Gurus: The Story of Acting,
from Stanislavsky to Succession

The 1935 American tour of the Moscow Art Theatre ignites a revolution. Stanislavsky's actors demonstrate something American actors have never seen: absolute psychological truth on stage. Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and the Group Theatre are changed forever.

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.

How did Britain develop its own approach to training actors? The founding of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art by Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1904 established a tradition of craft — voice, text, and classical technique — that would define British acting for a century.

The young Konstantin Stanislavsky encounters Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. How did Steiner's ideas about the spiritual life of the body shape what would become the most influential acting system in the world? The unlikely philosophical roots of the Method.

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.

Anton Chekhov didn't want to write plays. Then he met Stanislavsky. The collaboration between the playwright and the director that produced The Seagull, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard not only changed theatre — it created the template for modern dramatic realism.

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.

Character actor David Patrick Kelly — whose career spans Broadway and Hollywood — talks about what Michael Chekhov's technique actually feels like from the inside, and why it changed how he understood his own body as an instrument.

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.

In the wake of the MAT's American tour, Michael Chekhov finds a new home at Dartington Hall in Devon, England, where Dorothy Elmhirst and her husband Leonard offer him a sanctuary. The Chekhov School at Dartington — with Beatrice Straight as its star pupil — becomes one of the most extraordinary artistic communities of the twentieth century.

Two-time Tony Award winner Michael Cerveris — whose range spans Sweeney Todd to Hedwig — talks about working with directors who come from vastly different training traditions, and whether a great actor has to have a coherent technique at all.

Broadway veteran Neal Huff — a Company member at New York Theatre Workshop — 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.

Michel Saint-Denis — Copeau's nephew — carries the French tradition to England and then America. Through the London Theatre Studio, the Old Vic Theatre School, and finally the Juilliard School, Saint-Denis creates a bridge between French physical training and Anglo-American conservatory education. Meanwhile Joan Littlewood takes ensemble work in a completely different direction.