Atlantic Theater Company Acting School
Atlantic Theater Company Acting School’s admissions procedures vary depending on the program for which you apply, but include an interview and written questionnaire. It addresses not just your artistic goals and thoughts about acting, but also your resourcefulness. At the end of the questionnaire are three questions easily described as trivia. This annoys many people and if it annoys you, Atlantic will make you a very unhappy camper. If you’re amused though, Atlantic may be a good fit for you. In case the questions haven’t changed since my own application pineapple is a type of poker.
One of the chief focuses at Atlantic Theater Company Acting School is the primacy of the text. Getting every word exactly right and honoring the playwright’s words is critical. This is excellent training, in that it forces you to give up the impulse to fight with the text or to desire it to be different. These are the words, and they are the best words you have ever read, now just do the work. This is a valuable discipline and a technique that is also helpful to actors who write or writers who act.
While the technique taught at Atlantic Theater Company Acting School is best described in A Practical Handbook for the Actor, Practical Aesthetics involves examining the text of the scene, ascertaining what this scene is like (something hypothetical, but plausible in your own life) and then performing it with that intention. It sounds convoluted in explanation, but I can assure you, it always works. That said, it can be a distinctly unsatisfying way of working for many actors who do desire to move into the world of the scene as opposed to moving the scene into their own world. Personally, I view Practical Aesthetics as a valuable technique, and one every actor should have in their tool box as a plan B if they can’t get to the emotional truth of a scene in a more practical way. Practical Aesthetics also has the somewhat unique benefit of helping actors to avoid getting lost in roles.
Training at Atlantic Theater Company Acting School can also be said to focus on the will of the individual. What do you want and what are you willing to do to get it? This is powerful stuff that keeps scenes energized and helps actors explore new tactics for achieving goals both in and outside of scenes. It can also be extraordinarily helpful to actors who do not feel they are aggressive enough on stage or have problems not getting defensive when exposed to certain types of conflict in scenes.
Ultimately, however, in my own experience, I find Practical Aesthetics to be best suited to the style of writing that David Mamet brings us. And while I’d love to do a Mamet play, I don’t want that to be the only thing I am capable of as an actor. Mamet’s work, for want of a better description, is very talky and cerebral, and often neglects issues of physicality. It is a particular type of heightened reality of the intellect, and it requires specialized skills to perform, but they are not always extensible to other types of scenes.
Finally, Atlantic Theater Company Acting School takes discipline seriously. If you are late to class, you are not admitted to the class. If you miss more than a couple of classes you are out. This teaches respect for fellow performers and personal discipline, and I actually highly support it. But at a given point their harping on it can get a bit tiring, especially if you’re no longer a teen-ager and have already learned these things through your own experiences. If you come to Atlantic Theater Company Acting School with a strong force of will already in place, it is easy to feel frustrated or like you’re butting heads with their way of doing things as opposed to getting things done. Ultimately, that’s why I chose not to continue my training there, although I continue to find the training I did receive there valuable.
I encourage anyone applying to Atlantic Theater Company’s programs to ask lots of questions and to consider not just its prestige and quality of training (both excellent), but if it is a good personal fit; it isn’t for everyone.
