 Again, this is Jim at the House of Poo Corner, and we are continuing our conversation. Peter Boynton and I are continuing our conversation about the profession of acting. Actually, it's a profession that's gone back to almost the dawn of history with the craftsman of Dionysus. I had an acting coach who wrote the book, Craftsman of Dionysus, fantastic acting teacher. And he was also a college, my master's degree, he was one of my professors. So I want to focus a little bit in this half hour on what you learn if you have good acting coaches and a good continuum of training. And I had the usual in college, four years of college where I majored in French but studied lots of other things. I think a liberal arts education is good for actors and trying all these different kinds of things. We. And then I got a master's degree in theater with a lot of training in technical theater, how to build things and how to knock over the set, all that sort of thing. And then after a brief hiatus of formal training, I studied in England with an emphasis on Shakespeare. And Ibsen. And I think we studied the great American playwrights. Was this at Lambda? No, it was like that. It was the British-American Drama Academy. But the people we worked with were Judy Dench, Richard Johnson, Paul Daynman, Derek Jacobi, Simon Callow, who was Mozart, the original Mozart on stage. So I got a lot of very valuable training. And I have to say that it reinforced my ideas about acting. I learned an awful lot, but it was all in the progression of what I thought was right anyway. And so when you study acting, you have to go in two different directions. You have to do the physical stuff, which is movement, voice, and the physical things that help you get around on the stage. Then you also have to study the intellectual side of acting, which is how to create a character. And you have to understand the play. You have to know what the words mean in the play. You have to know the subtext, what the playwright is getting at. And one expression that I learned in England that I have found absolutely true is that acting is thinking the right thoughts. So whatever else it is, it's a lot of other stuff too. But if you get to the right thought, and you've got the body, and you've got the voice, and you're working with other good actors, then you learn the subtext. The subtext comes to you. The metaphors come to you, which is another word for saying, what are you doing? Are you sticking it to the other person? Are you covering him with honey? Are you seducing? Because everything you do on stage has to be, should be, described in terms of verbs, not in terms of nouns, so much, and adjectives. I find when a director tells me what I am, it pins you down to a moment, which is useless. So this is perfect. I did a, for 13 years I taught a class at Burlington College for film directors, and it was a directing class. And the thing I focused on more than anything was getting them to use action verbs when they spoke to an actor, because they had no idea how to speak or communicate to an actor. They were terrific with the camera, setting up a shot, maybe writing the script, but now they had to communicate what they wanted to the actor. And if you use the verb to be with an actor, be mad, be this, be that, it shuts them down. Because whether you mean it or not, it is perceived by the brain as a criticism. I am not being that. I'm failing. Whereas if I say, Kick him in the ass. Or if I say, Jim, I want you to humiliate this person. That's a very, now that could be, it's gonna look like you are mad or manipulative or something, but I'm not asking you to be something, I'm asking you to do something. And it's interesting because you were saying, your British teachers were saying about the proper thing to think. Acting is thinking the right thoughts. Thinking the right thoughts. And I've never heard that, but I know all my American-based teachers were always talking about what do you want. And that's the same, it's just two ways of saying the same thing. One's a very British way, one's more of an American way. Just what do you want? I want to be recognized. I want to be loved. That's a huge part. I want vengeance. I want power. Whatever it is, if you know what your character wants, the other things will fall into place, which is really fun. Can I throw in, I'll throw in a pitch for, I think one of the best acting texts. There was a, he's passed away now, but there was a coach and director in New York named Harold Guskin, G-U-S-K-I-N. And I met him through Mary Elizabeth Mastron-Tonio, who did The Color of Money with Tom Cruise and Newman and The Abyss about the deep sea stuff. She had a nice film career, but she had a terrific stage career. It's my age, we worked together in Chicago before she moved to New York. But she started working with Harold because he's a private coach. He was Kevin Klein's coach for you for decades. And I was working on something and Mary said, you ought to go check out Harold. He's a really terrific coach. And he worked on a space half the size of this room and you sat and you worked through what the character wanted and he helped an actor figure out a part, which is terrific. But he wrote a book called, if I'm gonna get the title right, I think it's called How to Stop Acting. That's the title of the book, How to Stop Acting, Harold Guskin. And it's one of the best acting books I've ever read, just in terms of talking about, like when you're a young actor and you don't necessarily know what you're doing, you're working with experienced actors or you're going and auditioning, you're dealing with casting directors and they start taking about, oh, he made great choices or he made lousy choices when he did his audition. It's like choices, what choices? What are we talking about? And really it seems so foreign and out there. It has nothing to do with me. So to make it about you, it's just, okay, this could be totally wrong for what they want for this character, even I don't know audition. But I'm gonna make that choice they're talking about, it's just, what do I think this guy wants? Okay, I'm gonna do that. Or I'm gonna make a couple of decisions based on how the text hits me about this character and I'm just gonna let it fly. And I'll bring my own humor into it and my own physicality or wisecrack and whatever it is. So they get to see an interpretation of that written part for the role, but they get to see you too. And they may say, okay, what you're doing is totally, completely wrong, but we love how you did that. Can you do this instead? Make a couple of different decisions about what you think this guy wants or we'll tell you what he wants. And then when they do that, they just wanna see if you're directable, if you can take direction. And sometimes that's harder to learn than just basic choices about developing a role. Taking direction is really, if you have a good director who speaks in those active verbs, like I need you to apologize. There's no apology in the text, but when you go through this, you're apologizing. Can you apologize? Okay, oh yeah, I could, how would I do that? I don't know. And you may come up with something that he didn't or she didn't expect, but if you get the same result, they're gonna go, okay, I can work with this person. Because they get it. That I told you about Jerome Rockwood. We had a course where I think the whole course was based on metaphor. So if you would say to somebody, what are you trying to accomplish in this scene? What are you doing? And the actor would say, I'm persuading her. No, you're not persuading her. You're burning the words into her skull. So everything became a metaphor, which for an actor, that's a gift. That's a million dollar gift. Because it gives the actor the strength to play it with a much more interesting way. They have an image now in their head. Yes, you have a metaphor is speaking in one, about one thing in terms of something else. But yes, it's a physical image, a living metaphor. Exactly. A dead one, he kicked the bucket, that doesn't help much. No, and it's useful too. As you get to know an actor, all of us as humans rely on one of our senses often more than others. Some people are very visual. Some people are very auditory. Some people are very, you know, tensile touch is more. And if you can use that metaphor you're talking about in one of those senses more than another. If you know, if I know someone is, if someone speaks to you and they're always talking about, well, I hear this or I'm listening to, they're always talking about hearing things. That's probably a fairly person who's dealing with life from an auditory point of view. Or if you deal with someone who says, well, I think, well, I'm analyzing, well, my thought is that's someone who's cerebral. Maybe it's another approach with that actor, which if you're gonna direct them. It's fascinating. It's just people skills in a lot of ways. But listening to how people speak and how they move and how they, what they say or what they don't say, will tell you a lot about how you can work with them. I just thought of another one where he says, well, what are you doing? Well, I'm putting my makeup on. No, you're not. You're creating a masterpiece. I'm shaving. No, you're creating a masterpiece. That, it brings the life out of you. So, so strongly. So that's one of the reasons I think I mentioned Jerome Rockwood because as an actor, if some bad director says to me, I want to see more fear. And believe me, these amateur directors around here, that's all you get. You have to translate that. Into an action. And they'll think they directed you into it, but you are countering their direction and coming up with something positive because you can't portray a negative. It doesn't, it doesn't work. One of the things I learned the most from the various teachers that I thought were the best, Julie Bovasso was one of the best teachers I ever worked with in a small acting class situation. She was John Travolta's mother in Stain Alive, no, what's the thing with the dancing? Stain Alive, what's that? I know what you mean, but I can't think of the name. What's the dance show? Yeah, with the disco dancing. Whatever that is. Julie Bovasso was his mother, that character. And she's one of the first pioneers of Off-Broadway, starting Off-Broadway theater companies. But she always used to talk about, and other people I worked with, the reason you need to have a little bit of technique, even if you have basic, good, inherent skills, is that 90% of the directors you're gonna work with have no idea what the hell they're doing. And you gotta be able to say, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, and then save your own skin. Because you don't wanna be openly antagonistic, and you have to understand what their vision is and try to give them that. But usually the way they're going to try to help you is not going to help you. And part of it for me, I know many successful actors who can spend hours in rehearsal talking about what they're doing. They have table sessions with the scripts out, talk. I hate that. Yeah, me too. That's the classroom I say. I hate talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Save it for the classroom. Let's just get up on our feet and let's see what's going on and let's do it. That's why often I've worked with actors that come out of a college drama program and they're still fairly clueless because they have a lot of talking in them and a lot of theory, but they didn't spend a lot of time just on their feet trying it. Try it 300 different ways and see what really makes sense. It's the doing, the doing, the doing, the doing. And you don't really get that until you start working with people who really know what they're doing. I can remember, I've been in different levels, shows that had different levels of success. My first equity job was a tour of the sound of music with Anne Blythe and Jean-Pierre Omont. And Jean-Pierre Omont was a French actor who came to the States after World War II. He was an ex-resistance fighter with the French resistance and became a Hollywood star, but he did a lot of Broadway. He did Tovarish on Broadway with Vivian Lee. Lots of plays, this is back before my time. But he was Von Trapp and Anne Blythe was Maria and they had completely opposite ways of working. Jean-Pierre would come up to you behind. We were in theaters that had, there was all theaters in the round, stages in the round. So we had bombs or vomitoriums to come in. Just picture like a big arena, like the Coliseum. And he'd come up to you right before your wrench and say, hey, how are you doing? What did you do last night? Meeting your girls, blah, blah, blah, all right, let's go and go work. Whereas Anne Blythe, you couldn't talk to her because she was preparing. Both are valid. You learn what actors need, what kind of space or how they like to work. And if you're an actor that needs to really block it out, you just make sure people know. And it changes, of course, the longest run I did was she loves me on Broadway, two years. So I think of two years, eight shows a week. You reach a point where you can go out there on automatic and you don't want to and you get out there and you make sure that you stay involved. But I've just been reading, I'm finally seeing Hamilton next week. Only opened four years ago on Broadway but we're finally taking the kids and we're going to see Hamilton. And I've been reading, of course, I boned up on the album because it's a different, I'm not real conversant with rap as much. And there's a lot of hip hop and rap in this and it's fast. And I knew I'd want to know the show rather than just going cold because my younger friends who have seen it said, some of it goes by so fast and the words are so fast that you miss a lot. Especially with our hearing problems. Yeah, hearing things or whatever. So I've been boning up on the album and there's an annotated, a book that was put out with all the lyrics and Lin-Manuel annotates each of the lyric sheets for each of the songs and talks about where this came from or if this was previously we had done this and it morphed and it changed. And it's fascinating reading that just to see how much it's changed. It's actually a great book for, eventually this is gonna get released so that every college in high school is gonna do this show. I mean, it's, have you seen it yet? No, it's a long story. I've read a lot about it and I don't want to see it, but. Okay, so now that I finally have had the album for a few months, I've been listening over and I know it cold now and I've gone through this book, I realize how amazing it is. It's really quite a, it's a game changer. Like Oklahoma was back in its day with Agnes DeMille and Story and Song and Dance and Script All Integrated. It's that much of a game changer. But it's fascinating, my point in all this is it's fascinating to see how many different influences created their final product. Not just the composer, lyricist, lead actor, Lin-Manuel, but all the other people involved through the workshop processes, through Off-Broadway at the Public Theater, to Moving to Broadway and all of those original cast members, how they individually had a hand in writing that show. Much like a chorus line is the perfect example. Those were dancers telling their story and Michael Bennett made their stories into a show. Unlike chorus line, everybody involved in Hamilton from the original company has a piece of the show, that's also groundbreaking on Broadway. They're gonna make money forever as long as they're alive on their contribution as the original company. I love that kind of story. Dancing at Lunisa was like that. The Irish company pulled that together and Rex Harrison had an awful lot to do with My Fair Lady. I mean, they just worked. I read his book, No Laughing Matter, Serious Business. Serious Business, it's called. But did they give him, did Lerner and Lowe give him a piece of the show? Probably not. I don't remember. That's old school. It's just, I think Hamilton's the first time that that's happened where the actors are created as the original cast who developed the whole thing, are created as contributing members, getting paid with either a percentage or a royalty, however they worked it out. That's pretty cool. I don't know the details on it, I've just been, I know that that's what happened. I've always thought that's the best way to do it. On the other hand, you've got William Siroyan locks himself up in a room and a week later he comes out with the time of your life. But the flesh and blood of the actor contributing, you've got to listen to that. It's very important to pull that off. Yeah. Yeah, with our movie that happened, the one that's playing around now, Made in Vermont, there was a lot of actor contribution to that. And some of those scenes are the, I don't know, the sweetest, the most interesting to me in the scene where, hey, why don't we try that? And they came up with some pretty good stuff. I love it. I love that too. It's really interesting, you know, getting back to being an actor specifically in Vermont, you know, your show gets an audience outside of Vermont. But any, excuse me, any non-small city or metropolitan area, like we are in a very rural state, the opportunities are often much fewer to get involved in theater. And that's where it's really great if you have a passion for it, you know, produce your own. You know, that's like, you do that, that's what I do. I did some shows with established theater companies in our local Mid Vermont area. But they are few and far between. And if you feel like, well, they're doing something really cool, but I kind of want to do this. And nobody's doing this, create it yourself. You have to, and you have to get the phone calls and pull everybody together. And it's really liberating. You know, once you realize, you know, there's no secret to being a producer. There's no secret handshake, you know, to be a director. You just do it. Even if you are not particularly successful when you first start doing it, the more you do it, the more you learn. And then of course, you know, for any younger actors, and we have quite a few, I worked with our local high school up until several years ago. For about 13 years, I directed their spring musical. And I worked with some really talented kids. And some of them were like successful on a high school level. And you could see that they were gonna stretch and definitely do something beyond the small rural Vermont-Harwood Union high school. You know, and a great example I love to use and anyone else who's worked with her loves to use it too is a gal named Shayna Taub. She was about two years ahead of my daughter. And she was leads in the shows that I directed at Harwood Union. And we always felt like we chuckle about Shayna when she was 15. We say, well, Shayna's 15 going on 35. She was already very focused, very mature, very dedicated to doing musical theater. Went through the Tish program at NYU, the acting program, and as a composer and accompanist, a director and an actor. She's done a lot of great work. And her latest gig is writing the lyrics for a new Broadway musical production that's coming now, I think in 2021 of the movie, The Devil Wears Prada. I'm sorry, yeah, that's it. And her composer collaborator is Sir Elton John. So this little kid from Waitsfield, Vermont, there she is. She's the collaborator with Elton John on a new musical. And I is Mitchell, this is similar. Say again. And I is Mitchell, isn't that her name? Yeah, she's from Vermont, right, Hades Town. Actually, Shayna did some of the Hades Town when they were touring that in Vermont years ago. Yeah, I saw the original production at the Berry. So you would have seen Shayna in that. She was one of the sirens, the three sirens. But yeah, so the point is, I know that when I was sort of in with the big league, I suddenly was working with Broadway people or daytime television stars or whatever. After the initial, whoa, am I really here pinching myself? It becomes very matter of fact, very quickly, in a good way. And you realize, of course I can do this. It's just got to put yourself out there. Well, it's also very nice when somebody needs you. That feels really great. When they've just, gee, who can do this? And then the phone rings. And it's just a really cool feeling. It is. And they pay you. Yeah. You know, that's, I like that. That's even better. You know, it's one thing to get the phone call when they're not paying you. Okay, I expect that. Right. It doesn't mean a whole lot. And to be honest, Jim, that's the majority of work in Vermont. Oh, yeah. You know, one of the things we pride ourselves on at the Skinner Barn is that I don't care if it's our intern, everybody gets paid something. Nobody's gonna make a living on it. But everybody gets, you know, a salary. Obviously our equity actors, the union actors have a minimum we have to pay them by contract. But I've always stressed that too. If it's a project you really wanna work on and it's gonna help you develop your craft when there's no money, of course do it if you can. But don't get in the habit of giving it away. You know, if you can work with companies that will pay you, it does great things for your confidence and self-sense as a professional actor, you know. And you feel, I feel a little bit more responsible. Maybe I shouldn't, but I do. I feel more responsible and obligated to the people who hire me when they're paying me. Well, of course. Well, good. I wasn't sure whether I should be or not. No, I think everybody feels that. You know, the stakes are a little higher for everyone. If somebody's like to produce, we just, we usually have a two or three week run of a show. So it's only gonna be 10 or 15 performances with two or three weeks rehearsal at a little 100 seat theater. Most of the musicals that I do at the Skinner Barn over the last, this will be our 20th year next year. Most of them come in somewhere around $25,000 to produce. That's a big chunk of change. That's royalties, costumes, tech people, programs, advertising, paying a director, paying a few equity actors and paying some lesser salary to everyone else. That's a lot of money to recoup for just a 20 or $25 ticket. So it's, when you hire an actor to be in that situation as a producer, right, I expect a certain commitment, you know? This is not, the community theater is fantastic and usually there's no risk from the production point of view. Nobody's put up big money. You have a minute. Oh boy, okay. So here we have been with Peter Boynton discussing theater everywhere, not just Vermont, but Broadway and regional theater. And I did a lot of independent movies, by the way, which was kind of cool, but those were the days. So I'm hoping that you will find this educational and interesting and that you will let your friends come and hear what two old theater people have found worth doing for most of their lives and then end it up in Vermont and we're doing it here. So thank you very much for listening and thank you very much, Peter Boynton, for sharing this with us. My pleasure. And this was the only way I would get you to hear my story. I love it. If I pin you down. I love it. So here we are and thanks a lot everybody and we'll see you whatever I do next time.