Orange Coast’s Golson Offers Non-Method Acting

For 22 years, aspiring actors have trooped through Alex Golson’s theater classes at Orange Coast College, learning about the dangers of “California line endings,” the unseemliness of stagy sighing and, Marlon Brando’s scowl notwithstanding, the virtue in a simple, engaging smile.

Now beginning actors elsewhere can share Golson’s insights. They are contained in the 122 pages of a little yellow paperback called “Acting Essentials, or, Just Say Your Lines Like You Mean Them and Don’t Bump Into the Scenery.”

As far as Golson knows, the 40 students in his beginning improvisation class are the only ones using it so far; but its publisher, McGraw Hill, will be trying to get the newly released text, billed as “a practical, beginning acting handbook,” into as many hands as it can.

Early in his career, Golson tried to write an acting text but wound up with a tome that was “just too long and boring and way too complicated and theoretical, and I realized it was against my whole philosophy of acting. It should be kept simple, direct and focused, and not too involved in theories.”

Adorned with humorous illustrations, “Acting Essentials” has the look and tone of the “ ... for Dummies” series of how-to books. The playful approach makes particular sense, the professor says, because students tend to have a hard time yielding to the playful imperatives of play-acting.

Golson says he began noticing the problem 10 or 15 years ago. Students raised on music videos, video games and computers just haven’t had enough do-it-yourself make-believe and imaginative play to prepare them for the focused make-believe of acting. In the old days, Golson says, new students could quickly jump into playing scenes from plays. Nowadays, he spends a good deal of time teaching them improvisation--the art of playing, of making it up as you go along.

While his book is interspersed with standard exercises, Golson says he tried to keep the emphasis on the fun of acting.

Those sneaky “California line endings” happen when an actor gets so relaxed that all the energy drains from his or her delivery by the end of a sentence. While that audible shrug is a stereotypically Californian tick, Golson says it is in fact a universal pitfall. His warning against it is No. 1 one on the book’s concluding list of 25 acting tips.

Tip No. 4, “Never, ever underestimate the power of smiling,” was driven home for Golson in 1972 when he was an Orange Coast student playing King Arthur in a campus production of “Camelot.” He played a dour monarch and bombed, until a more experienced actor friend advised him to smile. The result: a standing ovation.

Tip No. 5, “Usually, one of the worst choices an actor can make is to sigh before or after saying a line,” comes too late to help Al Gore, who may have sighed away the presidency in his first debate last year with George W. Bush.

Golson, who earned his bachelor’s degree from Cal State Fullerton and a master’s in drama from UC Irvine, credits UCI professor Robert Cohen with helping him land a publisher. Cohen, whose college texts on theater and acting are among the most widely used in the nation, introduced Golson to his own editors at Mayfield Publishing Co., a subsidiary of McGraw Hill. So far, Golson hasn’t heard of any other teachers using “Acting Essentials,” not even his younger brother, Rick, also a theater professor at Orange Coast.

“I’m trying to get him to use it, but there’s always a little academic jealousy,” he said lightly.

Meanwhile, Golson is scheduled to direct a good chunk of the season at Orange Coast, including Romulus Linney’s “Sand Mountain” (Nov. 30-Dec. 9), Shakespeare’s “A Comedy of Errors” (Jan. 24-Feb. 3) and “John Brown’s Body,” based on the poem by Stephen Vincent Benet (May 2-12).

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What’s a fit use for the home of a legendary Shakespearean actress? The docents at the Helena Modjeska Historic House and Gardens, a county-owned national landmark, have decided that a seminar in Shakespearean acting will do proper honor to its original resident. Modjeska (1840-1909), a Polish emigre, was one of the great international stage performers of her time. On Nov. 10, the first in a hoped-for series of acting seminars will take place at Arden, the home she built in Santiago Canyon and named after the love-enchanted forest of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” John-Frederick Jones, a drama instructor at Chapman University and Irvine Valley College, will teach the daylong seminar. His directing credits include an illuminating “The Taming of the Shrew” last year for Shakespeare Orange County. Jones says it is geared for actors and for non-acting Shakespeare buffs who want to learn a bit about bringing the Bard’s texts to the stage. Participants also will get a guided tour of the house from Modjeska herself--as played by Marcia Bonnitz of Fullerton’s Vanguard Theatre Ensemble. The program costs $50. (714) 546-5920 or john_laurel@surfside.net.