ACTING TEACHER AS CULT LEADER

From the UK's Telegraph courtesy of AlterNet:

Friends, thetans, countrymen

Put the word on the street that you're writing about Milton Katselas, and every student he has ever had will want to tell you about the best acting teacher in the world, the man who took them from fresh-faced, straight-off-the-plane ingenues looking for work - commercials; God willing, someday a sitcom - to being real artists.

They'll tell you about how he saved them from the failings of the artist's personality, like narcissism and drug addiction, and set them aright. They were born with the talent, but he gave them careers.

But there are dissenters too. Students have left Katselas's school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, because of the unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology, the controversial religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. Nobody ever told them to join, but they could not ignore how many of their classmates and teachers were Scientologists. Or the fact that Milton Katselas, the master himself, credits Hubbard for much of his success. And the assorted weirdness: one of Katselas's students has a day job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, where Tom Cruise and John Travolta study, and one zealous television star left the Playhouse because she said she believed that Katselas wasn't committed enough to Scientology.

Click here for the rest.

I've been thinking about this subject as far back as high school. From time to time I would meet or see theater teachers from other schools at speech tournaments or one act play contests. Some of these people were simply amazing. And I don't mean their teaching ability, which I never really was able to experience. I mean the people themselves. Enormous personalities that entered the room sometimes minutes before their bodies. Extreme devotion from their fawning students. High priests who had secret knowledge of how to create great theater, and who possessed great influence in the high school drama world because others respected and/or wanted such knowledge for themselves. These education theater gods could and did fuck with people's heads.

It used to excite me. Now it just sickens me. Especially after teaching high school theater myself for six years and coming to understand that such behavior is at worst abusive, at best fucking stupid. And especially after realizing that nobody who teaches high school is that important.

But it's not surprising that such charades and charlatans continue to speckle the high school theater landscape in the Lone Star State. All these would-be shamans model themselves after the real deal. Yeah, that's right. You see the same kind of behavior from many acting teachers at both the university level and professionally. I suppose it all makes a kind of sense. The theater attracts enormous egos; the theater is self-important. Of course you're going to find numerous blowhards, both legitimate and illegitimate, coming into positions of power.

And teaching acting is a position of power. Acting, especially at its highest levels of complexity, is vague and esoteric. Everybody gets it when they see a riveting performance; everybody knows when acting is great. What's virtually impossible is to explain why it's great. That makes acting an extraordinarily difficult subject to learn--indeed, my time at LSU working on my master's degree was one of the biggest challenges of my life. I'm very lucky that my teachers were relatively meek and humane in working with me and my classmates--I mean, there were touches of what I'm talking about, but not much. And that's a great thing: acting teachers necessarily toy with their students' psyches. And, to be successful, students must willingly welcome this. It's very tempting to abuse such power.

It's also very easy to get away with mind-fucking acting students, too. If there are ever any complaints, any appeals to higher authority, they are easily dismissed by statements such as "Oh, well, you see, this is my art; it's necessary to do this for my art." Like I said, acting is esoteric, and it's easy to spew bullshit successfully.

Anyway, as good as this guy Katselas is, I'd venture to say that he's walking a fine line. He says he doesn't proselytize, but when you work with students as intimately as an acting teacher must, higher standards are needed. Simple suggestions, offhanded implications, examples, all these things become tantamount to commands in the high stakes autocratic environment of the acting studio. If people are saying there is pressure at Katselas' school to join the Scientologists, it's probably true, even if their master doesn't think so himself.

And this is extraordinarily bad because, you know, the Scientologists are insane hardcore assholes.

It's funny actually. The University of Delaware hosts the well respected Professional Theater Training Program: its Colonel Kurtz figure, renowned acting teacher Sanford Robbins (scroll down for bio here), requires all of his acting students to attend Landmark Education's "The Forum," a series of cult-like psychologically and physically grueling self-help sessions. Indeed, Robbins is apparently on LE's board of directors, which creates an obvious financial conflict of interest that seems to bother no one in Delaware. This situation has the same potential for abuse as the one with Katselas, but it's probably worse, because attending The Forum is a requirement, not a suggestion, and the Hollywood teacher, unlike Robbins, profits in no way from his students exploring Scientology.

Here's the funny part. Landmark Education is what was once called "est" in the 1970s. Est was created by a snake oil salesman named Werner Earhard who literally stole many of his ideas and "educational" practices from Scientology when he was a member in the late 60s. Scientology, of course, hates him, and has responded in typical fashion for some three decades now, suing and harassing him so much that he fled the country in the mid 90s, fearing assassins.

Well, that's what he gets. Now if we can only find somebody to run the Scientologists out.

At any rate, crap like this, along with lots of other crap, is why I'm very disenchanted with institutional theater right now. Bullshit is bullshit, and it doesn't matter that acting is so mysterious. Nobody is my or your superior. American theater really needs to get out of this mire of superstitious condescension.

Because, really, nobody else gives a shit.

UPDATE: Here.

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