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Introductory Note 2017
I wrote the following piece in 2000 but, what with one thing and another, ended up setting it aside. This year, 2017, isn’t any particular
anniversary of George’s, but what I wrote about him here rings a personal bell for me as I go through another period of loss, and the way he taught still deeply informs and
enriches my long thinking about training for the theatre. As I’ve said for a long time, indoctrinating students of the theatre into an acting Method or a critical jargon
can’t replace giving them the foundations they need to develop their own creative approaches. So the kind of education the piece describes is all but vanishing, and the
theatre it engenders is all but vanishing with it...
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Introduction 2000
I had already been performing for many years when I got to U.C. Berkeley in 1975. The Dramatic Arts Department I went through there hasn’t
existed for years now. But at that time, their program was based on the notion that acting, directing and scholarship were completely inextricable from one another. An actor or
director simply could not thrive in his work if it weren’t historically informed and grounded in scholarship; likewise, a theatre scholar’s work didn’t make sense
without practical experience in training, rehearsal and production.
It was in that context that I met George Stillman House. Years later I was to dedicate my
doctoral thesis to him: "In Memory of George Stillman House/ Dramatist, dramaturge, demiurge/ Actor, director, teacher/ My extraordinary collaborator and friend."
I love the passages in Stella Adler’s newest book in which she talks about her scholarship. "When I go to California, I am a great celebrity—big star. Why? Because
Stella is the only one who talks about Chekhov. The others talk about the movies. They talk about "Star Wars" and I talk about Ibsen. Everybody sits down and talks about
the latest movie, how many millions it will make. But they say, ‘Stella, tell us about Strindberg.’ I get to be a star in a different way" (1999:81). Later on she
writes, "I am a student by nature. I am a scholar as well as an actress. This side of me has made for a great deal of progress in my life. I hope it does in yours"
(1999:195).
I especially enjoy passages like this because I was still young when I was first told that actors needed to conceal any higher education they’d completed.
And that this was especially true for women. This concealment is, of course, utterly ridiculous, and bespeaks a profession unworthy of serious consideration.
Under the
tutelage of my talented and inspired teachers, I fell madly in love with THEATRE HISTORY in that program, and with what it felt like to act and direct when I was grounded in the
history and the literature. It felt completely different! Clear, powerful, meaningful, generous. And the solitary study it required made a good balance for me with the public
nature of acting. I come alive in a different way in the Library Atmosphere, blossom with Research Energy.
From 1975 to 1987, I was mentored in my scholarship and performing
by Robert Goldsby, George House, Dunbar Ogden, William I. Oliver, Marvin Rosenberg—and by the incomparable Peter Selz in Art History. All are now emeritus or no longer here.
Bob, Dunbar, Peter—I am grateful that they are still now an absolutely integral part of my life [still true in 2017 – LTR].
My professor George House was closest
to me in age, and we were neighbors, and were soon cooking gourmet meals together and going to rare plant sales. For ten years, we acted together and for one another; we directed
together and for one another. I studied in his history and criticism seminars, in his directing classes. He tutored me through my written exams and my foreign language exams; he
chaired the committee for both my oral exams and my written dissertation. We shared our libraries. That is, we were best friends.
In late August of 1985, we opened
rehearsals for George’s production of Thomas Otway’s "Venice Preserved," for which I was ecstatic to be cast as Belvidera. On the morning of September 21st,
George stepped into my car, looked me in the eye, and dropped dead in my arms, of a massive heart attack.
This last October 1st marked the 15th anniversary of the Memorial
Service we held for George in the Zellerbach Playhouse of the University of California at Berkeley—on the same stage where we’d worked together for such a long time.
O’Neill scholar/producer Travis Bogard spoke at the memorial as George’s teacher and employer; actor/director/scholar William I. Oliver spoke as his colleague both
on- and offstage; designer/teacher/writer Henry May spoke as his designer. I spoke as his student and actor.
I am convinced that the only reason an actor or director
wouldn’t study theatre history is that he or she had never had any contact with George House. Therefore, what follows is the text of my memorial speech—which is mainly
made from his own lecture notes—in the hope that it may infect all readers here with George’s contagious, titanic passion for theatre history as a path to performance.
Memorial Speech: George Stillman House 1943-1985
This is George’s advice to the directing students:
Qualifications for a Director
A director must have an EYE: a sensuous and sensitive appreciation of color, shape, form, texture and light: be knowledgeable in all areas,
epochs, styles and ideas of Art History in the Western World and the Orient. A director must have an EAR: a sensuous and sensitive appreciation of the qualities of sound, tempo,
and rhythm of speech and music; be knowledgeable in all forms and styles of music in the Western World and the Orient. A director must have a MIND that has mastered astronomy,
astrology, social and political history, customs, manners and morals, architecture, archeology, botany, biology, zoology, geography, gastronomy, psychology (normal, abnormal and
para-), the Tarot, and the I-Ching. S/he must be as patient as Job, as compassionate as Mother Teresa, as strong as an ox, as wily as a fox, as brave as a lion, as ruthless as
Genghis Kahn, and as warm and sensitive as Alan Alda.
As I started going through the notes that George had made for his lectures, I was comforted by bits and pieces of phrases that were so familiar to
me:
Grotesque, horrifyingly beautiful, mosaic, irony and wit, the bedrock of material love beneath the glittering surface of hedonistic liberalism,
depravity, illusion of perfection, falseness of ideals, ambiguity of experience, images of the mind made manifest.
George was my personal, literary, artistic, intellectual, academic, spiritual, aesthetic and mystical teacher for ten years. For this occasion, I
can only try to give you a sense of the noble mind that is here o’erthrown. George was very good at talking about the chaos of man’s experience in a very organized
fashion. He seemed to live somewhere between the exotic and anguished worlds of Van Gogh and Artaud, and ours; he had the courage to grub around with their visions of death and
insanity—and then the generosity to articulate what he knew to his students with vivacity and sensibility.
From his own lecture notes, I’d like to take you on a
hop-skip-jump journey through George’s exceptional vision of dramatic history. For those of you who have studied with him, I hope that the sound of his words will comfort
you—and for those who have not, please imagine the large, pink, sometimes rumpled, always elegant, brilliant and very generous man who spoke these words.
On Greece
The polis, the community of the Greek world was hacked out of hostile, aggressive forces in the world. It functioned as salvation and refuge.
Ovid was exiled to somewhere in the Black Sea and wrote back pathetic letters saying he felt "like a fish frozen in the sea." The end of "Oedipus" praises
Athens as a great treasure. Nature is still the darkest terror of all.
On Seneca
Nero was emperor and Seneca his tutor and a kind of prime minister. For a while the Empire ran smoothly and the provinces prospered, but after
about five years the boy emperor started to get a strange glint in his eye when he saw somebody rich. He started to do things like order you to kill yourself and leave everything
to him in your will. I won’t bore you with his crimes, which were not as severe as later propagandists let on—he did kill his mother and kick his second wife to death
when she was pregnant. His worst crime was probably aesthetic: he played the lyre and sang his own verses and everyone had to listen and applaud. But things got bad, very bad in
the capitol. It was the Terror. Seneca tried to hold off the inevitable by retiring from public life and willing all his considerable wealth to Nero—but finally the order
came—the knock on the door, the imperial Gestapo. Seneca was allowed to die. The description of his death in the historian Tacitus has a strange, exhausted, numbing quality
that is curiously similar to the atmosphere of his plays, the endless duration of pain [note: read Tacitus]. That was the year 65. Seneca was 75 years old.
On Medieval Drama
The medieval play texts that we have are coeval with the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the burning of Joan of Arc, the voyages of
Columbus, the poetry of Chaucer and Petrarch, the painting of Jan van Eyck; coeval with the unsurpassed splendors of the Italian Renaissance, Brunellschi, Fra Angelico and all the
rest. Those plays continued to be performed for almost 200 years. They went out of fashion and were suppressed in the 16th century, but not before they doubtless had a chance to
teach and delight, edify and dazzle two youngsters by the names of Shakespeare and Marlowe.
On Shakespeare’s "Much Ado About Nothing"
Since it’s probably impossible to do any script of Shakespeare’s in a way that has never been done before, I wouldn’t try, but
rather find from the text whatever hints and suggestions I could. But I would also listen to the voice of my own taste and sensibility. What would I like to see up on stage? What
would I find beautiful and interesting and appropriate? (This is not an admission of hubris, nor is the process itself hubristic. That is the way it works. As Mr. Tyrone Guthrie
said once, if you do it badly often enough, they won’t ask you to do it again—so go ahead.)
On Racine
The Theatrical Event as an archeological expedition: I like museums. Far from being dead places, I find them intensely alive: absolute
tranquility, but with the potential for infinite movement if I choose. And if I am going to make theatre, I should stop apologizing for what I like. I once found sufficient
inspiration—I thought—for a production of Racine’s "Bajazet" in Keat’s "Ode to a Grecian Urn," but was told that theatre was not a
Grecian urn.
On the Family of Louis XIV
1661. A Sunday. The Queen of Spain, Dona Marian retires to the Tower Chamber with birth pangs; she has with her three thorns from Christ’s
crown, a fragment of the cross, a piece of Our Lady’s mantle, et alia. Six of the eight children she had were born dead. Margarita was born as her mother had a severe
epileptic seizure, but Carlos was born "most beautiful in features, with dark skin, and somewhat overplump." Charles V was a backward child, subject to fits—he had
a jaw so deformed he could not chew the enormous quantity of food his gluttony demanded, and so had chronic indigestion. Isabella is the one who staked Columbus, and who was the
mother of two emperors, two queens of Portugal, a queen of France, Denmark, Bohemia and Hungary. Phillip II was called prudent because he could never make up his mind--he married
four times: two wives were cousins, one an aunt, one a niece. Phillip IV smiled three times in his life.
On Continental Drama
Goldsmith was an essayist, dramatist, very ugly, and an inveterate gambler who dropped out of college to bum around Europe. Beaumarchais invented
some little gadget in the watch which is still used. Schiller got himself thrown out of his military academy and had his allowance taken away. [At the end of his notes on
“Faust,” George asks:] Can Good come of suffering? Why were we born? To love and want? Never to be fulfilled? Or when offered what we feel is fulfillment, only to be hurt and maimed by that very desire that is supposed to be the Glory of the Universe? It will take a very long new poem to attempt to work that out. (The poet is insatiable and relentless.)
On the Well-Made Play
Alexandre Dumas, pére, fathered an illegitimate son, was a flamboyant playwright, novelist, gourmet and author of a famous recipe for potato and
truffle salad. The song of the age: a whore singing herself to death in Paris. The theme of the age: the community of meaning that leads from the elegant, erudite entertainment of
Scribe’s "Glass of Water" with its jewel-like mechanism, a graceful cynical machine for temporary pleasure to the florid covert parable of "The Lady of the
Camellias,” with its middle-class heartbreak and romance vindicated, to the good sense and righteous pomposity of "Olympe’s Marriage" and its titillation, to
"Heartbreak House" and the decimated cherry orchard, to the Great War—the obligatory scene of the age.
On the Early French Moderns
Let’s examine two schoolboys—Arthur Rimbaud and Alfred Jarry. Adventures of the mind are the extremist revolt against the conditions
of everyday life—but in the end, they reached strangely different yet complementary answers to the symbolist decadent impasse—not the death-devoutly-to-be-wished of
Tristan and Isolde, not the liebestod of Salome with her John the Baptist—not the mythic evasion, or the shimmering mood of transcendence glimpsed through failure in the
world of too much presence, as in Strindberg--here, the end is life, transformed. A quote from Rimbaud’s Latin poem at the age of 14—"O glory of flesh! O
ideal!" The atmosphere of “Ubu” is exactly complementary to the atmosphere of Mallarmé or Maeterlinck: Let’s apply some mythic, psychoanalytic criticism,
shall we, boys and girls? Hmmm?
I’d like to end my part of this memorial with George on the 16th century Italian pastoral. George tells us this is drama in which the main
part of the lover’s day is given over to entreating, sighing, longing, expecting, praying and serving. In the pastoral, when union between lovers is achieved, all of these
activities begin to diminish. Love is always either increasing or decreasing. Since my friend-and-teacher George left without me, before my service to him was complete, my love for
him will always be increasing.
When we worked together on the 16th century English "As You Like It," George and I channeled this notion of the sadness of love into
Rosalind’s "Bay of Portugal" speech. The members of the Shakespeare convention who attended the performance knew this speech as a celebration of love. But George
saw in it a celebration of longing, and of the lyric existence: the song of loss, of love without hope. That song now sounds to me like our loss of George. This is the song as
George taught it to me:
"Oh coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath
an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal. No, that same wicked bastard of Venus that was begot of thought, conceived of spleen and born in madness, that blind rascally boy who
abuses everyone’s eyes because his own are out, let him be judge how deep I am in love. I’ll tell thee, Aliena, I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando. I’ll go
find his shadow, and sigh till he come."
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