Editor's Note

By Jim O'Quinn

There’s a case to be made  that the articles in this year’s Approaches to Theatre Training section outline the extreme parameters of contemporary training for two key theatre disciplines—directing and acting. In "So You Want to Be a Director," a quartet of educators talk candidly to Michael Bloom about the pros and cons of graduate-level university training for aspiring American directors. "There was a time when you could work your way up through the ranks," as Hal Scott notes, but today’s directors are increasingly likely to shore up their career paths with the certifiable ammunition of university connections and credentials. Other directors—like those accompanying Rebecca Engle on a sun-drenched, mind-altering encounter with master teachers in Umbria, Italy ("Space and Synchronicity")—fortify their energies in vividly nontraditional ways that will also translate into career-channeling assets.

On the acting front, what better illuminates the enormous range of training available on the American scene than the contrasting, boldly articulated points of view of the late Lee Strasberg ("Imagination’s Guru") and Japanese director and theorist Tadashi Suzuki ("Where Mystique Meets Technique")? "The emotional nature of man is what the actor responds to," Strasberg asserts in a never-before-published interview, as he praises Stanislavsky for the psychological breakthroughs of the Method. Eschewing psychology, Suzuki seeks through his intensely physical regimen—a virtual antidote to Strasberg’s Method—to create an actor who can "make the whole body speak, even when one is silent." Will the twain ever meet?

Of course they will, and have. As it has been frequently pointed out by Anne Bogart—who turns up in these pages as a master-teacher in Umbria as well as in the conversations with Suzuki and the four American director-trainers—actors (and, by extension, directors) are ultimately best served by an ecumenical approach: Train rigorously and deeply, Bogart insists, but draw from whatever technique feeds your imagination and sustains your creative instinct. Absorb the dualities, possess the contradictions. That advice goes for the reader of this issue as well.—Jim O'Quinn