Olympia Dukakis

New York University

By Ellen Orenstein

Dukakis is a guest master acting and directing teacher at New York University, where for 15 years she was on the faculty of the graduate acting program. She has done similar work at universities and acting studios including the Michael Howard Studio, the Actors Center and many others. Best known to the public as an Academy and Golden Globe Award–winning film actress, she is also a regular on the New York and London stage and the veteran of more than 130 regional stage productions in the U.S. She spent 17 seasons at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, and for many years led her own company, the Whole Theatre Company of New Jersey.

Why do you teach?

I started to teach 42 years ago—I got pregnant and I couldn’t do any acting, and I thought, well, why don’t I just get a group of people together and teach beginning acting classes? Basically I taught them what I knew. That’s how everybody pretty much starts—start with what works for you and what you were taught. I think I charged, like, 10 bucks a class.

Then, my teacher Peter Kass got involved in starting a graduate program at NYU, and he invited me to come. He said there was going to be a company: “You’ll act, you’ll teach, you’ll direct.”

Did it end up that way?

No. The company never happened. But the teaching happened.

How was it?

Well, that first year, I was incredibly anxious and overworked. I asked Peter to give me some feedback. He was a terror, a very powerful figure. No one could believe that I asked him in. But I trusted him, totally. I would say to him, “I can’t do it anymore. It’s so boring—I don’t give a shit about them. Does the world really need another actor?” (Laughs.) And so I said, “Come in and watch me.” The first thing he told me was to stay in my chair.

What I did at first was take responsibility for everything: getting up and acting with them, improvising with them, shadowing them, devising exercises to get immediate results—so that I could think, oh good, they did it. But what happens if you, the teacher, take responsibility—you deprive people of the opportunity to take responsibility themselves. Actors need to feel that they can do their work no matter what the process is, no matter who they’re with. You’re not going to get that if somebody takes responsibility for you; and you’re not going to get that if you’re locked into one approach, unless you work only with people who do that one approach. That’s why Peter told me: Stay in your chair.

We come from an educational system that is set up to please the authority figure, so I break it down directly: I confront that moment after a scene when all the actors look at you, the teacher. I say, “You turned out and you looked at me.” I try to give them perspective. “Look, you’re going to know me for a year. I’m going to be a funny name in the future; you’ll say, ‘I worked with Olympia Dukakis.’ I cannot be more important than you.”

 What made you understand that as a teacher?

This was Peter’s idea—of being independent and resourceful so that you can survive. That was in me, not only to take responsibility for myself, but to value who I was. This was very hard-earned for me. I had to fight to find my way to my own true sense of self because there was pride pulling me to be Greek, pride pulling me to be American. I spent a great deal of my childhood wrestling with that in my own way. For me, I found sports was the way to deal with it. Sports is about winning; it’s about having skills. It was no mystery: You got good by practicing. Interestingly enough, I was not as good at team sports as I was at individual ones. (Laughs.)

The European model has at its heart a uniformity of training for everyone. But that is not the case here. We don’t even have a national theatre. The regional theatres don’t have resident companies that learn to work with each other. So, what you need to train an American actor to do is to have an approach and skills that make it possible to work in different kinds of arenas with independence. And, as an actor, you have to really know yourself, you have to know what’s going on in you, you have to know what you’re choosing and not choosing and you have to embody it, vocally and physically, psychologically. And emotionally—we, as actors, have to build tolerance for expressing our feelings. It takes time. It’s a process.

Can you say more about that?

We don’t want to experience emotions—they feel so out of control. We’re not the person we want to be, or we’re not the person we want to be seen as. And sometimes we’re afraid of what we’ll do with our feelings. People say, “What are you getting angry about?” “There’s nothing to cry about.” Anger’s gone. Pain is gone. “Now look, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Fear is gone. The only socially permitted emotion is joy. How do we claim these other feelings as valid, appropriate, human—so that you can express them and have them available if you need them as an actor?

I’ve gotten a little taste of your teaching, and you are so responsive to whatever anyone brings into the room, as well as the difference between skills and the craft.

There are three kinds of actors: the ones you teach skills to, the ones you teach craft to, and the ones you prepare for a life in the theatre. You organize your energies around each person differently.

Usually you can see the people who, for whatever reasons, are comfortable being active. You can see the people who are comfortable with feelings. You can see the people who are comfortable with their bodies. Action is a skill. It’s like tennis—you have to work on your forearm. Emotional life is a skill. Tactics are a skill. I can tell students, “I’ll tell you what I think you need to work on here—actions.”

And, this isn’t the craft yet?

No—because people come to scenes with a ball of yarn for emotions and a ball of misconceptions for actions. So what you have to do is give them the opportunity to know themselves, to know what they’re choosing. And so you make it clear that we’re not doing the scene now—we’re using the scene to work on action or tactic or emotion.

Just as the students have to learn tolerance, you, the teacher, have to sit there and tolerate the process as they find their way. The process of finding one’s way is being taught at the same time that everything else is being taught.

And that’s why I wanted to teach teachers, because I wanted to communicate the dilemma: You’re going to have to do what the students are doing. You can call the shots for yourself. You’ve got to respect yourself and the fact that you are a teacher, and this process for you is going to evolve.