14 - Suler and the First Studio

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.