Becoming an Actor/Scholar

I'm currently in the process of applying to graduate schools -- I'm looking to get my MFA in Acting. This weekend I'm being the work on all those essays and personal statements that I have to write. One of them wants me to write about a defining life moment that has nothing to do with theatre. Um... I get that they want me to be well-rounded, but I don't think I have any life-defining moments that have nothing to do with theatre. Well, maybe the ones that have to do with religion, but I'm not sure I really want to be that personal. I've had people tell me that they don't know anyone that is as into theatre as I am, and so everything in my life I'm pretty sure I can relate to theatre in some way. My brother's fiancee joked that I could write about the moment I met her, but the night we met we watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch!

Anyway in order to prepare for writing these essays I have been digging up old pieces of writing and I've discovered a blog that I wrote and then never posted. It's sort of the companion piece to the posting after SAA 2010. I was supposed to post this one first, but I guess I never did. Here it is:

Today’s blog will give you a little bit of history: how and why I decided to change my career designation from Actor to Actor/Scholar.

I have always been interested in knowledge. I do inordinate amounts of research when I am in a play; the amount of research is only limited by how much free time I have. When I do a production of a Shakespeare play I always pick up the Arden edition and read all the notes; I also seek out other editions of and essays about that play to read.

Last year the Shakespeare Association of America moved their headquarters to Washington, DC which is also where they were holding their annual conference. I decided to attend the 2009 conference as an observer, since I wouldn’t have to pay for travel and room. I figured three days surrounded by lovers of Shakespeare could not go wrong. And I was right. The event was life-changing, and as such was both exhilarating and depressing. Exhilarating because I felt like I found a part of myself that was missing. Depressing because bridging the two worlds of actor and scholar will be a difficult task.

I attended the sessions and seminars that were somehow related to performance, but even with the scholars participating in those discussions, there was a sense of here are scholars and there are theatre artists and never the twain shall meet. In fact, the performance aspect of Shakespeare has been sadly neglected by most Shakespearean scholarship. I felt hope however, as this appears to be something that is changing. First, with the rising interest in original practices that has occurred in the last decade. Second, with the younger generation of Shakespearean scholars. The wonderful women my age that I met at the conference have a great love of performance, to the point where all of them at some point have staged readings of obscure early modern dramas.

But it is not just in the realm of scholarship where performance has been ignored. In the realm of performance, scholarship has been ignored. One scholar noted in her panel in 2009 that she will go to Q and A's and ask the actors if they read scholarly articles or academic reviews and she always gets the answer no. I spoke to her after to let her know that I do. She said, "Well, you are the first one I've met." And I had to be honest with her, I didn’t know anyone else who did either. And at that conference I only ran into two other full time practitioners, and actually one of them I only knew of as an actor, but in speaking with him it turned out he was actually an English professor who had just recently gotten back onstage. The other was a director, and indeed the scholars who also work in performance tended to be directors as opposed to actors. (This is not to downplay any of these people, their work, or their contributions, merely to point out that the task of being an actor/scholar was overwhelming when faced with the reality that there didn’t seem to be anyone else with my identical perspective or situation.)

So I came home from the 2009 conference with a determination to be a part of the new conversation of performance and scholarship, but not really sure how to go about that. I did know that one step I could take was to attend the 2010 conference as a participant instead of merely an observer. I’ll continue this later, but just to let you know 2010 was even better than 2009 and I left even more hopeful at the progress of the conversation between performance and scholarship.

So that was how the journey began. And it's a journey that is frustrating in regards to grad school. Because there isn't one program that will give me Actor/Scholar. I basically have to chose one for now and hit the other one later. There are two MFA programs that are really appealing to the scholar side of me: the MFA in Staging Shakespeare at the University of Exeter and the Master of Letters/Master of Fine Arts in Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin. I start think I should apply there (especially given how much I love the ASC), but then I remember that I really do want to get strong actor training in voice, movement, and all that jazz. Sure the two programs have acting components, but something has to go. So I'm trying to look at acting MFAs that seem interested in analysis and Shakespeare, and preferably with an abroad component. It's all very overwhelming.

"A man may write of love, and not be in love"

There have been many thoughts rattling around in my brain since SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) 2010. Some of them finally coalesced into something perhaps coherent after attending James Shapiro’s lecture at the Folger this past Friday. Shapiro was lecturing on his new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? I was already part way through the book, as I was able to pick up an advanced reader copy at SAA.

Despite the second part of the title, Shapiro isn’t actually interested in who. He’s interested in why and when. Why people believe in different authorship theories, and when it came to be that people started to believe that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays ascribed to him, as this wasn’t questioned until after 1850. So it’s a more recent phenomenon.

Shapiro points out that every non-Stratfordian argument is based on an autobiographical reading of the plays and poems. So and so had this happen in his life which is just like what happens in that play, etc. This frustrates Shapiro because it a specifically modern notion of authorship – literature as self-exploration. Early modern writing was not autobiographical, and therefore it is ridiculous to try and find clues about who Shakespeare was in his plays.

Shapiro made me and the rest of the audience laugh when he said that this view always made him think about an Elizabethan School of Writing. Kit Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Kyd are sitting in a classroom. The teacher asks, “What have you got for us this week, Kit?” Marlowe responds, “Oh it’s this play called Tamburlaine about this Scythian shepherd who conquers the world.” “Hmm,” says the teacher, “Are you from Scythia? Ever been there? Know any shepherds?” Shapiro’s point is that literature does not have to be “Write What You Know.”

Shapiro quoted the 1593 poem Licia to illustrate this point: "A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to plough, or of witches and be none."

One other point I found interested was Shapiro characterizing Shakespeare as a man of “unparalleled imagination.” He said that even though he wrote his thesis on Marlowe, he got bored pretty quickly. And yet, after teaching Shakespeare for years, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get bored with Shakespeare.


I was left thinking a lot about acting. How? Well there seemed to be a question coming up in a lot of the seminars I attended at SAA this year. Sometimes this question was asked outright, but sometimes it just seemed to be underlying what was said. It seemed to have a part in three seminars. Two that I observed: "Shakespeare and Theatrical Reconstructions" (much about the Globe and the Blackfriars Playhouse) and "Emotional Realism on the Stage", and of course the one I participated in: "Shakespeare and Systems of Rehearsal". In my seminar in fact, I was actually asked this question, and I’m not sure at that point I gave a very clear answer, because I didn’t have one until now. The question was How does studying Shakespeare and the early modern theatrical conditions help an actor today? Or even, does it at all? Is there a point to learning about this history? My answer was yes it helps, but I didn’t really have a complete answer to how it helps. But now I have two thoughts about it. The first is more something to throw out there, and a thought that I wished had been fully formulated during the conference so I could have brought it up during the Emotional Realism seminar:

A lot of the criticism and talk seems to have a Shakespeare vs. Stanislavsky feel, and I don’t think the two are incompatible or diametrically opposed. In fact, I’m curious about ways they connect. Is there a link between Patrick Tucker’s work with the Original Shakespeare Company and emotional realism/emotional memory? Tucker, in his book Secrets of Acting Shakespeare, argues that Shakespeare would put the actor in the same situation as the character in order to give the actor a shorthand for performance. This was necessary due to the lack of rehearsal, and the fact that actors were not given the full script to study (just cue scripts with only their lines on it). One specific example Tucker gives is Isabella in Measure for Measure. The actor playing Isabella would have had a script that ended with her (his) last line, so the actor would not know that the Duke was going to propose marriage. So when the Duke did propose marriage this actor would have been surprised and confused, and therefore, according to Tucker, Isabella was supposed to be surprised and confused. Presumably, this would only really work the first time an actor encountered a text. So the next time, the actor would use the memory of that first time and know how to play the scene? If Tucker’s theory is correct, is this not a sort of early modern version of emotional memory? Or is Tucker’s theory flawed because he is looking at it from a modern conception of acting?

My second thought was a more specific answer to the question of How does studying Shakespeare’s theatre help a modern actor? and it came to me while listening to Shapiro speak. Just like modern writers are taught to “write what you know”, so to are modern actors taught to use themselves in performance. I remember one actor friend telling me the motto of a prominent American acting school was “you are enough.” It seems to me that for writers to learn that writing was not always a self-exploration only opens the door for more possibilities, just as it would for actors to learn that there was performance before and beyond Stanisklavsky’s (or Strasberg's) methods. Shakespeare was a writer of “unparalleled imagination” and other writers can learn from that. So to can it help actors to learn that acting wasn’t always about looking on the inside, that they can also strive to be performers of “unparalleled imagination.” If a man may write of love, and not be in love, so too should a man be able to act in love, without ever having been in love. In one of the seminars someone quoted someone else, "Acting doesn't get better, it gets different." Learning about former/other notions of acting and personality can only give a modern actor more ideas, approaches, tools.

This also ties into a paper session I attended, "Shakespeare and the Extended Mind". There were three papers and they had to do with changing notions of cognition and how that is dramatized. Today we understand cognition neurologically. In the early modern period they thought that cognition was humoral. This obviously affects the way playwright wrote then versus how they wrote now. Then emotions were felt, expressed through the whole body. Today we understand them as occurring in the brain. An actor absolutely needs to understand conditions like this in order to understand how to approach an early modern text and an early modern character.

21:38 Hamlet -- On Hold

I'm placing re-reading Hamlet on hold for now. Here's why: My plan was to use this opportunity to read the 1st Quarto Hamlet (also known as the "bad quarto) all the way through. I've read the "regular" Hamlet several times, see it multiple times, and prepared auditions for it. So I know the more recognized text quite well. So I'm planning to read the Q1 just to really see all the differences. But I'm not reading it right now, because in a week I'll be heading to Chicago to attend the annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America. One of the pre-conference events is a reading of, you guessed it, the first quarto Hamlet! A reading that we get to PARTICIPATE in! I'm pretty excited. What are the chances they'll let me read Ophelia? (Not that I think she's an amazing part -- more on that later, but because I spent so much time prepping to audition for her, that I'd love the chance to sort of do it. I do know the songs... ;-) ) Though hey... maybe if they do the thing were the cast changes each act... maybe I will get to read a little of the melancholy Dane himself...
So I'll report back on that next week.