ACTOR VS TEST PILOT: THE SAME STRESS

Everyone knows about stage fright, but what is going on inside the actor during the performance? A Munich researcher reports that actors on stage display the stress levels of test pilots.

Helga Weissmeiler of the University of Munich’s Institute of Theatre Studies monitored several actors’ pulse rates during rehearsals and performances, and found that they went as high as 175 or more a minute during monologues. Readings this high had previously been observed only in test pilots during takeoff and landing, she said.

The stress-hormone content of the actors’ urine confirmed their high pulse count. All this from a report in “Chemical and Engineering News,” reprinted in Actors’ Equity News.

One would like to know more. Was Weissmeiler monitoring experienced actors or beginners? (All acting teachers stress the importance of relaxation on the stage.) Isn’t it a little grandiose to compare actors with test pilots? Don’t athletes display comparable stress during a game? And doesn’t it have its pleasurable side: the rush of high performance?

The test-pilot analogy has its truth, though. Everybody knows it takes actors a couple of hours to come down from a show. Particularly a good one.

This should cause some stress to those who point to Germany as the model for government arts subsidy: There’s concern there that state- and city-funded theaters and opera houses are spending too much money.

The current Variety reports that a study by the German Stage Assn. indicates that a $10 seat at a theater or a opera house may have from $30 to $90 of public money behind it.

And the budgets go higher every year. City support for the Cologne Theatre was $9 a seat 20 years ago. Today it’s $62 a seat, a jump of almost 700%--far higher than the general cost-of-living increase over those years.

“Authorities here are pondering whether it would be possible to ‘go public’ and ask the theater-goers and opera fans either to pay a higher ticket price or to subsidize the houses with private contributions,” Variety’s correspondent from Hanover, West Germany, reports.

Again, one would like to know more. Which authorities? Is there a move to do away with subsidies entirely? A group of German mayors visited Los Angeles a couple of years ago (including the mayor of Cologne) and were agreed that support for the arts was a fine and civilized use of public money.

More from Germany: the Berliner Ensemble is coming. Not to the United States, but to Canada. Brecht’s famed theater company will present his “Caucasian Chalk Circle” and “Threepenny Opera” at Toronto’s Royal Alexandra Theatre Oct. 21-25. The company will be headed by the legendary Brechtian actor, Ekkehard Schall, and Brecht’s daughter, Barbara, will also make the trip.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Ekkehard Schall, in the current New Theatre Quarterly: “All art is fiction, but we ought to forget that.”