Milton Katselas

Sep 21

Do the work, and then do the work the work requires.

Life and work

Milton Katselas (1933–2008) was born in Pittsburgh, studied at Carnegie Tech, and trained in New York with Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio, with further work under Joshua Logan, Joseph Anthony and Sanford Meisner. He directed the 1960 off-Broadway premiere of Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, Butterflies Are Free on Broadway in 1969 and its film version in 1972, 40 Carats, and the 1983 revival of Private Lives with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He won several Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle awards for his stage work. In 1978 he brought his classes into the Beverly Hills Playhouse and taught there for thirty years, until his death in Los Angeles in 2008.

Approach and technique

Katselas taught scene work like a director, because he was one. The room was built around the scene put on its feet and then taken apart in front of everyone, with the note delivered as a working instruction rather than a comment.

What set the class apart was the second subject. He held that an actor’s attitude and administration are part of the craft and belong in the training: what you do on the days nobody hires you, whether your materials exist, whether you are in the room where work is decided, what you tell yourself about your own chances. His book Dreams into Action is that half of the teaching. Acting Class: Take a Seat, published the year he died, is the other.

A director’s classroom in a film town

Context matters here. He was teaching in Los Angeles, where most actors are freelancers whose working life is auditions, self-tapes and long silences, not a company and a season. A class that addresses only the scene leaves that actor with a craft they use twice a month and a career they manage badly the rest of the time.

His students included Gene Hackman, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kate Hudson, Patrick Swayze and Tom Selleck, which tells you the room could hold working professionals under real pressure. A class that keeps that population for years is doing something beyond teaching beginners to be truthful.

Why the career belongs in the classroom, and where that gets dangerous

Start with the plain case for it. Talent that never meets an opportunity produces nothing. The habits that put an actor in front of the right people are learnable, and they are mostly unglamorous: materials that are current, a list of people who should know your work, a weekly quantity of contact, a truthful account of what you are actually castable as right now. None of that is mystical and all of it can be coached.

The case gets stronger when you notice what actors do with the blank days. Most fill them with a private argument about whether they are any good. A teacher who names that argument, and replaces it with three actions you can complete this week, is teaching something as real as an objective in a scene. Katselas called it attitude and administration, and the two words belong together, because the state you are in determines whether the administration happens at all.

Now the danger, which you should understand wherever you study. A class that speaks to your career and your attitude has a much larger claim on you than a class that speaks to your scene. The teacher stops being someone who fixes your work and becomes someone who adjudicates your life. Attendance starts to feel like belonging, and disagreement starts to feel like disloyalty. That drift is not caused by a bad teacher; it happens in any room where the stakes are personal and the authority is concentrated.

The protection is simple and worth practising as a discipline. Keep your own record of what changed in your work, independent of what you were told about yourself. Notice whether you can say no to something in the room and still be welcome there. Keep at least one serious person in your life who is not in the school. Take the administration and leave the adjudication. A class can teach you how to run your career without being the place you answer to.

Applications for actors

Split your working week in two on paper. One column is craft: text, voice, body, scene work. The other is administration: materials, contacts, submissions, the specific five people who should see you this quarter. Most actors keep only the first column and call the second one luck.

Rehearsal exercise

Write the five actions your career needs this month, in verbs, with names attached. Not goals. Not feelings. Actions with a recipient: send this to that person, book that session, finish those pages, ask this colleague for that introduction, put that scene on tape.

Now do the smallest one badly today. Not well. Badly, and completely. The point is to break the link between the action and your estimate of your own worth, which is the link that keeps the list undone.

At the end of the month, score only two things: how many of the five happened, and which one you avoided longest. The avoided one is your real material. Take it to class and say it out loud, because the avoidance is usually a belief about yourself and not a scheduling problem. Then write next month’s five before the day ends.

Books and further study

Acting Class: Take a Seat, published in 2008, is the teaching room on the page: scene work, notes, and what he expected of a professional in class. Dreams into Action, from 1996, is the career half, written for a wider audience than actors, and it reads like a coach rather than a critic. Read them as a pair, since his argument is that neither one works alone.