Some individuals are advised that they need to lose control, break barriers and strip themselves of old habits. Beginners with no background are told to gain control and fashion a technique. Malleability and an egalitarian attitude are reinforced through the notion that everyone on the talk show, everyone who speaks in the seminars, everyone encountered on the pages of theater history is after the same thing. The Method is just another term for whatever props you up, gets you to the character or enables you to carry out a given task. The students from overseas and those with heavy regional accents take classes in standard American speech.
All students study voice production.
By the time participants have added mask work, stage combat, accents, clowning and variations of style to their repertoire, they are deemed ready to engage in fifteen weeks of repertory. Or they may tuck their membership card away for future reference and seek other venues. In the meantime, those still active at the home base on West 44 th , unobtrusively continue their twice-weekly sessions behind the traditional closed doors. Different moderators comment on the work of longtime members who are in town and wish to bring their intuitive and emotional responses to bear on a piece of selected material. Here they still hold to the credo that the artist is found in the suffering child and it s this kind of vulnerability that taps one s instrument and fuels one s search for truth.