May 7, 2009
The Role of Their Dreams
By
SARAH KERSHAWWHILE preparing for her role as Addison Montgomery Shepherd, or the villainous Mrs. Dr. McDreamy to fans of the hit series “Grey’s Anatomy,” Kate Walsh reached into the depths of her dream life.
Working with an acting coach and in workshops with other actors, using an increasingly popular technique influenced by Jungian psychology in which actors study and play the characters in their dreams, Ms. Walsh mined her unconscious for clues to understanding her character.
“When you’re hooking into your unconscious or working on a dream,” said Ms. Walsh, who played an ob-gyn on the show and now plays her on its spinoff, “Private Practice,” “you’re connected in a real way that you are not manufacturing or trying to force.”
Ms. Walsh has used many other acting tools, including observing real doctors in delivery rooms and researching gynecology and obstetrics. But she said that using material from dreams over the last five years to develop her role has made it “that much deeper.”
In the last decade, dream work, as it is known, has spread into actors studios and classrooms across the country, taking its place among the ever expanding techniques of actor training and in the long-running debate over what leads to the most authentic performances.
Dream work grew largely out of Method acting, and it is now being taught at the New York home of the Method, the Actors Studio, and by several teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Teachers say that at least 1,000 actors have been trained so far and that interest is growing in the technique, which is inspired by the theories of
Carl Jung, who believed that dreams are the expression of the unconscious, and the images and symbols in them communicate crucial information to the conscious mind.
Dream work is used by such stars as Ms. Walsh,
Meg Ryan and
Harvey Keitel, who said in interviews that it was essential to preparing for their roles.
“I see a place for this in all the acting schools across the country once they come to know about it,” said Mr. Keitel, who, along with others who study dream work at the Actors Studio, knows it as the Way.
“Actors are always searching for ways to get close to the psychology, the life, the experience of the characters they are creating,” Mr. Keitel said in an interview at Bubby’s restaurant in TriBeCa. “And we investigate all these situations, looking high and low for the experience that will bring us closer to this mysterious character we’re trying to create, we’re trying to know, to understand and to be.”
He added, “The dream work brought to the actor another tool — we stage our dreams, we put them on their feet.”
People have mined their dreams for insights into their lives for milleniums — Genghis Khan was said to have used his dreams to prepare for battle — but pure Freudian and Jungian dream analysis has faded in practice somewhat since it was popularized a century ago. Still, the use of dreams in psychotherapy, particularly for work on recovering from trauma, is still fairly common, psychologists say. Actors in particular appear to be drawn to the work of Jung, who once wrote, “The dream is a theater in which the dreamer is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the author, the producer, the public and the critic.”
Jung’s theories were first adapted for actor training in the early 1980s by Sandra Seacat, an actress and acting coach, who went on to work with Ms. Ryan, Mr. Keitel and many others.
In a telephone interview, Ms. Ryan, the star of “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” said she had long been interested in Jung and had incorporated dream work in her career for years, though she declined to speak about individual roles. “There’s dark and light within you,” she said. “So there’s a way of not going outside for inspiration, but going inside.”
Acting teachers using dream work instruct their students to use dreams to help them connect their own personal struggles with the struggles of the characters they are playing. An actor preparing to play Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” might write a letter to herself asking her “inner self” to reveal in a dream how her own emotional experiences may be similar to those of the tortured Blanche.
“They are really living the part,” said Ms. Seacat, 72, who continues to coach in New York and Los Angeles. “I believe that the artist is a wounded healer, that they are healing wounds of their own, and when they do that truthfully they heal the audience.”
Dream work has much in common with the Method, the approach to acting championed by
Lee Strasberg, who taught his interpretation of Konstantin Stanislavski’s “naturalism” for the stage.
The difference is that while the Method also seeks to draw on the unconscious, it involves actors reaching back into their life experiences and real memories, both happy and traumatic, to evoke emotion in their roles, rather than taking inspiration from their dreams.
Elizabeth Kemp, who studied for seven years under Mr. Strasberg at the Actors Studio, began incorporating dream work into her coaching, directing and acting in the early 1990s, after training at the C. G. Jung Institute in New York. “The results from working with dreams were extraordinary,” said Ms. Kemp, chairwoman of the acting department at the Actors Studio Drama School at
Pace University.
She coaches Mr. Keitel and has been teaching dream workshops at the Actors Studio for about six years.
“In the Method, we revisit something we lived through,” she said. “But there are still pockets in the unconscious or the psyche that have a residue of feelings, feelings that have not at all been expressed in life.”
Just as Method acting has long been criticized by more traditional dramatists, dream work is also drawing skepticism.
Robert Brustein, the founding director of the Yale and American Repertory theaters, said it was another example of actor training that was self-absorbed, in which focusing on a player’s own psyche and emotions can turn written characters into the people playing them, rather than the other way around.
“This is a continual debate that will never be resolved,” said Dr. Brustein, adding that Stanislavski’s work has been misinterpreted over time. “He taught how to bring the character close to the actor, instead of how to bring the actor close to the character. Instead of making an imaginative leap into the mind of a big character who is raging against the universe, everything gets minimized.”
“Blanche DuBois is a fully created character by
Tennessee Williams,” Dr. Brustein added. “It doesn’t need the actor’s dream life to act her. She has her own dream life.”
Mr. Keitel said that the Method — and now dream work— were continuously misunderstood by people who had not experienced them firsthand. “We do some things that might be construed as voodoo, but nevertheless it gets results,” he said. “I question everything, but I haven’t been able to puncture any holes in this dream workshop.”
At a recent class in Manhattan taught by Kim Gillingham, a protégé of Ms. Seacat, 15 students lay on
yoga mats, their dream journals beside them. Incense burned, candles flickered and musical selections from Chopin and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt helped muffle the street noise outside the Chelsea studio. Students had been told to bring with them a dream to work on individually. Other times, they act out one another’s dreams.
“Whisper into the mat what you wouldn’t want anyone else to know,” Ms. Gillingham said. “Tell it where you’re scared, tell it where you’re stuck.”
After the mat work, the students stood up and Ms. Gillingham said, “Breathe out like an old horse.” They did so, followed by a guttural chorus of “ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
“Travel to the place, the thing, the energy that you most don’t want to deal with,” she instructed.
Her assistant and student, Ken Barnett, an actor, walked around the room with tissues, and many students used them as they wept. Others shouted, ran in place, shook out their hands and legs and spoke aloud to the people in their dreams.
“You have the freedom to speak to them now,” Ms. Gillingham said. “Any acting would be a waste of time.”
Later, Keith Nobbs, a television, stage and film actor, said he had been skeptical when he showed up for the workshop. “When I first read about it — dream work, body work and voice work — I thought, Put the gun to my head, please. You imagine a first-year acting class where people are acting like dogs for 45 minutes.”
But he said the workshop had been helpful for him as he prepared to play an autistic man in an independent film. He is exploring “what is emotionally terrifying for the character in a way that I can understand, because I’m looking at the real parts of myself.”
Mr. Barnett, who assisted in the New York dream workshop, recently appeared in the musical “Atlanta” at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, in which he played a Yankee soldier in the Civil War pretending to be a Confederate soldier in order to survive. The character was under the command of an abusive colonel.
“Working on a script like this as if it were a dream, I begin by asking myself, What is at war within me?” Mr. Barnett wrote in an e-mail message. “What are the two sides of me battling to protect a union? What part of me is like the colonel, judgmental and cruel? How am I cruel to myself?”
The audience, he said, “didn’t know what I was doing, but for me, the action of the play held more potency than just the pretend circumstances. Instead, it offered me, as every script inevitably does, an opportunity to confront a dynamic in my own life and work on it, night after night.”
