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Adding Style to Substance: the American Actor Finds a Voice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2009
Abstract
Slowly, the focus of creative and critical interest in American theatre has shifted from Broadway ‘product’ to the work presented by the non-profit theatres of the regional centres – work which has not only continued and developed the native naturalistic tradition, but embraced the best of the world repertoire, past and present. Method acting, adapted from Stanislavski to produce a distinctive but limited school of interiorized performance, proved inadequate to meet the increased demands of this range of work; and in this essay John Harrop examines the process by which university and conservatory training has come to accept that ‘style’ is not a sort of applied veneer, but a matter of finding the appropriate response to the linguistic and physical requirements of any play. Presently Head of the Professional Training Programme for the BFA in Drama at the University of California, Santa Barbara, John Harrop is himself a professional actor on the regional theatre circuit. An advisory editor of NTQ, and a frequent contributor to the old Theatre Quarterly, he is also the author (with Robert Cohen) of Creative Play Direction and (with Sabin Epstein) of Acting with Style.
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- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1985
References
Notes and References
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14. Or even earlier if one takes into account the Cleveland Playhouse which was established in 1916 as part of the Little Theatre movement arising from the New Stagecraft impetus. It went professional in 1921 and survived the depressed years of American theatre to lay claim to be America's oldest regional theatre. In fact, however, of the more than 160 professional regional theatres in existence today, all but eighteen have been developed since 1960.
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56. It must be said here that a rash of programmes developed in the 1970s as BFA and MFA degrees in performance became academically acceptable, but that not all programmes had the same standards as the Julliard School, were staffed at the same professional level, or had stringent entry requirements. In fact many were not as ‘professional’ as they advertised themselves to be, and did not equip their students for entry to Equity companies. This is not, however, to deny the workof the best programmes – it is simply one of the unfortunate aspects of a capitalistic society in which, if one ‘product’ succeeds, dozens of imitators crop up with a similar ‘name brand’. Education does not escape the syndrome.
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