Kwame Alexander on 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert'

 

[I watched The Late Show, the CBS late-night talk show with Stephen Colbert as host, on Monday night, 13 January 2025.  One of Colbert’s guests was poet and writer of children’s fiction Kwame Alexander, of whom I didn’t think I’d heard.  (It turns out he’d been on The Late Show before about a year ago, but I either forgot that appearance or missed that episode.)

[Alexander’s Encyclopedia Britannica entry says:

Kwame Alexander (born August 21, 1968, New York, New York) is an American poet, author of young adult and children’s fiction, and advocate for introducing literary works and the art of writing to schoolchildren. He gained national prominence after winning the Newbery Medal in 2015 for his novel The Crossover (2014), much of which he wrote in free verse.

Alexander was born to literary parents: his father was a writer and publisher and his mother an English teacher. When he was 12 years old, his family moved to Virginia. After first studying biochemistry at Virginia Tech, Alexander switched to English and developed an interest in poetry under professor and poet Nikki Giovanni. He began his career as an editor, producing The Flow: New Black Poets in Motion (1994). Among his other literary pursuits, he founded the Alexander Publishing Group and its imprint, BlackWords Press (1995–2005). In 2019 Alexander teamed with publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to launch the Versify imprint, under which he helped choose children’s books to publish.

Alexander’s first poetry collection for adults, Just Us: Poems and Counterpoems, 1986–1995, was published in 1995. His other collections include Kupenda: Love Poems (2000), Dancing Naked on the Floor (2005), and And Then You Know: New and Selected Poems (2009). The book Crush: Love Poems (2007) was written for young adults. In Out of Wonder (2017), Alexander and poets Chris Colderley and Marjory Wentworth created poems in celebration of 20 of their favourite poets. Ekua Holmes, who illustrated Out of Wonder, won the 2018 Coretta Scott King Book Award for her work. In 2020 Alexander published Light for the World to See: A Thousand Words on Race and Hope, a collection of poems on historic events, including the killing of George Floyd, the protests of football player Colin Kaepernick, and the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president.

Among his other writing accomplishments, Alexander wrote stories for children. Indigo Blume and the Garden City (2010) tells about a little girl and her rooftop garden. Acoustic Rooster and His Barnyard Band (2011) introduces jazz to young children through animals. Surf’s Up (2016) follows the adventures of two frogs, one who likes to read and the other who likes to surf. In Animal Ark: Celebrating Our Wild World in Poetry and Pictures (2017), Alexander contributed verse to go along with photographs of animals. Published in 2019, The Undefeated is an homage to Black life in the United States. The book was named a Newbery Honor Book in 2020. Kadir Nelson, who illustrated The Undefeated, won the Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award in 2020 for his artwork.

Alexander also wrote books for an older audience. He Said, She Said (2013), for teens, explores the relationship between two seniors in high school: a football player and a social activist. Alexander’s award-winning book The Crossover follows a year in the lives of twin African American 12-year-old boys and their love of basketball. Rebound (2018) is a prequel to The Crossover, focusing on the twins’ father. In Booked (2016), Alexander again used free verse—this time, to explore a boy’s relationship with his family and friends as he navigates a soccer injury, bullying, and his reluctance to read. Working with novelist James Patterson, Alexander combined prose and poetry in Becoming Muhammad Ali (2020), a fictionalized retelling of the boxer’s youth. Solo (2017) and Swing (2018), both written with Mary Rand Hess, deal with weightier topics, such as drug addiction and social divisions, respectively. In 2022 Alexander published The Door of No Return, the first novel in a trilogy about a boy living in what is now Ghana who becomes entrapped in the transatlantic slave trade.

Alexander also wrote about the technical aspects of being an author. He published Do the Write Thing: Seven Steps to Publishing Success (2002) with Nina Foxx. In The Write Thing (2018), he discussed how writing workshops can benefit school-age children.

Besides writing, Alexander has been active in community-based initiatives. In 2006 he founded Book-in-a-Day, a nonprofit educational literacy service. The organization helps to promote reading and writing skills by encouraging children to write poetry and publish their work. In 2012 Alexander cofounded the Literacy Empowerment Action Project (LEAP), which is dedicated to increasing educational opportunities in Ghana. He is also a frequent contributor to Morning Edition, the daily news program on National Public Radio.

[In any case, I was very impressed with him as a talk show guest.  He had a charming and engaging personality and was a great raconteur, so I thought, if I could find a transcript of his interview, I'd run it on Rick On Theater.  I did find one, but it wasn’t like the News Hour transcripts I’m used to—these are full of errors and have no speaker identifications (except "Stephen" for the host, and a symbol for the guest, but no name, and no formatting).  So there was a lot of editing to do, and then I needed to listen to the video to fix all the mistranscriptions and gobbledygook.  (The transcription is clearly machine-generated and no human checked it.)

[So, I re-edited the transcript, which aside from the errors, had little punctuation, so I pretty much repunctuated it as well.  So what you’re about to read is about half computer-created and half mine.]

STEPHEN COLBERT: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen!

My friends, my next guest is a New York Times best-selling author of 42 books, who has won the Newbery Medal [2015; for “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” for The Crossover, his children’s novel in verse] and an Emmy Award [The Crossover (2023) for Outstanding Young Teen Series; on Disney+].  His new book is How Sweet the Sound [Little, Brown and Company, 2025].  Please welcome back to The Late Show, Kwame Alexander!

[CHEERS, APPLAUSE, AND MUSIC.] 

We love poets on The Late Show.  We love having the artists on here who paint the pictures with the words and the rhythm and inflection and unexpected twists and turns and combinations, and I’m just curious: you as a poet—what is it that first drew you to poetry?  When did you discover poetry as a human being?

KWAME ALEXANDER: I was three years old.

COLBERT: You remember!

ALEXANDER: I remember.  I was living on the Upper West Side.  My parents were in graduate school at Columbia University.  My mother read to me every day—Lucille Clifton [African-American poet, writer, and educator; 1936-2010], Nikki Giovanni [African-American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator; 1943-2024], and Langston Hughes [African-American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist; 1901-67].

But my favorite book was a book that went like this: “Fox / Socks / Knox / Box / Fox in socks / Socks in box” [Dr. Seuss, Fox in Socks (Random House, 1965)].  So, ummm . . . at my preschool, there was this kid who didn't like me, and one particular day, I built a castle out of wooden blocks to show my mother so she’d be proud of me when she came to pick me up, but this kid knocked ’em over.  So I went up to him and I used the only weapons I had.  Those were my blocks that you flipped.  Lest you want some quick payback, better fix my quick blocks stack.  [LAUGHTER.]  And he started crying.  [LAUGHTER.]  And so, when my mother came to school, the teacher was like, “Mrs. Alexander, we have a problem.  Your son Kwame is arrogant.  He intimidates all the kids with his words,” and my mother said, “Thank you.”

[NOTE: Alexander recited the Dr. Seuss lines from memory, but he misquoted it slightly.  He did the same with the Nikki Giovanni poem below.  In both cases, I’m transcribing verbatim what the poet said on camera, then I’ll post the correct verses as published in an afterword below.    ~RICK]

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: Mission accomplished!  

You were last here [on 1 February 2024] for your collection of poetry This Is the Honey [Little, Brown and Company, 2020].  You now have How Sweet the Sound: A Soundtrack for America.  This is your 42nd book—who’s counting—and many of your books are for kids.  Do you change anything in the way you write, if the book is for children as opposed to a general public?

ALEXANDER: Not really.  I try to write books that I would have wanted to have read when I was four or ten or 12 and I would love now.  So I’m writing about topics that I think families can read and enjoy together, but certainly, I have a soft spot in my heart for young people because I believe that the mind of an adult begins in the imagination of a child, and what better way to enhance . . . elevate that imagination than through the words on a page.

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: The book is a love letter, How Sweet the Sound . . . [APPLAUSE] . . . the book is a love letter to music.  What makes up the soundtrack to America to you?

ALEXANDER: Well, I believe it’s a symphony of refuge, it’s a score of redemption, it’s a . . . .  Last night I was at the Blue Note [Jazz Club, Greenwich Village] and I saw Sweet Honey in the Rock [all-female, African-American a cappella ensemble].  

COLBERT: Oh.  [SINGS:] “We all . . . everyone of us . . .” [We All . . . Every One of Us, 1983].

ALEXANDER: They sang that. 

COLBERT: They did?

ALEXANDER: Yeah.  And I don't care where you are from, what you are feeling . . . when you hear music, music can heal, it can give you hope.  It can open up a world of possibility, which is what the same thing I think children's books do.

COLBERT: Poetry and lyrics are . . . well, what is the difference to you?  Are they the same thing?

ALEXANDER: No.  I think maybe they are cousins.  Maybe they are kissing cousins. [LAUGHTER – ALEXANDER LAUGHS – MORE LAUGHTER.]  Imagine this, Stephen: lyrics, when they are done right, they need a beautiful guitarist, they need a sax player.  They need musicians to help elevate those words that are on the page.

COLBERT: They’re in relationship to the music that they’re dancing with. 

ALEXANDER: Poetry is the whole band.  Like, you have to do it all in those words on the page.  And I think that makes it special. 

COLBERT: Have you written lyrics?

ALEXABDER: Umm . . . not successfully.

COLBERT: You’ve given it a shot.

ALEXANDER: I’ve given it a shot, and that's when I found out they’re not the same.

COLBERT: One of those first poets that was read to you, the acclaimed poet Nikki Giovanni, passed away a few weeks ago [d. 9 December 2024; one of the world’s best-known African-American poets], and I know that she was your mentor.  How did the two of you become close?  That’s an extraordinary experience, to become close to someone who influenced you when you were 3.

ALEXANDER: Well, I met her in 1987.  This was the beginning of our relationship.  I was a sophomore at a place called Virginia Tech [Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg; Giovanni was University Distinguished Professor Emerita at VPI since December 2022].  And she was a visiting professor.  Me, deeming myself a pretty fantastic poet, took her advanced poetry class. 

I think she gave me a C-minus. [LAUGHTER] And so, I was livid and I went to her office and I—I had just discovered jazz music—and so I went and sat down in her office during office hours and I said, I don’t understand why I got a C-minus.  I’m a poet.  I listen to Nancy Wilson [jazz singer; 1937-2018] and I’m channeling my inner jazz and I know what I’m doing.  And she said, “Kwame, I can teach you how to write poetry, but I cannot teach you how to be interesting.”

[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: Oh-ho!  I felt that.

ALEXANDER: That was the beginning of a 37-year relationship.

COLBERT: Are there any words of hers that you would like to leave us with here tonight?

ALEXANDER: Yeah.  Can the band join me on this?

COLBERT: Yeah!  Can you guys . . . [MUSIC.]

ALEXANDER: I know you just wrote a cookbook with your wife [Stephen Colbert and Evie McGee Colbert, Does This Taste Funny? (Celadon Books, 2024)], so you might find this apropos.

COLBERT: Okay.

ALEXANDER: It’s called “Still Life with Apron” [in Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (William Morrow, 2013)] by Nikki Giovanni. 

I would like to see you
Cooking
I would like for you to cook
For me
I would like to see you decide
Upon the menu
Go to the market
And pick the fruit
The vegetables
The fish
I would like to see you smell the fish I would like for you to Test the
     flesh for freshness and firmness
I would like to watch you
In the bakery by the dinner rolls
Deciding: Rolls or Crusty Bread
I would like to watch you run back
To get the Goat Butter
 
I would like to be sitting in a corner
And you
Intent upon your meal
Not noticing me
When you go to the wine store
I would like to watch you wrestle with red or white wine
Of course, because it is fish, but red
Is so Seductive and who ever fell in love
Over a glass of white wine?  [LAUGHTER]
 
I—uncharacteristically on time—
Would like to greet you
I would like for you to greet me
In a butcher’s apron
I would like for you to greet me only
In an apron
I would like to watch the movement inside the
     apron
As I undress for you
I would like to watch you walk
No
Stroll to the closet
Where you bring out your buffalo plaid
     dressing gown
Your pilly much-washed dressing gown that
     smells like you
After you shower After you brush your teeth
After you comb your hair
I would like to embrace your odor
I would like to embrace
Your essence as we sit down to eat
I would like you to cook for me
Yes
I would like that
Very much

[CHEERS AND APPLAUSE.]

COLBERT: Thank you for that.  How Sweet the Sound is available tomorrow!

Kwame Alexander, everybody!  We will be right back!

[The verse from Dr. Seuss’s Fox in Socks goes like this (I’ll try to duplicate its original typography as well):

Fox
Socks
Box
Knox
Knox in box.
Fox in socks.
Knox on fox in socks on box.

 [Nikki Giovanni’s 2013 poem “Still Life with Apron” (as published in Chasing Utopia; again, I’ll attempt to replicate the poets format and typography):

I would like to see you
Cooking
I would like for you to cook
For me
I would like to see you decide
Upon a menu
Go to the market
And pick the fruit
The vegetables
The fish
I would like to see you smell the fish Test the
     flesh for freshness and firmness
I would like to watch you
In the bakery
In the bakery by the dinner rolls
Deciding: Rolls or Crusty Bread
I would watch you run back
To get the Goat Butter
 
I would like to be sitting in a corner
And you
Intent upon your meal
Not noticing me
When you go to the wine store
I would watch you wrestle with red or white
White, of course, because it’s fish, but red
Is Seductive and who ever fell in love
Over a glass of white wine?  
 
I—uncharacteristically on time—
Would like you to greet me
In a butcher’s apron
I would like to watch you greet me only
In an apron
You would ask me to undress
To undress for you
Before I sit down at the beautiful table
Before you hand me my glass
You would ask me to undress
I would like to watch you watch me
Undressing for you
I would like to watch the movement inside the
     apron
As I undress for you
I would like to watch you walk
No
Stroll to your closet
Where you bring out your old buffalo plaid
     dressing gown
Your pilly much-washed dressing gown that
     smells like you
After you brush your teeth
After you shower After you comb your hair
I would like to embrace your odor
Your odor Your essence as we sit down to eat
I would like for you to cook for me
I would like that
Very much

[And for those interested in Alexander’s new book, How Sweer the Sound, which brought him to The Late Show earlier this week, here’s a review from Kirkus Reviews, 12 October 2024:

HOW SWEET THE SOUND

by Kwame Alexander; illustrated by Charly Palmer

A work whose lyrical and artistic genius only becomes more apparent upon rereads.

A journey through American music history as shaped by Black artists and traditions.

Fittingly, given the U.S.’s long and complicated racial history, this work takes its title from the beloved hymn “Amazing Grace,” written by a slave trader turned abolitionist [John Newton (English; 1725-1807)]. The book begins on the African plains: “Listen to the fireside chorus / of the motherland / to the talking drums / dancing beneath the gold sun / that beat a bold tapestry / of yesterday’s stories / and tomorrow’s dreams.” Likewise, the author has created a beautiful tapestry, woven with song titles and musical references. With each introduction to a different genre, he implores readers to “listen.” Laced with powerful imagery, alliteration, and onomatopoeia (“BUM-DUN! BUM-DUN!”), his verse begs to be sung. Taking a comprehensive approach, Alexander explores regional styles such as go-go alongside internationally known genres, including gospel, jazz, and hip-hop. Palmer’s distinctive illustrations offer the perfect accompaniment. Bold colors set the mood, while his brush strokes evoke movement and convey strong emotion as he depicts everything from enslaved people joyfully dancing in New Orleans’ Congo Square to fists raised high for Black power to performances by Chuck Berry [1926-2017], Prince [1958-2016], Lauryn Hill [b. 1975], and other musicians. Detailed backmatter defines terms and explains the significance of the music referenced.

A work whose lyrical and artistic genius only becomes more apparent upon rereads. (Informational picture book. 5-10)

[How Sweet the Sound is available through Amazon ($17.09), Barnes & Noble ($18.99), Strand Book Store ($18.99), and Books of Wonder ($18.99).]

Bombast to Beckett

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward has contributed many posts to Rick On Theater since I launched it in March 2009—122, including several multi-parters.  Most of Kirk’s pieces have been on theater or other performing arts, notably music, and he’s covered a broad range of topics within those areas.  One of the areas of theater on which Kirk’s written is, necessarily, acting and actors. 

[As a sometime actor himself, and a director and acting teacher, Kirk’s well-positioned to write about acting.  (It also doesn’t hurt that he’s also a produced playwright, in which capacity he’s had to work closely with actors as well.  And let me not forget that his late wife, Pat, was an accomplished actor, teacher of acting, and director as well.)

[Back in March 2022. I published Kirk’s review of Isaac Butler’s book The Method, his exploration of the popular acting style based on an American interpretation of the techniques of Konstantin Stanislavsky.  Kirk recently reread The Method and did some reconsidering and expanding of his responses.  “Bombast and Beckett” is my friend’s later thoughts on the book.

[Let me add that I also trained as an actor at HB Studio, the American Academy of Dramatic Art (briefly), and the T. Schreiber Studio (with the late Lee Wallace [1930-2020]), and I have an MFA in acting from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (when it was still the School for the Creative and Performing Arts).  I had a short career on the stage, doing some teaching and turning to directing in the last few years.  I have some experience from which to judge Kirk’s conclusions, and I agree with them entirely.]

One of the best books about theater in general, and about acting in particular, that I have read is The Method by Isaac Butler (Bloomsbury, 2022), a “biography” of the approach to acting that may be said to have begun with the work and writing of the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938). I’m reading the book for the third time, and I continue to find new and interesting things in it. (For a review of and commentary on Butler’s book, see “The Method – a Review,” posted on this blog on 12 March 2022.)

At the end of the book is this provocative passage:

Today, the major challenge to an actor is not being heard, or seen, but seizing and holding an audience’s attention. One thing that art can offer us is a chance to be a pure spectator, to discard for a moment the discomfort and anxiety of always performing and to simply experience. But it turns out we often find these islands of solace anxiety-producing. We feel the pull to check in with the outside world, the worry that we might be waiting in the wings while a big moment passes us by onstage. It is this drive in the audience that actors must fight against. The ever-escalating battle for the finite resource of a viewer’s attention encourages both storytelling and acting in which the choices are big, simple, and clearly communicated. . . . Now acting and writing head instead toward clarity, worried that a surfeit of mystery and subtext risks committing the cardinal sin of art: boring the audience.

I wrote a friend that:

Butler points out how closely related styles of acting (and playwriting, I’m sure) are to the society they exist in – maybe “the environment they exist in” is more accurate. David Byrne [the singer and composer, formerly leader of the rock group Talking Heads; b. 1952], in How Music Works, claims that the environment is as much the creator of art as the artists are.  Anyway, as Butler says, the acting style of Cary Grant would have been completely out of place in Streetcar, and Brando’s acting would have been baffling in Philadelphia Story.

That may just be another way of saying that acting styles and fashions change. However, something he says at the end of the book has made me rethink some of that narrative. Something is radically different for theater (and movies) now in a way that’s more than just changes of styles. For the first time people don’t have to go to the theater – it’s entirely optional in a way that it wasn’t, say, in 1900, where there were extremely limited alternatives. Not only do they not have to go – they’re afraid to, because something more interesting may be happening somewhere else at exactly that moment, as illustrated by the number of people consulting their phones during plays, and also by the number of ways you can multitask art, for example by streaming while texting. What style of acting does that call for? FOMO, fear of missing out, is driving our media, and what kind of theater can keep up with that?

No sooner had I written those words than I began to regret them, or at least to rethink them. Should I have? Jason Zinoman, in his column “On Comedy,” posted on the New York Times website on December 31, 2024, titled “For Comics, Honing Jokes Has Taken a Back Seat to Marketing. That’s Not Good.,” quotes the comedian Isabel Hagen (b. 1991 or 1992):

Every day instead of writing, I sit and think: I should post a clip of stand-up. What clip will get mean reactions that spark fights in the comments and therefore feeds the algorithm and gets me more views? Should I go into my folder of bikini photos and post one with the caption ‘lol hi’?”

Zinoman notes that “the major change has been the proliferation of video,” and then he adds, “The current ethos is to throw everything at the wall as fast as possible and see what sticks.”

“Hagen speculates,” the Times columnist asserts, “that the accelerated speed of technological change is what’s behind the need to grow careers at the same rate”; however, he wonders: “Do we want to live in a world where quality is so easily compromised to get more attention? Should we really be happy with a cultural system that incentivizes artists to spend more time selling their wares than developing their work?”

The stand-up Hagen “fears that we are moving to a culture where we’re just looking to be distracted.” She concludes, “If distraction is the goal, the loudest and most persistent ‘artist’ will win, and many may forget why they entered a creative field in the first place.”

If what Zinoman and Hagen say is true of live comedy performance, what can we say about theater? Is it likely, is it even possible, that live drama can compete in a short-attention-span world?

Whether or not it was literally correct for me to have said that “For the first time people don’t have to go to the theater,” I am certainly not the first or only person to observe that attention spans are getting shorter while the availability of easier, faster, and more disposable means of entertainment are proliferating.

At the moment, for example, one can stream a series of movies, series, and concerts on the cell phone while doing any number of other tasks, or doing nothing. How can theater compete with that?

I may be wrong, but it seems to me that paradoxically what seems to be the great weakness of theater – the proliferation of faster and more available kinds of technologies – may be its strength. The “Third Law of Motion” of Isaac Newton (1642-1727), which states that “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction,” applies to society as well, perhaps not in every specific but certainly in general.

Technology today is producing a reaction – for example, people deliberately doing without their cell phones or computers for varying periods of time. For those fed up with things technical, theater in its basics can be powerfully attractive. Theater can be performed anywhere, under any circumstances, even without technological assistance if appropriate. For example, I’ve staged plays in living rooms with no settings or properties of any kind.

[Many of Kirk’s ideas in this section are reminiscent of the foundational theories of Polish director and theorist Jerzy Grotowski (1933-99), considered one of the founders of experimental theater. Early in his career, Grotowski devised what he called “poor theater” (see Towards a Poor Theatre [Simon and Schuster, 1968]), which eliminates all the aspects of theater that he considered “extraneous” (i.e., “spectacle”).

[Poor theater entails little to no costuming, props, or elaborate sets. Grotowski relies on the abilities of the actors and uses nontraditional performance spaces (i.e., not conventional theaters). It’s essentially the opposite of commercial theater. Grotowski believed that theater shouldn’t be compared to television or film and shouldn’t try to emulate or compete with them. ~Rick]

Will theater in years to come resemble theater as we know it now? I don’t know, and certainly on Broadway these days we’re seeing plays that make elaborate use of technology, Will that kind of large-scale production survive? The monetary costs of technology can be enormous, and in addition, as always, there’s the problem of attracting audiences. Will a play that tries desperately to use cinematic techniques be as popular in its way as a movie?

We shall see. Regardless, live theater is always an alternative. It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can be simply staged. It needs something to say, but it doesn’t necessarily need elaborate and expensive ways in which to say it.

However, my major subject in the letter I quoted above wasn’t so much about the survival of live theater as about the impact our intense current technological environment might have on acting. Here too I find myself rethinking my initial panic, for the following reasons.

There are of course countless theories about acting – what it is, what it means, how to do it. It might make sense just to ask actors what they do, and quote them, in order to define the craft, and there are excellent books that do just that, for example Actors on Acting by Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Three Rivers Press, 1995). However, actors’ thoughts on their craft are all over the place, and there may be discrepancies between what performers think they do and their actual behavior.

Similarly, in the last hundred years or so there’s been no shortage of acting teachers and writers on the craft. One might wonder how there’s anything more to be said, although of course it keeps being said anyway. Is it possible to find a synthesis somehow?

Perhaps we can look at acting this way (although of course there are exceptions to every rule).  Actors’ work typically sorts itself into three different areas. Actors work on themselves, their bodies, minds, feelings, spirits. They also work (typically) on the script of the play (e.g.: Aaron Frankel’s [1921-2018] How To Do Homework course at HB Studio; see “An Actor’s Homework,” 19, 22, 25, and 28 April 2010) or on other material provided by the creator(s) of the play. And they work with a group of other people – production staff, audience, but in particular with other actors.

Self, script, other actors. It seems sensible that a theory of acting would incorporate all three aspects of the craft, making a sort of “three-legged stool” capable of supporting almost any kind of acting.

This is not always the case. In the Twentieth Century, three of the major teachers of acting in the United States were Lee Strasberg (1901-1982), Stella Adler (1901-1992), and Sanford Meisner (1905-1997).

Although the following is an oversimplification, Strasberg may be said to have prioritized the actor’s own inner self, through a technique known as “affective memory.” Adler was particularly noted for the emphasis she put on script analysis. And Meisner based his teaching on the interaction between actors, devising exercises to bring them into close communication with each other.

Each, then, is best known for emphasizing one of what I have described as the three major elements of acting. Each also, I believe, would have said that of course all the elements of acting – internal, script-oriented, and relational – are important to a performer, and that of course an actor would have to be skilled in all of them. And after all the three famous teachers learned their craft in the same place – the Group Theatre of the 1930’s, out of which came The Method.

In practice, however, I suspect, actors are likely to use what might be called a “toolbox” approach to acting, drawing on a range of techniques depending on what is needed at the time. Butler in The Method makes it clear that many actors who swear by the approach of one of the great teachers (or of other teachers, or of principles outlined in numerous books), nevertheless in practice use a combination of techniques as necessary.

Butler writes that we can

go to many rehearsal halls in America and you’ll see a process divided in equal fourths into work around a table, staging, refining, and tech. The director and actors will talk about beats and structure a scene by its actions, will try to create staging that is informed by the characters and their needs. Visit a scene study class in America and you’ll likely hear the teacher ask the student some variation of “what does your character want? What is in their way? What are you doing to get it?” You’ll see them try to activate the mind, will, and feelings of the actor. You’ll hear them say the words “given circumstances.” You’ll hear actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters. . . . You’ll hear them talking about being present in the moment, or really listening to their scene partner, or the steps they’re taking to stop indicating so damn much.

Every word in that paragraph is a description of standard American acting practice. It’s what I’ve learned and worked with and taught in my own experiences in theater. The elements of the description originated in various places and have been passed down to today by generations of actors, directors, and teachers who included elements from the various “schools” of acting and applied them to the actors’ selves, script study, and teamwork.

Actors who approach their work with a mixture of internal work and physical relaxation, intelligent script analysis, and the ability to talk and listen in the present moment to the other actors in a play, are in a position to expand from that base to almost any style of acting, from detailed realism to stylized period performing, from mumbling to mesmerizing, from bombast to Beckett.

Because, particularly in this country, an actor’s career is so precarious, so strenuous, so uncertain, an actor becomes skilled in adjusting, in rolling with the punches, in taking advantage of what’s available. As long as the foundations of an actor’s craft as I’ve described them are sound, an actor can and will maneuver from a solid base.

That is why I feel my letter, although accurate enough in laying out the problem, was wrong to expect a crisis in acting. This is not to say that there are not – or will not ever be – crises in society, in the economics of entertainment, in delivery methods of performance. There will be. There are, right now. (See “A Crisis In America's Theaters,” 13 September 2023.)

But the actors who have learned the pillars of the profession – sound work on themselves and their minds and emotions and bodies, capable script work, and the ability to “live” in performance with others – should be well prepared to weather the storm.

[When I read “Bombast to Beckett,” I had some reactions to several of the things about which Kirk had written.  That happens a lot, not just with Kirk’s pieces, and the reactions aren’t usually in disagreement, but are often commentary on or support for what the writer has said. 

[These were my thoughts on the post—my responses to what I was reading.  I’ve decided to append them pretty much as I wrote them on Kirk’s draft of the article.  I've done this before: my four posts of commentary on Kirk’s Art of Writing Reviews back in November ’09 were entirely composed of my remarks, made in marginal notes, on what I was reading.

[When I taught writing to college students, I told them that writing, especially essay-writing, was a sort of conversation between the writer and the reader(s).  That's what an essay is supposed to do: make the reader think, look at something from a fresh angle, ask questions.  In an extended version, the “reader” would write another essay in response (the other side of the conversation), then the original writer or another essayist would chime in, and so on.  Well, what I’m doing here is a perfect example of that, and this afterword will be my contribution to the conversation.

[What I’m going to do here is comment on some of the things Kirk said in “Bombast” that jogged my mind and made me think about all kinds of ideas.  That's a good thing, I think.

[To his first quotation from The Method, Kirk invoked FOMO as a motivating force in present-day acting.  This, in a way, is what drives Tom Stoppard’s (b. 1937) 1966 absurdist comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: two (inconsequential) characters who are out of the room when significant actions occur, try to “glean” (a word they use extensively in one scene) what’s happening around them. 

[In Act I of this Hamlet-derived play, The Player admonishes the courtiers to “. . . look on every exit being an entrance somewhere else.”  But in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s situation, when someone like Hamlet, Gertrude, or Claudius finishes a scene with them and leaves the stage, the two courtiers are left behind while the others enter a scene of great moment “somewhere else.”  (The reverse also occurs: when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave a scene, they enter into oblivion, while a scene of great moment takes place where they left.) 

[Stoppard makes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to piece together what went on in their absence—and they always get it wrong.  I maintain that one of Stoppard’s favorite themes is How do we know what we think we know? It’s the central theme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Arcadia (1993).  In Arcadia, piecing together what the characters missed is something of an intellectual exercise, but in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, misinterpreting what happened when they weren’t present, leads to the courtiers’ deaths.

[I pointed out to Kirk that his discussion of eschewing spectacle and tech on stage sounds very Grotowskian.  I suggested Kirk give the Polish director and theorist credit and he responded that “a reference to Grotowski is fine if you think it will be useful”—I did, as you can see—"no harm in expanding readers’ frames of reference, I guess.”

[By the way, I always found it interesting, in the days when I was researching the work of experimental stage director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97; see, among other posts on ROT, “A Biography of Leonardo Shapiro,” 16 April-7 May 2023), that he laid claim to being an acolyte of Jerzy Grotowski, who was fundamentally anti-tech, while Leo himself loved tech. 

[Shapiro’s productions were low-tech (but not no-tech) due to budget, not artistic philosophy.  He once told me, after I saw one of his shows in which he had some very effective low-tech visual effects—he was very good at that—that he wished he’d been able to afford holograms. (Kirk noted: “That is a funny paradox with Leo.”)

[Kirk speaks of the impact of the "technological environment might have on acting,” which made me think that artificial intelligence is already considered a direct threat to acting and actors.  AI was at the center of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike against movie and TV producers (14 July-9 November) and the almost-simultaneous Writers Guild of America strike against the same industries (2 May-27 September).  

[According to the unions, AI makes possible "artificial" actors and acting, NHI (no humans involved).  What impact could be greater?  Among the goals of the actors’ strike was the prevention of AI from replacing actors on set by creating virtual copies of actors’ faces, bodies, and voices.

[(The writers’ demanded that scripts, dialog, or plots generated by AI not be considered literary or source material—meaning machines can’t be eligible to receive any writing credit and thus take both creative credit and payment out away from WGA writers.)

[The effect of these developments, if any, on the nature of the work itself (writing or acting) hasn't been openly discussed as far as I know—except the possibility of putting actors and writers out of work entirely if producers and directors can assemble Franken-scripts and Franken-casts instead of hiring live writers and actors.

[One frightening change in the field that occurs to me is that in the (near) future, actors may be hired to create AI templates, like mo-cap files, to be stashed and then used later in myriad movies, tv shows/commercials, and videos, morphed into other “actors” and inserted into scenes over and over again.  Sooner or later, once the technology has advanced, there’ll be fully generated virtual productions without actors, a director, designers, techies, or ushers! 

[Back in 2021 (in a post called "Computers and Actors, Part 1" [4 October]), I ran a 1987 Time magazine article on the pre-AI precursor of this potential, "Dreaming the Impossible at M.I.T." by Philip Elmer-Dewitt.  It was about a computer program that let playwrights create a virtual representation of their plays w/out hiring actors and a studio and putting up a workshop production of their scripts.

[Kirk’s response to these comments was that my points “are extremely important”—but that “developing the thought of electronically created actors would derail” “Bombast to Beckett.”  You can see that’s he’d be right.

[As to Kirk’s brief discussion of actors talking about their techniques and practices, I’d add that there’s also the apparent fact that actors, even the most talented performers, aren’t the most articulate about what they do.  They often either use acting jargon (of which there are many different “vocabularies” for all the “countless theories,” as Kirk indicates, plus hybrids) or incoherent explanations made up of things teachers, coaches, or directors have said to them and their own unmediated descriptions of their techniques.  At least that’s been my observation. 

[I guess that suggests a corollary to the saw that "those who can't do, teach": Those who can do, often can’t teach.  Acting is such a personal and individual endeavor, it’s not easy for artists to explain or describe what they actually do clearly to someone else.

[Kirk’s response to this remark was: “You’re absolutely correct.  I was tempted to mention that, but [I] didn’t feel that was important enough.”  As far as “Bombast” is concerned, he’s probably right—but the next time an actor is a guest on a talk show and the host asks about her or his craft, note how coherent the actor is.

[When Kirk refers to books by actors writing about their own techniques, I thought another excellent example, in addition to the anthology collection of Actors on Acting, is, of course, Uta Hagen’s (1919-2004) Respect for Acting (Macmillan Publishing Co., 1973).  My dad gave me a copy in 1974, when I got home from the army ready to go to the American Academy of Dramatic Art.  

[That copy got so well-thumbed, it was falling apart, and so full of marginal notes, underlining, and highlighting, it was hard to read the original text.  I was teaching acting then and ended up buying a new copy so I had a clean one to lend to students.  (I should note that my first acting teacher at HB Studio and the Mason Gross School was Carol Rosenfeld, a student of Hagen’s and my main model as a teacher.)  Kirk agreed that Respect was “a really fine book, one of the very best of its kind in my experience,” but he didn’t feel expanding his examples beyond the one book would advance his point.

[Kirk points out that the “three-legged stool” that comprises an actor’s preparation for a role necessarily requires that "actors work on themselves."  Possibly many readers know that the original Russian title of the Stanislavsky book we know in English as An Actor Prepares (translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood; Theatre Arts, Inc., 1936) is (in literal translation) "an actor's work on himself" (Russian: Работа актёра над собой (Khudozhestvennaya literatura, 1938) – romanized: Rabota aktyora nad soboy).  “Which is a better title, I'd say,” replied Kirk to my reminder.  I’ll also note further that a 2008 retranslation by Jean Benedetti of that seminal acting text is entitled An Actor’s Work (Routledge).

[Regarding the things Kirk specified that actors work on, "Self, script, other actors," I asked if he would consider that "place," meaning the work space (i.e., not just the theater and the stage/acting space, but also the set), is important, too.  I contend that Ihe space in which actors work, both in rehearsal and in performance, has an effect on the acting.  I offer some illustrations:

[When the Group Theatre was doing Johnny Johnson (1936; see “The Group Theatre’s Johnny Johnson," 18 November 2019), their only musical, they rehearsed in a small, intimate theater.  When they moved into the much larger theater where they performed, many witnesses reported that the production suffered. 

[In his Homework class, to impress upon us the importance of establishing a sense of place, Aaron Frankel recounted that when Jack Klugman (1922-2012) took over the role of Oscar in the Broadway première of The Odd Couple in November 1965, he actually lived in the apartment set at the Plymouth Theatre for several days to establish a relationship with what was supposed to be his home. 

[Years ago, in an acting class, I was assigned the Watchman’s opening monologue from Aeschylus’ (ca. 525/524-456 BCE) Agamemnon (ca, 458 BCE).  When I read the play, I realized that I had visited the ruins of the place where the play is set, the city of Mycenae, of which Agamemnon was king.  I’d stood atop the Lion Gate, which is restored, looking out over the Plain of Argos down to the Aegean Sea.  I’d been in that place in real life only a year or two before this class, so it wasn’t hard to envision what the Watchman sees when he spots the signal fires from Troy telling the Greeks that the war was over.

[(As a director, I have worked on this aspect of a performance once or twice, most memorably in Ward Six (Drama Committee Repertory Theatre, NYC, 1979), a stage adaptation of a short story by Anton Chekhov (Russian; 1960-1904) in which most of the cast were patients in a psych ward, but the performance space was a store-front black box with suggested, non-Realistic scenery.)

[Kirk responded to my point: “It’s very important, probably next in line, but I wanted to limit my list to what the actor brings into the room, so to speak.  You’re certainly correct about its significance.”  In Respect for Acting, Hagen includes “place” as one of “the essentials to examine in order to define” what makes any given moment in a character’s existence “real.”  She wrote, “Since place is crucial, let me remind you [to] examine every aspect of it. . . .”

[Kirk quotes Butler’s statement in The Method that “actors alternate between the third person and first when discussing their characters,” depending on what training system the actor follows.  For instance, Uta Hagen, and therefore Carol Rosenfeld (my teacher), stressed the first-person relationship to the character.  They felt it reinforces the identification of the actor with the character, which was their interpretation of the Stanislavskian approach to creating a character.  (I can’t remember if Hagen says anything about this in Respect for Acting—Kirk said he couldn’t either—but Carol said it to us in class.)  

[Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), on the other hand, and therefore Leo Shapiro (a follower of Brechtian theater theories, alongside Grotowski’s), eschewed character identification, both for the actor and the audience.  Kirk agreed, asserting, “Yes, Brecht loved using the third person.”

[Leo said frequently that he didn’t see the dramatis personæ as “characters,” but as “roles,” by which he meant their functions in the story/scene.  For example, in Children of the Gods (Shaliko Company, 1973; see “Children of the Gods: Launching The Shaliko Company (1973),” 19 November 2021), his collage of several Greek plays, he didn’t see Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Menelaus, Orestes, or Electra as characters, but as “[t]he greedy King, the unforgiving Queen, the sacrificed Virgin on the altar, the stormy Uncle, the wounded, disillusioned Young Hero, the Sister who has been unhinged by the thirst for revenge.” 

[I try to explain this dichotomy from Leo’s perspective in “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25 September 2013.  Kirk’s response to this comment: “That’s an extremely interesting comment.  By the way, I find in working with actors that even the most method-oriented actors will literally alternate between ‘s/he’ and ‘I’ constantly in discussions, with no reason for the differentiation that I can tell.”]

Artistic Scientific Method

 
“ENGINEERING AN ARTISTIC SCIENTIFIC METHOD”
by Martine Kei Green-Rogers 

[The following article was published in American Theatre, vol. 40, no. 4 (Summer 2024) as part of the Theatre Futures series sponsored by the Ford Foundation, which continued through the fall of 2024.  American Theatre asked leading theatre thinkers to envision the future of this art form and industry as it stands at a historic crossroads; Martine Kei Green-Rogers’s piece is on the theme of Content and Form which explores innovation and new-work development.  It was posted on the AT website on 14 August 2024.]

The key to a thriving theatre education is space for experimentation.

I have always been interested in new ways of thinking about the world around us. In an Elinor Fuchs [theater scholar, critic, playwright, and dramaturg; 1933-2024] “Visit to a Small Planet” kind of way [see below], I have always put the world in front of me and tried my best to figure out how to shape it so that it tells the story I want to tell.

For example, “digiturgy,” which Allison Koch [an educator who works to maintain, create, and develop digital experiences and services for clients] defines as “the art, technique, theory, and practice of composition for digital storytelling,” was my way of life for years. But it sat on the fringes of mainstream dramaturgy—until the pandemic. Prior to 2020, I found ways to incorporate digiturgy into my “traditional” work, but that usually meant me experimenting and poking lightly at the way things have always been done. But the pandemic moved digiturgy squarely from the fringes and directly to the center of storytelling for the foreseeable future. My journey toward embracing digiturgy early on had been a direct result of thinking about dramaturgy from a space of sustainability and experimentation; now this kind of thinking, thankfully, is on more folks’ minds.

That outlook on experimentation has pros and cons; I give myself the permission to investigate, formulate, implement and sometimes, fail, in a society that values positive outcomes only. As such, in thinking about new models for 21st century conservatory training, I translated the spirit of inquiry that I use for my artistry into the way I think about education. Essentially, I have taken the scientific method (question, research, hypothesis, experiment, data analysis, conclusion, and communication) and reformulated it to use in theatre training.

As dean of the Theatre School at DePaul University, I am at a conservatory struggling to find the path away from “the way things have always been done,” which does not serve us anymore, and toward something new and innovative. The question of how we meet the needs of students in an ever changing [sic] performing arts industry looms large—especially as the dreaded “demographic cliff” approaches and the competition for the best of the best artistic young adults sharpens. Acknowledging and balancing the fear of the unknown with the excitement of the potential of the future is hard. Yet when I see the original ways our students are processing the world through art, it gives me the strength to keep going forward, and to research the ways to serve them best.

What I found in my research was that my students want to be in conversation with other artists and art forms. The thought of the conservatory being a place where we conserve the way things have always been done is gone and we need a new hypothesis on how to move forward. Hence, we are embarking on some ambitious plans. Not everyone is on board. Change always has its detractors with a palpable fear of change. I do not dismiss their fears, but I come from a place of “yes, and” as opposed to “no, but.” Change says yes to the ideas that live on the fringes of the mainstream but have the potential to solve the issues of our field (more 10-minute play festivals, anyone?).

I am curious, along with many of the students, faculty, and staff in the building, about all the potential applications of the skill sets they are learning. How can we use art to be in and of community with those around us? Where can we make something new for us out of the theatre of the past? Some of these plans won’t feel revolutionary to some of you, but as an organization that is about to celebrate its 100-year anniversary in 2025, these partnerships are huge steps in our evolution. [The Goodman School of Drama, which became the Theatre School at DePaul University, was established in 1925.]

So, we are moving into the experimentation phase. We are partnering with other arts organizations at DePaul and within Chicago to figure out what it means to be in conversation with another art form as a conservatory. For example, in February, four of our students participated in Christian McBride’s [jazz bassist, composer, and arranger, b. 1972]  The Movement Revisited [concert event, 2 February 2024] at the Chicago Symphony as the four speakers in the performance who represent great figures of the Civil Rights Movement [Rosa Parks (1913-2005); Malcolm X (1925-65); Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-68); Muhammad Ali (1942-2016); and President Barack Obama (b. 1961)]. Those students had the opportunity to learn about performing with an orchestra and how their processes around technical rehearsals are different from those of the theatre. We also devised a piece that opened in May [Memo, 12-19 May 2024] as a response to an exhibition by Selva Aparicio [Spanish, based in Chicago; b. 1987; interdisciplinary artist working across installation and sculpture] at the DePaul Art Museum [Selva Aparicio: In Memory Of, 14 March-4 August 2024] and will run in the museum alongside the exhibit. Creating something of this scale in an art museum is an example of the kind of change we desperately need. At this moment of crisis for all of the arts, we are stronger in our art-making community and can survive the weather of poor funding and general scarcity when we collaborate with others.

As we define the future, I see the conservatory encouraging other art forms, such as film, digital art, dance and more, to join us and incorporate the best of what they have discovered in their own processes, and apply that to our work. This is a place where, for example, short-form content becomes the “yes, and[.]” Also, I see it is the place where we can fail miserably, pick ourselves up, and start again. This process will provide measurable outcomes we can analyze, and help us draw stronger conclusions about what works and doesn’t work and share that with the community. With this method, partnerships between artistic units within a university (or across universities) can become the genesis for works that then can go on to producing houses and have a future artistic life (and, hopefully, create pathways for the students who worked on them to get a professional artistic credit).

The future of theatre lies in our ability to be flexible, to bring us back to being in community with one another, to help future generations learn how to process the world around them through art, and to, as Hamlet says to the players, hold a mirror up to nature.

[Martine Kei Green-Rogers, PhD (she/her) is the dean of Chicago’s Theatre School at DePaul University (formerly the Goodman School of Drama).  She is a dramaturg, director, and adapter, and her writing includes “Productions: The Theory and Practice" in Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy (2014), “A New Noble Kinsmen: The Play On! Project and Making New Plays Out of Old” in Theatre History Studies (2017), and “The Dramaturgy of Black Culture: The Court Theatre’s Productions of August Wilson’s Century Cycle” in On Dramaturgy: Unpacking Diversity and Inclusion, Case Studies From the Field (2020).]

*  *  *  *
“ELINOR FUCHS, PEERLESS GUIDE TO THEATRE’S ‘SMALL PLANET’”
by David Bruin 

[When theater scholar and teacher Elinor Fuchs died in May, David Bruin, a former student of Fuchs’s, penned this homage for American Theatre.  It ran under the heading “In Memoriam” on the website on 7 June 2024.]

A lively and perceptive watcher and thinker, she helped generations of artists and critics view theatre as a kind of space and time travel.

The best theatre critic in the 2,500-year history of the profession—that’s how I describe Elinor Fuchs when the occasion arises, as it has often since she passed away at the age of 91 on May 28. I confess that my claim rests more on love than rigor—something she would have protested—and superlatives are always cause for suspicion. Nonetheless, the phrase speaks to what I want to tell you here, which is that Elinor changed the way I read, watch, and write about theatre, as she did for so many others.

For Shakespeare, all the world’s a stage; for Elinor, every stage is a world unto itself. This insight animates her famous essay “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” [see below]. “A play is not a flat work of literature,” she writes, “not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space.”

Honed over decades of teaching and published by Theater [Yale School of Drama; see below] in 2004, the essay gives anyone the tools to make sense of what is happening onstage, whether they are reading a script or watching a performance. Rather than focusing on the dialogue of individual characters, she encourages readers to “mold the play into a medium-sized ball” and “squint.” Now you are ready, as the essay’s subtitle suggests, to ask the play some questions about space, time, weather, light, power, and much more.

In class, she would do this literally. As an MFA student in her criticism workshop [at Yale], I remember her discussing Adrienne Kennedy’s [b. 1931] Funnyhouse of a Negro [1964; see “Signature Plays” (3 June 2016) on this blog for a report on a production of Kennedy’s one-act] and putting her two hands in front of her face to form a small orb, then bringing it into a soft focus as she asked about the play’s color palette of jet black, ghastly white, blood red, and sickly yellow.

“Small Planet” turns reading plays into space travel—time travel, too. With a simple squint, one can stand before avalanches of text and images undaunted. Black boxes unlock before you. The harder the text, the better. Her syllabi speak to her desire for intensity, density, and lucidity, comprised as they were of [Henrik] Ibsen [Norwegian; 1828-1906], [August] Strindberg [Swedish; 1849-1912], [Getrude] Stein [ex-patriot American in Paris; 1874-1946], [Bertolt] Brecht [German; 1898-1956], [Antonin] Artaud [French; 1896-1948], Witkacy [(Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz) Polish; 1885-1939], [Samuel] Beckett [Irish living in Paris (wrote in both French and English); 1906-89], María Irene Fornés [Cuban-born American; 1930-2018], Suzan-Lori Parks [African American; b. 1963], and Reza Abdoh [Iranian-born American; 1963-95], whom she introduced to many students, me included, who became die-hard fans. These plays require pilgrimages, and Elinor blazed the trails.

The essay also demonstrates some of her unparalleled skills, such as her penchant for pattern recognition. “Find the pattern first!” she tells readers. Ancient Greek tragedies are reversal-recognition-suffering. The Medieval Mystery Cycles are reversal-suffering-recognition. Those lucky enough to number among her students know exactly what that means, as well as the economy of insight that she could bring to millennia of theatre history. (For those who don’t, I encourage you to read “Waiting for Recognition,” in which she offers the only reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, which inaugurated drama criticism, you will ever need.

[Interested readers will need access to Project Muse through some institution, such as a library or university, or pay a fee to read the recommended essay at the linked site. (Cardholders at the New York Public Library can access Project Muse though its website or at a NYPL branch.) The article was published in Modern Drama 50.4 (Winter 2007), and many university and large public libraries collect that journal.]

But Elinor was no mechanical engineer of interpretation. As a critic, perhaps her greatest gift was her ability to make sense of the odd and the obscure. “Warning,” she writes in “Small Planet”: “Don’t permit yourself to construct a pattern that omits ‘singularities,’ puzzling events, objects, figures, or scenes that ‘do not fit.’ Remember, there is nothing in the world of a play by accident. The puzzles may hold the key.” The emphasis is all hers, and her writing proves it.

In just five pages, “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” captures the sensibility of a critic whose abiding concerns read like a list of contradictions: patterns and puzzles. Repetition and singularity. The legible and the ineffable. Onstage and offstage. She was exacting about ambiguity and could peer into the unseen. She encouraged attention, precision, and wit, and she was at home in ironies, enigmas, and mysteries. She shied away from nothing so long as it was on a stage.

At some point, an essay must be written that chronicles Elinor’s achievements as a scholar. To turn a grand narrative into a short story, beginning in the 1970s, she brought French critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism to bear on theatre studies, particularly the historical avant-garde and the work being created by the most advanced theater artists in New York City, including Robert Wilson [b. 1941], Richard Foreman [1937-2025], Mabou Mines [experimental theater company founded in 1970 and based in New York City], the Wooster Group [experimental theater company based in New York City’s SoHo, successor in 1975 of Richard Schechner’s Performance Group], and others. Remarkably, she kept her theory light on its feet, deploying it nimbly in service to her true calling, which was, as she writes in her book The Death of Character [Indiana University Press, 1996], “a theatre critic in search of a language in which to describe new forms.”

Elinor was not unique in this, but she did it with a degree of clarity that inaugurated a new kind of theatre studies. At the very least, she set a new standard. Or maybe it’s just that when I read “Play as Landscape” ([Theater 25.1 (Spring/Summer 1994)] about landscape plays and staging in Stein, Wilson, Parks, and others) or “The Apocalyptic Century” ([special issue of Theater. 29.3 (Winter 1999)] about apocalypse and millennium in twentieth century [sic] theatrical avant-gardes), I wonder, How? How did she do this?

What I’m saying is that there will never be another like her.

Elinor’s approach to theatre offers not only rigor but pleasure. She could taste, smell, and touch a play. For her, there is no semiotics without sensuality. In remarks she wrote upon receiving the Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Society for Theatre Research [2018], she calls theatre people the “most semiotically aroused people in the world.”

A theatre person—that is, above all else, how I think of Elinor. She loved the theatre. She was in her 80s when I met her, and she was still pulling two-show weekends, everything from Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns at Playwrights Horizons [15 September-20 October 2013] to Thomas Hirschorn’s Gramsci Monument in the Bronx [Forest Houses (Morrisania), 1 July-15 September 2013]. She recalled her time as an actor fondly. She taught her final theory course (an astonishing saga) in a room that doubled as the dressing room of Yale Cabaret. She didn’t seem to mind discussing Italian futurism surrounded by costumes that the night before had been soaked in sweat and sprayed with watered-down vodka.

I think this is one reason why she made the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale her academic home. Her students include not only tenured professors and prolific writers but dramaturgs, producers, playwrights, and directors. Her mark on the field is everywhere.

She is gone, and I am still learning from her. No bother; she was suspicious of presence anyway. Her writing is a gift. Avail yourself of it.

There is an end to every life, but, as the final sentence of “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet” reminds us, so long as there is theatre upon this earth, “There will still be more to see.”

[David Bruin is the executive artistic director of Celebration Barn, “Maine’s Center for Physical Theater Training and Performance” in South Paris. He is the co-editor of A Moment on the Clock of the World (Haymarket Books, 2019) and teaches in the department of drama at New York University.

[I knew Elinor Fuchs slightly.  She was one of the founding members of Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of America (now . . . of the Americas) in the mid-1980s when I was taking Production Dramaturgy at New York University from Cynthia (C. Lee) Jenner, one of the two dramaturgs spearheading the launch of the organization.  Part of the course was to attend meetings of the New York City dramaturgs and lit managers and talk with the working members of the profession. 

[The class included an internship and I ended up working with Cynthia on the final steps of forming LMDA and I eventually went on to serve as her assistant when she became LMDA’s first president and ultimately filled the post of Vice President for Communications on the Executive Committee, editing the quarterly newsletter, when the incumbent had to resign.

[Of all the members and other professionals with whom I dealt in that time—and some were not only working dramaturgs and lit managers in major Off-Broadway and regional companies, but critics and reviewers, published authors, produced playwrights, and even artistic directors—one of the few who intimidated me with her deep knowledge and understanding of this field was Elinor Fuchs.] 

*  *  *  *
"EF’S VISIT TO A SMALL PLANET: SOME QUESTIONS TO ASK A PLAY”
by Elinor Fuchs 

[The title of this essay, mentioned in passing in Martine Kei Green-Rogers’s article at the top of this collection and more substantially in David Bruin’s tribute to the essayist that followed, is a reference to a television play by Gore Vidal (1925-2012) which debuted live (as most television was at the time) on 8 May 1955 on Goodyear Playhouse on the National Broadcasting Company network, one of the Big Three of the day. 

[Visit to a Small Planet starred Cyril Ritchard (Australian; 1898-1977) as Kreton, a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and seems anxious to provoke a war, “one thing you people do really well.”  Vidal reworked the teleplay for the Broadway stage, where it again starred Ritchard and ran 388 performances between 7 February 1957 and 11 January 1958, getting Ritchard a Tony nomination as Best Actor in a Play.

[In 1960, the play was revised again, this time for Hollywood.  The black and white film, released on 4 February, was directed for Paramount Pictures by Norman Taurog (1899-1981).  Jerry Lewis (1926-2017), the low-brow comedian (but a big star at the time), was cast as Kreton and the play became a film filled with slapstick humor and hijinks.

[In the film, Kreton is fascinated by human beings. Instead of trying to spark a war for his amusement as he did on TV and in the play, he decides to stay on Earth and study the humans and their world. 

[Fuchs’s essay was published in the Yale School of Drama (now David Geffen School of Drama at Yale) journal Theater, vol. 34, no. 2 (Summer 2004).]

Since its origination as a classroom tool in the early 1990s, Elinor Fuchs’s essay has acquired a devoted following, with tattered photocopies circulating in literary offices and university departments. More recently it has inspired discussions in Internet chat rooms and garnered citations in scholarly journals, despite remaining unavailable to a broad readership. The time has come to publish “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” an essay that widens our perception of dramatic worlds. Like good plays, it grows more meaningful with each reading.
—Editors 

The following walk through dramatic structure is a teaching tool. For the past several years I have used it at the Yale School of Drama as an entry to Reading Theater, a critical writing course for students in the MFA Dramaturgy Program.

The “Questions” below are in part designed to forestall the immediate (and crippling) leap to character and normative psychology that underwrites much dramatic criticism. Aside from that corrective bias, the approach offered here is not a “system” intended to replace other approaches to play analysis; I often use it together with Aristotle’s unparalleled insight into plot structure [primarily found in chapters 6-11 of his Poetics]. Rather, it could be thought of as a template for the critical imagination.

In a fine article on Hedda Gabler [Henrik Ibsen – published, 1890; produced, 1891], Philip E. Larson [1941-2013; longtime member of the Ibsen Society of America and contributor to Ibsen conferences and Ibsen News and Comment, the ISA journal] described the nature of “a genuine performance criticism.” If criticism “is unwilling to rest content with the evaluation of ephemera,” he wrote, “[it] must attempt to describe a potential object, one that neither the dramatist, the critics, nor the reader has ever seen, or will see.”* These “Questions” are intended to light up some of the dark matter in dramatic worlds, to illuminate the potentialities Larson points to. No matter what answers come, the very act of questioning makes an essential contribution to the enterprise of criticism.
—Elinor Fuchs 

*Philip E. Larson, “French Farce Conventions and the Mythic Story Pattern in Hedda Gabler: A Performance Criticism,” Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS, 1985), 202. 

We must make the assumption that in the world of the play there are no accidents. Nothing occurs “by chance,” not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance. Correspondingly, the play asks us to focus upon it a total awareness, to bring our attention and curiosity without the censorship of selective interpretation, “good taste,” or “correct form.” Before making judgments, we must ask questions. This is the deepest meaning of the idea, often-repeated but little understood, that the study of art shows us how to live.

I.  The World of the Play: First Things First

A play is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space. Language is only one part of this world. Those who think too exclusively in terms of language find it hard to read plays. When you “see” this other world, when you experience its space-time dynamics, its architectonics, then you can figure out the role of language in it.

If too tight a focus on language makes it hard to read plays, too tight a focus on character creates the opposite problem: it makes the reading too easy. To look at dramatic structures narrowly in terms of characters risks unproblematically collapsing this strange world into our own world. The stage world never obeys the same rules as ours, because in its world, nothing else is possible besides what is there: no one else lives there; no other geography is available; no alternative actions can be taken.

To see this entire world, do this literally: Mold the play into a medium-sized ball, set it before you in the middle distance, and squint your eyes. Make the ball small enough that you can see the entire planet, not so small that you lose detail, and not so large that detail overwhelms the whole.

Before you is the “world of the play.” Still squinting, ask about the space. What is space like on this planet? Interior or exterior, built or natural? Is space here confined or wide open? Do you see a long passage with many “stations”? Do you see a landscape of valleys and mountains? Sea and land? Are we on an island? In a cave? In a desert or a jungle? On a country road?

Now ask about the time. How does time behave on this planet? Does “time stand still”? Is time frantic and staccato on this planet? Is it leisurely, easy-going time? How is time marked on this planet? By clock? By the sun? By the sound of footsteps? What kind of time are we in? Cyclical time? Eternal time? Linear time? What kind of line? One day? One lifetime?

Ask about the climate on this planet. Do we have storms? Eclipses of the sun and moon? Do we have extreme heat? Paralyzing cold? Is the environment on this planet lush and abundant, sere and life-denying, airless and suffocating? What is the seasonal “feel” of this world? Autumnal? Wintry?

What is the mood on this planet? Jolly? Serious? Sad? Ironic? Sepulchral? The mood is not just a question of plot (comedies are “happy,” etc.), “tone” also contributes to mood. What is the tone of this planet? Delicate or coarse? Cerebral or passionate? Restrained or violent? How are mood and tone created on this planet? Through music? Light, sound, color, shape? What shapes? Curves? Angles?

Remember, you can’t just decide the planet is wintry or dark because you think it would look more interesting in snow or smog, at least not yet. Make sure you’re alert to what’s there; there should be actual evidence on the planet for what you report.

You’re not done. In most dramatic worlds there are hidden, or at least unseen, spaces. Ask questions about them as well. What are their characteristics of space, time, tone, and mood? How do they relate to the represented world, the world you can see?

Finally, while you’re looking at this planet, listen to its “music.” Every dramatic world will have, or suggest, characteristic sounds—of mourning, celebration, children’s patter, incantation. It will alternate sounds of human and landscape, or sound and silence. Listen for the pattern of the sound.

II. The Social World of the Play: A Closer Look

You are still not ready to examine the beings who inhabit this world. Before you inquire into their individual traits and motives, there are other things you need to know.

Keep squinting at the planet. Is this a public world, or private? What are its class rules? Aristocratic? Popular? Mixed?

In what kinds of patterns do the figures on this planet arrange themselves? Do you see groups in action, isolated individuals, both? Is there a single central figure, surrounded by a group? Are figures matched off in conflicting pairs? Are you seeing (and feeling) the tension of interlocking triangles?

How do figures appear on this planet? Are they inward or two-dimensional? Subtle? Exaggerated? Are they like puppets? Like clowns? Like you? (Are you sure?) How do figures dress on this planet? In rags, in gowns, in cardboard cutouts? Like us? (Are you sure?)

How do figures interact? By fighting? Reasoned discussion?

Who has power on this planet? How is it achieved? Over whom is it exercised? To what ends is it exercised?

What are the language habits on this planet? Verse or prose, dialogue or monologue, certainly. But also, what kinds of language predominate—of thoughts or of feelings? And what kinds of feelings? Is language colorful or flat, clipped or flowing, metaphorical or logical? Exuberant or deliberate? And what about silences?

III.  What Changes?

You have gotten a feel for this world. Now look at it dynamically, because it moves in time. Within the “rules” of its operation, nothing stays the same. What changes in this world?

Look at the first image. Now look at the last. Then locate some striking image near the center of the play (the empty box in [Thomas] Kyd’s [English; 1558-95] The Spanish Tragedy [published, 1592] is a good example). To give an account of destiny on this planet range over these three markers. Why was it essential to pass through the gate of the central image to get from the first to the last?

What changes in the landscape of this world? Does it move from inside to outside? From valleys to mountains? From town to wilderness?

What changes in time? Does time move from dusk to night? Night to dawn? Morning to midnight? Through four seasons of a year? Through the stages of a human life? Or the stages of eternal life, from Creation to Last Judgment?

What changes in language? In tone, mood, dress?

All of the changes you discover will of course contribute to and reflect on character, but each trajectory should be seen as a signifying system on its own.

What changes in the action? Have we moved from confusion to wedding (the basic plot of romantic comedy)? From threat to peaceful celebration (the basic plot of [traditional] tragicomedy)? From threat to disaster (the basic plot of tragedy)? From suffering to rebirth (the plot of the Passion play)? From threat to dual outcome, suffering for evil persons and vindication for good (the basic plot of melodrama)?

What doesn’t change? Is there a stable or fixed point in this world? An absolute reality? God? The grave?

Squint one last time. Putting together space, time, the natural world and the social world, elements that change and those that don’t, you are discovering the “myth.” Plays are full of archetypal places—castles, gardens, forests, roads, islands, green worlds, dream worlds, storms, night scenes, and on and on. If the play starts in a palace, goes on to a moonlit forest, and returns to the palace the next day or night (which is it? day or night?), what does that progression tell you? How is the final palace scene conditioned by the night journey into the forest? Is the world of the play at the end of the play a transformed world? Or is it the same world returned to “normal,” with minor adjustments? Worlds stand or fall on your answer.

IV.    Don’t Forget Yourself

Seeking what changes, don’t forget to ask what changes in you, the imaginer of worlds. Ask, what has this world demanded of me? Does it ask me for pity and fear? Does it ask me to reason? To physically participate in the action on the stage? Does it ask me to interact with other spectators? To leave the theater and take political action? To search my ethical being to the core? Maybe this world means only to entertain me, why not? But how does it make this intention known?

V. Theatrical Mirrors

Important as these internal systems are, dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other. How many performances are signaling to you from inside this world? How many echoes of other dramatic worlds do they suggest? How do these additional layers of theatricality comment on what you have already discovered?

VI. The Character Fits the Pattern

Only now are you really ready to examine the figures who inhabit this world. Every assumption you make about a character must reflect the conditions of its world, including the way psychology functions in that world. You can arrive at the most interesting version of any question about character by first exploring the features of her theatrical planet. Characters mean only as they inhabit, enact, fulfill, engage a succession of sites, actions, and objects under a specific set of conditions. They are constituents of a complex artistic pattern. Find the pattern first!

Warning: Don’t permit yourself to construct a pattern that omits “singularities,” puzzling events, objects, figures, or scenes that “do not fit.” Remember, there is nothing in the world of a play by accident. The puzzles may hold the key. Assume that the dramatic world is entirely conscious, determinate, limited. Give an account of that world that attempts to consider the role of every element in that world—visual, aural, temporal, tonal, figural. Become curious as each element is revealed as a player in the play. Be someone who is aroused to meaning.

Of course you can construct meaning in this world in many different ways. Construct it in the most inclusive way you can. There will still be more to see.

[I think you can see why Fuchs used Visit to a Small Planet as the eponym for her analytical technique.  Just as Kreton, the extraterrestrial, endeavors to study humans and their Earth, the critic or dramaturg (or director, designers, and even the actors) must examine the world of the play, which is different from the world in we ordinarily live.

[I do find it astounding, though, that Fuchs has found this parallel in the much-less-admired Jerry Lewis movie version of Vidal’s play (with which he was said to have been displeased), but even a stopped clock is right twice a day . . . .  (The French, apparently, loved the film . . . but they had an incomprehensible relationship with Lewis.  To paraphrase Astérix le Gaulois: “Ils sont fous, ces français!”

[One more comment on Visit: many TV critics and analysts assert that the movie version of Vidal’s play was the inspiration, perhaps even the source of the 1978-82 sitcom Mork & Mindy, which starred Robin Williams (1951-2014) as an alien visitor to Earth and Pam Dawber (b. 1951) as the human who takes him in.

[A good deal of Fuchs’s background and credits are scattered through these three articles, but let me end with a brief bio to finish it up.  She wrote or edited several seminal books, notably Year One of the Empire: A Play of American Politics, War, and Protest Taken From the Historical Record (1973), which premièred in Los Angeles at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in 1980; The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater After Modernism (1996), winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism; and Land/Scape/Theater (2002; co-edited with Una Chaudhuri).  

[A good deal of Fuchs’s background and credits are scattered through these three articles, but let me end with a brief bio to finish it up.  She wrote or edited several seminal books, notably Year One of the Empire: A Play of American Politics, War, and Protest Taken From the Historical Record (1973), which premièred in Los Angeles at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in 1980; The Death of Character: Reflections on Theater After Modernism (1996), winner of the George Jean Nathan Award in Dramatic Criticism; and Land/Scape/Theater (2002; co-edited with Una Chaudhuri).  

[Her 2005 memoir, Making an Exit: A Mother-Daughter Drama With Alzheimer's, Machine Tools, and Laughter meditated on the difficulties of aging and dementia.  (Fuchs’s mother, Lillian “Lil” Kessler, b. 1908, died in 1993, having lived the last ten years of her life with Alzheimer’s Disease.  Fuchs, herself, died on 28 May 2024 of complications of Lewy body dementia.)

[Her work has won numerous awards, in addition to the George Jean Nathan Award, she also won the Excellence in Editing Award of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Drama-Logue Best Play award.  Fuchs was the recipient of two Rockefeller Foundation awards and a Bunting Fellowship; she was awarded the 2009 Betty Jean Jones Teaching Award by the American Theatre and Drama Society.]