San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Annette Bening, Anna Deavere Smith among attendees to speak of experience
When the 12 students in American Conservatory Theater’s class of 2022 received their Master of Fine Arts diplomas on Monday, May 23, they brought to an end 54 years of top-tier professional acting training, a crown jewel of the Bay Area theater scene and a beacon drawing generations of artists to the region.
The Chronicle spoke to a few ACT alums about what their time at the program — the last in the U.S. not associated with a larger school or university — meant to them.
Anna Deavere Smith, MFA 1977
“I always say to my students, ‘Don’t go to school for answers. Go to school for your questions.’ At ACT, I found my question, and my question was: What’s the relationship of language to identity? That’s what I’ve spent my life working on. But the thing was pricked or sparked there, because I didn’t like the notion of the Method, that every single character lived inside of you. I felt that was a shockingly shortsighted view of the world and a spiritual dead end. I was hungry to think about performance in other ways.”
Annette Bening, Advanced Training Program 1980s; honorary MFA 1994
“On Fridays everybody would bring their scenes in, and it was quite a charged atmosphere at Friday scenes. My scene partner was Todd Robbins, and we were doing a scene from ‘Whose Life Is It Anyway?’ They very, very pointedly said, in a productive way, ‘You know, you’re not listening to him at all. You’re not taking in what your scene partner is doing. It’s not affecting you at all. You’re just doing, doing, doing, but not listening, not receiving.’ That lesson is still the one that has been the most useful to me and the most poignant. Good acting training teaches you to listen, receive, and that your main focus is on the other person or people. What are you doing to get something that you need, and are they giving you what you want? Are you checking and being affected by the other people and allowing that to guide you? It’s such a great thing to learn in acting, because, of course, we all think it’s about us and what we’re doing.”
Rod Gnapp, MFA 1987
“One day Ian McKellen came and did a talk for us. He opened up the floor for a discussion, and I raised my hand. I said, ‘When you study a role, a Shakespeare role, what’s the very first thing that you do when you pick up the script?’ He said, ‘I don’t know what all your teachers will think about this, but the first thing I usually do is I smoke a little pot and just read the play.’
“When I ruminate about that now, I try to let go of all of my expectations, all of my fears and thoughts about who has said these words before and who will say them again, and just try and bring myself completely, as a clean slate, and let my first impulses be as pure as possible when they meet this amazing poetry for the first time. You do that every time. No matter how many times I would go to the well, I try and go back like it’s the first time I ever
drank water.”
Lisa Anne Porter, MFA 1994
“I started to find a way that getting up onstage isn’t about approval anymore. It isn’t about validation anymore. I allowed myself to just get deeply, deeply curious about the conversation that myself, the other actors, the audience and the play were having about what it means to be human or be alive.
“You’ve got to get beyond this being about approval because you’re just going to get your heart broken every day. Also, that’s kind of boring to watch. Sometimes as an acting teacher, my note to a student will be, ‘I can see you being a good actor. That’s what your action is right now: to be a good actor. There’s a much bigger and more interesting action, which is why are we here?’ ”
Sherri Young, MFA 1995
“There was this exercise that (longtime ACT instructor) Jack Fletcher did. We were outside of the classroom door. Half of us put on blindfolds. One by one, Jack Fletcher led us into the room with our team partner, and the partner was on one side of the room and the blindfolded person was on the other side. What I saw was that there was an obstacle course: tables and chairs and things you had to climb over, duck under. He said, ‘When I say go, you’re going to direct your partner to come to you. If they bump, touch or move anything, they go back to the beginning of the obstacle course.’ When he said, ‘Go,’ everyone was yelling, trying to be heard. What I did was the exact opposite, just like very soft and low-key. We were the first ones to complete the obstacle course.
“I learned that even if it’s a tense moment, even if there’s something that has to be done urgently, people can hear you better when you approach it with calm. I didn’t realize it until much later in life that that was really a directing exercise.”
Jomar Tagatac, MFA 2005
“Right after I graduated, I got a part-time job at a fancy gym doing administrative stuff. Olympia Dukakis walks in, and she’s looking for her Pilates trainer who was running a little late. I got the courage to tell her that I’m a recent MFA graduate. She asked me, ‘What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be in L.A. or New York pursuing theater?’ I told her, ‘Olympia, I need to put money in my checking account.’ She laughed a little bit, and she paused and said, ‘Good for you. You create your own path, your own way in. Just because people did it one way doesn’t mean that’s the only way.’ That was 2006. I’m so glad that I stayed in San Francisco.”
Patrick Russell, MFA 2009
“The lessons that keep coming up, the ones I think about when I step onstage or when I’m teaching my acting classes, are simple mantras from the great Gregory Wallace (a former ACT resident acting company member and core faculty member). Every time we would get up to work a scene he would say, ‘I want to see you fall on your ass,’ which was so liberating to be given permission to take risks. And my personal favorite: He would say, ‘Change the air,’ just before we presented scene work.”
Liz Sklar, MFA 2009
“I applied to grad school four times. The first time I applied because that’s what everybody was doing. Then the second time, I was just mad that I couldn’t get in. The third time I was defeated. Then I got this point of clarity. I think I was an understudy at Cal Shakes. Maybe I was even in ‘The Tempest’ that year. I was like, ‘You know, this is what I really want to do, and this is where I want to put my focus. I want to authorize myself as an artist instead of just this kid who really wants to be this other thing that I think I ought to be.’
“When I started applying that year, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m getting in this year, and I don’t know where I’m going to get in — it probably won’t get to top school — but I’m going to get in.’ That year was the year that Melissa (Smith, former head of the MFA program) said to me, ‘I finally saw you in your body.’ And I got in.
“For a long time, acting had always been a way for me to be something other than myself. I think as an actor, I had always been feeling like I wasn’t right, and that’s why I wanted to act, so I could be more right. I started to be like, ‘No, I am right,’ and in so doing, I was able to connect more with my body, like the lower half of my body was now connected to the upper half of my body.”
Alanna Darby, MFA 2021
“I was a gay man when I entered ACT and a trans femme when I left.
So many moments have stuck — all the times I tried to impress Melissa Smith, God rest her soul. I can’t say I succeeded, but I learned I didn’t need to … eventually.
“I’m reminding myself that it’s a marathon not a sprint. And to focus on my own paper. If I try to copy someone else’s answer, I’ll probably get it wrong on my end. So I’m gonna keep writing, keep going.” Evangeline Edwards, MFA 2022
“I was working on the opening scene from Sam Shepard’s ‘Fool for Love’ with Morgan Gunter, and we’d maybe had the scene for about a week. Lisa Anne Porter (ACT’s head of acting) was giving us her thoughts on the scene and said, ‘Next time we hit this scene, drop in and bring your full selves to it. Play for keeps.’ I hesitated, saying, ‘But Lisa, I feel like I haven’t had enough time to be able to bring it.’
“Lisa smiled, shook her head a little, and said, ‘If this were an audition, what would you do? Would you tell them it’s not fully dropped in because you haven’t had enough time to think about it?’
“Lisa was absolutely right. Yes, intellectual preparation is very important and one must make informed choices, but an actor with training knows that she can trust her body and her creative impulses to serve her even when the intellectual self may still have questions. We don’t think our lives, we live them — embodied, breathing, sweating, laughing. It’s a messy jump from this moment to the next. I realized that no one else will give me permission to drop in once I graduate.”
“I’m reminding myself that it’s a marathon not a sprint. And to focus on my own paper.”
Alanna Darby,
American Conservatory Theater alum, of lessons learned at the school