Drama in Court : Lawyers Learn There’s a Method in the Way to Act in Front of a Jury

The first time around, the grim, young Los Angeles attorney mumbled his way through cross-examination, his voice falling with each disjointed question. The jurors’ attention wandered. The hostile witness seemed in control.

But this was a workshop, not a real trial. So the blond, mustachioed lawyer got another chance.

This time, at the instructors’ urging, he adopted another persona. Now he was a Marine drill instructor--shouting his questions, jabbing and pointing with a make-believe riding crop, circling the witness like a voracious shark about to swallow its prey whole.

The witness broke down, admitting she had lied on the stand. The jury broke into wild applause. The blond lawyer--finally smiling--said he felt “really good.”

Courtroom Theater

The theatrics this week in the coffered-ceilinged moot court room at the California Western School of Law were just that. More than 60 lawyers from throughout the country spent a day studying with a troupe of three Hollywood pros who believe that the techniques and attitudes of the actor can make lawyers more effective in court.

Call it The Method Meets O’Melveny. Call it The Bard Meets Black’s Law. Call it life imitating art. Whatever you call it, the “Applied Theatre Techniques” program of Los Angeles’ Free Association Theatre seems to work.

“Attorneys spend all their time in a two-dimensional vocabulary, reading and writing. But when you go into a courtroom, you are catapulted into three dimensions,” explained Alan Blumenfeld, the veteran television, stage and movie actor who directs the program. “Your skills are the knowledge of the case and the knowledge of the law. But to make the jury interested, you have to communicate an involvement in the case.”

Breaking Habits

In their one-day road show, and in longer programs they conduct at the USC Law Center, the actors of the troupe try to arm lawyers with skills that galvanize a jury’s attention while breaking them of the moldy, uninspired habits that leave jurors yawning.

They make attorneys listen to language, helping them strip their vocabularies of bilious legalese and build into their speech the inflections and music that maintain interest in the spoken word.

They wrest from lawyers the inhibitions that prompt too many advocates to leave their personalities and humanity at the door of the courtroom, recommending instead that the attorneys let jurors and judges see the humor and emotion that make them people, not pettifoggers.

What the actors don’t do is teach the gestures and vocal tricks associated with melodrama or old-fashioned oratory. And they don’t teach lawyers to act.

Different School of Acting

“A lot of people still have the misconception: ‘What are we going to do, put on leotards and do Stanley Kowalski?’ ” said Blumenfeld, who has a featured role in the current Barry Levinson film “Tin Men” and has appeared on “Family Ties,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Cheers,” “The Golden Girls” and other television series.

“We don’t teach them how to impose an actor on themselves,” said the rubber-faced character actor, explaining that the program’s roots are in the Method school of internalized acting developed by Konstantin Stanislavsky in the early 1900s. “We want them to bring all of themselves to the courtroom.”

The San Diego sessions, part of an 11-day training program offered by the National Institute for Trial Advocacy, offered a practical demonstration of the troupe’s thesis.

The lawyers’ day began with a series of relaxation exercises and vocal warm-ups designed to develop self-confidence and more powerful speaking skills. They practiced articulation, exaggeratedly squeezing their lips together and blowing out vowel sounds, filling a classroom with barnyard lowing. They practiced inflection--the use of rising, falling and sustained cadences in speech to hook a listener’s interest.

How to Convince a Jury

“You go into court and you want 12 people to be created into a single audience that will believe your story,” explained Joshua Karton, an actor-writer who develops the troupe’s curricula. “What you’re learning with this is a technique whereby your story ends where you want it ended--and not one minute before.”

As the day went on, the lawyers were sensitized to language by an exercise requiring them to craft an opening statement in an imaginary case using no more than 10 well-chosen words. They asked questions in French and Spanish and gibberish, just to listen to the sounds of their voices. They prosecuted Goldilocks for breaking into the Three Bears’ house, so they could ignore the substance of the proceedings and focus on the precise use of language.

The lawyers were transfixed. “I want to be in trial--that’s the only thing I want to do,” said Joseph Dicks, a young associate with Gray Carey Ames & Frye, San Diego’s largest law firm. “I fully intend to follow up with these folks.”

In Los Angeles, law firms have hired the actors to assist in trial preparation--coaching witnesses and lawyers in communications skills, helping the lawyers trim fat from their opening and closing statements and focusing the attorneys on the visceral, emotional elements of a case.

“As a practical matter, the courtroom becomes a stage and the jury is the audience,” said Michael Blumenfeld (who is not related to Alan Blumenfeld), a Century City lawyer who credits the troupe for helping his firm win a hotly contested fraud trial last year. “To exclude the possibility of the theatrical in the course of a jury trial is going to be a major error for any lawyer.

Karton, Blumenfeld and his wife, writer-actor-director Katherine James, have developed the applied acting program over the last seven years.

Began by Teaching Docents

After working together at the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, they began an acting program for museum docents designed to heighten the interest of guided tours and teaching presentations.

An acting teacher pointed out that lawyers could use similar advice, and the segue was easy. After all, trial lawyers, finding that traditional techniques don’t get through to the media-blitzed juries of the television age, have increasingly made use of a range of novel methods to reach jurors--from videotapes to overhead projectors to in-person reenactments of crucial events.

Using the Method in court seemed a natural next step--and one the most successful trial lawyers seemed to have figured out on their own.

“The great lawyers could have gone into show biz,” said Associate Dean Lee Campbell of the USC Law Center, one of the troupe’s key patrons. “There’s a set of behaviors most of us don’t have naturally, and we have to learn them from Alan Blumenfeld.”