Gurus: The Story of Acting,
from Stanislavsky to Succession

In 1935 the Group Theatre is on Broadway with Awake and Sing, while down the block, Michael Chekhov stars in a Russian Language Inspector General. Stella Adler heads backstage to ask Chekhov to teach the Group. A very young Beatrice Straight, heiress to the Whitney family fortune, pitches Chekhov to create his own company on a sprawling English estate at Dartington Hall. Guess who wins.

Academy Award nominee and Emmy Award winner Alfre Woodard joins Jeff to discuss how training shaped her extraordinary career — and what she believes young actors most need to understand about the craft today.

What came before Stanislavsky? In the late 19th century, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was an actor, director and theater owner in London. He was the original Henry Higgins in Pygmalion directed by Shaw himself, and he founded the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA.) Today he is forgotten. Tree's theatre of excess demanded something new and different and true.

Stanislavsky, the early days. If you set out to raise a child who would grow to become a great actor, director, and theatrical guru, this is how you would go about it: expose him to all the arts, build him his own theater, and make sure he has plenty of money to pursue his hobbies. Just don't be surprised when he abandons the family business and goes pro.

Alan Ruck — beloved for his role as Connor Roy in Succession — talks with Jeff about his training, his process, and why he believes the Method debate misses the point of what acting actually requires.

The shift in theatrical styles at the end of the 1800s was prompted by a parallel literary transformation. In fiction, figures like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky opened the door. Playwrights like Ibsen, Strindberg and Shaw, demanded a new actor that would render authentic human behavior. Anton Chekhov was the essential playwright in that moment. In this episode we hear his back story and listen to letters between him and his wife, Olga Knipper, star of the Moscow Art Theatre.

When Jeff Zinn met Cherry Jones at the ART in 1988, she was already well established as a founding member of the resident company. During her time there she would play leading roles in more than two dozen productions including King Lear, Three Sisters, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. From the ART she went to New York and quickly became one of Broadway\'s most reliable leading ladies, winning Tony awards for Doubt and The Heiress, and multiple awards and nominations for major roles including The Glass Menagerie, Angels in America, Moon for the Misbegotten, and The Baltimore Waltz.

He couldn't afford Juilliard, so he set out to cobble together a kind of DIY conservatory experience. That journey would take him to Paris where he trained with Marcel Marceau, then back to America where he would find his way into the avant-garde theater of Richard Foreman, Hollywood action movies, and the strange world of David Lynch. In-between takes he got on-set tutorials from Christopher Plummer, Max Von Sydow and Chris Walken.

B.D. Wong seemed to come out of nowhere when he won multiple Best Actor awards — including a Tony — for his role in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly in 1988. In this conversation we hear how he landed that part, and how it was shaped by his hippie acting teacher in LA, a team of expert voice and movement coaches, the brilliant but abusive British director Jon Dexter, and his very generous costar, John Lithgow. He shares his process for building a character, his feelings about the Method and actors who go too far immersing themselves in a role, and the one thing he does just before "action." We also hear how he has navigated an incredibly varied career that has included recurring roles on Oz, Law & Order, Gotham, Mr. Robot, Nora From Queens, and the Jurassic Park film and video game franchise.

Jessica Pimentel is best known for her work in seven seasons of the Netflix series Orange is the New Black, for which she earned four Screen Actors Guild Award nominations and three wins for best ensemble. A trained concert violinist who also plays guitar, electric bass, and keyboards, Jessica was born and raised in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic. She is a Latina of mixed heritage including Native American, Italian, Malian, Irish, and Iberian ancestry. A graduate of the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, she was awarded the Cleavon Little Scholarship and was a member of the professional acting company.

At the age of 25, Michael Cerveris was playing the hot new kid from Britain in the TV series Fame. Fast forward 30 years and Cerveris is a seasoned pro with 10 Broadway credits, 4 Tony nominations and 2 wins - not surprising after seeing all that early promise in the young star of Fame. But how did he get there? In this conversation Michael Cerveris talks about his training pathway.

Broadway veteran Neal Huff seems to have had an instinct for searching out just the right teachers and institutions at just the right time. He describes them as stones in a river placed before him that allowed him to take the next important step in his journey. In this conversation he talks about the relationship between training and professional practice, and what it means to build a life as a working actor in the American theatre.