Ed Kovens is director of The Professional Workshop in New York City. He studied acting with Lee Strasberg for twenty-five years and was a founding staff member of the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. He has been a member of The Actors Studio since 1968, and is a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

Mr. Kovens is also a professional actor who has appeared on Broadway, on TV, and in feature films. He feels that acting is vital for a teacher because it keeps him in touch with why and how certain techniques are helpful and important to the development of the craft. His approach to actor training is Method-oriented. But these techniques "weren't written in stone; they were a way of looking at acting problems…. I try to stay as close as possible to Strasberg's techniques as he did to those of his teachers. The changes that I have made have been more evolutionary than revolutionary."

How did you get started teaching acting?
Originally I went to art school and was a commercial artist, but at nineteen, after acting in high school, college, and stock, I quit college and became an actor. I went to NYU at night and studied acting and directing, and after six months I actually thought I was trained and went out and got work in radio. For the next four years I worked as a stand-up comic, had small parts in film and on TV, and directed some plays and revues. At twenty-three I stopped working because I looked like five hundred others guys who thought they were John Garfield. I was on longer a juvenile, and I was dissatisfied with my craft. This was 1957.

This led me to start studying again. By the way, originally I was very opposed to Method acting. I thought it was a lot of mumbling and scratching, that kind of stuff. But when I made a list of the actors that I liked, the ones that touched me, I found that they had either studied privately with members of the Group Theatre like Strasberg, Stella Adler, or Sandy Meisner, or had come out of the second Avenue Yiddish Theatre. Later I found that the actors who started the Yiddish Theatre were the nucleus of the Habima and had originally been trained by Stanislavsky's protégé, Vakhtangov. No matter where I looked, the actors who moved me, like Paul Muni, turned out to be Method actors. I admired Olivier, but he never made me cry. However, I remembered seeing Brando in The Men when I was sixteen, and he was so good that I was convinced that he was really a mean, nasty person. Previously I always knew that someone was acting. With Brando I wasn't sure. Up until then I had basically been an intuitive actor, if inspiration came - wonderful - if it didn't, I was in a lot of trouble. I knew when I was good, but I couldn't repeat it, and I knew when I was bad, and I didn't know why or what to do about it. From studying art and playing sports I knew there had to be certain principles involved, I knew I needed a craft.

The Group Theatre influenced acting in America. It had been influenced by the Moscow Art Theater, which came to the United States and left some of its people behind. Strasberg trained with those people at the Actor's Lab. The Actors Studio, though, has influenced world acting. There is no acting community that doesn't know something about Method training. When I saw The Moscow Art Theater production of The Three Sisters here in New York in the 1960s, I saw that it was stuck where Stanislavsky left off; that it was very old-fashioned.

In 1957 I started studying privately with Strasberg in a small studio above the Capitol movie theater. That was the time of the biggies: Monroe, Fonda, Hoffman, even Streisand. A lot of people studied with him who never talked about it. Subsequently, I also studied with him at The Actors Studio, where I became a member in 1968/ I kept on studying that way basically until his death in 1981. In 1965 a bunch of Strasberg students came to me and asked me if I would form a basic exercise class, since his private classes were so crowded. They wanted to study with me and Lee at the same time. So I charged one dollar a person and we did exercises. And I've been teaching ever since. I still act, because I think that's revitalizing to a teacher. If you just teach, you lose touch with the "why" of what you are doing, and how you should be doing certain things.

When Lee started the Lee Strasberg Institute in 1969 he asked me to teach for him. I was one of the founding staff members along with John Strasberg and Walter Lott. After five years there, I left the Institute - more over business differences than artistic ones - and I started my own classes, called The Professional Workshop.

What have you retained and what have you rejected from your training with Lee?
I don't think that artistically there are any differences. I truly feel that what Lee taught, at least what I learned from him, was fine.

Let me clarify something first. Stanislavsky didn't invent a new acting technique. He simply was the first to formulate what good actors had always been doing. At the same time, the theories of Pavlov and Freud were being formulated and he was aware of them. Strasberg was taught Stanislavsky technique at the Actor's Lab by Maria Ouspenskaya and Richard Boleslavski. He then, rightly, adapted and adopted those theories. I try to stay as close to Strasberg's techniques as he did to those of his teachers. The changes that I have made have been more evolutionary than revolutionary. His techniques have worked for thousands of actors throughout the world, so why fool with them? The changes that I've made have come about through more than twenty years of teaching, using the Method as an actor, and also through the discoveries in psychology that we have all been exposed to: Lorenz, Reich, etc. By the way, Lee introduced me to those people and told me to read them. Lee's work evolved also. At first he adhered to Stanislavsky and the principle of "what would you do if you were in this institution?" Slowly he adopted Vakhtangov's principle of "What adjustments do I need in order to do what the character does?

Could you explain the sensory Exercises you learned from Strasberg?
Everyone thinks that Lee's major contribution has been with Sensory Exercises and emotional expression. That's a misconception. Lee told me that when Stella Adler came back from Russia after her meeting with Stanislavsky she stepped off the boat yelling, "You're all wrong. I got the word from Stanislavsky." Stanislavsky's emphasis at that time was on action and so she told Lee that everything he was doing was wrong. She also talked about beats. The story goes that the translator she used kept saying "bits," but with his accent it sounded like "beats."

Sandy Meisner disagreed with Lee also. What's important, he said, is the interpersonal relationship between the actors on the stage, which is really a Vakhtangov principle.

Lee felt that later in his life Stanislavsky was searching for and making up for what he hadn't done in the beginning. Stanislavsky realized that he had left out the carrying out of tasks. People came out on stage and were static, so he added actions, physical actions or mental actions. At the Group Theatre, Strasberg never ignored actions. There are three component elements to acting: the carrying out of tasks, the interpersonal relationship between the particular actors onstage, plus the creation of sensory objects to ground an actor in a reality. Lee always focused equally on those components. People erroneously said his work was all sensory and all emotional. I never got that message from him. When we worked on a Sensory Exercise, if an emotional element arose, fine, but sometimes it was physical. We were not out to have emotional breakthroughs and psychic breaks.

In my estimation some of the most important work that Lee did was in the area of relaxation. Lee claimed that the inability to relax and anticipation were the two biggest problems of the actor. The first area in which there has been a major change in both Lee's work and my own has been in relaxation. In the beginning we would sit in a chair and literally try to fall asleep. Then later at the Strasberg Institute when Lee was exploring kinesis, he started using movement during relaxation. That would open up the body physically and allow emotions to come pouring out. Lee started using this technique after reading Lowen's The Betrayal of the Body. It's gotten to the point now where some teachers use movement for the sake of movement.

My understanding of Strasberg's work was that nothing in the training should be done to form new habits in the actor. You are trying to break down habits and mannerisms. So that each character that the actor plays has a whole new set of mannerisms. So what I have no incorporated in my work is having my students sit in chairs trying to fall asleep and moving their bodies easily and subtly (as they would on stage) in an effort to locate the areas of tension and break down the habit of how they relax, because even that can become habitual.

Ideally, what you want is to be able to get into any position on stage and be in a relaxed state. I am not talking about lethargy or somnambulism. I am talking about the excessive use of energies. If I were a dancer and was extremely tense, I couldn't do more than two or three combinations. I want the student to use only the amount of energy that he needs to move. Stanislavsky saw that actors in a relaxed state seemed easy and that emotion and logic flowed easily from them.

As students begin to relax, the emotions are often elicited. The first sign is that the eyelids will begin to flutter. I then tell the students, "Make a sound from the chest." When they do that I will often hear an emotion connected with it; they may sound angry of sad. I ask them if something happened today, if something upset them before they came to class. Is there something coming up that they are anticipation? Is it that they are onstage and feel themselves being judged? Often that alone can be the cause. They ask themselves these questions and often people start crying or get very angry as they make the connection with what's affecting them. As the students start expressing what they are feeling, they relax; they clean the slate, going to a zero state. That ensures that when they start the sensory exercises, whatever response comes up in them will be purely from the exercises and not some extraneous matter they brought in with them. This, by the way, is not only a training device. Relaxation is done every time they get up to do an exercise and during the preparation of a scene or a monologue. It is then continually checked upon throughout the piece.

The students in my class also learn to relax without a lot of visible movement. At times I don't want to see them actively working on an exercise. This comes in very handy on a film set when an actor is between takes and wants to go off into a corner and do his work but doesn't want to look like some idiot doing that Method exercise and have the crew make fun of him. So actors learn to do it surreptitiously. They should be able to do it publicly without anyone knowing that they are doing it. If they need more than a minute, they should go into the dressing room or, if need be, the bathroom. Unfortunately, most directors don't understand what an actor needs to be able to create.

I once went up for a part and the director said, "Oh, you're one of those Method actors. You're not going to do any of that crap here, are you?" I said, "Don't' worry. You won't be able to tell that I am working. If you know that I am working, then I am not working correctly." And that's what I try to teach my students.

My classes are broken down into two two-hour sessions Two hours are devoted to exercise work. I have expanded what I do in the class to include the song and Dance Exercise, which is one of Strasberg's most important exercises. I also do commercials, cold readings, character study, and improvisation. After the relaxation period, students start on sensory exercises. We all respond to sensory stimuli without realizing it. If I play some music and it reminds you of an old boyfriend, it's the music that is triggering your feelings.

This kind of triggering was studied by Pavlov. Most people don't' realize that Strasberg was a Behaviorist, a Pavlovian, and not a Freudian.

Absolutely. Lee's emphasis was in the doing. People have all these strange ideas about what he taught. The students are put through a series of sensory exercises to discover how they respond to certain stimuli, what makes them angry, sad, etc., which is highly personal. Different students may respond to the same stimuli differently. We then use these exercises while doing scenes to create realities for ourselves that coincide with the responses of the character. While a good deal of class time is spent in the creation of these exercises, it is still only a part of the work that goes into a scene.

The sensory exercises that I saw in class and as they evolved were very simple but very meaningful, so I try to stick as closely as I can to them. Lee had students work on creating a cup of coffee. Why a cup of coffee? You need all five senses to create that simple thing. So what a teacher is looking for in that first exercise is how many of the actor's senses are working.

The second exercise is generally looking into a sensory mirror and trying to see yourself putting on makeup or shaving. Here the teacher is discerning if the student is merely following a sequence, or really exploring the objects sensorially and if the person can see himself in the mirror or not. This reveals whether he is a subjective or a nonsubjective person. Subjectivity in this sense refers to a person whose feelings do not get expressed; the more deeply he feels something, the more inward it goes. He is the kind of person who goes into the corner and broods and then explodes over nothing. When a student says he can't see himself in the mirror, that's a sign to me that I must help him to get the emotion out rather than sit on it, as is his habit.

If a person doesn't have a problem in life expressing certain emotions, it stands to reason that he shouldn't have trouble expressing them on stage. The difference is that the audience can become a barrier. It's my job to get the student to respond and act as fully on stage as he does in life. If he has a problem in life expressing certain emotions, he goes to therapy to work it out, which is not what I am there to do, but I can help him get over self-consciousness, especially through the use of private moments. Laurie Hull describes this well in her book Strasberg's Method.

After shaving, the next sensory exercise is putting on your shoes and socks. So the order is (1) coffee, (2) mirror and shaving or makeup, and (3) shoes and socks. Next is looking in a full-length mirror and putting on undergarments. Often people do not really look at their bodies. I look for whether they are self-conscious or even inhibited. Then next is sensorially creating three different pieces of fabrics. These are all externals in the sense that the actor is visibly manipulating the objects as he creates them. After that students create sunshine and actually try to feel a sense of the sun on themselves.

You and I know about psychosomatic illnesses, about false pregnancies, and so on. These are all sensory responses. You know that you can put a piece of ice on someone's skin and say you are burning him with a poker and the skin will respond as if it were burned. If the mind can do something like that, it fan also create a feeling of sunshine. As a student you might say, "Why do I have to do all this?" Why? Because on stage you are not really going to be in love with the leading man, you are not really going to be poisoned. You have to believe it. If you believe it, the audience will believe it. If you believe it, you will act within that environment in a truthful enough way to convince the audience, which has also suspended its belief for this period of time.

The funny thing is that as you create an object sensorially, everything else falls into place. From this stimulus that you know isn't real, suddenly all the other false things become real and you start behaving truthfully. Stanislavsky saw that the difference between the good actor and the great actor was the ability to be relaxed, to stimulate oneself, and to be private in public. This is nothing new. There are stories of the Kabuki master who sent his protégé to walk in the snow in his bare feet so that he could then come onstage and create it properly, for years actors have always tried to find things that would help them create reality.

But it must be noted that it is not the successful completion of these exercises that's important. It's trying to use them. Even if you get 50%, it's better than 0%. The exercises also put you into a state in which inspiration can take place. By the way, Strasberg once said that the use of drugs and alcohol that is so prevalent in our profession often comes out of a search for excellence, because the actor knows that when he is relaxed and easy, things happen. So the actor says, "If I take a drink, I will relax." Unfortunately, there is no control over that, and before you know it the very thing you were trying to achieve has been eaten away. It's such an epidemic in our business today. It's shameful the amount of talent that is being blown away - sometimes not from a negative search, but from a lack of craft.

When the actor works on creating sunshine he is really getting to the first internal exercise, because the teacher cannot see what is going on. Then we work on pain, and then exercises involving single senses: taste, smell, seeing, and hearing. Hearing is the first exercise in which I begin to work on verbal patterns. Then we do sensory work that involves the external body and overall sensations, like showers, rain, sunburn, being drunk or ill. After that we go on to personal objects, anything that might have some sentimental value for a student.

How do you instruct students to work on a personal object?
The student examines it, trying to create its weight, the feel and color of it. I don't want a student to work on the real thing, but the sensory object. Often the student already knows what emotion is going to be elicited by that object. It's so important to train the sensory response, because it's so easy for actors to work just for the result, just for the emotion. Then they wind up saying that the object doesn't work for them anymore. If they work with just the senses, the senses will keep feeding them over and over again.

At sunshine it gets complicated because we add a monologue. When I studied with Lee I was with him for three years before I was allowed to use any actual material with the sensory exercises. When he said, "Now do the exercise and put a monologue to it," it became a problem. This brings us back to the second problem of the actor: anticipation. If, as an actor, I know what I am going to say, how can I make it sound as if I am saying it for the first time? If the character is responding to a given situation with a certain emotion, the emotion will color the word. Change the emotion and the meaning of the words changes. Punctuation is a writer's device. No one talks with punctuation. There has never been a writer who could write something so that two people would say it in the same way. The only thing a writer can do is create a character in a situation. It's the same thing for the actor. The character is in the situation. If that situation makes him angry, the words come out angry. The language a writer employs in his style.

Everyone in my class learns a monologue and he or she learns it without meaning or punctuation. It's generally a non-Shakespeare and nonverse monologue. The students start to work on a sensory exercise and it brings up an emotion. I ask them to make a sound so I know how it's affecting them. I believe sound is the purest form of emotional expression. Then I will tell them to give their monologue in gibberish. Then I tell them to go back to the words. I observe to see if they allow the emotion to color the words in the pattern the gibberish elicited or if they revert to the way they learned it originally. What I am trying to do is break down the verbal patterns that people unconsciously learn and allow them to speak extemporaneously, with the lines that they have memorized, to allow their emotions, not their intellect, to take over and color the lines.

In the next exercise the students begin to work on creating an overall sensation while they are working on a personal object. This leads to two different reactions. Now I will take them over the same lines with each of these different sensory exercises individually. Ideally, the way they say the lines will be altered because the exercise will be changed and affect them differently. Then I'll tell them to put both stimuli together. That way I get people laughing and crying at the same time because they are combining exercises. The words are now coming out in a third way. Then I get students doing four exercises at the same time and also doing an everyday task, like making the bed or having a cup of coffee - or we may impose an animal on it or a character study. You may ask, "Why are you doing all this? They will never have to do all this in a play." Well, if you want to train to run a mile competitively, you run twenty miles every day. Lee never went to that many exercises at one time; he never used gibberish that early in the work. That's another area in which I feel I took the work a little further.

Working on four sensory exercises at the same time, such as an overall sensation, a smell, seeing somebody, and a personal object, is preparing students for doing an Affective Memory, where they have to use all five senses. Many teachers give new students an Affective Memory and talk them through it, and they have big emotional breakthroughs. But then the students can't do it by themselves on state. The teacher has to be there. If students are trained sensorially, they can do an Affective Memory whenever they want. I also do the same work with singers. Instead of monologues, they use songs and arias.

How do you use this sensory work in scene work?
In Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Ellen Burstyn is having a good time with a friend when the phone rings. She has to pick it up, hear that her husband has been killed, and break apart. You think that's easy, going from on emotion to another like that? She could have done it by creating an Affective Memory that gave her the emotion that was applicable to the character at that time. Strasberg stressed that it wasn't important for the Affective Memory or any object or substitution to be similar to the event in the play. Anything that will give an actor the same emotional response as the character is valid.

If I had to play a scene in which I had to cry over my father's coffin, and I used my real father's funeral, I would get angry (as I actually did in life), not cry. So I would use something that made me cry even though it wasn't a similar event.

Why, then, the effort to be yourself on the stage? So you can more easily recognize the difference between you and the character. Where you and the character are the same, you leave yourself alone. Where you and the character are different, you need an adjustment or an exercise to give you what the character has or do what he does. Most of the material that you are confronted with as an actor is easy to do. But what if I had to play Caligula? I've never killed anybody, and Caligula not only kills, but he enjoys it. However, I know I do enjoy swatting mosquitoes and smashing them before they bite me. I get off on it. How do you apply that same emotion to killing a person? Well, it's not a person anymore. When I hear the buzzing of a mosquito, I start to get excited and annoyed and the actor becomes a giant mosquito to me. I can take that emotion that is mine and expand it into a character trait. So I'm still being myself, but using that emotion in a different area.

So the sensory work and the Affective Memory work are only to be used when the actor can't use the circumstances of the character.

It's a circle. First you read a piece of material and it affects you and you respond. Then you start working on the material and you find you're not responding anymore. Then you have to get back to your initial reactions. Actors should always have an exercise ready so they can re-create the initial response, not imitate it. And by the way, the more training you get the less you need to get turned on to the stimuli of the script. Often it's a simple thing like tasting the coffee that will do it. After a while you need less, not more.

You use Lee's Song and Dance Exercise. Could you describe it?
It's a very simple exercise. Lee originally devised it for singers and then he found that the same problem affected all performers, actors as well as singers.

In the first part of the exercise, the actor is asked to stand aligned, so that he can breathe properly, in front of the class and make eye contact with the people in the audience and without moving sing a simple song. He is then asked to intone the song note by note and syllable by syllable, taking a couple of breaths in between, and holding each note for relatively the same length of time. The sound is to be strong and from the chest. At the same time, he is asked to allow himself to express whatever emotion he is feeling at that given time. Sounds simple enough. It's very hard to do.

Now what does the actor have to do in a play? He generally is asked to sit or stand onstage (although in a lot of films today he is asked to lie down), and he is asked to say words fully from the chest that he has memorized while making contact with his partner or the audience, and to control his movements and allow whatever he is feeling at the time to express itself in the words. Therefore, this exercise is the acting problem in a nutshell. But there is nothing to hide behind, no scene or character. Anything an actor cannot do in this exercise he will not be able to do onstage. If he can't go moment to moment in the exercise, chances are he couldn't do it onstage either. But since the actor is being judged, suddenly you can see all the things affecting him from his present and past. You show me a girl who was the tallest in her class, and I'll show you a girl who unconsciously stands in a way so as to minimize her height. That's what happens at the beginning of this exercise.

As an actor begins to make sound, I sense the person and what he is feeling. I ask him questions, but I don't want him to answer me, just to think about them and to make a sound. As he makes a sound, often an emotion comes up, because he is thinking about what is upsetting him. What I have done with this that's different from what Strasberg did is that when the person starts to have a feeling and, for instance, cries, I then teach him how to rechannel the emotion. I say, "Take these tears and rechannel them into anger or laughter." He goes right into it because the organism is open, you see; the veil is lifted. I teach the person how to take his emotional temperature before he walks into a scene. After all, the actor is his own instrument. If he is aware that he is feeling angry and he has to go out and be happy, he can rechannel that emotion and go on and play what he needs to.

In the second part of the exercise the actor sings the song again, note by note and syllable by syllable, but this time it's done in a short explosive sound. He also starts any movement and repeats it. If he repeats it seven, eight times, he's created a rhythm. He then has to sing the song independently of the physical rhythm that he has established - when his will says sound, and not when the rhythm in his body demands it. One time the sound may come out on the third movement, the next time on the second, and so on. Then I say, "Change the movement," and the actor has to create another rhythm, and the song will come out of that. We are trying to separate the voice from the body, training actors to use them individually. This Song and Dance Exercise, more than any other, calls on the intuition and perception of the teacher.

So the song and dance is a way for students to get in touch with their moment-to-moment feelings and impulses and react to them.

Yes. It puts them in touch with what they are feeling and trains them to control and use those feelings.

I also do the Mirror Exercise, where actors stand facing each other and "mirror" each other's movements and facial expressions. There is a lot of psychological information I can get from watching that exercise. For instance, which actor likes to lead and which likes to mirror a behavior? Does one actor monopolize the exercise because he never gives the other person a chance to lead? Does he see what he is getting from his partner? Is he or she simply a reactor? Is he always depending on his partner? The Mirror Exercise helps you when you have to fit into a cast in a play that's already been performing, when you have to replace someone. It enables you to fit into other people's rhythms, to do scenes that have already been set because they've already been directed. So this is a seemingly simple theater game, but it has many manifestations and repercussions for actors. In Viola Spolin's book, she used this to find out how well an actor could mirror another person's movement. But there are other skills to be learned from it. This is how we integrate psychology, theater games, etc., into a craft to help the actor. Only artists, by the way, have the audacity to think that they create wholly from themselves. A scientist would never deny his debt to his forerunners, would never claim that he discovered something on his own. Well, actors are not any different.

What I do is based on the principles that Strasberg handed down. They weren't written in stone; they were a way of looking at acting problems. A lot of teachers use these kinds of exercises, use the sequence, and that's all. They don't really understand what problem is being solved, what to look for in the student when they are doing it. Teaching is asking yourself, "What am I giving a student at this specific time that will answer his need?" A lot of teachers don't know what is behind the exercises, as I tried to explain with the Mirror Exercise. I spent a lot of time talking theory to Lee, asking him what specific exercises were designed for, and that's what I've kept till today. Most teachers in colleges and even professional workshops talk about sensory work, but don't actually do it. They believe in it, they say, but they don't teach their students how to do the exercises.

How do you help your students learn to work on comedy?
I started out as a stand-up comic and always had a feel for it, but could never break it down for myself. The best theory of comedy I've come across is that comedy is real people in a real situation behaving in an unreal way. For instance, in The Odd Couple, one guy can't be a "little" messy and the other guy a "little" neat. That wouldn't work. So the behavior has to be unreal, but done in a real way. You take it to the extreme. There is a fine line between comedy, farce, and burlesque. Farce is real people in an unreal situation behaving in a real way (as in the move Kind Hearts and Coronet) while burlesque, I believe, is unreal people in a real situation behaving in an unreal way. I once played a very neat character, and I had to clean everything in my environment. So if I was in a restaurant, I decided to clean my silverware, the table, the chairs, etc. That's comedy. Now take it a step further. The waiter comes over and my character starts cleaning off the waiter - that's taking it to the next step, and that's burlesque. That's what Sid Caesar as a tramp would have done. All comedy is logic taken to an extreme, while tragedy is illogical behavior.

How do you use improvisations?
There are three basic improvisations that I use for scene work with students. In the first I ask the student to do the scene with the dialogue, but putting himself in the situation and reacting to the circumstances as he would himself. Then he will know where he and the character differ. Wherever he differs, he will have to make an adjustment. In the second improvisation I tell him to act out the whole scene without the dialogue. He can grunt, whistle, anything he wants. What does this do? It tells him what actions he should be taking during the scene.

He didn't come into the environment to play a scene, but to do something, and the scene interrupts that action. Sometimes I will have actors do the lines in gibberish. Gibberish will force communication between them. They know what the lines are, but it will also solidify for them what the emotion is.

There is something else I use that Strasberg innovated. Instead of the lines, I will have students talk out the inner monologue of their characters, and sometimes, when an actor comes up against a block at a particular moment, I will ask him to go through the scene saying the lines, but adding his own feelings and thoughts - not the character's, but his own. That's very interesting because often the actor is blocking something he or she is afraid of and if he talks it out, he can get to what it is.

Improvisation is an interesting tool. I remember reading that the first actress who worked on Hedda Gabler acted out scenes that were not in the script because doing just the scenes in the play didn't give her enough knowledge about Hedda. I also ask students to do that.

The other improvisations I do are really from theater games: exits and entrances - where you are coming from, where you are, and where you are going. You know, an actor never makes an entrance. He is never coming from the wings. He is always coming from another place. I used about two dozen different ones, like character studies and animal exercises, but time doesn't permit going into all of them.

Are there any approaches to acting that you disapprove of?
One of my pet peeves is that the acting student today is being taken advantage of by many so-called teachers who are not accredited, have not had accredited training, and have never studied to be actors or ever acted or directed. What they teach, then, is opinion - theirs. Students do a scene and they tell them how they think it should be done. They don't teach a craft. A lot of these teachers are casting directors or agents and claim they teach soap opera acting, film acting, or commercial acting. That has nothing to do with technique. And the hidden promise is that if students study with them, they can get them a job. You might ask, "So what's the damage?" The damage is, apart from it being dishonest, that these teachers take money away from young actors who would otherwise use it to study with legitimate teachers who could teach them a craft and a technique they could use to make a living. They are robbing young actors of a livelihood. There is an old saying: "If you give a man a fish, you feed him; if you teach him how to fish, you teach him how to feed himself." These people are hurting potential artists and destroying our business. They should be ashamed of themselves.

What advice would you give someone just starting out in acting?
When you look for a teacher, see if you can audit the class for free or for a single fee. Ask about the teacher's background. Who has he or she developed? Get training and keep training. You train for the future, not today. And decide what you expect from a teacher. Realize that a teacher cannot make you talented. He can only help you develop what talent you already possess. A teacher cannot make you an artist. He can only give you a technique. How you use that technique makes you an artist. A teacher's task is to recognize what is individual about a student and quickly and fully develop it. A teacher should give you roots and wings.