Online NewsHour: Michael Kahn on Acting -- September 2002



	MICHAEL KAHN ON ACTING
September 2002

The Shakespeare Theatre's Artistic Director Michael Kahn

Arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown interviews Shakespeare Theatre Artistic Director Michael Kahn. In this section, Kahn discusses his opinion on the most challenging aspect of teaching acting.

Part IV: Kahn discusses his reasons for creating the Academy for Classical Acting.

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JEFFREY BROWN: So you've been doing this a long time. What's the hardest thing to teach?

MICHAEL KAHN: Trust, both in the other actor and in yourself. And to get over the desire to be right, to be good and to please someone else.

JEFFREY BROWN: Because actors want to please?

MICHAEL KAHN: Human beings want to. We all want to do the right thing so someone will tell us it's okay. But the truth is an actor has to just work on their process and not try to please anybody.

JEFFREY BROWN: You were, you said to them that you want to be, you tend to be...frank.

MICHAEL KAHN: Mm-hmm.

JEFFREY BROWN: Not cruel, I think, but clear.

MICHAEL KAHN: Mm-hmm.

JEFFREY BROWN: This is a very kind of raw, open experience that they're opening themselves [up to].

MICHAEL KAHN: Well, having been through it, you can't tell somebody to be open and available and honest and then just kill them when they are. So the question is...

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, you could.

MICHAEL KAHN: You could, and there have been teachers who are, and I feel they should be certainly denied the ability to teach if there aren't worse punishments for them. But I think that the best kind of teacher is one who enables the actor to in a way teach themselves; that when they leave you, they have to have a way of working that you've helped them go to, or that they have discovered with you. So you try to point out all the things they do that block them from the fullest expression of their talent and give them some tools to help it.

I think I teach certain things the same way with everybody, but I think I'm very sensitive to each person, so I think I teach differently when all is said and done to each person that comes along, and that's the way I direct, too, so...

JEFFREY BROWN: Again, to the outsider watching this, these people were just meeting you for the first time--

MICHAEL KAHN: Absolutely, I think they were very courageous to get up and act for each other today with, I'm sure, loads and loads of nerves. I was quite pleased to see how they managed that.

JEFFREY BROWN: But this is what acting is about?
MICHAEL KAHN: Absolutely.

JEFFREY BROWN: --exposing yourself that way?

MICHAEL KAHN: Yes, sure, of course. Or hiding behind another character and exposing yourself through another character. Eventually, acting's about transforming yourself, to turn yourself into whoever you're playing. And, of course, that gives you huge liberty to feel things, do things, say things that you might not say in real life. But you do have to start by bringing yourself to whatever you're doing, so it is both exposing yourself and transforming yourself. It's both of those things at the same time.

It's not an easy thing. Acting is, I think, a real craft and it's an art. And very often people don't know that because, of course, the one thing every single person has done has been in a school play, and we're not called upon to do that. You just worried about whether you could learn your lines. But that's just the beginning of acting or the end of acting. All this other is a craft, and it requires patience, requires discipline, requires diligence, and it requires passion, requires being able to get through disappointment and surmount it, rejection and surmount it, and finally to care about the art more than you care about yourself.

Part IV: Michael Kahn discusses his reasons for creating the Academy for Classical Acting.