Allen Barton

Sep 21

Inherit the room, then prove it still works.

Life and work

Allen Barton, born in 1968 and raised in Lexington, Massachusetts, took a degree in Russian and Soviet studies at Harvard in 1990 and moved to Los Angeles, where he studied acting at the Beverly Hills Playhouse and apprenticed under Milton Katselas as a director and teacher for eighteen years. He began working at the school in 1993, became its chief financial officer in 1997 and its chief executive in 2003, and started teaching there in 2002. Katselas left him the school on his death in 2008, and he has taught and run it since. He is also a classical pianist and a playwright: Engagement in 2010, Years to the Day in 2013, which drew Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle and LA Weekly notice, and Disconnection in 2015. He has directed numerous Los Angeles productions, among them Rabbit Hole and The Real Thing.

Approach and technique

The teaching descends directly from Katselas: scene work staged and then examined, with the note given as an instruction the actor can act on, and the working life of the actor treated as part of the subject rather than as small talk before class.

What his own career adds is the perspective of someone still making things. A teacher who is writing plays and directing them meets the same problems his students meet, on the same week, and cannot teach the craft as a settled body of knowledge because his own work keeps proving otherwise.

The succession problem

Every school built around one teacher faces the same hour, and most face it badly. The founder dies, and what was a living practice becomes a set of remembered phrases. The successor either repeats the founder word for word, which produces a museum, or breaks with him, which throws away the reason anyone came.

Barton is a useful case because the handover was explicit. He was named by Katselas, trained by him for eighteen years, and runs the room as the same room. The question that puts to any student, and it is the fair one to ask of any inherited school, is whether the work is still being tested, or only preserved.

Why an inherited method has to keep earning it

A method is a set of answers to problems actors were having when the founder was alive. Some of those problems are permanent: you cannot listen and perform at once, you cannot want something abstractly, you cannot be interesting while protecting yourself. Answers to those keep working, and preserving them is right.

Other parts are answers to a particular market. The Beverly Hills Playhouse teaching about attitude and administration was formed in a Los Angeles of agents, pilot season and casting offices. The actor in front of you now works in a business of self-tapes, direct submissions, contracts about digital replicas, and platforms that did not exist when the syllabus was written. The craft half of that inheritance may be untouched while the career half quietly ages into folklore.

So here is the test you can apply to any school with a founder’s name over the door, this one included. Ask when the curriculum last changed and what changed it. Ask what the founder taught that the current teacher no longer does, and why. A successor who can answer both questions specifically is running a practice. A successor with no answer is curating a shrine, however good the shrine is.

There is a second, harder question, and it applies to teachers of every lineage. What in the room is craft, and what is culture? Craft transfers to any stage you walk onto. Culture is the house style: the vocabulary, the manners, the things everyone agrees to admire. A strong school produces both, and students often cannot tell them apart until they work somewhere else. Keep track of which of your habits travel and which only work in the room where you learned them.

Applications for actors

If you study at a school whose founder is gone, ask directly what has been revised since and what has been kept deliberately. Good teachers welcome that question, and their answer tells you whether you are joining a practice or a memory.

Rehearsal exercise

List ten things you were taught that you now treat as rules. Write them in the words your teacher used. Then mark each one C or H: craft, meaning it would hold in any rehearsal room on earth, or house, meaning it is how your school does things.

Take one you marked H and deliberately break it in a rehearsal. Not in performance, and not to be a nuisance. Play the scene the way the rule forbids and see what actually happens.

Afterwards, decide which of three things is true: the rule protects something real and you now know what, the rule is a taste you have adopted as a law, or the rule was never a rule and you invented it out of a note you half heard. All three answers are worth having. Do this once a season, because a practice you have never tested is a belief, and beliefs make actors rigid in exactly the places they think they are disciplined.