from EDWARDIAN to AQUARIAN: Alvina Krause

Starting to accumulate information about someone on a blog (or in this case two blogs) is not the same thing as writing a book about them.  It’s easy to say,  “write a book” which people envision as one waving a magic wand so “poof” it appears on a shelf somewhere.  One needs to justify writing a biography.  In fact, a thorough search of places and documents means an investment of considerable money and travel.

These are scans of scans rather than transferred code, so they are a little vague which AK was NOT!  

They come from Tom Foral and remind us of AK's favorite teaching story which was about an actress who could summon the sense memory of a rose so vividly that the audience could tell what color the rose was.  The photos were taken at the Bloomsburg home of AK and Lucy McCammon.

Alvina Krause (January 28, 1893 – December 31, 1981) was an acting professor at Northwestern University who taught her own version of the famous “Method,” which used sense memories from the lives of the actors to evoke realistic acting.  That’s not all there is to acting,  First one has to learn lines, follow blocking, make sure to cheat towards the audience, project to the back wall of the auditorium, “land” lines and all manner of other technical things that need to become unconscious, intuitive and second nature.  Beyond that, an eerie and sometimes frightening magic seizes the actor and audience in a trance of belief.

Krause was considered a “star maker” and that’s the way Northwestern University presents her, with a long list of her “stars.”  She herself repeatedly emphasized that to come to her expecting to be made a star was folly.  She told a story about a mother who brought her son, demanding that Krause make him famous.  The silly woman was turned away.  But there were plenty of sons (and daughters) who came on their own, begging to be split open, to get at the heart of their passion or talent or whatever it was inside them that drove them towards this specific art form, a near-sacred vocation.  

Google can lead one in and out of many flammable and burnt buildings.  I’ve read what dead men wrote, secrets and old black mail, and -- if you know how to read between lines written in invisible ink or decipher codes from past eras -- a lot of nonsense and laughable convictions.  For former students none of that has the compelling power of Krause’s handwriting in one of the blue exam books where she scribbled her directing notes.  One glimpse and we’re back in some moment, skewered like an insect on a pin, when insight struck us between the eyes.  Oh!  THAT was it!

A handwriting sample and clip from Foral.  

She liked a small format as is this page which was evidently from a journal or diary notebook.

I’ve been posting all this on two blogs -- actually there are three if you count a fragment that I abandoned early.  They are www.krausenotes.blogspot.com  for those handwritten bits.  www.thesilvercomb.blogspot.com for writing about Krause, much of it mine, I confess, but also notes and articles from others.  The fragment is at http://theplayhouseateaglesmere.blogspot.com  David Downs, a student and working partner of Krause, has also posted on a blog at www.DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com.   David Press’ thesis about Krause’s work is available at the usual Ph.D. thesis source, University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, MI, and Krause’s own Master’s thesis is available through the Northwestern Archives.  I put notes from them on "The Silver Comb" blog.  She did not receive a Ph.D.

People have wondered why Krause was abruptly and forcibly retired from the School of Speech and why no one has ever explained her work in the way that other famous Method teachers have been analyzed.  What is it that made her so effective and meaningful for so many people -- quite apart from any “star system” (an idea that made her snort) and even apart from the theatre, since many of us didn't become actors or directors.  Underlying the politics of the School of Speech and the actions of the university are the dynamics of a great sea-change in the nature of theatre and another deep shift in the assumptions of the larger culture.  The theatre went from realism to surrealism (possibly because of film or possibly because of a world gone absurd) and the culture went from prissy to libertine.

Krause’s lifespan nearly coincided with the 20^th century.  She began her career as a stalwart orator, Chautauqua-style, declaiming great literature for her rural Midwest small town.  Her first teaching job was in Seaside, OR, where she was the gym teacher.  Then began a slow progression up through a small college, then Garrett seminary, and to Northwestern University, by that time under the protection of Dean Dennis, a great favorite on the Chatauqua circuit.  She was technically a teacher of “interpretation” until almost the end of her teaching career, though by then she was staging plays year-round.

The materials on the blogs I shepherd are mostly from the last few years at Northwestern as they transitioned through Eaglesmere, PA to the Alvina Krause Theatre in Bloomsburg, PA, which is another source of information about Krause and her work. (http://www.bte.org) Over the years people tried to question her about her theories and methods, but she was evasive.  There were several interrelated reasons for this.  One was that she really didn’t have conscious theories and repeatedly protested that she just KNEW, she FELT it.  Questions felt like challenges.  In an academic setting she justified her presence in a university instead of a conservatory by emphasizing the crucial importance of history and culture, how it affected a character, how it had shaped the playwright.  Her conviction was that actors could never learn too much.

The Eagles Mere Playhouse in late days.

Photo from Foral.  He is with his mom and sister.

Some students were exploring religion, as is natural at this stage in life, and grappling with some very muscular serpents.  Questions about the core aspects of life were too much for some and there were accusations that her methods were too rough, damaging and belittling.  She was certainly no mollycoddler but the students came begging to be broken open.  It was risky in the way that true creation and art must be to have real value.  Not a pretty pursuit, an entertainment, but a gut-wrenching transformative experience.

Of course sex was part of it.  In those days girls at NU had to sign in and out after dark with a ten o'clock curfew, and the housemother came at midnight to make surprise bed-checks.  If a girl married or became pregnant, no matter the sequence, she had to leave.  A man caught in a homosexual act meant jail, a felony.  Krause was in what is sometimes called a “Boston marriage,” two women in household partnership, a matter of intimacy and trust.  Lucy did not come to campus, but in the summer and on long breaks the two women were together, often traveling.  No one quite believed in lesbian relationships anyway.  But at the other extreme some Method directors and actors at that time felt they had to break barriers and taboos on stage.  One was cautious about being associated with them.

School of Speech professors, who included high school dramatics coaches, speech pathologists, hearing experts, designers of stage lighting, costumers, and other stage technicians, were very assorted in style.  The debate and public speaking people traveled, competed, were half-politicians -- they were the randy ones with opportunities.  Interpretation?  I wouldn’t know.  An undercurrent of lust is always in the hard wiring of a university -- let alone in the euphoric or tortured atmosphere of theatre companies -- no doubt there was worry that it could burst into a conflagration that would consume alumni donations.

Today the School of Speech is gone, replaced by the five divisions of Communication Arts:  Communication Sciences and Disorders;  Communication Studies;  Radio, Television and Film; Performance Studies, Theatre (includes Dance)  Debate and interpretation have disappeared, along with the teaching of high school dramatics which was my actual major.

The division called “Rhetoric and Public Culture” would hardly stutter if presented with problems of sexuality, gender, and all that ticklish stuff.  So why leave that hidden social aspect of the Fifties/Sixties School of Speech unstudied?  What’s still in the closet anyway?

Former students.  Some “out”, some “bi,” some hidden, protecting reputations that control their employment, some just feeling like the Krause years were so intense and so personal that they don’t want them talked about.  And there are, bless ‘em, still people who had no consciousness of any of this.  We’re old now, our partners may be sick or dead, and life is tough enough without questioning what happened in one’s youth.  Some write their own books and include Krause as part of their story.

Former student Joy Zinoman, founder and director of The Studio Theatre, has already spoken of  Krause as a "fierce lesbian" and has been a living example of Krause's other and mostly unremarked major contribution, which is her belief in local repertory theatre like both EaglesMere and Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.

Maybe there’s no place or justification for a book about Alvina Krause.  Maybe it ought to be a play instead.  David Downs took a run at it.  Anyone else?  Or should we just let Alvina Krause fade into the past?  (I do not know who wrote the Wikipedia entry.)

THREE PLAYS: GATEWAYS TO THE PAST -- or future?

I don’t have the kind of analysis subscription in place that would tell me who in Chicago reads this blog, though I know there are some.  Perhaps they will be the most directly interested in this video, since they might attend Looking Glass Theatre productions.  I asked whether the whole productions might be on video some day, but they tell me for legal reasons it can’t happen.  Anyway, there’s nothing like live theatre, which is the whole point.

http://lookingglasstheatre.org/content/node/3560

I was struck that this season includes Marguerite Duras’ “The North China Lover,”  Antoine Saint-Exupery’s “The Little Prince,” and Sara Gmitter’s “In the Garden: A Darwinian Love Story.”  The video above is a teaser triptych by the three directors.  I’d love to see the productions.

But the subject of this post is that though this company is based on a group of Northwestern University students, post-Alvina Krause and in those terms “only” twenty-five years old as compared to my time there (1957-61).  They wished to explore experimental and original works.  Somehow they have come back to three subjects that I first learned about in the late Fifties, right there at NU in Evanston when repertory theatre was only a dream.

Duras

Duras

I came to Marguerite Duras’ work through “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” which is the same autobiographically based story that she returned to again and again.  But that version was entwined with the atomic bomb and the whole issue of peace.  I had never seen such a sexy movie -- the lovers shower together -- nor had I seen eros paired with death so explicitly.  It has never left me.  I watched it again not long ago and I’ve also re-watched “The Lover” several times, but I haven’t read much of her writing.  Maybe I should settle down to a formal study of her work but it would be more fun and possibly more rewarding to rework the Browning Sixties as though they were Saigon, using the holocaust massacre theme.  In my head in those years the images of “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” were very much alive -- it was only a year or so after sitting amazed in the Evanston art house film theatre.

The Little Prince

Saint Exupery

“The Little Prince” is bittersweet to think about.  I still have the book given to me by a dear classmate, not as a romantic gift, so much as a sign of sharing a world, a coded version of a friendship.  That friendship endured a long time, but maybe we’re out of sync now.  It's not ended, really.   Again, much of it echoed a few years later in Browning -- like the fox who comes to discuss what it is to be “tamed.”  Of course, Saint-Exupery  himself was never tamed.  I read his biography and the other books and saw that he was one of those men who needed women as a base port, not a co-pilot.

Charles Darwin

His wife and cousin.

The third story is also relevant since my basic biology education was at NU and my biology lab partner became a very close friend.  He died young but not before major achievements as a law professor and as father of a treasured family.  Still reflecting on bio issues, much of my thinking now is about the “omics”:  genomics, proteomics, epigenomics, culturomics and so on.  I still hear that lab partner’s voice.  The Darwin story is about the dynamics of understanding that have gripped us a long time, but the evolution of the actual animals has been displaced by the evolution of the code that makes them -- and our interventions in the code, accidentally and on purpose.  

Since I often drove the barrel of “our” microscope through the slide we were trying to look at (I’ve always had a problem with focusing) but Bill never did, and since I had the greater manual dexterity at that point (I drew praise from the professor for an angleworm dissection), we made a synergistic pair. We often sat together in the back of the auditorium at Annie May Swift to observe the acting classes of Alvina Krause.  At that point he was thinking of becoming a psychiatrist, so we were preoccupied with issues of identity, human heroism, and cultures that challenge and resist exceptional individuals.  He never shared my interest in religion.

From this vantage point in time, Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin seem to walk in light, but they were all three problematic characters who had to weather a lot of doubt, resistance, and affliction.  None of them were saints and none were religious in any conventional institutional sense.  They were people who took chances, met hardship, made love, and left legacies.  I’d like to be like that.

I never shared thoughts about these three individuals with Bob Scriver or anyone else in Browning.  Both my NU friends came to visit Browning with the high school sweethearts they married.  They were both sons of doctors -- what does that mean?  They didn’t know each other except to pass on campus.  Bob knew them only as my former classmates and they were very curious but baffled by him.  No discussions of the meaning of life.

Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how compartmented my life has been.  I suppose it’s an artifact of moving, not just from one place to another, but from one total context to another -- all of them unpredicted and with nothing obvious in common, and yet the themes and skills I learned from Duras, Saint-Exupery and Darwin have come with me -- the stolons stretching across the continent, connecting rhizomes that were communities of experience.

Maybe it’s a demonstration of how the arts and humanities become like spider silk, trailing along behind one, weaving a pattern.  Or to be more funky, one could speak of the slime trail left by a slug, a kind of excrement in the opinion of some.  When you look it up, slug slime is pretty complicated, implicated in everything from the ability to climb vertical surfaces to assisting sex.  It’s how you use it that counts.

But the “whole point” is the story, the live theatre of all this.  Consider that Ivan Doig was from here, is my age and attended NU at the same time, but in a journalism and history context.  I doubt that he attended that art house movie theatre or that it had any particular effect on him.  His writing is read in Montana, mine is read in Seattle.  His writing is conventional “books,”  mine is blogging.  Our audiences are probably about the same size, but the difference is he’s able to make a living writing and I am not.  But then our lifestyles are also different.  And our writing is nothing alike.  Yet we're both Scots -- maybe I'm more Irish.

If there is someone around here who watches Duras movies, reads Saint-Exupery books, or even thinks about Darwin, I don’t know who they are.  Mere proximity means very little these days.  But if one is “different” and spends the day writing, there are always friends a keystroke away.  There is a lot more to this story.

A PLAN OF ACTION

The idea was simply to type up my notes from the acting classes I took from Alvina Krause between 1957 to 1961.  It’s turning into Pilgrim’s Progress.  The sources I will name now are not morally invested like the symbols in that hoary old book, but they are representative of different points of view that both inform and frustrate attempts at biography or, more pointedly, attempts to describe and evaluate acting methods and the teaching of acting.  The big cyclorama “green-screen” constructed by the media, of course, is the Stanislavsky “Method”  that has seduced so many, promising them fame and fortune to say nothing of passion between the sheets, mumbling pillow talk.

This “blogging” is a way of working that wasn’t possible before the Internet and that will be disconcerting to some and fulfilling to others.  Those who think of this blog as a “Montana” or even Blackfeet source must be braced, but not because I’m going to shocking in terms of revelations and broken taboos. (I DID shut off the “safe search” feature but I’m not making people sign in after a warning that I might talk about sex, which seems to be the only “adult” subject matter.) This is not directly about cowboys and Indians.

I’m working in reference to the thesis by David Press, available like all Ph.D. theses through http://www.proquest.com which is a thesis archiving website.  $37   “A PH.D. THESIS FOR CARNEGIE MELLON ENTITLED "THE ACTING & TEACHING OF ALVINA KRAUSE: THEORY AND PRACTICE”  by David Robert Press.  In the past it has been brushed aside but it is carefully footnoted.  The trouble is that AK had a change of heart midstream.

I’m also working off the notes I took and my memories of the time period, as well as the notes generously posted by David Downs, who was AK’s designated heir as acting teacher in the NU Department of Theatre, defined as stage acting in repertory.   (DavidGoingOn.blogspot.com )  By comparison “Industrial” theatre (I’m thinking mainstream Broadway musicals or film and television) are different.  The kind of theatre now represented by groups like “Looking Glass Theatre” who create their own productions, often from local history mixed with classical mythology and including such things as juggling, puppets or trapeze work, develops out of and -- I would argue -- is a logical continuation of AK’s understanding of theatre as a community within a community. (Sample at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZq5W-hVKaE  Looking Glass has connections with NU, just as it did with Steppenwolf and Second City.)

The much broader and more philosophical department of “Performance Arts” at NU was separated not so long ago, maybe thirty years.  It would include my idea of a person as a performance (which I’m drawing from various psych contexts, including Internal Family Systems Therapy and Gestalt), “flash” performances that are possibly high culture (“The Messiah” at Christmas) and possibly social protest (pouring blood).  These ideas are open to ethnic and highly experimental means, often as technical methods become available -- projecting Mapplethorpe nudes on the sides of buildings in public squares or streaming sequences filmed by children on the tiny screens of smartphones.  

Performance Arts is open to “philosophy of performance” in the same way as  everything spiritual -- whether part of an institution or not -- is open to “philosophy of religion.”  Both are interested in the human creature and how it works.  We know we take in sensory information (some yearn after super-sensory mystical information), do something with it according to our internal structure, abilities and needs -- then act and interact.  Sometimes we are more interested in the individual and sometimes the greater community -- clear up to the most extreme and inclusive patterns that are the cosmos.

My informal (and involuntary) guides for this grandiose enterprise are Brian Rusted at the U of Calgary, who was at Northwestern in the early Eighties when the two disciplines separated, and Robert Benedetti, who was at NU when I was, except that he was mostly in the Department of Interpretation.  I’m bound to get things wrong.  Rusted has been reading my blog for a long time.  Benedetti always terrified me at NU, so I approach him gingerly but he HAS written well-respected books on acting as well as doing a bit of social action in the fine movies:  “Miss Evers’ Boys” and “A Lesson Before Dying,” powerful and much praised films in which he was both producer and actor.  He still teaches acting and is emailing me.

The person you can’t see but who is a strong contributer and provocateur for more, more, more thinking is my close friend, Tim Barrus, who has roots in the wildly exhilarating San Fran days that were crushed by AIDS.  I was a costumer for Eagles Mere.  He was costumer for fabulous, incredible, disruptive theatre.  (If you go researching, remember Wikipedia can be HIGHLY misleading, simply by omission.)  Since 2006 or so, one of my daily tasks has been to find ways to explain a cruel world to street boys by using what I learned as preparation for ministry to nice educated people, mostly prosperous and in families.  Remarkably, sometimes it worked, and NOT remarkably, sometimes they had to explain the world to me.

A big part of arts (and religion) is finding dimension, not getting deflected off into teeny-tiny issues of immediate personal interests.  If all the pain and struggle of learning one’s field and skills is to count for anything, it has to be aimed at the Ultimate.  Not just “love, sweet love,” but also justice, facing the abyss.  (AK would mention Antigone right about now.)

Usually I end these posts by circling around to the beginning, so I will.  AK’s life and work are remarkable because this small town woman (literally “small”) lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression (not to mention the Roaring Twenties) on a major urban university campus without losing her focus or her tenure.  Then in old age she found a way to survive the Aquarian dislocation of the Sixties and Seventies by returning to small town repertory theatre.  (My guide here is Jim Goode of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.  www,bte,com) Surely she still has much to teach us, whether or not we are actors.

And in the background -- oh, they are always sneaking up (It’s a performance art form.) -- are the Blackfeet who were always noted for dream narrative and oratory, ceremonial performances and trickster politics.  When a local female drama teacher (white) was fired for “romancing” her lead actor (enrolled), no one was much surprised.  Happens on university campuses all the time -- always has.  (Yes, even same sex schools. Even seminaries.)  The force for life, for creation, for survival, drives everything.  The difference is that we make plays about it.  Did you know AK wanted to cast Benedetti in a production of “Oedipus”?   I kinda wish it had happened.  The rehearsals might have been more exciting than the opening night.