My Front Porch

My Front Porch

OK, here I am, rocking back and forth in my virtual rocking chair, pondering what to share with you today, and as one by one, my students, past and future mentally step up to the porch I think, “Well, it’s been a while. What would you like to hear from me today?” And I imagine you saying, “Geri, you’re older than dirt.  You were born in the first half of the 19^th century. You’ve seen a lot. How do you think acting has changed since back in the day?” And I answer in my typical long-winded fashion:

My teacher, Oscar Brockett, arguably the best theatre historian of the 20^th and the 21^st century, was fond of saying that every generation makes steady progress toward a greater naturalism. While he lived into the age of the milennials, I doubt he ever imagined how great the progress would be in the last twenty-five years.  Back in my day, emotional truth was the direction of great progress.  I was a student of one of the first graduates of the Actors Studio where Lee Strasberg had made emotional truth the order of the day. However, fellow founders Bobby Lewis and Elia Kazan were equally interested in all of Stanislavski’s contribution to the development of realistic theatre so one small woman, Robin Humphrey was able to raise a ragtag bunch of very diverse students into inheritors to that which was most cutting edge in theatrical realism even in the bowels of darkest Missouri. 

The 20^th century made the greatest progress toward realism made in history of theatre because of a number of technological advances that made the very concept of theatrical realism possible. The development of electric lights made possible lighting techniques that would make it possible for a large audience to see clearly actors behaving in a recognizably

believable fashion for the first time. Fortunately Anton Chekov was a writer who had in his long career writing hundreds of short stories had become a master of the expression of realistic detail. When Constantin Stanislavski and Nemirovich Danchenko created the Moscow Art Theatre as a means of developing actors capable of truthfully expressing the developing body of realistic drama they were lucky to become fellow collaborators with Chekov who, more than any writer at that time was capable of challenging the new theories in acting to their highest form.

 At the end of the 19^th century theatre attendance was, by and large, an elitist activity.  The technological changes of the 20^th century changed the character of the audience and with it the character of theatre.  Movies, radio, television, color television, live tv as made possible first by cable and then by then the internet made everyone in the civilized world an expert in the wide variety of human behavior. And because they saw theatrical performances via the same media that brought them the evening news they started to develop the same standard of believability they expected from real life. Everyone had become an expert theatre critic.

(I’m going to continue this blog in the next episode of My Front Porch. I don’t think many people want to read more than a page of history of the theatre at one time. Next time a capsule overview of the conventions of theatrical production through time as dictated by the technological limitations of the day.  So why should we care? Because many contemporary productions draw their imaginative thrust by the synthesis of realistic acting styles with the conventions of the past.)