"And I think that every actor has the responsibility to make the rehearsal work. We have a lot of things we have to do, and just to come in and act your part, to me it's not enough. If you believe in the theater, you have to make the theater better wherever you are."
-- Marian Seldes, in Actors at Work, by Rosemarie Tichler and Barry Jay Kaplan
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This post will be short. Actors At Work is a compilation of interviews with prestigious film and stage actors. Among them: Kevin Kline, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Meryl Streep. I've been reading it for only two days, taking in questions and answers in spurts, and already it's blowing my mind.
It's fantastic. Really, really, fantastic.
2 comments:
Yes! This is on my 'to read' list...I'm glad to see a positive review from a friend.
I did a master class with Marian Seldes right after college and she was the most gracious and lovely women. Mostly, she just talked to us...and not about herself. She asked us, "What are you looking for? What moves you? Have you noticed that it scares you too? It's the wanting that frightens us, but know that we are all frightened, all of the time, just as all of us are filled with a longing we cannot understand." There was not a dry eye in the room...it was just filled with recently graduated actors crying because, finally, someone understood what we were going through. I'm a Marian Seldes fan for life.
That sounds wonderful. After reading her chapter, I would love to have been in the same room with that woman, let alone get some attention from her.
And definitely read it. I just finished the chapter with Billy Crudup, and I feel like it was written with my experiences in mind.
I think you'll also like this (also from Seldes' interview):
"Q: As a teacher, what kinds of things about your technique were you able to bring to the students? Or didn't you work that way?
A: I think what I brought to class was a sense that it was all about them. I used to let them, whenever I could, choose the scenes they would do, because I wanted them to read plays... I think that my students knew, and still know, that I trusted their instincts more than mine...
I learned so much from watching other people... I used to try, particularly when I had the first-year students at Juilliard, the incoming class, to work with someone every day. I always tried to involve them and let them work every day. I tried to do as many scenes in a scene class as I could and then send them away to work on them and bring them back, of course, I would just--we would all just watch them. And I could look around at the faces of my students and see that they were learning from their fellow students. And that's what I do in rehearsal too. I can learn from that.
Q: In your work and in your teaching and in your life, you do seem to embody the sense of the ideal of what the theater could be.
A: I want to. That's what I've always wanted."
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