Jed Diamond
The Actors Center Journal Vol. 2, No. 4, November 2010
The Interview
Jed Diamond has been Head of Acting at the University of Tennessee, an endowed MFA program, since 2005. Prior to that, he lived and worked in New York City as a teacher and actor for 18 years. He received his MFA in Acting in 1989 from the NYU/Tisch Graduate Acting Program. He is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique and has taught at The Actors Center, NYU, The Stella Adler Conservatory and The New York Shakespeare Festival. His acting credits include work at The Roundabout Theatre, Signature Theatre, Arena Stage, and the Acting Company. At the Clarence Brown Theatre at the University of Tennessee, Mr. Diamond has performed in All the Way Home, Born Yesterday, The Life of Galileo, A Flea in Her Ear and as Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.
PC: Jed, as an actor, have you ever been a part of what you would consider a repertory company or been privy to that experience?
JD: The closest I have come to a true repertory experience was in the Acting Company, 1990-1991 season. Zelda Fichandler had come on board to work with Margot Harley, and we were slated to do Three Sisters, directed by Zelda, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Joe Dowling, and Fugard’s Blood Knot, directed by Tazewell Thompson. I was lucky to be cast in the two-hander, Blood Knot, so I was in all three shows. We worked as a company on all three shows in a variety of spaces over about 7 weeks in August and early September of 1990, I think it was. The idea was to put up Midsummer and Blood Knot straight away, while doing preliminary rehearsals for Three Sisters which would then be continued on the road till the show was up and running. Sadly, due to company finances, we never got to mount Three Sisters. We did tour for the better part of seven months with Blood Knot and Midsummer. Some of the more illustrious company members were: Geoffrey Wright, Andrew Weems, Rainn Wilson, Patrick Kerr, Angie Phillips, Derek Meader, and Jonathan Earl Peck. It was wonderful to be at it all day, not only on the shows, but on ensemble building exercises and games, and doing wildly varied roles with completely different directors. I was playing Morrie in Blood Knot, Ferapont in Three Sisters, and Robin Starveling/Moonshine plus a fairy in Midsummer. In the end, we took Midsummer and Blood Knot to some 65 cities, playing in everything from high school gyms to fantastic 19th century theatres where Sarah Bernhardt once toured. The repertory and touring experience were absolutely invaluable to me. Playing in different theatres virtually daily, for a wide variety of audiences, develops one’s use of the theatrical space, use of voice and movement, sensitivity to lighting, design, and technical support, and overall flexibility and practicality. It develops presence and sensitivity to audience like nothing else can. And it quite simply removes all preciousness from the actor’s process. I believe repertory company experience is the best possible proving ground of an adept and powerful actor. And it grieves me that there are so few such opportunities for the actors I teach. If there is one major thing I dream of to improve the current model of training in MFA programs, it would be to somehow create or ensure a fourth year, post-graduate, repertory production program. Now, actors leave three years of intense training and steady work, they are in excellent condition, only to fall off the earth into almost certain underemployment and loss of skills. This is what I find causes the most acute pain among them: not the insecurity and having to scrape for a living, but the feeling that they are losing their abilities and creative energy.
PC: Has the diminishing opportunity for actors to work at the deepest level at all affected your approach to teaching? It seems as if you are uncompromising in your standards (and beyond fortunate in the work you have been able to do) but how could the dearth of theatre work out there not inform your work as a teacher?
JD: Well, I can’t be sure it has affected my approach to teaching, because I have not ever taught in a situation when there were enough theatre opportunities to allow for all but a select few to work at the “deepest level” over years of endeavor. But I suppose I would say this “dearth of theatre work” has probably made me more conservative in my teaching values (in interesting contrast to my political values).
It raises very basic questions about the number of actors it makes sense to train at the advanced or professional level, and what one is looking for in an actor. I think that currently MFA program demand for actors well outstrips the viable talent supply, and MFA actor supply well outstrips the professional market demand. Either way and both together, we are training too many actors. I am happily training 8 every other year at UT, and I think that’s a reasonable number if I can consistently recruit a high level of talent, which is a challenging ”if.” Brandeis has closed, Denver National Theater Conservatory has closed, A.C.T. has reduced in size, and other prominent programs are doing so as well. As hard as it is, I think some closing and shrinking in this field is a good thing.
Also, it affects the kind of talent I look for. I don’t ever expect that every actor I teach will have a “big career.” But I do look for actors that may be capable of it, or at least that may have enough talent and creative imperative within them to make a valuable contribution within the field. I look for viable talent: someone who has the ability and drive to persist and contribute in a substantial way.
Then too, the chastening prospect of the career horizon affects the honesty of what I have to say in the studio to each actor every day. The realities of the marketplace constantly challenge me to keep focused, uphold standards, and to be as truthful as I can.
I think the first questions for running a program are: “What do we want to do in the time given, what can be done in the time given, and how is it best done?” I place emphasis upon old and lasting values of the art of acting. I want to train actors to the possibilities of the art form that has come down to us through the great writers, the great actors, and the great teachers. At the same time, I work very hard to provide opportunities for real world experience on the stage during training, in summers, and following graduation. I am not a purist about theatre. Clearly much of the finest work being done over the last 60 or 70 years is in television and film, and it has been bloody hard to make any kind of a living in theatre alone since the beginning of time. But I think that theatre remains the best training foundation for a versatile and enduring actor. I tell actors whom I teach that if they are to persist, their life will have two imperatives which depend upon each other: first to keep the art of acting before them, alive and growing in their souls and daily practice, and second to find or create a way in the world, in whatever medium, that makes it possible to do so.
What I think can be done in three years is a solid measure of work upon fundamentals of technique, i.e. fundamentals in the actor’s use of self and approach to texts, i.e. fundamentals of breath, voice, speech, movement, freedom of impulse and action in the service of great writing. We can open the surest wellspring for a lifetime of endeavor: we can honor and fortify the impulse to make art; we can cultivate the spirit that seeks for meaning and for mastery and bring it out into daily, disciplined contact with great art and artists; and we can provide reliable craft tools for a lifetime of practice. Such idealism does not mean that we abandon business practicality. We cannot grow in the art without work in the business. Our actors are engaged in deep examination of technique in the studio for 8 hours a day, and then in the evenings and on weekends they are in the current regional theatre standard (alas!) 3.5 week rehearsals in a LORT theatre, the Clarence Brown, playing a wide variety of roles. They are deeply examining their technique, and they’ve got to put it together to get a show up. We bring in artistic directors to audition for theatres and summer festivals; we produce DVD auditions to send to dozens of theatres and festivals; we have workshops and classes in auditioning and in career matters with prominent business professionals; we showcase our graduates in New York through the “New Leagues” which the Actors Center produces. Our actors work hard on networking and job-hunting, traveling to neighboring and sometimes distant cities and festivals to audition, doing mailings, etc.
But it is important to realize that just as we cannot grow in the art without work in the business, neither do we tend to survive in the business without a vision of the art. So I don’t teach to an idea of short cuts to make an actor more immediately marketable. I try to provide tools for a lifetime dedicated to pursuit of self-knowledge, empathy for others, knowledge of human nature and experience, understanding of the power and importance of story-telling in the ancient form we practice, understanding of the life-illuminating – indeed the life-shaping – possibilities of the greatest stories in the canons of literature and performance. There are no short cuts to attaining artistry, and there is no substitute for engaging throughout a lifetime those writers and actors and teachers who have created and defined the range and limits of our art. There is no substitute for deeply encountering the Greeks, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, Miller, Williams, Albee, Stoppard, Kushner, etc. There are no half-measures in the greatest work done by the best actors of our age or any other. And excepting the rare genius, young actors can hardly conceive of this thing called acting unless they submit themselves to the study and practice of the best that have come before them. Over the long term, tools for daily practice, knowledge of the great texts and actors, and deep faith in the value of what one is doing, ARE what is sustaining – they are what help actors to land the job, and to find a way against the odds.
Call this pragmatic idealism if you wish. It is the heart of what I think we can offer in MFA training, and what I try to convey in my classes. In a way, MFA training has become the contemporary substitute for the old master/apprentice model in a theatre company, which I’m not sure was ever very available for all but a few, but which I think many of us dream upon as on some golden age. We’ve always dreamed of having opportunity for sustained practice, but very few get that consistency or have ever done so. I hope to provide in conservatory training at least three years of it, both in the studio and on the stage, to the limit of the amount of work a young actor can healthily sustain. Because they will very likely not ever have it again, and it’s the best foundation for their own journey to make something better.
PC: I wonder how many acting teachers have such an articulated philosophy about their work. Do you have a favorite performance? A favorite moment in that performance?
JD: Do you mean a performance of mine, Philip? Or a favorite performance I have seen? For mine, I have never distinguished an absolute favorite, but one that stands out was playing Morrie in Blood Knot with The Acting Company and then at Arena Stage. My favorite moment was sitting at the table with my brother Zachariah, composing a letter to our new pen pal, a beautiful young white girl. I was very close with the other actor in that show, Jonathan Earl Peck, and in that moment, it always felt very simple and very complete, like we really were brothers, with a great shared delight about this girl. I tend to over-work in my acting, and in that moment, I was always quite free and simple, and I could tell the audience was right with us. It was very light, and very powerful at once.
If you are asking about ones I’ve seen, there is one that stands above all others in my experience: Janet McTeer in A Doll’s House. Best single performance, best company of performances, and best production I’ve ever seen.
PC: Well, I had meant a performance you have seen but I think it is all kinds of wonderful that you respond with one you have given as well. As one who spends most of his time feeling like an observer, it is a privilege to share a conversation with someone who is so clearly a participant. Thank you for your time and your thoughts.
JD: Thank you, Philip. This has been a real pleasure and privilege for me – to be asked to share my thoughts and opinions about our work, and to have an exchange with you. Thank you too for the work you have done with Michael in making the Journal possible.