Feb. 25, 2011
Second-year M.F.A. acting student Lauren Davis has just performed Hamlet's first soliloquy and now sits on the floor of the Lab Theatre, facing her seven classmates; Associate Professor Gary Sloan; and actor Ted van Griethuysen, their guest teacher for the day.
"What made you choose this passage?" van Griethuysen asks the master's student.
"I love Hamlet's journey," answers Davis.
"What is his journey?" he asks.
Thinking for a moment, Davis answers, "Hamlet has lost his father; he's trying to decide what to do. His journey is the real human journey."
Van Griethuysen nods, then probes more, asking Davis about her own father, talking with the students about his father, then bringing the discussion back to Hamlet and performance. "You can start with the personal, but you must transform the personal into the professional. Use your feelings to get to him."
Then he gives Davis and the class an interesting assignment. "Have you ever listened to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos? Go find them. Listen to them for their meter. That will help you with Shakespeare."
Sloan, associate professor of drama and a professional actor, asked van Griethuysen to teach the Performance Studio class not only because of their close friendship, he says, but also because of "his special depth of experience and insight into performing Shakespeare. That," says Sloan, "and the fact that the students look up to Ted, who is very often appearing in plays at the major theaters in town."
Characterized by his contemporaries as a "great, profound actor," van Griethuysen has won two Helen Hayes Awards for his work with D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre Company. "Most memorably for me," says Sloan, "I've played Hamlet to his Polonius and Mark Antony to his Caesar." Van Griethuysen has appeared in Hamlet eight times.
To watch the casually clad students walk to the center of a large room and gather themselves to become classic Shakespearean characters is to glimpse, in the raw, the process through which actors plumb their own depths for their art. In van Griethuysen it is evident that they find a respectful critic: Through Socratic questioning, disarming and perspicacious personal and professional anecdotes, and brief demonstrations, van Griethuysen - who has played all the great Shakespearean characters and many of the lesser ones - gets to the essence of each student's choice and, ultimately, the essence of Shakespeare.
Van Griethuysen asks, "What is Shakespeare? Not the plays. Not the characters. Shakespeare is how he says it . Close your eyes at a Shakespeare play and you will know what is going on by the language."
"Shakespeare is all about voice. And your voice is the deepest thing about you." Here the actor stands and, through only his voice, becomes mousy, boisterous, angry, and, finally, the sonorous actor, Ted van Griethuysen.
From van Griethuysen's critiques, the Performance Studio students learn about how to harness their own emotions to create a character. They also take away some more universal tips.
"Shakespeare's plays are like one long poem. Become familiar with poems, especially pre-20th-century poems, like those of Matthew Arnold. When you know poetry you know inner drama," says van Griethuysen.
He tells them, "Let your vocabulary grow! I know it's a time of 'tweeting,' but you will be well served by becoming familiar with all kinds of words that carry the meaning.
"Angry. Irritated. Mad. Fed up. Each of those words," he says, "means something different."
Finally, says van Griethuysen, "You can spend your life learning how to play Shakespeare."
Sloan agrees, "They say it takes 20 years to become an actor, but we secretly know it takes a lifetime."