Caroline Fairweather

THEA 312 Reading Response

The Suzuki reading reassured me that it is neither necessary nor wise to try and reconcile

the Stanislavsky Method with Greek Tragedy. The amount of energy and emotion required

cannot be contained within a system meant to reveal psychological human experience through

exploration onstage. I have often struggled with this exact issue in the past. In high school, I

played the title role in a production of Macbeth and struggled constantly to act how I would act if

these heinous circumstances were somehow shoved into my quotidian reality. I did not know

how to inhabit insanity and paranoia starting from the inside. The result was indeed emotionally

taxing and involved, funnily enough, crying onstage. It also involved a complete inability to

maintain breath control, vocal support and a grounded physical state. I thought I had to become

undone onstage for the audience to make the journey of the Scottish King with me. Through

training, however, I have realized that the world of the fiction allows the actor at once to step

outside of herself and also to place incredible amounts of focus and thought into the exploration

of a character.

The readings revealed that in Greek tragedy, the actor almost functions as a prophet at

some points. They are still indeed humans with human psychological reactions and tendencies,

but there is a divine element allowing them to deliver massive quantities of knowledge or

violence. Suzuki's analysis of the function of violence in Euripides’ texts is crucial to

comprehending how an actor communicates an entire world while audience members bear

witness. There seems to be freedom in expansion beyond one’s human self into the realm of the

world and the god ruling said world of a piece, particularly in Greek tragedy.
 Often, training for me has been about cultivating physical strength and allowing

sensations to inform an emotional reaction. The aspect that I am just recently beginning to

develop into is the idea of a constant “fiction.” I was confused and disinterested in this vague

concept that seemed to be getting in the way of my focus on the exercises. I now understand that

there can be no theatrical exploration without imaginative expansion to accompany the

physically expansive movements. An exercise that has helped attach these two parts has been

Shakuhachi with improvisational text. It has forced me to use physical focus to feel the text more

deeply, and inversely, to use the text to focus even more on the details of the movement.

Of course, the task of performing Agave’s huge realization moment is going to be a

challenge, partially since surprise is such a pure emotion that it appears similarly in both Greek

and modern theatre, at least at first glance. I feel that the training will allow me to have a body

with lungs that can hold up all of Agave’s terror and rage and grief without letting me buckle. I

need to work on generally being more outward and performing in service of an audience as

opposed to, as Suzuki mentions, standing and talking to a scene partner like one would in

everyday life.

In general, the training will eventually allow me to create a body from which emotional

states and sounds are put forth and explored onstage instead of trying to conjure earth-shattering

psychological states from the stratosphere.