Gurus: The Story of Acting from Stanislavsky to Succession

We're very excited to drop a bonus episode this week from our friends at Next Chapter Podcasts, who have done so much to bring actors, and especially Shakespeare, into the podcast space.

This episode features a conversation between Michael Goodfriend, Executive Producer of the Play On Podcasts, and the legendary Estelle Parsons of films like "Love, American Style," "Rachel, Rachel," "Bonnie and Clyde," for which she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and so much more, both on screen and on stage.

For more of the incredible collections of shows available at Next Chapter Podcasts, be sure to visit their website at ncpodcasts.com

The tortured early days of the Moscow Art Theatre, a sprawling behemoth that would come to employ hundreds of actors, directors, designers and technical staff, tour continents, survive wars and revolutions, and transform the world of the theatre forever.

In the Season One finale, we take a look inside one of the top training programs for actors in the country, the Drama Division at Juilliard, created in 1968 by John Houseman and Michel Saint-Denis. It features conversations with Michael Kahn (the first person to take charge of acting at Juilliard), Evan Yionoulis (current Head of the Drama Division), and Mary Lou Rosato (graduate of the legendary Group 1), along with an archived raw and unedited interview from an American Masters series with highly influential mask teacher Pierre Lefevre.

Copeau and Bing return to Paris after the war, launch a school, and struggle to meet the high expectations of the audience they had built. Michel Saint-Denis, back from the front lines, takes an increasing role of leadership. Burnt out, Copeau abandons Paris for the Burgundy countryside where his young company trains and performs for the locals. The end of this phase finds them in London with a new show, devised from the fable of Noah’s ark. The London theatrical establishment opens its arms.

Neal Huff has had a remarkable career including multiple Broadway and off-Broadway shows, and numerous roles in film and television. His training journey has been equally remarkable. He seems to have had an instinct for searching out just the right teachers and institutions at just the right time - he describes them as stones in a river placed before him that allowed him to take the next important step in his journey.

He has most recently been working on Broadway in the acclaimed production of To Kill a Mockingbird, in which he originated the role of the town drunk, Link Deas, alongside Jeff Daniels as Atticus Finch. After a record-smashing year, Neal switched roles to play Bob Ewell opposite Ed Harris as Atticus. Just before Mockingbird, Neal played the dissolute lawyer Willy Oban in George C. Wolfe’s hit production of The Iceman Cometh starring Denzel Washington.

This episode begins the story of Jacques Copeau, his lover and collaborator, Suzanne Bing, and his nephew, Michel Saint-Denis. Around the same time that the First Studio was being formed within the MAT, in Paris, Copeau is launching his new company, the Vieux-Colombier. After an incredibly successful start, the progress of the Vieux-Colombier is interrupted by the onset of WWI. Copeau relocates to America for the duration and mounts a season of plays in New York. Meanwhile, Suzanne Bing is inventing theatre games with children at a Montessori school.

At the age of 25, Michael Cerveris was playing the hot new kid from Britain in the TV series Fame. Fast forward 30 years, Cerveris is a seasoned pro with 10 Broadway credits, 4 Tony nominations and 2 wins, one for featured actor in Sondheims’s Assassins and one for leading actor in Fun Home. On TV he’s had major recurring roles in Fringe, Treme, The Good Wife and, currently, The Gilded Age. None of it is surprising, really, when we see all of that early promise in the young star of Fame in 1986. But how did he get there? In this conversation I ask Michael Cerveris to talk about his training pathway.

We return to the story of Michael Chekhov; his auspicious start from the early days of the Moscow Art Theatre, his exile from Russia after the revolution and the rocky road that led him to that fateful encounter down the street from the Group Theatre in 1935. It was there he met the young Beatrice Straight, talented actress and heiress to the Payne Whitney fortune, who offered him the chance to build his own school and acting company at Dartington Hall in England. In the competition for the attention of young actors between Michael Chekhov and Michel Saint-Denis that took place in the UK in 1935, Chekhov never had a chance.

Jessica Pimentel is best known for her role as Maria Ruiz on the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black, and won 3 Screen Actors Guild Award wins and one nomination. She is a graduate of the High School for the Performing Arts (a.k.a. "Fame") in New York City and the prestigious American Academy of Dramatic Arts, also in New York City, where she holds a degree in Theater Arts and where she was awarded the Cleavon Little scholarship and was a member of the professional acting company.

The MAT was too big, too unwieldy a place for Stanislavsky to develop his burgeoning system. Instead he created a smaller space more conducive to his explorations. Enter Leopold Sulerzhitski, a truly picaresque figure - hobo, stagehand, conscientious objector and polymath - whom Stanislavsky entrusted to lead the First Studio. Suler personally taught a roster of major figures - Michael Chekhov, Eugene Vakktangov, Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavsky - who would eventually bring the system to the wider world.

BD Wong seemed to come out of nowhere when he won multiple Best Actor awards, including a Tony, for his role in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly in 1988. In this interview we will hear the story of how he landed that part - he really did come out of nowhere - and how it was shaped by his hippie acting teacher in LA, a team of expert voice and movement coaches, the brilliant but abusive British director, Jon Dexter, and his very generous costar, John Lithgow. He shares his process for building a character, his feelings about the method and actors who go too far immersing themselves in a role, and the one thing he does just before “action.” We will also hear how he has navigated an incredibly varied career in film and television that has included recurring roles on Oz, Law and Order, Gotham, Mr. Robot, Nora From Queens, and in the film and video game franchise, Jurassic Park.

David Patrick Kelly's training journey - which he considers to be still ongoing - was of the “school of hard knocks” variety - his words. He considered going to Juilliard but couldn’t afford it. So he deliberately set out to cobble together a kind of do it yourself conservatory experience. That journey would take him to Paris where he trained with Marcel Marceau and back to America where he would find his way into the avant-garde theater of Richard Foreman, Hollywood action movies like The Warriors, 48 Hours, Last Man Standing, and the strange world of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. He studied with the legendary Russian, Mira Rostova, who famously coached Montgomery Clift. David also asked for - and got - on set tutorials from Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow and Chris Walken, in-between takes on the movie sets they shared. Not bad.

In 1897, a fateful meeting lasting 18 hours between Constantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, would give birth to the Moscow Art Theatre. The MAT would become the incubator for Stanislavsky’s evolving system of acting.

Cherry Jones is an American actress. Having started her career in theater as a founding member of the American Repertory Theater in 1980, she then transitioned into film and television. Celebrated for her dynamic roles on stage and screen, she has received various accolades, including three Primetime Emmy Awards (24, The Handmaid's Tale, Succession) and two Tony Awards (The Heiress, Doubt) as well as nominations for an Olivier Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award.

The shift in theatrical styles at the end of the 1800s was prompted by a parallel literary transformation. In fiction, figures like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky opened the door. Playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw demanded a new actor that would render authentic human behavior. Anton Chekhov was the essential playwright in that moment. In this episode we hear his back story and listen to letters between him and his wife, Olga Knipper, star of the Moscow Art Theatre.

Alan Ruck has made over 100 appearances in films and television, and on stage. He is best known for his role as the friend of Matthew Broderick and hopeless hypochondriac Cameron Frye, in John Hughes's "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (1986) and as Connor Roy in the critically acclaimed HBO show "Succession" (2018).

When we drill down into the biographies and training histories of the cast of the hit show, "Succession," there's no uniformity of background. Some of them carry the pedigree you might expect: the American conservatories; Yale, Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon, or the London conservatories; RADA, LAMDA, and Central. Some come out of the New York studios; the Neighborhood Playhouse, Stella Adler, the Lee Strasberg Institute. A few have bypassed those training pathways altogether. This episode compares and contrasts the pathways of some of our favorite actors.

Stanislavsky, the early days. If you set out to raise a child who would grow to become a great actor, director, and theatrical guru, this is how you would go about it: expose him to all the arts, build him his own theater, and make sure he has plenty of money to pursue his hobbies. Just don’t be surprised when he abandons the family business and goes pro.

What came before Stanislavsky? In the late 19th century, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an actor, director and theater owner in London. He was the original Henry Higgins in Pygmalion directed by Shaw himself. Tree founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA.) Today he is forgotten. Tree’s theatre of excess demanded something new and different and true.

Alfre Woodard has been astonishing audiences with her humanity, her truth, her beauty, and her versatility as an actress since she first came into view in the early 1980’s. Starting on the stage in For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf and then in the film, Cross Creek with Mary Steenburgen, she’s practiced and perfected her craft in too many films and recurring TV series roles to recount here. We met around 20 years ago when I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with her at the 92nd Street Y for a performance of Voices of a People’s History of the United States that included her frequent co-star, Danny Glover. Alfre then, in person, was so warm and unassuming, it was no surprise to find her that way again in the conversation you’re about to hear. We actually spoke twice - there was just too much to cover in one session - and I was glad because I really wanted to hear about her experience playing the healer woman, Paris, in the Apple TV series SEE. It’s about an imagined world, hundreds of years in the future, where sight has become extinct in humans and blindness is the common condition. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT. Alfre Woodard has received various accolades, including four Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards, as well as nominations for an Academy Award and two Grammy Awards. In 2020, The New York Times ranked her as one of "The 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century".

A quick fast forward to 1935 when the Group Theatre is on Broadway with Awake and Sing, while down the block, Michael Chekhov stars in a Russian Language Inspector General. Stella Adler heads backstage to ask Chekhov to teach the Group. A very young Beatrice Straight pitches Chekhov to come to Dartington Hall, a center for education, agriculture and the arts founded by her parents, Lord and Lady Elmhirst, on a sprawling English estate. Guess who wins.

How did we get from the bad old days of stagey, artificial, over-the-top acting to where we are today, with performances that are subtle, authentic and true? In this episode we meet some of the main figures in the story including Stanislavsky and Jacques Copeau. We follow the diaspora out of Russia of Moscow Art Theatre players that sparks Russian fever in America. We also follow the parallel journey out of Paris that eventually landed on the shores of the UK and transformed the major conservatories.