Everyday Astonishment and Crafting the Theatrical: Speaking with David Downs on Undergraduate Acting Training

David Downs is an emeritus professor of acting training at Northwestern University, where he taught in the School of Communications for thirty-five years. He is the author of The Actor’s Eye: Seeing and Being Seen (1995), an introduction to the craft of acting. Some of his former students include actors Zach Braff, David Schwimmer, Denis O’Hare, Harry Lennix, Mamie Gummer, and Lily Rabe; playwrights John Logan (Tony Award for Red, screenwriter for Gladiator, The Aviator, and Skyfall) and Bruce Norris (Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for Clybourne Park); and director Mary Zimmerman. His curriculum was designed for Northwestern’s acting program in which majors began working with a teacher during their sophomore year, and typically remained with the same instructor for three years (on a quarter system). He presently resides in Los Angeles, where he occasionally teaches workshops at the Antaeus Theatre Company. He is also a playwright and painter.

I was Professor Downs’s student at Northwestern, graduating in 2003. In August 2015 I interviewed him regarding his unique approach to acting training.

Max Shulman:

Can you talk a little bit about the training system at Northwestern while you were there? What were the roots of that program?

David Downs:

I do want to say first that the system, the curriculum, the acting program was a three-year structure that a teacher, Alvina Krause, created over her thirty years of being at Northwestern. But it didn’t begin as an acting program because there was no theatre department when she started. There was one acting class, and it was what became the first year of acting. The other two years, she taught courses under the heading of “Interpretation” as an area of study, what became performance studies. There wasn’t an acting program the way you would think; she had figured out a way to make it three years of acting. The first year was supposed to be the fundamental creative aspects of acting and, technically, scene-free … not quite scene study. The second year was interpretation of drama. The first quarter of that was supposed to be Greek tragedy, second quarter was Shakespeare, and third quarter was Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shaw.

MS:

What is behind that progression and what do you think was at the root of the way Krause taught and the way you taught?

DD:

I was Krause’s student and the understructure I got from her in terms of “why bother doing this and why teach at all?” The first year became the creative understructure. You wanted artists to be able to perceive the world more vividly and meaningfully than other people did. If you read da Vinci’s notebooks he talks about “Oh, painter, go out into the world, look and see what happens when shadow hits light. Do not think you can just do it.” And it’s sort of the same thing. Becoming a perceptive artist means translating what your senses experience into paint and into form. The actor translates what your senses perceive into understood behavior. It was training the senses. If you’re aware of how you sit, what is it revealing about you? And not allowing it to be an intellectual response. Krause just kept saying “it’s your totality that has to come to this understanding.” So you start that in the first quarter by training the senses to perceive, and then [in] the second quarter you focus on what the creative imagination does with that perceived reality. It was the imagination for the actor—once again, in behavior terms. These foundations highlighted what we can call “inner techniques of creation.”

MS:

In that first year with your students, you’re teaching sophomores and you talk about learning to perceive the world—I remember a lot of that being through physicality. The actor comes in, where do you start with that actor?

DD:

The first quarter was just supposed to start people realizing, discovering through individual senses. Sometimes I would start with sense of sight, sometimes I would just start with...