Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

40 Chapter 3 The Actor
No American actress in the past forty years—indeed, probably no actress ever—has come close to equaling the
achievement, both artistic and commercial, of Meryl Streep. Quickly moving from her Yale Drama School acting Master
of Fine Arts (MFA) degree into five Broadway shows between 1975 and 1977, Streep crossed into films and by 2015 had
received more Academy Award nominations (nineteen—the most recent two being in films based on plays: Into the
Woods and August: Osage County) than any other performer. But Streep remains closely connected to the stage through
the New York Shakespeare Festival, where, in 2001, she played Madame Arkadina in Chekhov’s The Seagull. She is
shown here in 2006 in one of the most demanding roles in modern theatre: the seventeenth-century war-profiteer Anna
Fielding (Mother Courage) in Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children. Audiences lined up from the early morning
hours, rain or shine, to see Streep’s three-and-a-half-hour outdoor performance in Central Park’s Delacorte Theatre.
She received nearly unanimous praise for fully capturing Anna’s hardbitten cynicism, raucous exuberance, and capitalist
fervor—as well as for belting out Brecht’s audacious songs with tremendous élan. © Michal Daniel
discipline promised by calculation,” and cautioned his
fellow performers that “it is never correct to employ the
left hand alone in gesture” and that “the hand [must not]
be raised above the level of the eyes.” These notions
of regularity and discipline became championed in
the eighteenth century by the French essayist Denis
Diderot, whose 1773 “Paradox of Acting” proclaimed
the radical thesis that “a great actor . . . must [only be]
an unmoved and disinterested onlooker.” Diderot then
argued fiercely that it is better for an actor to imitate
anger than to actually be angry, and that actors should
therefore play from the head, not from the heart. “Actors
impress the public not when they are furious, but when
they play fury well,” he declared, explaining that “actors
who play from the heart . . . are alternately strong and
feeble, fiery and cold. . . . Tomorrow they will miss the
point they have excelled in today. . . . But the actor who
plays from thought . . . will be always at his best; for
he has considered, combined, learned and arranged the
whole thing in his head.” Diderot beautifully represents
the rationalist view of the European Enlightenment,
which sought to demystify both medieval superstition