Helping Actors Make Each Time the First Time

The New York Times - Tuesday, May 14, 1991

By MERVYN ROTHSTEIN

It was, says Mike Nichols, the only time he was ever cruel to an actor. The year was 1976, the play was David Rabe's Streamers at Lincoln Center, and the actor had been playing his role for three months when Mr. Nichols came by to take another look.

“It was all beautiful, poetical, mechanical,” Mr. Nichols says. “So I said: 'Listen, what do you think your job is? To learn the words? The usher can do that. Your job is to say them for the first time. Each time.”'

Mr. Nichols is talking about acting, and he is talking to actors. The actors in question, however, are not Meryl Streep and Carrie Fisher of Postcards From the Edge, his most recent film, or Harrison Ford and Annette Bening of his coming Regarding Henry. They are a group of about 40 students in a studio classroom at the New Actors Workshop, a school on West 30th Street in Manhattan.

But the technique Mr. Nichols uses as a teacher of these performers in training can provide an insight into the methods by which the 59-year-old director has won Tony Awards for The Real Thing, The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Prisoner of Second Avenue and Plaza Suite, an Academy Award for The Graduate, and high praise for many other movies and plays.

His reminiscence about Streamers has been presented to an actor who has offered two monologues from the novel “The Subterraneans” by Jack Kerouac, two pieces about loneliness, depression, sexuality and betrayal. And it is clear that Mr. Nichols thinks there is room for improvement in the effort to make Kerouac's words sound as if they are being said for the first time.

Personalizing the Action

Tell us, Mr. Nichols says to the student, about a time in your life when you were betrayed.

“Which time?” the student asks. Everyone laughs.

And then he tells of when, behind his back, his high school girlfriend, Allison, took up with his best buddy.

“Now,” Mr. Nichols says, “tell us the story you've just told us, but use the words of Kerouac. Do it right now.”

The student begins the monologue again. And it is better. Just a little, but better.

The method Mr. Nichols is using is the one he chose for the Streamers actor 15 years ago, and part of the Method Mr. Nichols himself learned as a student of Lee Strasberg in the 1950's: relating the role to personal experience. Or to use Mr. Nichols's catch phrase: “This is like when I...”

(The phrase, he will say later, is his own rephrasing of one of Strasberg's basic principles, a tool for analyzing the text rather than actually playing the scene, a way of animating the text with one's own thoughts and associations.)

“Here's the main thing,” Mr. Nichols says to the students, interrupting the stream of Kerouac consciousness. “When you were telling us your story, you didn't know what you were going to say next. You have to use that idea. You have to really be thinking about the Allison narrative, not the generality.”

“We have to be careful,” the director adds, “especially if you have beautiful words to learn, that we don't learn them beautiful. Because when you're telling us about Allison, some of it is funny and some of it is embarrassing and some of it is dumb and some of it you skip and then you tell a joke.”

You have to tell the Kerouac in the same way, he says, “to break up this lock of the beautiful prose.”

The second-year students in Mr. Nichols's three-hour Thursday-night class take turns performing and observing, while those in their first year only observe.

After each scene, the one or two actors involved pull up chairs on the studio's small stage, face Mr. Nichols, describe how they prepared for their roles and listen to his critique. Above all, he is gentle. He is quick to praise a good performance but does not hesitate to find ways in which it can be improved or to criticize one that is not quite up to his standards.

Learning by Teaching

Mr. Nichols's relationship with the students appears to be open, natural and friendly. They, for their part, do not seem to hold him in any kind of awe. They approach him eagerly before and after the class, as well as during a break, full of questions, thoughts, experiences.

“Mike doesn't let you put up a cover,” says Pamela Dubin, a member of the class.“ He talks to us about other directors, his own career, his own experience. And you get self-confidence when he tells you that your instincts are right.”

Mr. Nichols says he loves teaching. “It's a good way to find out what you think,” he says later. “I've seen these kids every Thursday for two years, and what's happened is quite exciting. I try to teach them to be physically expressive and free so nobody perceives any acting going on.”

In his Kerouac critique, Mr. Nichols offers the student a rehearsal suggestion. “Slip it into a conversation to see if you can get away with people not noticing,” he says. “Because the difference between the way you talk to me and the way the guy that learned the Kerouac talks is not large, but it's very palpable.”

“And all the time that you're preparing it,” he continues, “you have to keep bonding every thought to something in your life, in you.”

“Here's the best part of it,” he tells the student. “You can tell stories about yourself that you'd never tell anybody. You can tell the worst things that ever happened to you. It's great. You can tell them in detail and nobody will ever know. Because nobody knows what you're thinking.”

The job of the actor, Mr. Nichols concludes, “is to fool us. If you can fool us completely, then it's done.”

He looks at his student and smiles. “Come back,” he says, “and fool us.”

Picture at top is of Mike Nichols, center, teaching a master class at the New Actors Workshop.
Photo: G. Paul Burnett, The New York Times.

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