Transference is a technique propounded by Uta Hagen. She initially called it “substitution”. Transference is the process of attempting to find counterparts from your own experience for the people, places and things you interact with in the course of your performance. Sounds straightforward enough, right? I’m playing Stanley Kowalski, I need to find someone from my own life experience with who I have or had a relationship that is comparable to my relationship as Stanley with Stella. So I am looking for someone with whom I have a powerful bond of love and affection that has endured for some time, a life partner.

There may or may not be someone in my life that fits that description perfectly, but it isn’t about the perfect fit. We are looking for an approximate match. The immediacy of the interaction with the actual scene partner will take care of the rest. We are looking for an experiential way to orient ourselves toward the other person, to invest in them, to imbue them with the appropriate kind of significance.

What muddies the waters is the perennial confusion with another technique, called emotional memory, or affective memory. The reason for the confusion is that both techniques rely on the actor’s personal experience, but one is a rehearsal technique, and one is a technique for preparation. Transference is ONLY a part of the homework process, the process of preparing to rehearse and perform. Uta Hagen is explicit on this point: you do not attempt to mentally dangle your transference in front of the other actor as you play a scene. In that moment, you want to be fully engaged with the other actor, “in the moment”, to coin a phrase. The transference is a part of the homework, it’s a part of the process of finding correspondences between people, places and things in your own life and that of the character. At most, you might remind yourself about a transference just before you go to play a scene, but while you are acting, it should not be on your mind.

Emotional memory, on the other hand, is a rehearsal/performance technique. It is a way of trying to use your past experience to induce an emotional state somehow appropriate for a given scene. So your attention is at the very least divided between your partner and the past experience, if not wholly on the past experience. Again, the goal is to induce a particular emotional state, rather than to orient yourself towards someone or something, and to imbue that someone or something with significance.

It’s tricky to teach because I haven’t had the actor’s experience, so I am not in a position to judge the fitness of a given transference. That is an instinct an actor has to develop through practice. However, I learned recently that actors are often not clear about how to decide what kind of person, place or thing is called for. The actor is often tempted to attempt to make that decision based on the situation in the scene. An actor recently told me that for a scene, he would look into his past for “someone he wanted to encourage” because that was what he understood himself to be doing in the scene. But this is precisely not the way to make this choice. Because transference is about defining the relationship, not the situation. In a given relationship, we may find ourselves in a variety of situations, and what we can expect of others and what they can expect of us is determined not by the situation but by the relationship. As Stanley, I expect Stella to have sex with me not because we happen to be in bed together but because she is my wife. In fact we are in bed together because she is my wife. With transference, we are trying to get at the wife-ness and not at the in-bed-ness. So in the situation I was describing with my student, he needed to look at what the basic nature of the relationship was with the other character (father, boss, mentor, idol, etc), and find someone from his own experience that corresponded to that basic nature of the relationship, rather than trying to find someone that he wanted to encourage.

In the past, I have taught transference and then left it alone, for the reason I described above: I don’t have the student’s personal experience, so I can’t evaluate the choices that they make. But this recent episode showed me that I can help students describe what kind of relationship they are looking for when they look for a transference. That’s one small step for my student, one giant leap for the Mother of Invention.

In 1968 Earle auditioned me in New York for Carnegie Mellon. I made it in, and was on my way with my ten month old daughter and her mother. I had recently turned eighteen. When I arrived in Pittsburgh, there was a problem with my living quarters on campus. They didn’t know I was coming with a family. Earle solved the problem by taking us into his home on Squirrel Hill. It was a mansion. We had the upstairs room while Earle, his wife and child was on the floor below. I found out that Earle was the head of the drama department. I would ride with him everyday to the campus.
I brought a little money from New York with me because I wanted a used car. I told Earle about it, so one day he took me to a used car dealership to purchase one. The car I wound up getting had a stick shift. Not only could I not drive a stick shift, I couldn’t drive a car period. However, I didn’t tell Earle this. I also failed to tell him I didn’t have a driver’s license. He soon found this out, of course, but somehow decided to do whatever he had to do so that I could have that (stick shift ) car.
He left his own car at the dealership and drove my car home with me as a passenger. This was a good thing since I couldn’t drive. Once we got home and parked, like a father, he said that I couldn’t take the car out until I got my license. At night and early in the mornings I would sneak the car out and practice on the trolley track streets of Pittsburgh. It was definitely a challenge, but I soon got the hang of it. I took my drivers test and passed with flying colors. Driving on the trolley tracks has made me an excellent driver in New York where I dodge cabs. Thanks again Earle. Who else would have done that for me? Of course on the other hand, if you knew I couldn’t drive…

I was a scrappy latchkey kid, who grew up in a house of ham-bones. When I did theatre in high school, I was hooked. The stage, a place where being sensitive had value, where I finally made sense. I found HOME. I was a hippy with a theatre company in the Haight-Ashbury when Earle plucked me out of obscurity. Yale was a dream come true for me, and our times in that basement with Earle, where times of great terror and triumph. We were all his children, he was our father. We lived and died by his word. We could change the world. He told us to make our time there as selfish and focused as we could muster, because OUT THERE, you won’t get to play these parts, you won’t have this luxury of time and talent. “Don’t f#@K it up”. HIS FACE when an actor would GET IT? He would whirl his small frame around in his chair to meet each of our eyes with his, ” DID YOU SEE THAT, THAT’S IT!”, the joy in his face. Often he would throw down the mike and speak with his hoarse gruff sounds, and the clarity in which he could communicate was remarkable ! He was beloved by many and his legacy carries on in all our words, our hearts, and most importantly in our actions. Rest in peace, dear Earle, rest…

In my first year at Yale, I arrived knowing that my father was dying of cancer. A few days into our third month – my mother called me to tell me that my father had taken an unexpected turn and that he wouldn’t make it through the night. I immediately made plans to leave. I remember running through the streets of New Haven to Earle’s office to let him know my father was dying and that I had to leave right away. I was lucky enough to find him in his office. He listened to me and without a pause he embraced me and told me to take as long as I needed. Nine hours later my father was gone.

That moment with Earle has a deep imprint on my memory. It was special for me and through my 3 years at Yale I always felt those kind arms of support around me. I’m so thankful to have had a chance to be one of Earle’s many students. The acting tools, lessons of life – and O yes those kind arms of support have helped me time and time again. A second father – yes most definitely. Thank you Earle – you rocked my world and I’m all the better for it . . .

My brother passed away suddenly three months before I was to start school at Yale. I was in a cloud. When I started class, I was upset and withdrawn. I was going to leave school. I went to tell Earle. After I told him, he was silent and then closed his office door. We sat silent for quite some time until Earle finally spoke. He said he hadn’t lost a brother so he said he would not pretend to know how I felt. He then asked my to tell him about my brother. I told him he was successful, loved, and a good businessman. He asked what my brother thought of my attending Yale. I told him my brother was proud of me.

He then said, “It doesn’t sound like your brother would want you to blow such a great opportunity.” That was all I needed. I dove into my work and never looked back. Someone mentioned Earle as a second father: Nailed it.

We all owe you such a debt that went beyond teaching. I owe him my life.
Evermore thanks, Earle, say Hi to my Bro

Best memory of Earle Gister and this goes to the HEART of the man was Graduation Day 1987- My father who had lung cancer travelled from Wyoming in his Cowboy hat and boots to see his daughter graduate from an Ivy league school. Something no one in our famiy had done- we never had much money- and Dad wanted to meet Earle Gister and when we went into his office – dad in the western tradition hung his hat off the end of Earle’s desk and then said,” I feel I have known you my entire life” and started weeping- Earle came around the side of the desk and held my father in his arms….ok? That is the kind of man Earle Gister was…..

Not long after 9/11, when every security precaution was taken, from removing shoes, checking backpacks and passing through metal detectors, I had driven Earle to an event in NY. As I pulled into a parking garage, the attendant met us. He asked me to open the trunk of my car, in order for them to search it. I was more than willing to oblige but Earle jumped out of his seat and nearly knocked this poor man over. He utterly refused to allow him to search my car. The audacity, that someone would think, that it was possible, to look into a person’s trunk, was more than he could stand. I had no worries, what did I have to hide and what did I care if he looked inside my trunk? He hurled many an expletive at this attendant while I talked our way out of there. At the time, I wanted nothing more than to allow this man to do his job. Earle saw things differently; if we allow others to impinge on the “little” things what is to stop them from impinging on the bigger ones?

a right jolly old elf

I was sorry to hear today of the passing of Earle Gister, Dean of the Acting Program at the Yale School of Drama from 1980 to 1997. He was a brilliant, incisive, generous teacher and a true lover of both the theater and the drama. We will not see his like again.

“You are what your deep driving desire is. – Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

#quote

Went to see this yesterday. Beautiful film, some luminous performances. Highly recommended.

I was playing Demetrius. Frances de la Tour was playing Helena. Peter said, “OK, let’s run the scene.” We did, and I thought I’d impressed him with some funny, charming, witty acting. I saw Peter Brook, the great director, advancing slowly across the rehearsal room with a twinkle in his eye. I thought mistakenly that he was about to say, “My dears, that was absolutely wonderful!” I stood up mistakenly waiting for the praise to fill my actor’s begging bowl. He put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eye, and said, “Dear Ben, that was absolutely suburban.” There was a long pause after the word “suburban.” And he said, “If we want to watch suburban, we’ll stick our heads over our neighbor’s fence.”

He then put us back together by bringing us to the text, and saying, look at the words you just skimmed over. Give them their weight. Give them their value. He infused us with a sense of urgency, what was profoundly lacking in our mistaken reenactment of the scene. He turned it from something sugary into something challenging, dangerous, exciting, and sexy.When we did the play in New York, this one scene got rounds of applause several times.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

H/T Yolanda Seabourne

I enjoyed it immensely. It’s wonderfully charming and full of free-wheeling American hustle and bustle. But beneath all of that are some hard-hitting insights about identity and and the way the value of a life is reckoned. That George Bailey learns that the world would have been much worse without him, and that we don’t see the good that we do, or too easily forget it, is a major thrust of the film, but it is also not the deepest thing about it. When we look at how he learns that lesson, we can begin to see how the film affords us some pithier insights.

That his absence would mean that certain existing circumstances would be changed for the worse is part of George Bailey’s education, but it is not actually the central part of it. Consider the encounter with George’s mother. While there may be ways in which her circumstances are worse for his absence, the true horror, for George, is her failure to recognize him. Within the context of the premise of the movie at that point, it’s because he never existed, but he still is George Bailey, with all of George Bailey’s experiences and attachments, and to have his own mother, or his wife, or his good friends look at him blankly as if he were a stranger and none of their common experience had ever happened, is to experience a moment of vertiginous horror. This is all summed up in their failure to recognize his face or his name.

The egregiousness of such a betrayal is indelibly rendered into one of the founding documents of our civilization, the New Testament. The favored apostle, Peter, notoriously denies knowing Christ three times in the course of one night, to secure his own safety. This denial is a part of the larger sequence of the Passion, the series of events in which Jesus is humiliated, tortured and murdered. Jesus foresees Peter’s denial in Gethsemane, and it is one of the bitterest parts of his vision of what is to come.

The reason, I would maintain, that we find such a denial so horrific is the basic recognition that we are only possessed of an identity, of a self with defining characteristics, insofar as those aspects are recognized by others. We are, all of us, interconnected, and our identities interpenetrate with those of others. To be shunned, ostracized, to have one’s face and name denied and rejected, is to undergo a kind of psychic execution. It is to be made, in some very deep sense, unreal.

In light of all this, we can see that the play that Uranium Madhouse is preparing to produce, A Man’s A Man, has more than a little in common with It’s a Wonderful Life. Though one is a Hollywood melodrama and the other is by a hard-bitten, wry observer of some of the darkest chapters in the history of the West, they have in common the spirit of scramble and hustle and surviving by the skin of your teeth, and they both have some dark waters running deep beneath their respective rambunctious surfaces. Without wanting to give too much away about the story of A Man’s A Man, I’ll just say that denials like the ones George Bailey experiences occur at decisive moments in that play, without the comfortable counterfactual padding that the guardian angel Clarence affords, and they pack a wallop.

I’m very much looking forward to splashing around in the raucous surfaces of the play and plumbing the depths beneath. If you like the sound of all of this, please make a donation today to the cause, and help us make this production a reality.

Mr. Fassbender has been getting raves for his performance in Shame. I saw it tonight fully expecting add him to my list. But, it turns out, his performance was…not great. There were certainly things to admire about it. He knows how to exploit his personal vulnerability to seduce people, and that’s not nothing. But there were a lot of holes. Consider the moment after (not a spoiler!) his boss gets off the video phone call with his son. This is a climactic moment in the film. Notice Fassbender’s physicality in this moment. It’s awkward and stiff, and not because the moment is awkward and stiff. He has no idea, as an actor, what to do with his body.

And that’s the thing about Fassbender: when he does act, it’s pretty much completely from the neck up. If he does become viscerally activated, it’s in a tight close-up when he knows no one is looking at his body, and he relaxes.

Consider the “big” moment near the end of the movie in the rain. He tries really hard, but that’s all we get. We are not there with him, experiencing what he is experiencing. We are on the outside looking in, because he isn’t really in it himself. He’s supposed to be convulsing, but he isn’t really convulsing, so it doesn’t work.

Also, he’s not that good at dialogue. There is a long scene in a restaurant, when he’s on a date, and his partner in that scene acts circles around him. She’s going on the list.

Mr. Fassbender deserves props for the difficult, painful situations he explores in the movie, and for the moments when he does pull it off. He’s talented. But he needs to read Uta Hagen’s chapter on Animation in A Challenge for the Actor. And fire his acting coach.