JOSEPH CHAIKIN

AND THE CLASSICS

Edited by Bill Coco, with Rhea Gaisner

T
hough Joseph Chaikin is celebrated as a major visionary director in American
experimental theatre, rarely acknowledged is his interest in and affection for
“the classics” and their essential place in his artistic imagination as a source
of forms, values, and possibilities. Chaikin’s interests in classics was extensive: in
music, from Beethoven-Schubert-Wagner-Mahler to Billie Holiday; in philosophy,
from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and Sartre to Martin Buber; in modern poetry,
from T.S. Eliot to Pablo Neruda to Muriel Rukeyser and W.S. Merwin; and in theatre
from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare, and to Chekhov, Brecht, and Beckett.

Productions of classic plays were not a primary focus in Chaikin’s career, yet the clas-
sics shaped a continuing theme in his choices of plays to direct and act in throughout
his life, beginning with his greatest critical and artistic triumph as a young actor in
The Living Theatre’s now-classic production of Bertolt Brecht’s Man Is Man. And
after playing Hamm in The Open Theater’s version of Beckett’s Endgame, Chaikin
went on to direct plays by Sophocles (Electra), Euripides (Medea), Molière (Don
Juan), Chekhov (The Seagull ), many plays by Beckett, and at the time of his death
in 2003 he was casting a production of Uncle Vanya, the title role of which he had
played at La MaMa under the direction of Andrei Serban. And further: just prior to
his stroke in 1984, he was discussing the possibility of playing King Lear for Joseph
Papp in Central Park; later he even contemplated a move into opera to stage a ver-
sion of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, where the world of commedia dell’arte
collides with characters from tragedy.

While not “known” as a director of classics, Chaikin created productions of classics

that were often widely admired, and response could be strong. In a New York Times
review, Mel Gussow wrote about a Chaikin production of Beckett’s Endgame: “Mr.
Chaikin is an experimental artist who is scrupulous when dealing with the classics.
This is an authentic Endgame down to the last agitated pause.” Great international
directors of classics were also wooed by Chaikin’s art. For example, Peter Brook, Jerzy
Grotowski, and Jean-Louis Barrault invited him to collaborate in their international
workshops, and Lee Strasberg asked Chaikin to participate in an Actors Studio sym-
posium on the Grotowski troupe’s debut season of performances in New York.

© 2009 Bill Coco with Rhea Gaisner PAJ 94 (2010), pp. 1–22.    1
Chaikin never promoted the classics—he even shied away from the term—yet their
art and vision formed the dramaturgical ground upon which he stood as actor-director
and from which he reached into the realm of the experimental. This background and
most serious interest has not been documented, so I was astonished when in winter
of 2004 Rhea Gaisner, the distinguished director, teacher, and long-time colleague
of Chaikin’s, showed me a notebook she had just discovered that had been hidden
away since 1974 in her personal library. I was thrilled (a favorite Chaikin word)
to examine it and as I read its carefully written pages, I heard an authentic record
of Chaikin’s unique, fragmented, and distilled voice as he spoke about his favorite
dramatic classics before a personally selected group of theatrical collaborators.

As Gaisner tells us in greater depth in her remembrances below, she was an early
and dedicated member of Chaikin’s Open Theater. When later she reached a major
stumbling block in her artistic growth, Chaikin responded by creating a series of
weekly workshop classes in the classics in winter–spring 1974 with a group of actors
that included members of The Open Theater, other experimental theatre luminaries
such as Ceil Smith, and a growing list of observers, including Susan Sontag.

While she participated in these workshop classes, Gaisner kept a careful record of the
general remarks Chaikin addressed to the actors before the performance and critique
of that day’s scenes. At the conclusion of the workshop, she put the notebook away
until the day she discovered it several years ago and asked me to edit the manuscript,
which I was most pleased to do on the condition that she would always be there
to clarify her handwriting and recall the workshop events as she remembered them.
We put off working on the material for several years while Gaisner bravely battled
with inoperable lung cancer, but then in summer 2007 we decided to go ahead and
complete the work, whatever the future. We finished in September of that year, just
months before she passed away, in January 2008.

Chaikin often referred to his thoughts as “pebbles,” and sometimes his words remain
elusive, reminding one of the elusive modernist poetry he admired. Yet his reflec-
tions here are so deeply felt and observed, so securely grounded, as Chaikin always
was, in his era and in his searching nature. These thoughts are witness to a rarely
documented aspect of his teaching that might inspire yet another generation with
his unique theatrical voice and wisdom.

Bill Coco

WORKSHOP NOTES FROM 1974

The major phase of The Open Theater officially ended in 1969 when Joseph Chaikin
wrote a letter to the group saying he felt it was time for him to move on to a new
adventure with a smaller and less contentious group of people. It was, I believe, a
shock to most of us. Then a kind of diaspora occurred.

There is no question that Joe was the leader of the group. Internally there were
always many voices disagreeing, arguing, agreeing, etc. All that happens when people

2    PAJ 94
have worked together a long time and egos are easily bruised and overemphasized.
A rather extraordinary body of work had been accumulated over the years, both in
terms of the performances themselves, but also in the processes that we developed
in creating pieces, exercises, and improvisations. Joe was the most inventive person
I have ever known. His ways of working and his vision of theatre were unique; he
energized us by posing questions that excited the theatrical imagination to solve.
He was able to incorporate things that were occurring in the present in pieces about
the past. This can be seen in the Kennedy-King-Kennedy assassination material that
was integrated into The Serpent.

The group consisted of actors, directors, playwrights, critics, artists, and musicians.
It was never a group of friends or one for group living; it was a group that came
together to work and explore. Joe’s vision articulated the group’s common, and often
inarticulate, feelings and needs. It seems absurd that students of theatre know the
names of Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook, but have so little knowledge of Joseph
Chaikin.

With the breakup, Joe formed a smaller group that went on to create and perform
Terminal by playwright Susan Yankowitz, and two other large pieces. Sam Shepard
and Jean-Claude van Itallie were two of the playwrights who contributed material
for the very late show, Nightwalk. The actors included Tina Shepard, Paul Zimet,
Jo Ann Schmidman, Shami Chaikin, Tom Lillard, Ray Barry, Ralph Lee, and Ellen
Maddow; Mira Rafalowicz was Joe’s dramaturg on these pieces.

Barbara Vann and Jim Barbosa started their own group called The Medicine Show,
and many actors simply went back to being freelance actors: Cynthia Harris, Ron
Faber, Peter Maloney, Ellen Schindler, Fred Forest, Phil Harris, Jane Haynes, and
Mark Samuels. Lee Worley went off to Naropa in Colorado. Jenn Ben Yacov stayed
in Holland after the Serpent tour. Brenda Dixon decided to go an academic route.
Peter Feldman, Joyce Aaron, and I found ourselves in Amsterdam, Holland, where
we gave workshops, worked with Dutch theatre companies, directed plays, and
taught.

It is important to understand that at that time most theatre training in America

was psychologically based. We were good at a certain kind of emotional excitement
and looking for oneself in the role, or the role in oneself. Private moments and
generalized text work were common. Words were less important and therefore the
use of the voice was limited.

The breath as the center, common, important element of life and theatre was not
considered. The body was underdeveloped and the idea that it could give actors
impulses and information in character choices and in general was also not consid-
ered. You might study dance but not the actor’s body movement. The sense of the
voice and all it could express was underexplored. Respect for the use of language as
a major point of the theatrical experience was seldom found. Theatre was supposed
to be realistic, played behind a fourth wall with the audience as voyeur.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    3

Joe was interested in a different kind of theatre. One that could express dreams,
express what we don’t say and don’t even know we feel or are aware of. He wanted
to be able to perform plays by Ionesco and the Absurdists, Beckett, and also poetry.
He looked to explore the voice and breath itself as the actor’s instrument. Words were
clues and keys to the actor’s experience. They were suspect, but not when used care-
fully, chosen, and fully expressed. He cared about images and the discovery of what
is being experienced at the moment it is being experienced. He was very aware that
theatre was repetition. He cared about the relationship between actor and audience,
in which both had an awareness of the other and communicated with each other. His
vision was not of the usual actor wanting to please the audience, but rather about
the audience joining the actor in the experience of the acting event.

This was all happening during a very unusual period. People in the different arts knew
each other’s work and had a kind of camaraderie. Theatre groups, such as Mabou
Mines, The Performance Group, and The Manhattan Project went to each other’s
performances. We cross-pollinated each other. We were looking to break traditions
that felt stifling and limiting. Dancers began to talk, actors began to move, paint-
ers made costumes, critics directed. We all wanted to find a way to work in which
the work itself was the most important thing, not commercialism or money. The
Vietnam War and Civil Rights movement brought many different people together
to protest, make change, to take on the larger authorities. Maybe most important
of all, we did believe we could change the world. We wished to make it better, safer,
and more possible to be humane: more creative. These feelings were international
and one saw Grotowski and Brook and Mnouchkine each exploring different ways
to express it. The ethos was political, though for the most part not doctrinaire. That
was certainly true of Joe Chaikin and The Open Theater.

After three years in Holland, I felt I needed some time back in New York, where I
could be the student, the learner, again instead of always being the teacher or direc-
tor, the one who knows more. I missed the kind of talk about theatre and life that
had been part of the group. I was also missing exploring new areas and new ways
of approaching an acting problem. I wanted to work on my bête-noir: stage fright.
It had bedeviled me for years. I was a really good rehearsal actress, and found noth-
ing more exciting, creative, and invigorating than the rehearsal process, but when
the audience showed up, my terror took over. I came home to New York to try to
work on these things.

Of course, I went to Joe to ask with whom I should study to work on my prob-
lems. At first, he said I should only study one semester or term with one teacher,
or there was a danger of becoming “guru-ized,” and he then thought that working
with Stella Adler would be the most useful and interesting. I spent a wonderful
semester with her, learned a great deal, and found that, though I was in awe of her,
I wasn’t afraid of her.

After that, I went back to Joe to ask about whom I should work with in the spring.
He thought a long time and finally said he didn’t think there was anyone to recom-

4    PAJ 94
mend, so he would give a class for me. Oh, unimaginable joy and excitement! He
wanted to work on only a certain group of playwrights whose work he found both
exemplary and usually badly performed. Those would include the Greeks, Shake-
speare, and Chekhov as well as Brecht and Beckett. There would be ten to eleven
classes and he would select the actors.

What follows are the notes I took in those classes. I did not write down his critiques
of specific scenes but rather his general comments about the playwright’s style,
philosophy, and the actor. There is some repetition in these notes, as there always is
in a class. Apart from a preliminary class in late fall, all the classes took place from
February through April of 1974. As news of the class got out, people started asking
if they could come to observe. The audience grew, becoming more important and
prestigious.

It is important for the reader to note that Joe did not speak in sentences, and my
notes are verbatim. Bill Coco and I have worked to make the material more avail-
able to the reader, making sentences out of fragments and ellipses while trying to
maintain the spirit and nature of Joe’s way of thinking and speaking.

One personal story: In one of the workshop classes I was working with Ron Faber,
a wonderful actor, on the Richard and Anne scene from Richard III, in which he
offers her his sword to kill him or take him for a husband. We worked the scene up
and down, back and forth. We built a history of their childhood and how they knew
one another, we did it all. We also very foolishly were working with sharp kitchen
knives, which we had to handle. In one rehearsal I “hated” him so much and was
in such a rage with him that I could have killed him, and raised the knife to do so.
At that moment Ron ripped his T-shirt down the front. Suddenly, I saw his heart
beating, the veins, blood, everything. The knife dropped out of my hand. I found
I might be able to kill Richard, but I couldn’t kill a living human being. We had
solved the scene for ourselves. What happened was nothing either of us could have
consciously thought or planned. It was a discovery that happened in the moment,
gave shape to the moment, meaning, and insight to the scene. It was thrilling, and
demonstrates what Joe means about discovering in the moment.

On a more personal note, it is very strange to be revisiting this material, realizing

how it influenced all the work I have done as a director and a teacher during my
career. It also makes one aware of how much the times have changed in thinking
about theatre, and the presence of theatre as a cultural entity. In our materialistic
celebrity-driven world, Joe’s words are a breath of fresh air. In a way they seem
newer now than they did then. Ironically, at this moment in my private life, in
September 2007, I am dealing with inoperable lung cancer, and the question of
breath is constantly on my mind and in my body. Joe’s concern for and awareness
of its importance resonates strongly.

Joe’s sense of theatre, of presence, of discovery, of the need to bravely enter the
actor’s process without preconditions or a finished product in our heads does not

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    5

find a parallel today. We are all too conditioned to look for answers and be rewarded
for the correct one. Even though everyone talks about process, what they seem to
mean is a process through which you will come to a preconceived product or end.
Each school seems to have a different set of practices (training) to get the actor to
that prescribed end.

Working on these notes has been a very unexpected and intense experience. Both
Bill Coco and I have been aware of Joe’s presence on many levels. Looking at his
words and ideas in today’s context makes me aware of how powerful they were and
how the underlying set of assumptions from which they sprang are gone today.
We have had to translate sentence fragments into sentences that can be read and
understood. Joe was a talker, an actor; he was not a writer. Yet when you listened
to him and watched him, he was perfectly clear.

We don’t know how to identify this article. Is it a treatise on theatre; or of philoso-

phy, or of how to live, or is it a poem? In no way is it a how-to or training guide.
Perhaps, instead, it is a discussion about theatre, acting, and the world from one of
the great theatre minds of our times. It offers no rules to follow and no product to
be achieved. It will be best used as an article to read and re-read, to muse upon, to
question, and to have a conversation with over time.

This is where Joe’s ideas are so revolutionary. He doesn’t have a prescription. Nor
is he interested in one. His main preoccupation is discovery, finding, and making
visible, of the actor as an explorer who brings his or her back experience for the
audience to see and be involved with. He says clearly that each character can be
played only one way by each actor. In other words, each of us can only discover our
own way of creating a particular character in a certain situation. How freeing! There
is nothing to imitate, no one to be in competition with. He puts his emphasis on
the body as a neutral entrance place, then the addition of the voice, and the text
exactly as written.

We live today so much in a world based on materialism, of got-to-get-the-new-thing,

of got-to-get-the-information-to-get-into-the-best-school, new job, the apartment. We
are so product-oriented that we cannot even imagine what is meant when you are
asked to explore, and the teacher or director doesn’t tell you what you are looking
for before you begin your search. Finally, that is what feels so different. Something
that we seem to have lost now is our curiosity to understand the question we are
being asked to explore. The search itself should be the work, rather than going on a
treasure hunt to find a known object. It is good to know that a precious few young
playwrights, directors, and actors today are attempting, in their different ways, to
participate in the experimental tradition that can seem lost.

This is very important to think about and explore. What does it mean? Partly, I
think it means being interested in areas outside of training, of seeing life and the
theatre as interrelated. It means continuing to question received knowledge and

6    PAJ 94
asking impossible questions. One must listen to music, read poetry and philosophy,
look at art, stay abreast of the news, ask what function theatre has in all this, and
how can it affect the way we see and experience our lives and world.

Rhea Gaisner

THE PRELIMINARY CLASS

In preparation for his workshop in the classics in winter-spring 1974, Chaikin conducted
a preliminary class in October 1973. Before a group of actors, he discussed the differences
and complexities of working on classical plays.

The definition of a scene:

Any event that’s repeatable has definition, not only qualities. That is, any given
event between people has a movement inside itself which is its definition; a form,
and a shape. An event is not just a clash, because the clash has form and shape
within it.

Shakespeare works on two levels, which is why it is so difficult to work on compared

to most of what we perform.
Othello—human action that has definition.
1. On the one hand, there is the common or familiar.
2. On the other hand it lives on the scale of poetic life.

It’s a scale that we usually do not experience moments of. In Shakespeare both levels
are together.
It requires that you have one foot in the plausible and one soul in the poetic.
When these things are brought together we see things in a special light.
Scenes must be plausible–like how to use the candle in Othello, i.e., coming in with
the candle and the in-and-out of each of the parts of the scene, the characters are
changing their minds and hearts all the time, back and forth, two needs pulling a
person.
Two processes:
1. Entering play and character
2. Conscious work on what are the forms and shapes.

Actions–what the character is effecting by these actions. Stanislavsky terms: once one
has learned “circumstances,” etc., one is still left with what do I do? What are the
actions, i.e., I want to persuade you, etc., etc. Choice comes from circumstances, but
it isn’t just the circumstances, it is what to play to do the active thing I do, as I speak
the line. That is the choice of what I play. I try to affect you with my choice.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    7

How to start work on a scene:
1. A scene is like a circle—one comes in at any point. Go like a blind person.
Feel it. Touch it again and have a sense of shape of it. Do it again and again.
One of these times something interesting occurs to connect to. I start the
work with that which concerns me, start with my connection to it.
2. Another way into the circle is through the external. My body takes a
physical position that puts me in touch with material. Organic touch can
occur through an external physical action. It’s called the gesture—gestus,
which has resonances of ages and ages of history.
3. Don’t believe that the only significant meeting is between actor and
character, it is also between the actor and the writer.
4. In America we believe in our own feelings; today psychology is the truth
of the moment.
5. This view often releases something in the actor but often is very limit-
ing and stupid-making. We try to get into the “character-rush” as actors,
without the definition of the episode. We try to release a kind of affect in
us as actor: Actors Studio. Even in that “rush” is definition.
6. In acting we tend to trivialize the lines of the character by moving into
their “rush.”

Some questions about character:

Writer makes character who is not him/her self. Actor acts a character who is not
himself.
Meeting of spectator, actor, and writer is through that other one—the character.

Character is the meeting point of everything and the event.

Who is this person? How does one know another person?

Large question:
In any one person there is the potential for the understanding and empathy for
people very unlike oneself.

Rhythms of scene and breathing of actor should come together. There is a breathing
in everything we’ve been doing.

THE FIRST CLASS

Audience
For the Greeks it was necessary to go to theatre—it changed you.
To examine:
1. Community—centrally about family stories, black theatre, women’s
theatre, gay theatre. Where we locate our people.

8    PAJ 94
 2. People don’t know difference between people and things—for example,
picture vs. person, tape recording vs. voice. We are interested in the living
experience.

Tragedy
Theatre is the home of tragedy.
1. Inevitability.
2. Irreversibility.
Tragedy is interwoven in our lives.
Irony in the flow, the mistake.
Aristotle—whole need for a recognition scene.
To see—to recognize.
Recognition—seeing the most central in tragedy of theatre and living theatre.
Recognition—vitality of theatre.

Technically
Work like a detective:
Clues are all in material. Work in English, and yet as closely as we can conceive that
the plays were intended to be done.
No improvisation on text—use text. What’s happening—then what—now what—
all from the text.

Character
There’s myself and myself as actor.
Actor, and actor playing a character.
In Method view: character as set of tendencies, right for this character, such as
Blanche in Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar.
Can’t proceed only from set of tendencies. There is more.
Actor→character→audience
In Eastern ideas—dissolve certain things—there is a detachment.
Forget Eastern ideas when dealing with classic texts.

Every human heart contains all things.

Actor—try to put self in character’s shoes and situation and work on character that
way. My source is external in its nature—it will be fed by my own experience and
emotions.
Suspend our own limits—go from. Don’t begin approach with judgment.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    9

Character and Feelings
Full character: seems to be there, but is only the tip of the iceberg.
Consciousness and being stem from this great sea of not knowing.
Character is back to being an unanswerable mystery.

Freud
Ego-Id-Superego
Person is being judged, looked at, etc., by part of our own inside consciousness—
this correcting agency is Superego.

This can be projected externally.

Id–the sea. All the longings from which the character comes, which leads to
unconscious.
Id is Eden, jungle, concentration camp, etc., feeds ego entity, which is controlled
by Superego.

Morality—people are unevenly moral

Plays that deal with the passions:
Greeks-Shakespeare-Chekhov-Brecht-Beckett
Humanizing passions

Feelings
Nameable and unnameable feelings.
Everyone has anger, fear, pain, and happiness, but that is not it—there is more.
Feelings have rhythm, vibration, and quantity.
Poets find it in language and we can use the language to go back and rediscover
them.
We’ve done a lot of cutting up and dividing in of feelings. Makes it difficult to act
from our own perceptions.
We seek reflections of our selves. But these reflections are a very limited, idealized
part.
All of what we see is outward manifestation of some part of our own experience.
Seek dominant character themes which one can find the thread of.
Each of these writers needs a different kind of preparation.

Actor-character-character-audience.

10    PAJ 94
THE SECOND CLASS

Theatre—repetition:
In repetition one lives through it again.
Very important to be selective about what you do when you act, because you inhabit
it again and again and therefore it too is your life.

In Greeks and Shakespeare: audience is held.

Approach to tragedy:
Americans have access to own inner promptings—good: but with that sensitivity
often comes interpretation. Naming a feeling comes so quickly that we barely have
a chance to experience the emotion.
Theatre is the home of tragedy. Life and tragedy are intertwined. Theatre is the
confrontation with tragedy as well as other things.
Tragedy has a kind of irony—corrective to our arrogance. If it is so great a thing, it
cannot be approached in a domesticated manner. Have to enter it with understand-
ing that we discover it in the doing of it, not before.
Recognition scene is about “to see.” To see whatever is going on in the play.

Theatre is obliged to be as vital as being. Character—the self. How we perceive it and

how actor perceives it and how it enters into these different playwrights’ ideas.
Human themes that are true to us, and were true to people long ago. Included in
human longing is the longing for transcendence.
What do you want the other character to believe of you?
Intention is one point—can only do one thing at one moment. Intention is the
active choice of what in fact you do.

THE THIRD CLASS

What are the human longings? Basic human longings.

Actor’s source.
Actor as person. Continually living source of my life. Drawing from person.
Swinging between chaos and meaning.
Most scared of going crazy, full into limitless, mindless chaos.
Have to try to enter some of this stuff—this chaos, madness, pain. Need to look
bravely.

Character
All the materialized humans we see are an analogy of the range of character, the
materialized inner parts of me.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    11

Language
These days there has been a rape of our language.
So then speaking hasn’t so much meaning. Where is the relationship between mean-
ing and word? Word—precise thought and image. It is also sound and vibration.
People say what they mean but it is usually tucked away on peripheries. Chekhov
does it particularly well. Have to find that meaning.
Characters—have a strategy for living. How to endure?
Primary themes are of how to navigate. Does it work?
In Chekhov, characters are almost always on the brink.
How character sees self act in relationship to how one sees self, and how one expects
others to see me.
In Chekhov, characters are related to family, place, society, nations, etc.
Accident of birth connections.
Who am I?

In all of these passing thoughts and feelings, I claim a few of these as me.
People act out of moments where action taken and action not taken are both
present.

What is the worst thing you can imagine? This most terrible thought is what Greek
tragedy is all about. To kill the people nearest them.

Seeing:
Choose to see some things and not others.
If relations of actor/person to character is clear,
if relation of actor/person to audience is determined,
then it is possible to clarify what should be seen.
Audience as specific beings: identification.
Audience as only energy.

Nameable and unnameable feelings. If you only stay with nameable ones, you can-
not get to all that goes on.
Acting: trying to be expressive of all the things that are passing through one.
In English.
Sound, thought, impulse, phrase: all come together.
Person speaks, sounds speak.

12    PAJ 94
Two traps:
1. Making language ordinary as in ordinary life.
2. Taking away real life so it’s only operatic.
What’s happening is the story. Theatre is about story telling.

THE FOURTH CLASS

1. Theatre must be as compelling and vital as living.

2. Classic period plays had a community, which came to them as for food,
nourishment.
3. Certain longings have gone on through the ages. We have them, they are
available to the study of human character.
4. Two extremes:
a. Worst thought in head, impulse to kill someone who’s close to
you. So terrible a thought. I don’t want to register my thought. Greek
material is always about that.
This horror was there before as well as now.
b. Fear of flipping out into the chaos.

Actor and relationship to feelings:

Our range of experience has to widen.
“Be as strong as you can be vulnerable.”
Find balance to be able to give form to that range of emotion without locking it up
as already experienced or known.
Actor—try to put self in shoes and circumstances of character. Own experience will
enrich it, but don’t limit and reduce character to own emotional, personal history.

Acting has to do with repetition:

Ethical question: what can I bear repeating so often? How to talk where talking is
eventful?
How to invent a way of speaking that is eventful?
Have to find the inevitability of speech?

Character
The locating of a person. The definition of a person. Like a silhouette.
“I don’t know why I am alive.”
“I don’t know about the earth on which I live.”
“I don’t know my responsibilities.”
My stakes have a lot to do with my character location.
Greeks—family.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    13

Shakespeare–passions to rise in the political set-up.
Chekhov—situation, but real location is in the longing for what is not there.
Our sense of dislocation must be confronted in our character work.
Brecht—located in class.
Look for location of characters in these scenes.
Character is not only located in rotten marriages, class, set-up, etc. There is more—it
has elements of wonder, e.g., as on an acid trip.
Located in relation to the design and to the living and growing of this moment.

Greek plays—always a recognition scene. In Greek plays this means to see.

Actor—gives expression to what it is to be alive, or at least expression to one aspect
of being alive.
Actor causes audience to see. To do that, actor must be there.

THE FIFTH CLASS

Technically, the actor has special problems with Greeks.

In life we restrict our tones, gestures, face, etc., which is how we understand each
other.
How one moves from social life to requirements of Greeks and Shakespeare is in
question.
How is actor to become available to these other things—that “how” remains a
mystery.
Otherwise, we are left with problem of domesticating the tragedy.

Recognition in Greeks is to see.

To see is the special possibility of the stage.

Character
Location:
In Greeks, available in family structure.
In Shakespeare, in relation to state and family.
In Chekhov, to home and family.
Relate in terms of the character, in terms of the audience.
Range of feelings very wide, which are not simply classified.
For the actor to be expressive of all these state of feeling and being is risky. Have to
find the equilibrium to be able to do so.

14    PAJ 94
The Trojan Women:
Theme and terrain of loss.
We are feeling, sensate beings.
We grieve.
We have yearnings.
We have experiences that we share. Some extreme as well as banal.

Actor is the vessel through which this experience can move.

In Greeks:
Worked on vocal themes—
Life-tones and death-tones.
Actor learned these tones and audience was able to receive these tones.
Writers worked with these tones, included them in their writing.

In Chekhov:
At any given moment in play, character can barely stay alive.
Tension in Chekhov is endurance.

Form
Any given moment in life is formal.
In classical texts the essential thing we look for is the form of the moment.
First, work with a neutral period where you are open to the character possibilities
physically, vocally, feelingly.
Every part has for each actor one way to play it. The actor as vessel. The inevitable
if found and played out.

Question of character is related to question of actor/person.

Form comes out of putting oneself in the place and shoes of situation of character.
Not from some simple external decision.

Clues for style and form of how to play a piece are in the text. It is not arbitrary—it
is in the text.

THE SIXTH CLASS

Feelings:
Is there a way to give formal forms to those feelings that are difficult to describe?
Nameable and unnameable feelings. How to make visible the unnameable ones.
We contain in us these passing feelings.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    15

Vocabulary of experience is much broader than our acting training would have us
believe.

Character:
Meeting point between the actor, playwright, and audience. Character location that
is ongoing whether or not character is there.
In America—we work with emotional memory. Rather than entering, move out to
the character’s circumstance rather than enter your memory of a specific emotion
or experience. By going out to, say, The Trojan Women, we learn about the specific
character of that loss.
To discover the same human theme but in another circumstance.
Memory—different from real experience.
To find access to these deep experiences which we can name and not name.
The next step is to find expression of that emotion in a performing dialectic.

Character:
Puzzling—
Who is one acting from?

Story:
Moment-to-moment.
In Chekhov—one character and another character.
Brecht—one character and audience. In Brecht what’s happening is in what’s hap-
pening moment-to-moment in the audience.
1. Who is the actor acting from?
2. In what ways do I intersect with the other characters and audience? In
what ways do they intersect, in what ways do they divide?
In America—character seen in terms of hang-ups.
In character, it’s what is significant to them.
Earlier the actor played forces, i.e., death, gods, everyman, etc.
Today it’s more specific.

Character:
1. What one finds significant.
2. Yearning.
3. Itch that person has.

Theatre is about repeating. Question is then what do we want to repeat again. What
is worthy of repetition for the self?

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Character of an experience, terrain of the experience is different and specific to each
particular treatment and circumstance. This may well be different from my particular
experience of that emotion.

THE SEVENTH CLASS

Audience-actor-character
Being-thereness of theatre.
That’s the exploration.
Character:
Location. Who is anybody?

Also, what the playwright left out. Playwright focuses in on one aspect of that per-
son in a particular set of circumstances. Classical plays have actual physical place
connections as well as other people connections.
Character appetites—human appetites that we see.
Today, hard to define human appetites. Today we tend to devour others to satisfy
our own needs.

Being-there-ness of theatre.
Experiencing the rhythm of being there in some way.
Rhythm is changing movement we feel from live persons.
Rhythm is feeling.
No feeling or experience that is not expressed with some kind of manifest feeling.
Rhythm-like music, like feeling that’s changing all the time.

Do the material without patchkying. To try to find pulse of human rhythms.

To see how we change from entering it and what we discover from entering it.
Question at all times in scenes:
What’s happening?
What’s the character doing?
To start off, often begin with the body.
First, try to release body to make it available to the character’s body and
expression.
Begin to move body very slowly to find this one moment.
Leave body susceptible to find information of where the body finds one particular
moment.

Actor must find how to enter and re-enter the world of each playwright’s vision and
perspective. What gear do we want to shift into if we want to create a theatre now,
out of our lives and our crises and our condition.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    17

Joe’s hunch—actors are supposed to be trained animals—whether actor is interested
in the material is secondary, he is hired out to do it.
Maybe actor has certain report to make and is there to give form and definition to
that which the audience has experienced.

THE EIGHTH CLASS

Character:
Our crisis is in how to proceed in making theatre developed from character.
The who is the character.
In the past, people came to theatre to see people who are like them onstage.
Now we have our disconnectedness as our identification. Metaphysical homeless-
ness.
How can we see one another without the form of the contexts of family, army,
country, etc.
Fear of dropping into the chaos that seems to be surrounding us where there are
no signposts.
In acting, the actor is allowed to go crazy. Must know he can only go crazy as far
as he is strong enough to go. As vulnerable as one can be strong—strong as one
can be vulnerable.

In Euripides’ Alcestis:
Irrevocable separation is the event.
Words are extension of gesture of body.
After body is susceptible then there is the space between you and other characters
wherein lies the material for the scene.
How does one endure it and live in it if that is what is happening?
Body-space-body.

Words:
Once body is in on it then the voice can enter into it.
All of this is in relation to a particular circumstance.
If I start only with characteristics, I am cutting myself off from embodying the
character.
In our own lives we do not play our feelings.
Actor has to pump self up to play the feelings.
Imbalance between what is being experienced and presented, experienced, and
expressed.

Exercise: leave body alone.

18    PAJ 94
Take moment of recognition into body.
Release body back to neutral.

THE NINTH CLASS

What is unique about theatre at all?

Carnality.
We must work from ourselves.
Question is which self or selves.
One has to work from what in oneself connects to the material.

Character and context:

Church
Family
State
Political movement–feminist and gay.
Person and context—connection.
Spiritual puberty of the times.
Our ineffectiveness becomes dismay. We go around with an overwhelming sense of
separateness. Meaning one lives without sharing.
So we wait.
But waiting doesn’t pay off. Shortness of life. Being in transit.
In theatre we play out certain things we see, we understand.

Greeks:
Taboo—to play out killing of people close to you.
All relationships are this within everybody.
Need to think about this material without Freudian interpretation.
Story—
Brecht: actor-character-audience
What happens in relation to audience. Method technique only works with plays
where audience is not included.

In Chekhov—work very lifelike.

1. First need is to break down in terms of story.
2. Body and body image.
Body can learn and sometimes inform the consciousness.
First drain the body.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    19

Bodies are then susceptible to what body and I could not otherwise discover.
3. Emotional dynamic.
We bring interpretation as well as emotion to working with the emotion.

In music the tonic is given—the home which one returns to. The whole octave is
contained in the tonic.
Presentation of personality is like playing the tonic.
Chekhov: feeling and doing are not necessarily the same.
Suffering in Chekhov.
We are hypnotized into thinking that we suffer only for short periods and then it’s
over.
Suffering goes with living. Futile to try to amputate it.
Differing comes in many different forms in different people.

THE TENTH CLASS

Question of character is associated with question of audience.

We come to meet each other and ourselves through the medium of character.
Separate and intersect.
Audience intersects with actor/person/character.
Today people feel dispensable and interchangeable.

What is there to report of what we see, know, project?

What do we tell each other?
We have one primary language in which to tell each other what we experience and
witness.
What do we tell ourselves in our privacy?
Theatre—to give manifestation of what? What do we wish to report on again?

Shakespeare:
Precision of words.

Chekhov:
Moved away from what’s life-like.
Attention turned onto internal movement rather than attention on external
terrain.
To play inner life of character is falsification of character.
“I am a seagull”—where does it come from? It’s like a note from another composer
thrown into Schubert.

20    PAJ 94
THE ELEVENTH CLASS

Sense of exile from one’s own land.

Thoughts about a contemporary theatre that doesn’t exist which one goes to for
nourishment.
Playwright makes a character who’s not the character, actor plays the character who’s
not that character, and audience identifies with character who is not self.

Human dynamic in theatre. Hard to locate what and where that is.
We are trying to take away certain boundaries to the emotional terrain because
of psychological diminution and because of the taboo on certain emotions, i.e.,
jealousy or grief. Certain kind of emotional character in human dynamic that is
not beautiful.
If we try to give expression to these banished feelings, we begin to find the human
dynamic.
What is worthwhile doing in theatre?

Next week:
1. What would a theatre be?
2. How would the repetition of the play be enhancing instead of
diminishing?
Othello, Macbeth, The Seagull?

Othello is domestic till it moves into this emotional eternity. Words have to be exten-
sion of body and emotions move through body. But voice must also be included.
Theatre—to see at once.
To see as it is happening.

THE LAST CLASS

Chekhov and Brecht:

How I see, what’s important.
Dynamic of suffering—Chekhov
How people act on each other—Brecht
They both look and report.
Subject matter and truth content of work.

Things that are about being alive are what remain in time.
It’s about vibrating present—people in time.
What we do in the theatre has an effect on us as makers of theatre.

COCO AND GAISNER  /  Joseph Chaikin and the Classics    21

The repetition of inhabiting the terrain affects us, so must choose what we do in
theatre.
Action happens as it happens—while going on both for performers and audience.
In Brecht—partnership with audience, another kind of address.
In Chekhov—shape of the action. Each action has shape, rhythm.

Lending body as vessel to take on an image. Only good as exercise, but not to go
into the work.
Trap—exercises can keep you from entering the moment of the material.
Stretching of voice and body totally important for performance.
Voice needs connectedness to impulse.
Technique qua technique is of no interest without connectedness.
Voice as breath and body to begin—
But finally it’s voice and space.
Work on voice and body—no technique or formula as of yet, of how to go about
it.
In making theatre today what do we show, what assumptions do we share?
The story:
1. What happens?
2. How does one see what happens?

How can one give form to certain feelings we have?

Story as event, as something happening.
What kind of theatre do we want to go to?

RHEA GAISNER was an influential acting teacher at Carnegie, Cooper

Union, City College, and Emerson and an inventive director, from her
days with the Open Theater through projects with contemporary play-
wrights and internationally with Exiles in Ireland and with companies in
the Netherlands.

BILL COCO is Director of the Theater History Department at the Actors

Studio Drama School at Pace University. A theatre journal and book editor,
he was dramaturg for Joseph Chaikin on fifteen productions of plays classic,
modern, and contemporary, including four by Samuel Beckett.

22    PAJ 94