O'Neill as Opera

Theatre is opera and opera is theatre. Or so goes the theme of my 20-year conversation with legendary director Frank Corsaro. It has taken place at Juilliard, The Actors Studio and in Italian restaurants near both.

When Frank received an honorary doctorate from Juilliard in 2010, he shared the stage with Tony Bennett, Patty Lupone, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Tony Kushner. When a list of his accomplishments was read from the stage, Juilliard president Joseph Polisi organized the salute into two separate categories, theater and opera.

In theater, Frank is known as the original director of Tennessee William’s The Night of the Iguana and Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain. He was artistic director of The Actors Studio for a decade. Among his acting students were Steve McQueen and Harvey Keitel.

In opera, he staged over 50 new productions as a resident director at New York City Opera and a guest director at The Met. His 22 years of teaching at the Juilliard Opera Center have made an indelible impact on the art of acting in opera. His students included Renee Fleming, whom he recently directed in her first La Traviata.

At commencement, Mr. Polisi acknowledged Frank’s impact on both worlds, but for me his legacy also includes the impact of each side of his art on the other.

Frank spearheaded theatrical realism in opera, and has been its leading proponent and its finest practitioner. But he also brought an unusually heightened sense of theatricality to spoken theater, and a specifically operatic one at that.

I had the opportunity to observe both of his lives at close range. This first hand experience took place simultaneously as a member of the Playwright-Director Unit at The Actors Studio and as an assistant director at The Juilliard Opera Center.

But the real apprenticeship took place at the Italian restaurants. “Directing is a very special art” he would say over pasta, spinach and wine. By “special” he meant that there was no book or manual for directing opera, not even a modern tradition such as can be found for performers. In his case it is an exceptionally special one when you consider that his perspective is equally informed by both sides of his art.

His ecumenical view of musical and spoken theater has guided the course of my work with O’Neill’s plays. Since he emphasized the musical qualities of spoken theater, his influence led me to first think of O’Neill’s plays in operatic terms.

This realization first struck me when I did a turn it as an actor in one of his workshops with “method” actors. I was working on a monologue from an O’Neill play and was straining to be believable. The result was resoundingly unsuccessful.

Frank asked me what I was thinking while I worked. I told him that I was trying to not be over-the-top or “operatic” as I put it. I wanted to be truthful. He then asked me to do it "operatically," or what I thought of as such.

When I did, I felt the power beneath the words take hold because he told me to embrace the very thing I was consciously avoiding.

This experience began me thinking of O’Neill as opera. The length and scale of O’Neill’s works find a musical equivalent in grand opera, in which characters from legend, myth and classical drama often fill the stage. Staging these works requires the presence of an orchestra of symphonic scale as well as singing actors with voices that can be heard ringing above it.

On the American stage, Frank added the ring of truth to the mix. He raised the standard of acting in opera through his pivotal role in creating a modern theatrical tradition for it.

Thos theatrical values were of the highly realistic tradition of The Actors Studio, where Lee Strasberg was artistic director, a position which Frank would eventually assume himself, having once been a protégé to Strasberg.

When Frank first invited me to observe his work at The Actors Studio, I entered a world where a where the Studio membership was fixed on “sense memory,” “effectively memory” and other tools of the “method” as Strasberg’s approach came to be known.

I watched Frank impose his own independent vision to the work at The Actors Studio, a sensibility informed as much by his work in opera as in theatre.

Frank stated outright that the membership of The Actors Studio was lost in memory, specifically that of Lee himself, the father of “the method.”

Frank challenged some of Strasberg’s basic principals by emphasizing the benefits of using the imagination, instead of memory, as the doorway to inspiration for the actor.

Similarly, his message to the opera world was a wake-up call to move on from the pre-war view of the singer as a solely vocal instrument.

Naturally, he met resistance along the way in both situations. But from where I was standing he was doing what he did best, that of daring closed minds to open.