Ron Van Lieu
The Actor’s Center Journal Vol. 1 Num. 1 September 2009
Interview With Ron Van Lieu
For the Teacher Profile of this first issue of The Actors Center Journal, we have a man universally recognized by his peers and his students—past and present—as an authentic Master Teacher. If any human on the earth can unequivocally be said to deserve the title, it would be Ron Van Lieu, that most excellent, empathetic and effective sage of New Haven.
Since 2004, Ron Van Lieu has served as the Lloyd Richards Professor and Chair of the Acting Program at the Yale School of Drama. Prior to his appointment at Yale, he taught for 29 years at the NYU Tisch Graduate Acting Program, where for many years he also served as chair of the program. He was a founding faculty member and head of training for The Shakespeare Lab at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He was also a founding faculty member and Master Teacher at The Actors Center, where he currently continues to teach as well as to head the Workshop Company.
Ron, you once said you felt that in this country for an actor to return to the classroom after working professionally was generally considered a sign of defeat. Short of Meryl Streep returning to Yale as a student, how might this perception best be changed? Ought it to be changed?
Yes, I think it’s important that this perception be changed. I think it has a lot to do with the whole culture’s definition of success—what it means to have “made it.” The popular assumption is that once you have made it you are set for life. Only losers have to go back to school. If you trained at a conservatory like Yale or NYU and got an MFA it can be assumed by others that you are finished, done, fully cooked—a master of the trade. In reality, all a good training institution can do is to get you ready to make a respectable beginning as an actor, and the rest is up to fate. So an actor announcing to others that she/he is going to take some classes or join a workshop can seem like an admission of failure on the actor’s part to have learned the craft in the first place.
It’s puzzling to me that in professions such as dance, singing, and music the assumption is that the classroom or the tutorial session will always be a necessary and even pleasurable place for artistic maintenance, but with actors, and friends and families of actors, the reaction to ongoing training can be so negative. Then again, some actors simply hate the classroom and only want to do production work, and that is who they are. If they had abusive or ill-informed teachers and the classroom was a place of humiliation or bad advice, then who can blame them for being leery of any more training.
The prejudice against “going back to school” for actors is actually beginning to die out. I hear more actors talking excitedly about some class they are taking or some workshop they are participating in than I have heard in the past. And they are not apologizing for the fact that they are in these classes and workshops. If the atmosphere in the classroom is open, free of fear and competition, respectful of the actor’s position of vulnerability, and if risk and failure are regarded as learning opportunities rather than judgments on talent and skill, then actors will want to be in the room. At least that is my prejudiced view, and one that I am fostering with the Workshop Company at The Actors Center. And the members of the company seem to be thriving in this atmosphere over the past year, so we are doing our part to make “continuing to learn” a sign of health and strength rather than an admission of weakness.
(For the record, just let me explain to the reader that the Workshop Company at The Actors Center is an invited group of approximately 100 professional actors whose purpose and doings will be covered and explored frequently in future issues of this Journal.)
What are you doing with The Actors Center Workshop Company?
I meet with the Company once a week for 12–14 weeks, depending on my schedule. Company members are also taking classes and workshops with a number of teaching theatre artists such as Chris Bayes, Slava Dolgachev, Rob Clare, Anne Bogart, Michael Kahn, and others. My class is a scene study class aimed at the needs of the individual actors who are choosing to work that day. I am not dictating a method of work, nor am I picking which scenes the actors bring in. I am there to examine the principles of craft they are using in rehearsal, help them use those principles better, allow them a greater sense of freedom in their choices, and encourage an attitude of “freedom within form” in their work so that there is room for spontaneity and inspiration in their rehearsal methods. I do not teach “the right way to do it.” I don’t even know what that is. I am very much about the individuality of the actor and encouraging actors to trust themselves. Some of the actors in the Company have never been allowed, or have never even allowed themselves, to work without fear of violating “the rules,” so this kind of work can be liberating to them.
I like the word “liberate” when talking about actor training, because I think that is what an actor is there to do on a stage—liberate energy in the theatre, disturb the air a little, awaken the audience’s minds and emotions. And you can’t get that in a theatre by playing it safe or by refusing to work from yourself and with others in a generous and spontaneous way. So the atmosphere within the Workshop Company aspires to allow for that sense of freedom through the selection of the teachers it chooses to work with and by encouraging an open, non-competitive, playful attitude in the room.
It sounds as if you delight in freeing people who may have been subjected to very doctrinaire training. What about young people who are at the beginning of their training? Might they not be helped to find their own “right way to do it” by exposure to a teacher who feels he or she has “the answer”? In other words, how can you find your own truth without something to rebel against?
Well, I have been talking about my work with the Company so far probably because it is the newest element in my teaching life. However, I have been teaching in actor training conservatories since 1975, first at NYU Graduate Acting and currently at the Yale School of Drama, so I am very aware of the need for beginning actors to have a basis of technique from which to act. What I teach them springs fundamentally from Stanislavski, along with what I learned from my most influential teachers—Joseph Anthony, Lloyd Richards, Peter Kass, Olympia Dukakis, Omar Shapli. So, yes, there is a way to act being taught by me and it’s idiosyncratic to me, but I never think of it as “The Answer.” Technique exists to support talent and should not be thought of as an end unto itself. I hate to watch a performance that’s a demonstration of where somebody went to school. I think you can teach young actors to master and employ specific techniques in acting and still not erase them in the process. It doesn’t have to be a case of the actor’s rebelling against their teaching. They can learn to respect the craft as well as to value their own uniqueness.
To me, much of what goes into the creation of a great performance is a mystery. It can’t be analyzed and passed on to every other actor to be used by them to give similar performances. I try to resist the young actor’s desire to know the answer and to always be able to get it right. When they try to get it right their work is clichéd, empty, void of imagination and feeling. It’s mechanical and detached, there’s no flesh and blood on the stage. Actually, learning technique is the easy part of actor training. The hard part is filling that out with some flesh and blood. That’s the element that requires courage, willingness to risk, confidence, humility, empathy and imagination.
Are Stanislavski’s books part of the curriculum at Yale? Michael Chekhov’s? What part does reading play in actor training?
When actors are admitted into the program at Yale they are sent a recommended reading list before they enter the school in the fall. The list does include Stanislavski’s books as well as Michael Chekhov’s book. I don’t, however, make constant reference to either of these men’s theories when I am teaching. I will refer to certain areas of their methods as it applies to the specific scene being done in front of me.
With Stanislavski in particular I am very careful to keep repeating that his “method” is really just a brilliantly articulated analysis of how human beings behave and an observation of the tactics they use to attempt to move their lives forward. The concept of objectives in his work is based on his observation that humans are constantly in a state of want (hence, the theory of objectives in acting), and that we primarily use language and physical actions to obtain those wants. Objectives are viscerally felt and are not simply intellectually formulated. It’s important to emphasize the connection of objectives to the body of the actor, and to note that objectives can be actually felt as well as articulated by the intellect.
So few actors these days seem to act with their whole bodies. Gielgud was famously accused of being a brilliant actor from the neck up, but I remember him in No Man’s Land memorably slithering around the stage, his character inhabiting every inch of him. Is there less emphasis on the physical in the training actors today? Is it a failure of passion? Or do you not agree that today’s actors are, on the whole, less physically committed to their characters?
I don’t think there is less emphasis on physical training today. I think that sometimes actors approach the training of the body more intellectually than viscerally. In other words, they are in their heads about the theory behind the physical work when they should be in their bodies experiencing the work. Some actors can approach Viewpoints work in that way, for example. Physical training is effective only to the extent that the actors are willing to take it to the limit, to give up self-monitoring, stop trying to look good and to fully release into the work. So the loss of physicality on the stage (or perhaps the loss of BOLD physicality on the stage) has more to do with the lack of full commitment than lack of training. Today’s young actors are more likely to worry about “is this the right way to do it?” or “will this be too much?” or “won’t this look put-on, phony?” And then, of course, young actors live in a time in which understatement and irony and appearing not to want anything too much are the prevailing modes of social behavior and expression, and that doesn’t help them to do Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams or Suzan Lori Parks. I don’t think they want to be that way, however. I think they want to fight their way out of restrictive social habits.
Then there’s the danger of the misuse of the concept of relaxation in actor training. The misuse of relaxation leads the actor to check-out, remain inward, go into a state of neutrality, and in the most extreme form of misuse the actor literally does nothing. This can lead to a real deadness in an actor’s work. To me, relaxation is a state of alert readiness which is free of tension or defensiveness. It’s an active state rather a passive one. The actor is ready to go, to engage and to play.
It’s interesting that you mention Gielgud in No Man’s Land. I have this memory that during the entire first act he made only one move—a cross from stage left to stage right. And yet, I agree that his was a vividly physical and alive performance—fully inhabited. The same for Richardson, who I remember sitting in a chair for the entire act until the end when he got on his hands and knees and crawled off stage. Gielgud loosened up a lot as he got older and perhaps didn’t have to worry about being a classical actor in the traditional vein. Maybe he gave up “trying to do it right” and became more originally himself. As you are by now quite aware, the “stop trying to do it right” theme is my current obsession.
What are you looking for when a potential student auditions for you?
What I am looking for is talent, but that is such a vague word. It means a lot of different things to different people. I think talent has something to do with an actor’s depth of imagination. A talented actor has a vital imagination and can make me believe in something that isn’t actually real but seems so real to them that I buy into it. It’s a childlike quality that most of us shed rather early on in our lives. If you can imagine deeply enough you can transform into another person, and that act of transformation is both the artistry of acting as well as the greatest source of pleasure to the actor.
I like actors who have a strong sense of their individuality, who are not always trying to figure out who they think I want them to be or what I want them to say. When they leave the room after the audition and interview I want to feel that they have left something behind in the room—that something happened while they were there. I guess that’s the thing in the theatre that we call presence, the ability to be fully, 100% there.
I want actors who are physical, who live in their bodies and not in their heads; actors who consider their bodies to be expressive instruments and not merely decorative enticements (all those hours at the gym). I need actors who like to move through space rather than who need to be forced to move. I want actors who love language and who understand words to be a form of action in a play. I have no interest in soloists. My actors need to be team players and collaborators.
I also look for a sense of humor. I think that’s a real asset in this difficult profession. And resilience and stamina—or as Nina puts it to Treplev in The Seagull, “the strength to endure.” You certainly have to learn to bounce if you are going to survive. In fact, there are so many creative and personal elements that need to come together in a single organism to create an actor capable of navigating a career that spans decades that it’s impossible to predict who that person will be when you first meet them. It’s mostly instinct on my part when it comes to choosing.
What are you looking for when you interview a potential acting teacher?
I would want them to be a master of what they do, but not a guru or a dictator. I would like them to teach from a place of joy, not by creating an atmosphere of fear and intimidation. Especially if they are teaching young beginning actors, they need to employ a combination of rigorous demands and strong discipline tempered with empathetic support. They can teach whatever method they believe in as long as it results in some technique by which the actor is better able to illuminate the human condition after having completed the class.
Do you have a favorite performance? A favorite moment in that performance?
The two performances I talk about frequently and actually remember in some detail are Geraldine Page in Sweet Bird of Youth and Jason Robards in Moon for the Misbegotten. Sweet Bird of Youth was the first Broadway play I ever saw. I was 17 years old and had saved up money from a summer job and took a bus from Wooster, Ohio to see five plays in New York. I was astonished by the pure behavioral spontaneity of her acting, by the fact that you could not predict how she would respond to the next moment in time and how she seemed to be making it all up as she went along as if there had never been any rehearsal. I had only known acting to be something very studied and carefully presented until I saw her performance. I know now that there was a great deal of technique behind what she was doing that night, but to me it was all just magic—big, bold, truthful, funny, scary, completely idiosyncratic, and only possible because it was coming out of that particular actor in her unique way. It set a standard for what I would later call good acting, and I wanted to learn how to do what she was doing. I stayed around after the curtain to ask for her autograph. She came out the stage door with Jose Quintero. They were both incredibly sweet to a very nervous 17 year-old and asked if I would like to join then for a Coke at Whelan’s Drugstore, but I was too shy and hyper-excited to say yes, and so I made up an excuse not to go. But I did follow them at a distance and stood across the street and watched them as they sat in Whelan’s and talked. It was one of the best nights of my life.
I saw Robards years later after I had studied acting and been on the stage myself. His work that night in Moon for the Misbegotten was the most naked and revelatory both of self and of character that I had ever seen on a stage. I know that he had a reputation of being an inconsistent stage actor, but I must have seen him on an especially lucky night. There were moments in the last act when he was confessing to Josie (the great Colleen Dewhurst) that were so accurately and painfully truthful, with such a generous synthesis of actor and character, that I had to turn my face away from the stage and only listen to the play. It felt wrong to be watching something so personal. That section of the play seemed to be too much to take in completely in its relentless honesty. Robards acted without a trace of vanity or any of the self-protective armor that actors can sometimes adopt to save themselves from the deepest level of implication with a character’s situation because it’s just too scary. That performance was another step forward for me in gathering together a definition for what good acting is.
Thank you for your own relentless honesty and allowing us this window into your thinking.
Editor’s Note:
As stated at the beginning of this interview, Ron Van Lieu is a Master Teacher of Acting. I have to add here that ‘Master Teacher’ is a term that annoys the hell out of me, since anyone can call him or herself a Master Teacher or be so labeled by their school which, in fact, they may run. In other words, the self-serving nature with which the term has come to be applied is a problem. It is a term for which there are no codified requirements, full of sound and fury and signifying a great deal which is very likely to be misleading. But that is a topic to be addressed in a future issue.
Interview conducted by Philip Carlson
