I graduated from Northwestern and I taught at University of wisconsin-milwaukee Indiana University Carnegie tech for a couple of years Return of the acting program at Yale, and I went up into Canada for a couple of years and thought of the National Theater school and was traveling at York University in Toronto. Then I moved out to California at the University of california-riverside for a year. And now I'm Edina theater at the California Institute of the Arts. That's what I've done teaching wise. I've been a member of the Second City company and the original game Theater in Chicago and director whole house heater in Chicago Company director the Milwaukee Repertory Theater for a couple years and I've rented a lot of Shakespeare festivals in the summers in Oregon Great Lakes in Colorado. And after I confronted you play house and producer CBS TV for a while might not realize how much influence he currently has in theater circles, but it became evident to me very quickly at the 38th annual Convention of the American Theater Association held in Minneapolis, the Benedetti was respected by those working in professional theater as well as those involved in academic theater and actor training We Begin our conversation with comments about his book the app. You're at work be accurate where came out 3 years ago. And it's going into a second edition next year. It did much better than we thought it would I guess it just appeared at the right time. It's in it's a sprinting now and in three years, then there's another book coming out next year call singing being and becoming which is like a theoretical thing about acting about why are they? Why do we have actors? Why should someone be an actor? What what fundamental human needs is? Does the actor fulfill in our society? Why did why do we bother to support theater? or at least acting and I'm working on another book at present which will be in advance how to do a sort of book but I doubt if that'll get published because nobody did the textbook Market has has collapsed really besides that it seems to me that be on an introductory level. I don't know of a single good acting teacher that uses a book. And I don't think it would be much purpose. So I might not pursue that one. There are a variety of formats in which acting is taught in this country and I suspect that students tend to sort themselves out usually badly and without good advice because the different programs don't haven't always done a very good job of identifying their objectives to an incoming students. The refrig sample the league of professional training programs which consists of eight or nine schools that state that their objective is to train for the profession. They offer a broad range of skills. They all have voice and movement expert on the staff. They all offer intensive programs in acting and all of the axillary skills, besides voice and movement usually a smattering of mine or Dance Training as well as other things like circus techniques or make up any of singing dancing any of the things that are auxiliary to an actor. And those programs tend to be somewhat like the conservatories in Europe now in Europe in England, there are conservatories that our government totally supported for the training of actors in Russia. And Germany you have often these conservatories attached to some of the great theaters like a balloon or Ensemble has up like a whole farm club of a whole the whole chain of farm club schools the Bristol Old Vic had its own theater school for a while now in this country for financial reasons mostly. And because of Union regulations the Repertory Theatre's themselves with the exception of act and I believe I am honest program at the Cleveland Playhouse with those two exceptions. Repertory. Theatre's have not been able to have schools of their own training actors for their own companies. The gusli by the way is seriously considering the possibility of establishing such a school in relationship to their new second stage, which they're thinking of starting for the which will be dedicated to the doing of new place and I've been Consulting with with Michael and and Eugene Lyons and Don show him about that. We don't know if you know that will happen or not. But all the Repertory Theatre's would certainly like to get like to get into training. It's just a financial impossibility. It's also pretty much ruled out by the time restrictions in the equity contracted any anytime and training would have to be taken out of rehearsal hours as things now stand and I think that is going to require if the theaters are going to begin to do some of the professional training in the way they do in Europe or England. Then there's going to have to be quite a change of attitude in relation to training on the part of the unions and on the part of the foundation's which should tend to support these companies because a training program is a new note is enormously cost and returns absolutely. No dollars. It's it's a complete expense. It does not pay pay you back in a single penny for anything you put into it. Now that's true within the university situation as well unlike the Sciences. Over example where defense contracts in the old days anyway or business programs. We're very often corporations or in the wall where law firms will often subsidized or endow scholarships or even prefer professorial chairs or where the Alumni Association turns out to be quite rich and influential there's a certain kind of money coming back into the University from such programs. Why didn't see you there in the Fine Arts in general you tend to not have Rich alumni. In fact, you have a rapport alumni you tend to get very little in the way of governmental subsidy into the school's because one governmental agency does not like to give money to another governmental agency. So it's very hard for a university or College. To get governmental subsidy money, even from a state Arts Council because in a sense, they're already supported by public funds. At least. That's the argument that we often get. It's a more costly form of teaching than the teaching of Arts or Sciences liberal arts or Sciences. Because first of all, we need to lower student to faculty ratio how you can't do a good job of training in any of the Arts. If you're much above a ten-to-one student-to-faculty ratio, whereas the average faculty-to-student ratio in most disciplines is around 18 or 22 one. So we need twice as many teachers for the same number of students. That's very costly. We need special kind of spaces dance studios in theaters and so on which tend to be costly to operate. at the same time I think we have to admit that it's also a matter of priorities cuz if if you go over to Aunt, you know to the chemistry lab or to the physics lab and you look into one laboratory usually see enough equipment enough for the materials being expended to to easily run a modest theater program. So I think all that I've said all of the financial logistical difficulties of running a theater training program even in the University's is really a reflection of a very low National priority on Cedar and until the recent increase in the National Endowment budget our government gave virtually nothing relatively speaking to other governments. To the theater and we've had two more or less pay our own way by diluting really the intensity and in many cases the quality of the Year training offered in order to service the University of large teach those Mammoth survey courses and so on now, I'm obviously speaking from the point of view of someone who is interested in a professional preparation not vocational. There's a very big difference there and that's that's widely misunderstood. One of the first charges leveled against theater training in this country. And it's it's going to continue to be in the University's the theater that you Repertory theaters are not going to be able to take over the training function. The government is not going to establish a government who supported academies such as exists in Canada or an England. The universities are the only institutions in this country who have the wherewithal in the facilities to train for the theater. I mean in a sense I'm saying that theater training has ended up in the University by default in our country, but it is true that there is no other for no other siblings to tution capable of Housing and supporting a theater training program you in our country. We have over 2,000 drama departments and I suspect we could probably get along nicely with six or seven training programs. But there are values to the training of theater in Liberal Arts situation where there is no professional or vocational orientation at where there is no intention of Preparing People for their profession. We already have too many actors of actors were dear. We probably have to shoot half the herd in this country because well many fewer than half of the total number of people who call themselves actors really are working anyway, and it does seem silly that we have so many drama Department's cranking out actors because the emphasis usually is on after training or at least it seems to be at in terms of the amount of lip service the amount of attention given you don't hear a whole lot about playwriting programs and directing programs in the you do hear something about technical theater programs, but it's sort of ironic that whereas our theater is a desperate for playwrights for good managers and for good directors we continue to to put so much emphasis on the actor when in fact the actor is probably the least require new commodity in the theater But all that all those vocational considerations aside what we haven't done a good job of is justifying the teaching of theater. some exposure limit exposure to acting exposure to dramatic literature exposure exposure to of the physical environment of the theater and what it what what kind of human events can occur within it as a form of general education General development and broadening and Of of the of the student as a human being to my mind. I'm biased I started out teaching at the University of Chicago where we didn't even teach theater at all. It was strictly and regular activity. This isn't the old Robert Maynard Hutchins days Mortimer Adler those kinds of people really a Renaissance Academy in that sense. If we had a tremendously active the theatrical activity there that I operated and what I found was that if education higher education is really a preparation to learn that is what what are University want to do is to teach you how to educate yourself how to be able to educate yourself so that your education becomes a lifelong Endeavor. I'll somehow American Advanced education as a whole has been gotten very much away from this has gotten into mirror imparting of knowledge within a very specific. Of time during these four years. You will learn the subject. When we're done with you, you are educated you get that sheepskin and you go out and you do it the Carnegie commission report on education and arts and campus and everyone has been stressing the fact that we must somehow break down. This is Richard. The sense of of advanced education is happening within these few years and turn it into a lifelong kind of activity, which means that the best kind of education is. Helping a person to find himself to find his own Center to use that metaphor so that he can begin to develop and fulfill himself as a human being because once you once you've assisted the student to to touch the center of his own existence to to feel his own human energies beginning to flow in a free and unconventional. I used to weigh without being pigeonholed into Ridgid battery patterns of expected behavior in Solon. Once you've liberated in the sense of human beings energies to begin to explore new Realms of experience to explore himself in and variety of situations then all you really need for education is a good Library. Or Rich life experiences not to the formal classroom. Not the the the Judgment of how much knowledge in terms of quantity one one possesses and many of us in the theater would argue that since the theater is about living is about Human Action about humans interacting with one another and with their environment and since the study of acting or any aspect of theater is in a sense a also a study of the way in which the human being relates to himself and his other fellows and his environment. And the actor is forced to confront himself to identify to make touch with his own deepest personal energies to begin experiencing himself in new forms as he adopts various characters to begin having new a new range of experience as he begins to experience at least vicariously within the discipline the experience of the characters that he plays that in fact, it can be one of the most meaningful kinds of Education in the sense of human development and it's obvious from the topics at the convention and the kind of works. It is going on across all across the country today that the human development movement in general and and the training of acting are very very close together in the techniques at the uses tremendous interchange of ideas between the two disciplines. We see many more acting teachers Going into the human development movement and vice-versa tonight. I start a four-day post-convention workshop at the rarig center where we have a bio in a Genesis the role for an Alexander technique person of structural integration has a wide range of disciplines from the human development movement all there to help acting teachers develop something of those skills for you within the acting classroom. Now, if somehow we could make our case to our culture not just the university administrators or to the government but to the man on the street that the theater Itself and training for theater also fulfilled really fundamental human needs that will enrich the daily life of anybody quite apart from any professional concern over occasional concern. Then I think people would begin to have a sense of the kind of respect the kind of feeling of the Dignity of Theater which is prevalent in Europe in England, but is almost non-existent in the United States the last 10 years. I think I have seen the greatest change in educational philosophy in general and in the teaching of a theater in particular a much greater change in his ever occurred in our history before that's partly because we've been forced to re-examine. Our objectives and are methodologies by necessity by Financial Necessities by logistical necessities. At the same time that the pressure has been enormous from above to curtail or or at least to force us to be accountable or to justify the presence of theater training on the campus or anywhere for that matter. At the same time that this pressure for example, Columbia University eliminating is theater program. One of the oldest most respected graduate programs in the country out of budgetary necessity was a terrible blow to all of us because that was one of the great pillars of advanced scholarship in theater in this country the closing of Repertory Theater in the fifties. We had this tremendous surge of the building of Repertory. Theatre's all across the country. Not just the Guthrie though. The Guthrie was probably the most ambitious of all those projects and at the same time in the in the decade since we've seen the study definition of the number of those theaters that have been able to survive all of the foundation of thought in those early days that if we could give the Guthrie a three-year Grande That in three years you'll be able to support themselves and in that three years passed and then lo and behold I needed another five-year Grant and at the end of that five years you'll be able to support yourself and it was an incredibly naive attitude given the fact that no see her anywhere has ever supported itself. There is no way that I know of in your up or governmental subsidy is not massive in the theater in If This Were Austria a city the size of Minneapolis would have probably to state-supported Opera Houses and seven or eight State supported theaters as well as a whole host of a satellite. Avant garde theaters, although the fact that there are 28 theaters operating in Minneapolis makes it one one of the healthiest. If not, probably the healthiest theater town in the country right now. I think probably only Toronto on the North American continent compares to Minneapolis and I include New York in that because New York is getting to be a pretty dead Place theater wise Los Angeles oddly enough in the heart of media oval is is showing signs of burgeoning into a real theater town. but that anyone should think that theater would be able to support itself is extremely naive because it was a very interesting book called the economic crisis in the Performing Arts economical Mo crisis in the Performing Arts was turned out by a couple of Economist and their explanation for our situation made a great deal of sense. It was so obvious as it was a surprise. I never thought of it before as technology advances that television set over there perhaps costs a third less to produce today than it did 10 years ago because of technological advances and the end and advances in production techniques and yet a play takes exactly as many man-hours to produce today as it did 4,000 years ago. So as the cost per unit All that television set drops and have everything else all the other produce Commodities in our culture drops through technology the cost per unit of the Performing Arts appears to increase relative to the cost per unit of everything else and they statistically over a wide range of samplings prove that the cost of theater and ballet and Opera and symphony orchestras appears and therefore really does because in economics appearances are reality appears to double every 10 years and will continue to double every 10 years for the foreseeable future, which means that by the year 2000 Cedar is going to have a hard time surviving unless Matt, there's massive governmental intervention. Or unless theater changes its form to become less expensive and I think we're seeing both things happening. We're seeing corporations governmental agencies State Arts. Council's Civic governments beginning to give more and more to the theater and to symphony orchestras. Although many symphony orchestras are in very bad shape and and the universities are starting to have to act as patrons for them and for dance companies as well as for theater because the tradition of the patronage of a rich family is gone in this country was a strong in the twenties and thirties but no more the rich families don't have that kind of money and plain and simple or at least they don't see the Arts as a way of spending their money quite quite as much as they once did. But at the same time we see the growth of a kind of Theater, which is very inexpensive to produce Street Theater outdoor touring companies for children many of the 28 seaters that are in Minneapolis represent a kind of shoestring Theater, which we find nice all Love's Labour's lost at the Guthrie last night a lovely lovely production. Not only lavishly clock costume, but the beautifully acted and clear and made a very difficult text very wordy text come wonderfully to life. I saw it all the way through out. But that is rare for establishment theater very often the large-scale high budget theaters in this country are turning out costume shows spectacles that are sometimes filled with somewhat shallow, or at least Halo acting not and I'm not saying that it did that that's true of the Guthrie quality of productions here in terms of the human encounter. The human values expressed by the production is very high because Michael had kind of director. But we're beginning to realize that without spending all that money for all that velvet and all that lace that we can have a very intimate very intense nearly spiritual kind of experience just down in the lobby of the hotel yesterday were a group was performing around in some neighborhood park are in the gymnasium of the local school or wherever a little group of people can come together and some of some renovated Warehouse or storefront we're beginning to realize it was important about theater is the human encounter. Between the live actor in the live audience and that a lot of the things that makes the heater. So outrageously expensive do not in fact necessarily enhance that human encounter. Now that realization is causing a Revival of interest in touring. We have many more to ring companies going in this country and I wouldn't be at all surprised if in the next decade we saw a Revival of the old theatrical circus like the old Schubert circuit where there were or the old Nixon circuit where there were seven or eight Theaters owned by a corporation. They could mount a show and send it out for a few weeks at the play in each of seven or eight different cities. This is this makes economic good sense, you get much more return $4 invested from a show that's guaranteed a Year's run in a variety of cities. You've also got a much healthier theatrical situation where the theater is going to the cities outside of the outside of the biggest ones because the old circuits had theaters in St. Louis and Cleveland and Cincinnati and in all of the above. middle-sized towns not just in New York in Chicago and Los Angeles We also see the itinerant Company the company just sort of wanders around playing wherever they can your chickens company recently disbanded Richards. Hector's company the bread and Puppet Theater. Laundry Gregory's Manhattan Project just a whole host of these kinds of fears who also service and a groups which would otherwise never get to see theater prisons hospitals Indian reservations ghetto children, very important at the theater be brought to these people because it's been proven time and time again that they cannot or will not come to the theater. They they they don't have the wherewithal or that or the Habit necessary to leave their environs in and come downtown to wear. The big theaters are even when we give the tickets away. Obama study that I mentioned earlier for example went to all of the three theater in that he could find and did an economic survey of the audience and found that the mean income of audience members at free theater was $18,000 a year. So that did the poor work. We're not coming now and Joe Papp sends a Spanish-speaking production out into Spanish Harlem when Andre drivers Manhattan Project goes into into Morningside Heights or wherever it was that it was and then does a production that grows out of that Community as a very different situation. Now you're taking theater to the people the bread and Puppet Theater in the same thing in the streets of New York agrarian theater theater at beginning to happen for the rural audience in for the Royal experience. I think you're very important that we that we to some degree. Urbanize theater that we set theater free from it's a total dependency upon Urban centers because the are our inner cities are all in trouble. And if the other remains entirely dependent on the inner city, it's going to be equally in trouble as we are witnessing in New York for most major cities today where people don't want to go out on the street after 10 at night. So we're moving to earlier curtain times were seeing dwindling audiences dwindling Seasons everywhere where the theater exist in the Inner City. Now all of this has had a tremendous impact on the training of actors, whereas in the last 30 or 40 years. The training of actors has been able to gear itself towards a certain dominant style a certain dominant kind of theatrical format in this country. We pretty well knew what we were training a student to do. Not now. I'm speaking from the point of view of preparing a person for the profession. We pretty well knew what he was going to end up doing nowadays. We have no idea what kind of theater a student is liable to work end up working in. We have no dominant style of playwriting 10-15 years ago. You didn't have to worry too much about training a student for anything besides realism because they ate out of 10 plays that he was going to do in his life. We're going to be realistic plays probably because that was the dominant style of theater going in this country in the thirties and forties and enable the 50s. Now there's no longer a dominant style of play writing has been a Revival of the classical repertoire. We still continue to do realism of course, but there's also a whole range of avant-garde play writing which makes demands of a highly athletic nature of an intense spiritual nature on the actor, which simply requires that the actor be trained for a broader range of performance skills, and with less of a biased towards one given kind of theater. And that has caused the tremendous Revolution within the within the serious training programs in this country. We have begun to emphasize more and more physical and vocal techniques. Sometimes we get caught up in a kind of faddishness. I could make a great deal like I would if I were speaking strictly commercial point of view for myself as a teacher the best advice I could give a young person who wanted to Reno make a good living with be to become a timesheet master or to teach one of these skills, which can you six or seven years ago? It was theater games. Everybody had to have a theater game teacher now everybody has habithai cheese, you're not putting these things down a practice in myself and and have high teachers in theater game secrets on my own faculties in the factories of the programs that I've run. These are skills which can be of enormous importance to the actor, but they are not a substitute for the central demand that acting makes on the human being which is the demand for transformation. Did the man that somehow that actor be able to contact his deepest personal energies and permit them to flow into the form of the character into becoming a new personality and that is essentially a spiritual discipline. and what's happening now, I believe is that we're realizing that the physical disciplines the movement disciplines the vocal disciplines that were teaching in our in our Conservatory type training programs are in fact The mechanisms of a spiritual discipline just as almost all Oriental religions start with a physical regimen like you don't get very far in yoga until you do your half of yogurt. Do you do your physical exercises even in in the Jewish tradition and in the Christian tradition, although it, it's bendy emphasize what is now being emphasized again, the physical aspects the attending to the body as the as the repository of the souls who is be getting into new States Of Consciousness through physical activities of various kinds we see this change in our psychology in our therapy getting away from laying on the couch and talking about your childhood and getting into active states of encounter in the immediate moment to no longer this emphasis on memory and but rather an emphasis on the immediate situation the immediate encounter. All of this has been reflected in our actor training and I think that the continued interest in physical and vocal disciplines and in the principles, which the human development movement have to walk for us. Is because we have realized that these disciplines are not just there to give the actor a better voice or to give him more responsive and limber and expressive body, but they are also there because they can be the mechanism of his spiritual development of his ability to undergo transformation to surrender his habitual ego. So as to be able to fully become the personality of the character that he is playing within the boundaries of his craft. I'm not talking about any kind of permanent alteration in his identity. In fact, I'm talking about really an expansion of his identity as a human being because unlike most people the actor has a chance to experience himself. In a variety of forms living in a variety of times and having a range of experience. It's inaccessible to ordinary Mortals. He is to me very much like the ancient worshiper who puts on the mask of the god and as he's wearing the mask of the god shares because they share in the Divinity of the God begins to be possessed by the God and when we go to the theater speaking now from an audience is point of view. I think what the Live Theater really has to offer quite aside from what any given play maybe about whatever the play may have to say, whatever it may teach us about who we are the way our lives are the fact that we can watch a human being the actor transform himself read to find himself enter into a new state of reality reminds us as we watch him that we ourselves have that same potential. Cheap look at that guy. He is really being somebody different than who he really is. I can to if I want to be I can change my life if I want to I can have different experiences and I have I can be a different person than I am if I want to be because human beings have this potential for Spiritual transformation and revivification. And that is the fundamental thing that I think theater live theater has to offer which the movies and a television simply cannot because they're not human encounters Robert Benedetti dean of the theater program at the California Institute of Arts in an interview conducted during the week-long 38th annual Convention of the American Theater Association in Minneapolis. Benedetti made a final comment on his hope for the American Theater. He said the closer we get to that level of the human encounter. The more important theater is going to be two people in their everyday lives in this country. I'm kind of Goldman.