We’re on stage in Prosser Studio, behind Memorial Auditorium. We’re standing in a circle, shoes off, rolling our heads, dipping our shoulders, wiggling our fingers down to the tips. We open our faces wide, then scrunch them up. Make room in our bodies for our voices to live. Take deep breaths and let them go.
Then, we’re in a Bronx bar, on a dreary Monday night. And drama lecturer Kay Kostopoulos is asking our company of thespians to visualize the so-called fourth wall—the theatrical space behind the audience. What’s hanging there? How does it feel?
Students in Contemporary Scene Study start to pitch suggestions. A dart board. An old calendar. A neon Budweiser sign. And an especially grating touch: Tom Jones singing “It’s Not Unusual” on a grimy jukebox.
Kostopoulos beams. “Okay, Megan, cross downstage and look at the ‘Bud babe’ sign,” she says. “Take a fake sip of your drink, taste it and start talking. And go with a heavy-duty Bronx accent and any other cliché you can think of. Make a huge choice, because you can always pull back.”
Junior Megan Cohen and sophomore Lauren Dunagan are embarking on a cold reading of John Patrick Shanley’s Savage in Limbo. Each time they repeat the scene, Kostopoulos adds new elements. “Get furious with her, Megan—like you want to kill her!” And to Dunagan: “Keep shuffling your cards while you watch her.”
Kostopoulos, who has an MFA degree from San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater (ACT), has taught advanced acting courses in the drama department since 1998. Her “contemporary” class puts students in touch with a range of modern playwrights. “I’ve done Russian realism and revisionist plays, but as an Asian-American actor, contemporary stuff is what I’ll probably get the most work in,” says senior Jason Lee. “I think people in the drama world tend to look down on modern works as kind of nihilistic, but Kay’s really taught us about the beauty that there is in colloquial playwriting.”
In the course, Lee and seven other students, most of them drama majors, are exploring John Guare’s Lydie Breeze and Sam Shepard’s A Lie of the Mind, in addition to the Shanley piece. The actors are paired off and they get an intense half-hour of Kostopoulos’ attention as they work the scenes they’ve been assigned. “You really must listen to the other person,” she will tell them. “Too often actors only think about their own parts, and that’s dead on stage. So follow through after a line leaves you, to make sure it lands on the other person. Make sure it is understood.”
For many students, Kostopoulos says, getting on their feet with a contemporary script can feel like crossing the border into a foreign country. “A lot of these plays are about rapid rate of utterance—speaking quickly and clearly and with great precision—and it’s a skill they can learn. With a [George Bernard] Shaw play, you have to speak quickly or it’s going to be five hours long.”
Kostopoulos also urges students to stay “in the moment” with one another on stage and trust that they’ll remember their lines when it’s their turn to speak. “Your focus must be present, or the audience will see it right away,” she adds.
Each fall, Kostopoulos helps evaluate prospective freshmen who want to audition as part of the admission process, and as Commencement approaches she crosses her fingers for graduating seniors. “I want to give them as much encouragement and support as I can, but I also know that it’s a hard, hard, hard life of rejection,” she says. “It’s not like you graduate, go out and get a job.” Because the odds of getting into graduate school are so overwhelming, Kostopoulos says it was particularly gratifying when three of her students were admitted to Yale, Brown and ACT last year. “Often they’re so talented, but they can’t get in the door. But these three just hit it—one, two, three. It was fabulous.”
