s personal.

Chubbuck: We may have different approaches, and some of them are similar. I have a student who was studying with me and just went back to Milton. She said you really work for her, and that’s great. What I do is very specifically individualized to what I teach. It’s like a different art form of any kind. Some people are into realism, some are into expressionism, some are into impressionism, but they’re all art and it all works.

Katselas: About that student – Ivana and I talked about that student because it’s a pet thing of mine – I don’t like to take any students from any teacher without that teacher’s consent. The reason for that is not just altruistic; it’s that I don’t want the same thing to happen to me. If they say something about the teacher they were with in my class, and they say something shitty, I stop them. I say, “The moment you’re saying this about so-and-so, there’s a student of mine in another class saying something shitty about me. So just cut that out.” Sometimes you’ll get a form, and you’ll ask, “Who did you study with?” and there’s eight teachers, and it’s ridiculous.

Back Stage: What bad habits do actors have that you notice most?

Chubbuck: I have a couple of pet peeves. Everybody smokes, because it’s something to physicalize, and it’s clichéd and boring. The thing that is my biggest pet peeve is throwing food at each other. People just don’t do that.

Katselas: The worse habit for me is indicating that they’re just acting as if they’re doing something, not participating. That’s a killer. You know right away. You can tell when they’re really listening and when something is going on, when it’s not phony and not foolishness.

Back Stage: What do you say to actors who are expressing frustration with their ability or where their career is?

Speiser: If the frustration is about the acting, the creative process, I can help. If the frustration is that you don’t have a job, most of the time it’s personal. It’s about their life. They’ve gotten work before; they’ll get work again.

Katselas: I have a lot of private meetings with actors, and I’d like to have $50 for every time one complained. It almost always seems to revolve back to something Jaime Escalante, the math teacher [portrayed in Stand and Deliver], said when he spoke in my class once. He spoke about “ganas” – desire – how desire wanes, and when it wanes, so does their output in class, their output with their agent. It’s understandable because rejection is a terrible thing that an actor has to live with. But that’s the way it is. And the least amount of time spent on thoughts of that, the better. Just try to push forward and get back on the beat with that desire. I wrote a book called Dreams Into Action about trying to keep that alive and knowing each person is unique and there are no likely winners.

Look at somebody like [Ronald] Reagan, who was a total unlikely winner. Bette Davis said to me that he was the worst actor in Hollywood. And he became the president. So instilling the idea in them that they can be unlikely winners is important.

I just saw Kramer vs Kramer again the other night. And Dustin Hoffman is not handsome, yet he was beautiful, just gorgeous, in that. The way he stood, the way he held himself, he just looked wonderful. An actor has to be inspired to have that beauty brought out of them.

Howard Fine: What I try to do twice a year is bring in panels of agent, manager, casting director – I have to really rely on my friends – and the students get to ask them questions. What it does is humanize the industry.

Katselas: I have a little game, I guess you’d call it, that I play with students. That is, when they’re with me for a certain period of time and they’re not working, I tell them they have to book a job. And if they don’t get a job in the required time, they’re out. Seventy-five percent to 80 percent find a job. One actor, I found out, hadn’t had a job for 11 years, and he’d been with us for nearly five of those 11 years. I told him he had eight weeks. In eight weeks, he got an episode of Seinfeld – he was the Soup [Nazi]. It works. It makes that sort of necessity. If they don’t love the class, it doesn’t work, and it’s just as well.

Back Stage: What is the single most important thing you want your students to know?

Katselas: How to be a person: somebody who understands the world, what’s going on, and how to give and then take that and make it a part of what they do as an artist. How to be a person in their work. And in doing that, to discover within their acting the surprise that accompanies all acting. The revelation of it, the experience of it, the living of it. Because they are a person living an experience; they are not mechanical.

Chubbuck: I want actors to find a way to take all that pain and darkness and humanity we’ve talked about and find catharsis – within the parts that they’re playing and within their own private lives. So when you’re finding true catharsis within a part that you’re playing, which leads to a resolution to the issues of that character and thereby yourself, you’re also giving an audience a hope and the ability to achieve their own catharsis, and you can actually affect a greater number of people, which is what I believe art should be.