What’s on Jim’s Mind (Issue #198)

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,”

One of the most quoted lines in all of John Ford’s films is from his 1962 western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It is said by a newspaper editor who, at the end of the film, decides to publish a fictionalized version of events rather than the true story, as the legend of a heroic deed is more compelling than the reality. The phrase highlights the tension between truth and storytelling and how narratives can shape our understanding of events and people, sometimes overshadowing the actual facts.

The “legendary history” of the theatre and film is riddled with myth and filled with an epic argument, verging on bare-knuckle brawls, that broke out among the members of the legendary Group Theatre throughout the company’s existence in 1930’s New York, most if not all of it centered around Konstantin Stanislavsky, the famed Russian director, actor, and teacher of his so-called “Method.” Stella Adler would return from the summit of Sinai at the Moscow Art Theatre, where she had sat at the feet of the great teacher to proclaim to her fellow group actors that she had found the truth, the core and heart of the Stanislavski method…or ..system… or whatever various people preferred to call it, and that everyone else had gotten it wrong.

Successive pilgrimages to visit and study with the great Russian teacher were at different times undertaken by such American visionaries as Bobby Lewis and Lee Strasburg, each of whom announced to the members of the Group that all of the others who also had gotten it wrong. Only they truly understand what Stanislavsky was talking about. That is the legend, the myth. The truth is probably closer to the fact that the work of Stanislavsky, like the work of most visionaries, continued to evolve and even radically change and transform. His experiments took place over 40 long years. During that time, he continued his search for what he considered the most important attribute of an actor’s work, beginning with bringing an actor’s own past emotions into play in a role. He was frequently disappointed and dissatisfied with the results of his experiments as he continued his search for a conscious means to unlock the subconscious part of the creative process.

In 1935, he was taken by the modern scientific conception of the interaction of brain and body and started developing what until recently many thought was his final technique, which he called the method of physical actions, changing the core of his work from feeling to doing. Only recently have we learned that in the last years of his life, living under house arrest, he created a new technique called “Active Analysis,” which radically changed the nature of an actor’s early work with a text and has come to light only recently passed down to us by his assistant Maria Knebel.

Now, what you have just read is a combination of what I learned in theatre school, the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, and what Barbara has passed on to me about her own work with “Active Analysis,” about which she continues to be very excited to the extent she has very seriously incorporated into her own teaching. She briefly introduced this work to the actors of Irondale when we began work on our American Century Project, our own study of American plays of the 20th Century, a little over a year ago.

And, what is on my mind right now is how much of what I have just put down on this page is “fact” and how much is part of the Irondale “Myth,” Which I will call “What have been all the major steps forward and digressions to the side, and short-handed catchphrases that have enabled us to create what might also be called the “Irondale Method of Working” which also explains to both outsider and insider alike, why an Irondale show looks the way it does, and also a similarity to other Irondale shows, no matter how different they may be in terms of subject matter or writing styles, or genres. Some of these statements you may take as facts (and some are perhaps pure fantasy ), but taken as a whole, they form the story of the “Irondale Myth,” what Foner calls in his Book Review piece a common national story. Foner begins his piece on the Myths of America with “The Frontier,” by the way.

I’m calling mine “Myths of Irondale” to open and clarify our forty-year process and entertain and move our audience from the outside. We will explore a deeper appreciation of the critical elements that have shaped us and defined our aesthetic.

We invite you to get closer and play along on a deeper level.

A Personal Intuitive History of the Irondale Ensemble Project.

Our 40 years have always progressed through a series of in-depth explorations, always taking place with the desire to make what you see on stage something that is “alive.”

Fitting to that charge, we began (because I had found a copy of Jeff Sweet’s book Something Wonderful Right Away in a New Haven bookstore, and it inspired and entertained me) with an in-depth examination of the work of Viola Spolin and her son and founder of Second City Paul Sills.

Terry Barbara and I met several times a week at Terry’s apartment on the Upper West Side and worked our way through every exercise in Spolin’s Book Improvisation for the Theatre one by one. We found it to be a brilliant book, but very difficult to understand what it was about by reading it. You had to get up on your feet and do it. So, we did.

Our next step was to broaden the size of the group by leading other actors we knew and respected through the material with the idea of forming us all into a permanent company. After six months of workshops, we put together our first season: four plays beginning with the Comedy of Errors as performed by the Little Theatre of Dubuque, Iowa, Circa 1936 (It was just what the title implies. Shakespeare’s comedy was the jumping-off point. The larger story was completely improvised ala Spolin. This was followed by The Jungle (long-form story theatre based on Sill’s work, wholly improvised afresh each night). We adapted these skills into our first Brecht piece, The Good Woman of Setzuan, with Barbara in the title role.

By this time, through attrition and a lousy break-up scene, Irondale had evolved from a company filled with “actors” to a company made up almost exclusively of “Improvisors.” Today, people would probably refer to what we were doing as “devised theatre.” Ours was “devised” of a different breed. Our texts were never set, and we always acknowledged the audience’s presence as part of the performance.

During this time, we worked closely with choreographer Annie-B Parson, later of Big Dance Theatre. Together, she, the company, and I would simultaneously explore a project from completely different angles. Annie-b would create dance versions of the story while I focused on the text and guided the improvisation. Then, we would blend the elements, determining whether a given scene seemed more effective as a dance, an improvised text based on the script, or, in some cases, a very small part of the author’s words as written.

The Uncle Vanya Vaudeville Show (Terry as Dr. Jack Ass-trov, the host of the Breakfast Club): This was the first of what came called our “collision” pieces. The Uncle Vanya Radio Show was perhaps the most positively received show in the history of the company and would be revived three more times.

By this time, Annie-b and I were going our separate ways. She went off with Paul and Molly to start her own incredibly successful company, Big Dance Theatre.

I opted for direction whose main feature was a deep dive into the rigors of classic text and how to imbue that with the same aliveness as we had mastered with the improvised work, and the company moved into what I would call now our “John Barton” period with exercises in the tradition of Barton and Peter Hall, and Adrian Noble, really taking the company back to square one on our new journey of understanding and using the rigorous rules of speaking and performing plays that utilized a heightened and more complicated language, We worked to understand the principles of Hall’s Royal Shakespeare Company approach and through exercises and understanding the commonality of heightened language found its way not only into our Shakespeare adventures but also into our performing style for the plays of Brecht and the plays of Tennessee Williams. The exercises and years put into mastering these skills formed.

Yet, another new unit in the Mythic Land of Irondale led to 1599 (Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet performed in a single evening). The three plays Brecht wrote during his 12 years abroad while he was fleeing the Nazis made up another epic creation Brecht in Exile: Galileo, Good Person of Setzuan, and Mother Courage. Most recently, we have applied these same techniques in American Blues, five early one-act plays by Tennessee Williams. These were all very different plays, and we applied a very similar approach, which grew out of yet another Irondale Myth, and again one years in the making.

Music too, over the years, has also played an essential role in the Myth of Irondale, as it grew in complexity from the sound painting techniques introduced by Walter Thompson, who for many years our in-house composer, to the more recent work of company created song developed through the song pad techniques introduced by Nolan and also work with Sam and MD so woven into the basic fabric of Irondale’s creativity. It was the early days of this period of acquiring new musical skills that led to a significant portion of the songs for our production of the abolitionist play, Color Between the Lines being developed by the people who sang them in the show.

These were all critical skills and techniques, whether they came and went as the work moved in other directions or have become deeply embedded in our “Myth.”

And here’s something new:

Now, our desire is to pass these skills and core understandings along to other artists who might find the work useful in their own artistic journeys, as well as to people who want to embark on a deeper journey toward understanding what Irondale is all about.

We’ll offer a series of workshops this fall designed to pull back the curtain on what we do and who it is for.

As the recent American Theatre piece about us said in the article’s title: Irondale, where the Process Is the Project.

Well, here’s a new project, and new process. Could be fun, serious, useful, and a little dangerous. Want to come and check it out?

– Jim Niesen

Write to me directly at jim@irondale.org