Guest Post from Joanna Charnas - Making Artists: The National Theater Institute's Influence on a Writer

Making Artists: The National Theater Institute’s Influence on a Writer 

If art moves us, the impact never departs. It strikes an emotional chord that resonates into the recesses of our psyche forever. That’s how fourteen weeks at the National Theater Institute (NTI) affected me.

 In the fall of 1980, I was twenty years old, badly dressed, clumsy, and thirty pounds overweight. I took what I was certain would be a permanent leave of absence from my college, with little optimism about my future or myself. I felt lost. I had trained as a stage manager in high school and college, and I loved theater, but enrolling in The National Theater Institute, more than anything else, was a means to buy time while I struggled to figure out what to do with the next phase of my life. 

 The National Theater Institute, located at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Connecticut, offered a comprehensive, semester long theater training program for college-age students. Our instructors were world class and included an original member of the Group Theatre, a celebrated Broadway playwright, an Oscar nominee, and Obie and Tony Award winners. These exceptional teachers informed us we were the most difficult class they’d ever taught. They reminded us of this often, not because we were untalented, but because we were completely unruly. 

 Our teachers could thank Ryszard Cieslac, our instructor for the first week, for their troubles. Visiting artists conducted weeklong workshops at the beginning of each semester. Ryszard was the lead actor of the Polish Laboratory Theatre, which was famous among the avant-garde in New York in the late 1960’s. It was later the subject of much of the 1981 movie, My Dinner with Andre. Ryszard’s workshop started at sunset, and continued until he felt like stopping, usually in the early morning. He held it in a renovated barn, with open spaces to run, tumble, and engage in all manner of rigorous physical activities. 

At a reunion in 2011, my classmates had overlapping memories of this week.  All of us recalled its exhausting and exotic nature. One night Ryszard had us dancing for hours around lit candles, scattered over the floor. Another night we scrambled to the beach, which faced the Long Island Sound, and engaged in some shoreline exercise. Most of us remembered the night he taught us to stand on the side of our face and one shoulder. When I tell people this now, no one can envision it, and many are skeptical. Initially I failed at shoulder stands and spent the next afternoon practicing them on the O’Neill’s rolling lawns until I mastered the skill. By that night, I had plum-sized bruises all over my body. I retained this trick until I was about forty, and only refrain from attempting it now because, at sixty-three, I’m afraid of breaking something on dismount. My class was at the mercy of a wild man, but we managed to meet each challenge Ryszard presented. By the end of the week, we felt like super-hero zombies.  

 As a result of our initial teachings from Ryszard, whatever crowd control techniques our instructors were accustomed to practicing failed entirely with us. My class contained many gifted students, but we were impervious to our teachers’ usual methods of mass inculcation. We completed our assignments, engaged fully in learning, and then did whatever we wanted to. In particular, we drove the costume design teacher to distraction, and he berated us often. Nevertheless, we were responsible, passionate students. Although none of our teachers expressed it explicitly, the chastisements mostly involved our independent spirits. We didn’t care. After dancing around candles in the dark at 2:00 a.m. and mastering bizarre acrobatics, nothing could touch us. Ryszard Cieslac simultaneously made us into artists and ruined us for the remainder of the semester.

Of a class of thirty-one, after we completed NTI about a half-dozen of us moved to Manhattan, where we took a variety of high-end internships and first-rate theater classes. I found work as a stage manager at an off-off Broadway Equity theater within forty-eight hours of my arrival in New York. Most of us returned to college eventually. I graduated with my class on time by completing internships for credit and studying with tutors and mentors through independent study contracts. Some of us never went back. My classmates are enjoying successful careers in theater, television, and film; they are educators, mental health providers, or are engaged in other creative endeavors or professions. At our 2011 reunion, as former classmates entered the venue one by one, the rest of us encircled them, welcoming them after decades of separation, like long lost first cousins. One man cried.

MSI Press published my first book, Living Well with Chronic Illness, in 2015.  After its publication I held various readings and signings at Barnes & Noble stores. At the events, people were just as eager to learn how I managed to publish my first book as they were to   discover its content. I elucidated the mechanics of my publishing adventure, which took two short years from submission to becoming a bestseller in its small category Amazon.com. What I didn’t tell them is this: I went to the National Theater Institute, where I learned to be fearless. There I began to look beyond my perceived limitations and reach for the seemingly impossible. That’s how an untrained, novice writer gets a first book professionally published while in her mid-fifties. The lessons I learned at NTI informed and enhanced my entire life, and they continue to guide me. And although no longer an ugly duckling, I still cherish the memory of the bruised, fat girl who learned to stand on one shoulder.

Read more posts by and about Joanna Charnas and her books HERE.

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