The Great Work

One of my college acting teachers once declared, as she stood before the class holding her open palms up to either side of her face, that “plenty of acting teachers want you to do this:” She swept each hand over her face, as if donning invisible masks. “Watch me do this!” she said, hunching, enclosing, concealing herself with each swipe of the arm, “watch me do this!”

She paused, straightened, eyed us. “I am asking you to do this:” she said, reversing the gesture. “Watch me do this,” She said, gracefully sweeping the invisible masks away into the forgetting air. When I think of it now, the sweep of her arms reminds me of Wave Hands Like Clouds, an isolated piece of Tai Chi we practiced in a later acting movement class, each of us barefoot, dressed in unadorned black, grave of purpose, sweeping our hands across our faces, releasing an invisible cloud into the air, lifting the opposite hand and doing this again, ceaselessly. “Watch me do this,” I can hear her say, and she swept a final hand over her face, and kept them both raised, beatific, radiating total surrender. “To me,” she said, supremely peaceful, “this is what acting asks of us.”

Around that same time, The Jeff committee was caught in the crossfire of the reckoning around Profiles Theatre. The Jeff Committee put out a hasty and general statement on Facebook claiming they would “advise the community” at some point in the future as to whether or not abusive Artistic Director Darrell Cox’s award would be revoked. Publicly, no advisement to the community ever came, even after the theatre shuttered permanently. Darrell W. Cox is still the listed recipient of four Jeff Awards, alongside eleven still-standing recognitions for the disgraced company.

When Charles Askenaizer took home the Jeff this Spring, both moments came back to me.

When Askenaizer accepted his award in absentia, using his partner to address the audience in the first person, he invoked a very familiar narrative — of a suffering so epic it is transformative — of oneself, but especially of the world. He invoked a Jewish grandfather who was “denigrated, dehumanized, [and] lied about,” who “left behind his home and his family to dream of a better world.”

It wasn’t a random reference. It was a mawkish and grifting one, certainly, one which implied a link between Prior’s suffering in Angels in America, the suffering and death of Askenaizer's own family in the Holocaust, and the persecution Askenaizer would have us believe he is currently enduring as a result of his conduct.

Putatively, the invocation was in service of his interpretation of Angels in America. In extending his interpretation outside the play, though, Askenaizer’s speech suggests this framing as something central to his worldview; he sees suffering as inherently meaningful, valuable, and redemptive. There’s a “painful progress” – a phrase he borrowed from Angels in his speech– and it’s clear, to him anyway, that the pain isn’t tangential to the progress: it’s the very means of achieving it.

When a number of actors came forward regarding Askenaizer’s rehearsal room behavior this year, the stories about his directing methods were remarkably consistent. It seems that Askenaizer’s primary tool was to drive actors into more emotionally volatile states in rehearsal through the repetition of intense material, paired with the invocation of the actors’ own personal histories and traumas.

“He would have actors screaming their heads off for five to ten minutes at a time; they would do these very emotionally fraught scenes five, six, seven times– for the entire rehearsal” recounted actor Jack Morsovillo, who worked with Askenaizer on Hamlet. 

Ebby Offord, who played Ophelia, recalled that 

Charles […] would keep me in the dressing room alone with him, and he would ask me to grab his hands […] and push and push and push and push and scream until my throat was raw. And the entire time that I was screaming in his face, he would repeat back to me: “you’re never going to see your father again. He’s never gonna get to hear you sing. You’re never gonna get to hold each other. He’s never gonna hug you. You’re never gonna get to tell him how much you love him.” Over and over and over again until I would get to a point where I would literally physically start breaking down, and then he would push me on stage and expect me to perform the mad scene, and I would do it over and over and over again, some times four or five times in a row before I was allowed to have a break.

Actress Elise Soeder affirmed that, under Askenaizer, “We were expected to emotionally live our characters’ trauma. That’s how he rolls. It is not safe. It is not sustainable, but as someone ten years younger than I am now, I really wanted it to be good.”

As actor Shane Novoa Rhoades put it, “the way I can best describe the way Charles directs is somebody who learned all the wrong lessons from Meisner. He wants everyone yelling, screaming, and crying all the fucking time, because that’s where the “emotional truth” is.”

Morsovillo recounted that Askenaizer named this strategy explicitly, saying, as he recalls, “My job is to get you to have the most emotionally real performance that I can get you to have. To make the play the best it can be.”

In a written statement to Block Club, Askenaizer justified that his methods are “designed to help performers access deeper, more truthful work” and that “This is what good directing looks like. This is how actors are trained to do challenging, meaningful work”. His rationale draws a direct equivalence between the value of the work and its “truthfulness”. In his schema, the more self-evidently “truthful” a performer’s work is, the more valuable it becomes.

The worship of truthfulness is especially reminiscent of Profiles Theatre’s downfall a decade ago: then, it was another hybrid director-star, Darrell Cox, who criticized other actors in the room for “not bringing their real lives to the table. They’re not showing up, they’re not being honest.” The insistence on repetition is also mirrored here, with an actor who worked with Cox reporting “I never was able to get what he wanted right. One night he had me stay till 4:30 in the morning with another actor because we didn’t do the scene right.” The motto of Profiles was, quite literally, “Whatever the Truth Requires".

As I see it, there is a significant epistemological problem with Askenaizer’s justification, and Profiles’ motto: Can theatrical performance ever be classed as the truth, anyway? Even modes like verbatim theatre, pulled from a truthful source, become inherently fictive in their rehearsed retelling. We’re never the thing itself onstage, only ever its simulacrum. Further still, why is the truth even required?

This schema (correct acting equals truth equals total surrender equals meaningful work) is not at all exclusive to Profiles and Invictus. What Cox and Askenaizer represent is an especially pernicious expression of an idea already free-floating through our community and its collective unconscious.

“Why are we concerned with art?” Polish director and theatre Theorist Jerzy Grotowski asks in his 1968 manifesto Towards a Poor Theatre, “to cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness — fulfill ourselves. This is not a condition but a process in which what is dark in us slowly becomes transparent.” Elsewhere, Grotowski clarifies that this process of fulfillment 

is not an egoistic technique based on the actor’s enjoyment of his own emotional experience, but rather the revealing technique of a trance, an integration of spiritual, psychic, and physical faculties climaxing in a “penetration” from and by the actor's intimate instinctive psyche: the actor in the act of giving himself.

Grotowski’s imagery is much the same as Cox and Askenaizer — the sense of the truth being something buried, darkened, obscured by the intractable body, which must be totally surrendered; he describes his work as an “attempt to eliminate [the actor’s] organism's resistance to this spiritual process.”

Grotowski’s designation that this is an inherently spiritual endeavor, rather than a matter of technical skill, aligns his theatrical aesthetics with the practices of religious mystics.

In 1982, after a would-be-assassin’s bullet tore through Pope John Paul II’s abdomen, draining him of three quarters of his blood, he had been rendered, in his words, "half dead and half alive”. In the long months of convalescence that followed, the Pope’s thoughts crystallized around the mystical power of suffering, culminating ultimately in a letter entitled Salvifici Doloris– or, “redemptive suffering”. “Down through the centuries and generations”, he writes, “it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace.”

Indeed, some of the earliest Christian figures came to Revelation directly through their suffering, such as the Apostle Paul, who was stricken with blindness and commanded to wander the desert by God himself. When Saint Francis prayed that he might know the full measure of Christ’s suffering, and his love, Jesus appeared to him, shrouded in flame, and 

streams of fire and blood shot from His wounds and pierced the hands and feet of Francis with nails and his heart with the stab of a lance. As Francis uttered a mighty shout of joy and pain, the fiery image impressed itself into his body, as into a mirrored reflection of itself, with all its love, its beauty, and its grief.

Other Christian figures encountered this immense revelatory pain not once, but over and over. Hildegard of Bingen was beset with visions of God as a pure beam of light throughout her life, during which she expressed “I am constantly fettered by sickness, and often in the grip of pain so intense that it threatens to kill me”.

As Christians came to understand suffering as a potential waypoint to divinity, some of the devout started to seek out that suffering intentionally. In one of the most visceral examples, Saint Simeon Stylites, “endeavoring to realize in the flesh the existence of the heavenly hosts,” exiled himself deep into the desert, to stand atop a meter-wide pillar fifty feet high and open to the elements.  Wrapped in heavy chains, arms outstretched to the sky, he bowed ceaselessly, day after day. A spectator once reported that he “counted 1244 repetitions of this movement, and then gave up reckoning.” In so doing, Simeon sought to “[lift] himself above the concerns of earth, and [overpower] the downward tendency of man's nature, [...] intent on things above.”

In each of these examples, we see pain so extreme it reaches towards ecstasy- a kind of intractable, all consuming pain that tears the soul somewhat away from the confines of the body. In much the same way, Grotowski’s intent “to cross our frontiers, exceed our limitations, fill our emptiness – fulfill ourselves” supplants an ecstasy which reaches toward a divine creator, with a more vernacular, digestible replacement — the ever-elusive truth that Askenaizer and Cox worshipped in the rehearsal room.

The veneration of a “truthful”, self-sacrificial acting technique is by no means the exclusive purview of exploitative storefront theatre directors. Angelica Jade Bastién, in her 2016 essay observes that

For the last few decades, particularly after Robert De Niro’s infamous body transformation for 1980’s Raging Bull, which netted him an Oscar, method acting has become a critical factor in the campaigns of actors seeking trophies. Actors like Daniel Day-Lewis, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christian Bale, and particularly Leonardo DiCaprio have spoken about how they lose themselves in roles—gaining weight, whittling themselves down, never breaking character, taking on accents and hobbies that affect their personal life. The underpinning of this strategy is the belief that to create great art one must suffer.

Yet another author lamented that the Best Actor nominees evince “the tendency to see acting greatness in terms of transformation and misery… Acting becomes a stoic’s routine, a form of monk-like self-flagellation to prove devotion to one’s craft. Lose that weight. Eat that flesh. Take the punch to the face.” The clear pattern is that suffering and the perceived import or validity of the performance are deeply culturally interlinked.

Elsewhere in this issue, Hanna Kime explores theatre’s uneasy relationship with productivity. We like to believe that acting has the power to do something in the world, whether or not the evidence actually supports that claim. There is, perhaps, no more extreme justification for the theatre than a metaphysical one — that the very performance of the work (namely, the suffering) is a world-changing force, even over and above the capacity of the work to consciously change the perspective of a viewer. 

But putting aside a world where we all share the same religion and the same theological frameworks (a world which, needless to say, has never befallen us), the leap from the Pope’s balcony to the stage is a long and uncertain one. Even if you believe, as Pope John Paul II did, that suffering “is the irreplaceable mediator and author of the good things which are indispensable for the world's salvation”, there’s another leap to make to believe that intentionally self-inflicted suffering is an effective author of those aforementioned “good things”. Further still, should we believe that the theatre is a viable means of such mortification? I’m not convinced that this is the case. 

Still, this framework for acting looms large in the back of our minds. Whether or not any of us would explicitly or consciously submit ourselves to a regimen of mortification for the theatre, it’s a seductive enough idea that I think there’s no coincidence that Askenaizer won his award specifically for Angels in America, in which Prior’s illness and suffering is a direct link to the divine, and a force which, in and of itself, has the power to reshape the world. 

Make no mistake: the fact that Askenaizer won the Jeff is staggering. Askenaizer’s rehearsal room behavior is documented: repeatedly, fervently, unambiguously corroborated, viewed online 75 thousand times. There was plenty of time for the Jeff Committee to make a public statement, or withdraw the nomination, condemn even the intimation of abuse in theatre making. But to rebuke Askenaizer, to reject his Theatre of Mortification, would require the Jeff Committee to subscribe to an alternate model of what theatre can do and be in Chicago. In researching this piece, I discovered that the Jeff Committee has no publicly available mission statement. What kind of a vision does the Committee have for our community, or for the world?

It is imperative that each of us name our own positive values for the theatre. Disappointment with the Jeff Awards is not altogether misplaced, but we materially endanger ourselves by reassigning that responsibility to an institution, rather than claiming it ourselves. In the absence of a new prevailing cultural value, the old ones still linger, only now, they’ve slipped loose from their original contexts, and become ripe for exploitation and misappropriation. Mortification is still part of our rhetorical cargo, heavy as ever, sliding totally untethered over the deck.

Positioning acting as something that happens to you, something that necessitates a state of self-forgetfulness, of a separation from one’s own body, rather than as an activity requiring sustained engagement, creates the conditions for exploitation. If we position acting as inherently mysterious and unknowable, there’s no need to justify exploitative rehearsal practices. If we conflate our own suffering as actors with the meaning and value of the work, we create a feedback loop that engenders abuse.