Old Globe Master’s Program Attempts to Make Classical Adults of ‘Television Babies’

From the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Shaw, the great playwrights have had a love of language that reveals itself in mighty, galloping, furious speeches that engage audiences through their minds and emotions.

For instance, from George Bernard Shaw’s “Getting Married”:

“When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your souls. A moment only; but was it not enough? Were you not paid then for all the rest of your struggle on earth? Must I mend your clothes and sweep your floors as well? Was it not enough?”

With the advent of film and television, society’s entire way of life--not just writing--has changed. The word has given way to the image; thinking is being replaced by feeling, and the thought of that horrifies the Old Globe Theatre’s executive producer, Craig Noel.

“We are visually oriented. We have little regard for the written word and the power of that spoken word,” Noel said. “If you listen to the debates of the presidential candidates, well, it’s embarrassing. They’re not (real) debates, of course. They’re all canned, prepared statements they have taken, and they think that is going to get them into the White House by not really discussing anything. I mean, it is a game of avoidance rather than a game of confrontation.”

Today’s young actors, Noel has learned, are “television babies” familiar with the “hem-haw-stutter-stammer-and-scratch” school of acting. Realism they know, but by and large the actors of tomorrow haven’t the faintest clue of how to play Hamlet or even Romeo.

At the annual Juilliard auditions by master’s graduates from the country’s finest acting schools, Noel was hearing “two boys sitting on a beach with the most mundane dialogue. You know, whether they were looking up a girl’s dress, they weren’t all that good, and it wasn’t demanding anything to display what they had learned in a graduate program.”

After years of listening with increasing disappointment to such auditions and fearing that there was no relief in sight, Noel chose to do something about it himself.

Last year, the Globe launched a master of fine arts program in acting in collaboration with the University of San Diego. One of the program’s chief goals is to train young actors in the craft of classical oratory.

The students in the first class, besides taking a slate of academic courses in the classics, study practical applications such as movement, fencing, stage combat and voice. They also perform several plays a semester, primarily from the classical oratory, and will appear in smaller roles and train as understudies for the Globe’s summer season.

This week through Saturday, the master’s candidates are performing Shaw’s “Getting Married” at Sacred Heart Hall on the University of San Diego campus. One of Shaw’s lighter plays, it still forces Noel’s television babies to struggle with the playwright’s elevated speech.

“The language of Shaw and the intellectual concentration one must make in doing all that verbiage is very, very tricky,” Noel said. “They’re long speeches. He has diatribes. He has everyone speaking intellectually. And there are intellectual arguments.

“That is tricky. In order to get the reaction Shaw wanted . . . of either applause, laughter or audiences being outraged, one must take the thing--like one has to do with Shakespeare--by taking one big breath and going.”

The result is a tour de force speech that displays the gymnastics of the actor “by the speed with which he can intellectually go through and make the points and still be able to get to the end of the sentence without taking a breath.”

To gain the desired audience reaction, actors playing Shaw must dig in, Noel said, and do “some real preparation--thinking out the thought process and making absolutely sure that you are saying whatever those thoughts of Shaw are.”

The point of doing Shaw is to teach an appreciation of language and of a theatrical tradition.

“It isn’t just the poetry of Shakespeare or the true classicists,” Noel said, “but it is the prose of playwrights who spend a great deal of their time in the choosing of their words and what they have to say and how they want to say it--Tennessee Williams, O’Neill, Miller, Albee.

“All of these established playwrights have dedicated their life to being a playwright,” Noel said. “They don’t just write haphazardly. They are craftsmen.”