Actors & the Drama / Aesthetic Realism Education

Bennett Cooperman

Actors & the Drama


	Jackie Gleason & Anger

	Edmund Kean & Self Expression

	Edwin Booth & What Makes Us Important

	Jimmy Cagney & the Way We Fight

	Al Jolson & How We Can Have True Pride

	Edwin Forrest — What Makes a Man's Life Large or Small?

	Aria da Capo & Power

Marriage

Men's Questions

Actors & the Drama

"Many persons are better acting than they are just talking, because in acting they take on an impersonal world. All the obstructions are not there. Many actors left to themselves are just bad company, but once they have to take over somebody else they are transformed. From rather unlikable caterpillars, they change to effective butterflies. The problem of how people are better because they take over another self is a very big one. It's got very much to do with Aesthetic Realism; how we can be ourselves by being other selves."

— Eli Siegel, from his 1951 lecture "Aesthetic Realism as Beauty: Acting"

I love those sentences. They describe the best thing in a person that makes him want to be an actor in the first place, and also the pain actors have had.

Actors have often felt wonderful on stage, but like petty, small people in their everyday lives. Aesthetic Realism can teach them to heal that rift, to learn what it means to have the artist's purpose both in our personal lives and when we are "on the boards."

Part of my education has been the study of the lives and work of loved actors in history. I've given papers about them in seminars at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation—each in relation to a central matter in people's lives—some of which you'll find at left.