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JEFFREY BROWN: Now, why the academy? What's the meaning?
MICHAEL KAHN: Well, here we are, we're sitting here now in the Shakespeare
theater here in Washington, D.C., and we do six plays a year on this
stage and at Carter Barron, and often have about, what, 250 classical
roles a year that are up for grabs in addition to the people in our
company. And it does require specific skills to do those roles.
And I felt there was a need for training of professional actors who
had already had proven themselves in some arena as an actor but had
a passion for Shakespeare but had never had an opportunity to do it,
never had an opportunity to get comfortable with it, never had an opportunity
to do more than, let's say, one play in their BFA school or one play
maybe every four years in wherever their community was. So to be able
to develop the skills to do the material they had a passion for, I wanted
to create a program that was specific for that, that wasn't doing Chekhov,
that wasn't doing Sam Shepard or August Wilson; we're simply doing basically
Shakespeare.
And the only place you can really go for that as an older actor, as
an actor in your late 20s, 30s, 40s, or 50s, was really to England.
You could go to Lambda, you could go to Central School. But then you
would go to England. You would probably be in a class with other Americans,
but yet you would be trained in an English style, not bad in terms of
technique at all, and you would leave that school knowing some English
people and not being able to work there.
On the other hand, I really believe American actors can be as good at
classical material as anybody. We have the emotional life for it. We
have the physical imagination for it. We have the, somehow, sort of
internal belief in characters that really belongs to us. And we also
have this energy which is why we're so great in musical comedy.
So I wanted to do it in an American school and with American accents
and American Shakespeare, which is what we do here. And so I thought
the best schools are those that are associated with a working company
where we can practice what we preach, we can defend and talk to the
students about it. And so I thought about it for quite a long time and
then started the academy, and it is the only American school of its
kind, a one-year MFA program for professional actors to go into a part
of the theater that they've always had a great desire to do and never
really had the chance.
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