A Few Years With Falstaff

Just learned that one of my all-time favorite teachers died on May 29th, so here then are a few tales about what good teaching looks like.

Bill Sharp taught at Emerson College for only about fifteen years, after teaching at Stanford and then starting the theatre program at the University of California – Riverside. But those fifteen years happened to cover the entire period when I studied there, the more happy me. What Sharp excelled at was teaching acting styles, most particularly the classics. Now, acting is a particularly difficult thing to teach--it’s too easy to fall into the trap of saying to your students “You’ve got it or you don’t.” But he focused intensively on a few key things: understanding the text, trusting your instincts, and challenging your limitations.

He was wonderful with Shakespeare. In fact, the man was Falstaff. Squarely built, a bit of a belly, a good Falstaffian beard, a booming voice when he wanted it and a beguiling sweetness when he wanted it, plus a tendency to perhaps drink too much from time to time. If I were directing Merry Wives or the Henry IV plays, I’d have cast him in a cold second without bothering to audition anyone else. So he wasn’t one of those “If you can’t do, teach” sorts of teachers—he could do, indeed, and very well. Those of us in his class were always conniving to find ways to make him demonstrate a few lines of whatever we were working on, just for the fun of watching him handle the text.

And when we were working on a piece with some complex language, like Shakespeare, his first rule was always this: never say the line till you really understand it. He would sit with us and go line by line through a soliloquy and make sure we really thoroughly comprehended exactly what each line meant, why it was there, what it hoped to accomplish. By the time he was done, our speeches weren’t that awful generalized Shakespearean wash of sound but were concrete, and specific, and rich with meaning.

As for challenging an actor’s limitations—this is the guy who cast me as Othello in a long-form collection of scenes our class presented my Senior year. Bear in mind: I am just about the least likely Othello you could hope to imagine. Iago has always been more my speed, in fact I love that part and hugely regret that I never got to play it. (Though Sharp did spend ages working with me on an Iago speech that became part of my standard auditioning repertoire--the one that ends “’Tis here, but yet confus’d: Knavery’s plain face is never seen till used.”) But he wanted to push me, he wanted to see what would happen if I played a character way outside my normal range. It was essentially an in-class project with only a small audience from the other classes, so the point was not to create great art, it was to push the actors and see who could rise to the occasion. In the end I didn’t really do that great a job--but I appreciate hugely what he was trying to accomplish.

And here, finally, is a story about trusting your instincts. After I graduated, Sharp was nice enough to take on a bunch of us in his off-hours. His own personal time, something he didn’t have to do at all, but for about ten of us he decided what the hell, he’d continue working with us for a while. In that group were a couple of actors who weren’t really very good. Anyone else (me included) would say that these two just didn’t have it, whatever “it” may be, and that there wasn’t much point in spending too much time with them. Which may be exactly why Sharp included them in the group....

These two were doing the nunnery scene from Hamlet one night, and it wasn’t going terribly well. Stiff, and awkward, and dull. But at one point, Sharp noticed something, and he stopped the scene. He said to the guy playing Hamlet, “You had an impulse just then, didn’t you? You wanted to walk out of the room.” The guy nodded. “Then do it,” Sharp said. “Walk out of the room. It’s her job to keep you here, but if you have that impulse, you’ve got to honor it. Let’s try it again.” They started from the top, reached that point, there was a moment’s hesitation and then the guy really truly did walk out of the room. The girl playing Ophelia chased after him, and a moment later they returned, with Ophelia basically dragging Hamlet back onstage.

And after that, after that was one of the best versions of that scene I have ever witnessed. And for those two not-particularly-gifted actors, it was almost certainly the pinnacle of their acting lives, there in a dim room in the old Student Union at Emerson for an audience of about ten. Because Bill Sharp wanted to see every student accomplish as much as they possibly could.

I left Boston and have no idea whether he continued with the extracurricular classwork, but I know he retired in 1994, and despite the drinking he lived till the ripe old age of 84 down in Swampscott. I’m not much of a drinker myself, but I shall, this one particular time, most definitely raise a glass.