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Carol has worked in the professional theater as actress,
director and teacher for close to forty years. She was taught
acting by such masters as Robert Lewis, Morris Carnovsky,
Charles Nelson Reilly, Joshua Shelley and Michael Moriarty. As
an actress she played featured and leading roles in New York,
National Touring Companies and Regional Theaters throughout
the country. Her roles included such varied characters as
Tzeitle in A Fiddler On The Roof with Zero Mostel and again
with Luther Adler, Agnes Nolan in George M! with Mickey
Rooney, Catherine in Pippin, directed by Bob Fosse and Guitele
in The Rothschilds, opposite Hal Linden. She appeared as Kate
in Shakespeare's The Taming Of The Shrew and Celia in "AsYou
Like It" as well as the title role in Ibsen's Hedda Gabbler.
She was standby for Ellen Burstyn on Broadway in "Sacrilege"
and performance consultant for Eve Ensler on her Broadway
Show, "The Good Body". She has directed award winning
productions of David Mamet's A Life In The Theater,
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Ibsen's A Doll's House.
Her teaching career began with a nine year tenure at The
American Academy of Dramatic Arts and Five years at the T.
Schreiber Studio in New York City after which she created her
own studio.
From an interview
with Carol:
" I didn't have
what I would call a mentor, but I certainly had influences.
Why I say I didn't have a mentor is that where I had
professional relationships, they never passed beyond the
classroom. It may simply have been because I was very shy when
I was young, and I got what I could and snuck away with it.
Peter Brook had a tremendous impact on me. From his work, from
his productions, from his books, and from hearing him talk.
Morris Carnovsky was an enormous influence on me. I spent a
summer when I was in college at the American Shakespeare
Festival and was with him and watched him work. He made me
realize clearly, in no uncertain terms, when I was twenty
years old, that he never became the character. I sat there in
his living room and watched him literally transform himself in
just talking about different characters, and when I commented
on that, he got very upset and said, "I'm not a different
person. It's just what I do that looks different." So, I count
that as my first real acting lesson, because I really got it.
When I got out of school, I worked with two people who were my
primary acting teachers. One was a guy named Joshua Shelly,
who was a group theater person and then was blacklisted in the
early fifties, so he never had the kind of career that the
other people had. He was a wonderful teacher. And I worked
with Charles Nelson Reilly at the HB Studio because I was a
singer. And so I have this kind of traditional method training
on one side with Josh, and I had this buoyant, exuberant,
thrilling, based on nothing but, "Are you enjoying yourself?"
training with Charlie. I worked with Bobby Lewis for a while,
and that was very wonderful, too. And then the other big
influence was Michael Moriart, who was the first person that I
heard say, "It's all in the breath."
By that time, I had been teaching a few years already. I was
acting and teaching, and I was basically teaching everything
that I had been taught, and sometimes it worked and sometimes
it didn't. I don't have a good memory — I don't remember my
childhood very well, and so you know, in emotional memory
exercises, I was lost. It never meant anything.
Then, I did a scene and just worked on noticing where the
tension was coming from and relaxing it. And that was my total
point of focus. And you know, that was the best work I did up
until that point.
And I never understood what that was. Interestingly, as a
singer, I had much more access to my emotional instrument, and
in a very easy way, than I did in my early acting training.
And I couldn't understand it, and nobody could explain it to
me. It was such a bleak discomfort for me. And I realized many
years later that it was because I was breathing kind of funny.
It was that simple. But we didn't know. Nobody knew.
So there's something about my experience back then that I have
come to find out kinesthetically. I don't necessarily
experience visually. I don't necessarily experience literally.
So I had to go about finding a way of working that fit the way
I learn. And now in my teaching, I'm very mindful of how
people learn, so that I can adjust what I'm doing. The easiest
people to teach, of course, are the people who receive things
the way I do. The challenge is, when somebody is very literal
or visual, to find ways of translating what I do so that they
get it.
I teach a method of acting based on breathing, awareness and
joy. If you're having a good time, it's very likely that
everybody else is too. And that's all there is to it. I teach
mixed level classes, so that in any given class, I'll have
people who are beginning actors, people who are more
experienced actors but who are beginning with me, people who
have been with me for a long time, as well as people who are
working and then come back to class when they're in town.
My classes are four hours long. The first hour or so is a
warm-up exercise. It's a physical vocal/breathing . warm-up,
and within it, it contains the seeds of all the concepts that
I work with. Then I'll do an exercise that gives people the
experience of working with the breath without the pressure of
text. It's all group work; everybody's doing it. And it's very
simple work. The problem with learning it is that it's so
simple that people want to complicate it. The only thing that
is difficult about it is that the breath is a very direct
route into very deep emotional responses. I think of it like
learning how to ride a bucking bronco: For some people, when
the feelings come up really intensely, they're home free. But
for other people, they need to learn how to move with that
energy rather than sitting on it and going up into their heads
and trying to make it right.
As a teacher, I think my strongest suit is how much I love to
teach, and it's always a surprise to me. I can walk into class
feeling like the whole world is falling in on me and find
myself— in a moment — blissful. So I don't know where that
comes from, but I'm very grateful for it. I think I have the
ability to listen so that I can address each person very
specifically. I love acting, and I think that's the reason I
focused on teaching, because it's the ideal world of acting
that really turns me on.
I try to create a learning environment that is as safe as
possible. I can be tough. I can be very demanding, but I make
sure that before I do that, there's a safe, loving environment
from which to learn. My first choice is always to be as gentle
as possible, to get people laughing a lot. I've had experience
with put-down teachers and dangerous teachers, and I work very
hard to create a healthy environment. When I give the students
feedback, I make it's positive and that I am teaching what
works, because people know what doesn't work. People know when
they don't feel right. So I find that the safer I can create
the environment, the harder that I can be, and people seem to
appreciate that.
This is not one of the traditional techniques. It is simply a
useable, tangible, delicious acting technique that works. I
had a conversation with a woman recently who's a student at
the Strasberg Institute, and she asked all these questions
about my work, and I was talking and talking, and she was
really probing, and then she finally said to me, "So, what
technique do you use?" So I said, "What are you, the method
police?" So I think there's a part of me that keeps expecting
the method police to come and close me down. But I love this
work, and it works, and it's very exciting when it works. So I
guess if anything, it's not just who I am and how I do it, but
that this is a very reliable, tangible, body-based technique
that I can take with me anywhere.
I like to work with passionate students, people who have to
act. I don't care about the rest. I don't care how old they
are or how experienced or inexperienced they are or anything.
People who really want to do it are the people that I want to
work with. If the passion is there, the instrument is there. I
really believe that."
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