Response to: "A Crucible for Actors"

RESPONSE Response to: "A Crucible for Actors" Gay Gibson Cima Suzanne Burgoyne Dieckman's article in the premiere issue of Theatre Topics raises serious questions about the potential psychological effects of various aspects of actor training. Dieckman urges us, as directors, theatre educators, and practitioners, to consider developing a code of ethics to govern our behavior . She is especially concerned with helping actors resolve some of the traumatic dilemmas that they have faced during the rehearsal and performance process. (Her illustrations are derived largely from her production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, in which ritualized frenzy is enacted on stage.) She suggests that we employ techniques from psychodrama to "derole" actors, providing, for example, a ritual forgiveness from those whom the actors, in character, have attacked. She also suggests that "keeping student actors in character rather than bringing them into direct work on personal analogies may provide a psychological cushion." While I share Dieckman's concern for an ethical code, I am uneasy with her solutions. Granting forgiveness, after all, implies God-like status. That means that the actor's sense of helplessness both within the character and outside it may only be increased if the power of forgiveness rests in someone else's hands. For example, if the actor playing Tituba, the Barbados slave woman who names the names of "witches" to save her skin, employs her own remembered anger at or fear of racial discrimination in the scene in which Tituba decides to name the whites—and then is required to enact a rehearsal scene in which the white figures she has imagined "forgive" her for her anger, is this not merely a reinscription of the dominant cultural power? The same might be said of the actors playing the group of adolescent girls who name the names. Let's say that they employ the hatred they may feel toward some rigid part of their mothers in the scenes in which they accuse various members of the rigid Puritan community of being witches. If part of the "deroling" is to have the "mothers" forgive the young actors, doesn't that process subsume (and redirect toward traditional obedience) the legitimate anger the young women (both the actors and the characters) may feel within a repressive society? 155 156 Gay Gibson Cima Keeping the actors in character may very well not help, either, if the production style is realistic and the actors are playing stereotypical roles. What psychological release would the actor playing the Puritan zealot Danforth have if he were never allowed, in rehearsal, to enact the difference as well as the similarities between his own point of view and the character's? Many feminists have investigated the issue of the relationship between the actor and the character and concluded that actor training based on psychological realism can force female actors (and, I would add, male actors) into very damaging territory. Linda Walsh Jenkins and Susan Ogden-Malouf explain that "When a female is asked to align with an unhealthy gender role, to search for self-revelations that are demeaning, and to yield personal autonomy to a potentially exploitive authority figure, a syzygy occurs that usually reinforces the woman's already negative ontological development." [See Chinoy and Jenkins, Women in American Theatre, New York: TCG, 1987.] Method-based actor training may enable male actors easier access to their emotions, but both male and female students may need to be trained differently to combat the problems that emerge when the actor is asked to identify with a potentially damaging character. To combat this unhealthy situation, many directors employ non-realistic directorial strategies if and when they deal with realistic material, so that there will not be a seamless identification of actor with (demeaning) character. They may employ cross-gender or cross-racial casting, and move toward a more democratic rehearsal process, allowing actors to voice their views of characterization . But each of these strategies carries with it its own problem for actors. Movements embracing physically based training may offer a solution, but only if they also investigate the results of their own strategies in a self-conscious way, allowing students to understand and critique the means of their education. Perhaps...