By Cynthia Citron
LOS ANGELES–You wouldn’t think you could make a theater piece out of a textbook on acting, but Beau Bridges and his daughter Emily have done it—beautifully. The book is “Acting: The First Six Lessons” by Polish director and actor Richard Boleslavsky, and if all teachers were as articulate and emotionally charged as he, we would all be award-winning actors.
Boleslavsky’s book has been the acting bible of the prolific Bridges family: patriarch Lloyd used to press it on his children, and his son Beau passes it along to every young actor he mentors. “It is,” he says, “not just about acting, but about how to live.”
In bringing the book to the stage, Beau and Emily have assumed the roles of Teacher and Creature, and his lessons, rendered in language that is more poetry than pedantry, serve to guide her through her burgeoning career. We see her blossom from a wildly gesticulating King Lear to a quietly heart-broken Ophelia. We are taught the value of stillness and the art of “being alive” to every emotion and sensation—as valuable in life as it is onstage.
The message is the same as the one proffered by Thornton Wilder in his classic play Our Town. In the scene in which the newly deceased Emily returns to her home to relive her 12th birthday, she laments that her family takes life for granted and doesn’t really live “every, every minute.” Boleslavsky’s play takes you gently through the process of “realizing life” as you live it, “every, every minute.”
In another “lesson,” Beau, as the Teacher, instructs Emily, playing her own mink-clad aunty, on the powers of concentration and observation. She pours him a cup of tea and he challenges her to duplicate all the movements she has made in performing that act. She pretends to pick up the teapot and then stops, unable to remember her next move, whereupon he demonstrates how she had conducted this simple act, from holding her sleeve out of the way of the teapot’s spout to looking around for the creamer to fishing a lump of sugar out of the sugarbowl with a pair of tongs. It’s a powerful lesson in paying attention and one that is not lost on “aunty.”
“All life is open and familiar to you,” the Teacher tells the Creature, and acting is “the harnessing of dreams” and “the memory of emotions” rendered with precision, economy, and power.
Richard Boleslavsky, whose 1933 textbook is still in use in acting classes to this day, was the first to bring the teachings of Stanislavski to America and is credited with developing the technique for what would later become known as “Method” acting. His early students included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Harold Clurman, founders of the famed Group Theater in New York. He also directed many American classic films, including Rasputin and The Empress, which starred Ethel, John, and Lionel Barrymore, Les Miserables with Fredric March and Charles Laughton, and The Garden of Allah with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer.
Boleslavsky died in 1937, shortly before his 48th birthday. He is interred in a cemetery in East Los Angeles and commemorated with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. If he were alive today, however, you can be sure he would be gratified and thrilled to see how Beau and Emily Bridges and director Charlie Mount have brought his teachings to life. And probably surprised that nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, he and they have provided a modern audience with a moving and entertaining evening in the theatre. How’s that for immortality?!
Acting: The First Six Lessons will continue at Theatre West, 3333 Cahuenga Blvd. West, in Los Angeles, Fridays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 through May 16th. Call (323) 851-7977 for tickets.
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Citron is Los Angeles bureau chief for San Diego Jewish World