The Actor Explores
Theatrical students refine their craft near two Squares: Harvard and Red
In Moscow there are 200 theaters, and the drama students from Cambridge who study there can see plays every night in the company of impassioned audiences. “The theaters there are packed,” says one such student, actress Merritt Janson, who in June completed the singular program in theater arts offered by the Harvard-affiliated American Repertory Theatre (ART) and the venerable Moscow Art Theatre (MXAT) School.
During three months in Russia, she and 17 other young actors, four dramaturges, and one voice student watched three- to four-hour-long plays performed in Russian. They read War and Peace and played scenes from the novel in English, sometimes using Tolstoy’s prose for dialogue. In one scene, Janson played Countess Rostova as she, with her daughter Natasha, confronts the news that Natasha’s brother Petya has been killed in war. Two master teachers from the Moscow school, assisted by translators, coached the players, who found themselves immersed in an environment “totally out of your comfort zone,” Janson says, adding, “That only heightens your sensitivity to the text.”
Photograph by Michael Lutch
In Betty’s Summer Vacation by Christopher Durang ’71, cast entirely with Institute students, Janson played Mrs. Siezmagraff.
The Institute for Advanced Theatre Training, as the joint program is known, was born in 1987 at the ART as a training ground for professional American theater. Eleven years later it began its exclusive collaboration with the MXAT School, which the celebrated Russian director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko established in 1943. (He and Russian theatrical legend Konstantin Stanislavsky, author of The Actor Prepares, had in 1897 founded the Moscow Art Theatre itself, where three of Anton Chekhov’s four major stage works had their world premieres.) The Institute’s students—about 45 are enrolled at any one time, ranging from recent college graduates to well-established actors—study for five semesters (including the Moscow residency) in the course of two years. They work six days a week, morning, noon, and night, at all aspects of their craft. Graduates receive both a master of fine arts degree from the MXAT and a certificate of achievement from the ART.
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