Mason Takes Flight with Flying Swan Program for Students

It's a bird…it's a plane…no, it's a Flying Swan.  What is a Flying Swan, you ask? Well, it's an acting program! The Flying Swan is an acting program designed for young acting students aged 16-20 who wish to train in an intensive program. Based at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, the intensive four week summer residential acting program will be facilitated by four time Academy Award nominated actress Marsha Mason as President along with a team of celebrity instructors and esteemed acting faculty from the US and Britain.  I spoke to Mason about the program recently, which you will see further down this column.

In her steering of The Flying Swan Acting Program, Ms. Mason has teamed up with renowned London theatre program developer and administrator Tony Branch to lead the program as Executive Director. Tony Branch is an English theater training administrator and producer who in 1983 founded the British American Drama Academy (BADA) in London with Carolyn Sands, where celebrity actors such as Orlando Bloom,David Schwimmer,Paul Rudd, Oliver Platt,Paul Giamatti and others have been students. He remained as director until 2004, when he came to America to develop the Flying Swan Acting Program.

Flying Swan provides a learning environment that will give students the opportunity to live and breathe acting and theatre for four weeks. Through classes offered such as "Modern American Drama," "Audition Technique," "Introduction to Shakespeare," "Acting for the Musical Theatre," "Improvisation" and others, students willhave around the clock access to their instructors, improve their acting skills and identify their strengths and weaknesses while experiencing college life and gaining qualification for college, drama school and the acting profession at a liberal arts university such as Wesleyan University.

Mason and Branch have enlisted a stellar faculty of eminent professional actors including Ms. Mason and Henry Goodman as well as a hand-picked, all-star team of teachers from the US and Britain such as UCLA acting professor and theater director Joe Olivieri, London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art professor, Penny Cherns, and Senior Lecturer in Theater at Dartmouth College James Goodwin Rice among others.

Included in this program are Special Guest Instructors including Henry Goodman, who was voted British Actor of the Year in 1999 for his performance as Shylock in the National Theatre production of "The Merchant of Venice" and who has just completed ten months starring in the West End in "Fiddler on the Roof."  Other professional actors participating in the program include Brian Cox, who recently starred on Broadway in "Rock n Roll," actress Mamie Gummer, actor/playwright Michael Cristofer and Emmy Award winning TV director John Erman, among others to facilitate the curriculum through rigorous, in-depth master classes to the students.

Now, as I alluded to earlier, I spoke with Mason about this program. Marsha Mason is a star of film and stage that has been nominated for four Academy Awards: "Cinderella Liberty," "The Goodbye Girl", "Chapter Two", and "Only When I Laugh." She is also an Emmy nominated actress for NBC's "Frasier". Ms. Mason is the winner of two Golden Globe Awards: "Cinderella Liberty" and "The Goodbye Girl." She recently starred on stage in "The Feminine Ending," on Broadway in "Steel Magnolias" and in "Hecuba" at the Shakespeare Theatre in Chicago. Ms. Mason has taught extensively in Britain and the United States as an instructor for the British American Drama Academy. She is also founder of the Double M Ranch where her Resting in the River line of organic health and beauty products are produced.

So without further adieu, on to the chat…

TJ:  Hi Marsha. How are you?

MASON:  I'm fine, Tim. How are you?

TJ: Doing great, thanks!

MASON:  Happy holiday!

TJ:  Yes, indeed and a happy holiday to you!  Happy 4^th of July!  How are you doing this morning?

MASON:  Well, I worked this morning. I'm here in Connecticut teaching.

TJ:  At Wesleyan?

MASON:  Yes.

TJ:  That's wonderful! How long have you been a teacher, Marsha?

MASON:  Well, I've done it periodically on and off for several years now. I taught a master class at Carnegie Mellon. I've gone to Oxford in England and taught. And now, this program is new that I helped launch along with Tony Branch, who founded the Oxford Program.

TJ:  Now, the name of the program you are talking about is the Flying Swan Program, Where is the name Flying Swan come from?

MASON:  Tony thought it up. I thought it sounded kind of wonderful.

TJ:  I thought it was a great name too!  But I wondered where they came up with the name.

MASON:  No, he thought of it. I think he thought of beautiful young people and getting them to spread their wings.

TJ:  Hence the name. It makes all the sense in the world to me, now. I have to tell you I am very honored to be speaking with you, being a great admirer of your work. One of my favorite movies is The Goodbye Girl with you and Richard Dreyfuss.

MASON:  Oh, thanks! The kids are going to see it tonight actually.

TJ:  They are going to love it. It is such a great movie!  Tell me, how did you get involved with the Flying Swan Program?

MASON:  Well, I met Tony several years ago. He wrote to me asking me if I would be interested to come to Oxford University. They have a summer program there called Midsummer at Oxford. And so, I decided to do it and that was the beginning. Then, I went back a few years later and we tried a pilot program at Stanford University a number of years ago. Then Tony wanted to spend some time in the United States, so we thought it would be a really great program. And I really love the idea of introducing young people to the creative process. We have a really stellar group of teachers. Tony did all of that hard work pulling it together.  We have movement teachers, voice teachers and acting teachers.

TJ:  When you were that age, did they have programs like that available?

MASON:  Not that I knew of, no. I got interested in acting when I was in high school but that's all I had. And at that time, the high schools had the opportunity to be able to have programs. You had speech and debate clubs. You had one act play festivals. That's how I got a chance to exercise myself. But now, there are all different kinds of programs across the country. I think what makes ours very unusual is the tie to the English theatre. We have teachers from LAMDA [London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art] here and because of Tony being British, for example, Brian Cox was just here speaking to the students. And Henry Goodman is coming to teach a Master class. And I like the fact that the kids are getting an opportunity to be on a university campus. This way they get a sense of what that's like and it's very intense. They work 24/7 and they're living with the teachers, so we have our meals together. It's not just the class…it's also what's going on between classes and afterwards.

TJ:  As you said, it's a very intensive program.  What kind of screening or audition process do they have to go through to participate in the program?

MASON:  Well, they have to audition and present a DVD or something with two small pieces of material. We do contemporary or American drama and Shakespeare.

TJ:  How many students do you accept into the program?

MASON:  This year is our first year, so we didn't want to do too many. We started with 26 or 27 but we have the capacity and the ability to take it up to around 60, possibly more. This is our first summer.

TJ:  It gives them a very unique opportunity.

MASON:  Oh, totally! First of all, they get to ask me all kinds of questions about whatever they want to know about acting and television and film as well as on the stage. And they asked Brian Cox wonderful questions about how to do Shakespeare…what's the difference between the American and the English approach to acting. And Brian shared some of his experiences, in terms of his own training and what he has learned over the years, because he went to LAMDA. He was taught by one of our teachers here, a Shakespeare teacher.

TJ:  Is this program open for students from around the country?

MASON:  Yes, they are coming from all over. We have students all the way from California and New York City. That's the thing, too, is we want to develop a program that can take the program to the various high schools and colleges across the country. We have some college students. The age range is from 16 to 20.

TJ:  This program appears to run the gamut from Shakespeare to modern drama to acting in musical theatre.  Isn't that's a lot to fit into a four week program?

MASON:  Yeah, it is. But the kids love it! And the teachers are having a great time too. Gary Kline, w who is a teaching professor from Carnegie-Mellon, is our musical teacher and the kids are putting together a cabaret as well as learning all the basics about sound production through their voice.

TJ:  What is your hope that the students involved will take with them from this program?

MASON:  I want them to be more fully connected to their emotional life and to their physical bodies and their imagination.  And then, they can take that with them building on a level of self-confidence when they walk in a room. I happen to be teaching audition technique because I think it's important for them to have the experience of having to get up and say something in front of a group of people.

This kind of training is going to be able to be used no matter where their life takes them in the future, whether it's for a job interview or working in a corporation…it won't matter. They'll have the basic understanding of their own emotional life and how to handle it. Most importantly, I think, is the level of confidence you gain when you begin to be treated with respect and also when you are put in touch with a kind of level of your own entitlement to be in the world.

TJ:  Because auditioning can be a very traumatic experience.

MASON:  Exactly. So this helps enormously. And they're getting lots of different perspectives because we have Omar Sangare from Williams College and Clare Davidson from LAMDA and Joe Olivieri, who runs the Undergraduate Department at UCLA, myself, Henry Goodman…it gives them a much broader perspective to what's really going on. It's really interesting.

TJ:  As you have said, you have an amazing staff of group of teachers for this program.  How did you assemble this talent pool for the program?

MASON:  Tony did that. Because of his years working with BADA, which is the British American Dramatic Academy that he founded some thirty years ago in London, partly and because of his relationships with some of the different universities over the years, we just went back and talked to the professors and we talked to the kids. And Omar Sangare had gone to BADA and Clare Davidson had taught at BADA. So it gave us an opportunity to pull on the wealth of that experience.

TJ:  You've said that you're an instructor as well. Most people know you as being an actress. How did you decide to get into the education end of the process?

MASON:  People were always asking me if I had ever taught and I had never done it. Then, actually what happened was Tony and I did the Stanford project a number of years ago (Dreyfuss, Anne Jackson and myself were the three main people) and we only did it for two weeks. Gary Kline, our musical theatre person and voice person, was a teacher at Carnegie Mellon and he took the class. It made such an impression on him that he invited me to go to Carnegie Mellon and teach a Master class. So, I did. So, when we were putting together this program, we thought of Gary and he was very excited to be a part of this experience. So, that's how that happened.

And I think also because I really liked it…I liked working with the kids and young people. And it helps me enormously as an actor because I watch the constant behavior of each class. Especially the audition class, because auditioning can be so terrifying. I myself have been so totally terrified by auditioning that I thought, "Well, I better get in touch with this fear."  So, I got in touch with it and now, I try to help them get through it too.

TJ:  Who were some of your mentors in the acting business?

MASON:  Well, I think probably the very first teachers I had in New York were great. Darryl Hickman…I'm a big fan of his work. He is now a full time teacher even though he was a child actor, a CBS executive and all kinds of stuff. He's developed a process where he's utilized a lot of what Stanislavski taught, what Robert Lewis taught and what Michael Chekhov taught. He developed it into his own process and I was one of the founding members of his group. I gained an enormous amount from him.

Then, I think what helped me, in terms of film, was Paul Mazursky and Mark Rydell. Having been actors themselves and now were directors, they had the vocabulary at the level of understanding of what the actors' process was. So I was introduced into film in a really beautiful and very safe and graceful way, if you will. Whereas I find that when I then worked many years later with younger film directors who had never been actors, I noticed that they had no vocabulary or language with which to express themselves to the actors.  So that presented a completed different sort of problem.

TJ:  When did you decide that this is what I want to do…to be an actress?

MASON:  I first realized it when I was in high school in my freshman year. I was sort of drafted by one of the teachers into the school play or whatever it was. I think it was Babes in Toyland or something they were doing. And I was a jack-in-the-box. I had to be in a clown suit and crouch under this plywood box and pop up at a certain time. There were these rows of little kids in the front row in the gymnasium and when I popped up they all went, "Ohhhhh!!"  And then I knew I was hooked. The big 'aha' moment came with being noticed.

TJ:  So, you got bit by the bug by being a jack-in-the-box… [Laughing]

MASON:  [laughing] That's it! There you go.

TJ:  Do you have any other projects coming, Marsha?

MASON:  Yeah.  I think I'm going to be doing a special two part episode of a Lifetime series called Army Wives.

TJ:  Oh! I love that show!!

MASON:  I'm waiting to read the script, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to do it. I'd be playing Kim Delaney's mother. Do you love that show?  Tell me about that show.

[At this point, Marsha and I talked about Army Wives and the first episode of this season, which I don't want to include in case there are fans of the show who haven't seen it yet…but it was great]

TJ:  It's so informative and you get a look behind the scenes at what these wives go through with their husbands in the military. And also, from a husband whose wife is in the military. The season opener this season was a heartbreaker with a twist ending.

MASON: Well, I am excited to read the material! It definitely interested me right away.

TJ:  Yeah, you've got to do it!

MASON:  Ok. I'll tell them you told me I have to do it. [Laughing]

TJ:  Yep!  Tell 'em it came right from TJ Fitzgerald at BroadwayWorld. [laughing]

MASON:  I am going to call them up right after we hang up. OK.

TJ:  Now, the big question...are you coming back to Broadway soon?

MASON:   Hopefully, maybe I will be coming this fall or winter.  At least I'm hoping…I don't know yet for sure.  I have to read a play that's being proposed but I can't mention it because I don't know even if they have a theatre or not. As soon as I do find out something specific, I will tell you.

TJ:  Great!  I will definitely be there in the front row.

She is such a doll! It's official…we love Marsha Mason!! What a great opportunity for students. Again, the Flying Swan Acting Program is a four-week summer, residential acting program for students aged 16-20, which is running this year from June 26, 2008 through July 28, 2008. The Flying Swan is a program of the International Conservatory for Training in the Arts in association with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Dartmouth College, Washington University in St. Louis, and UCLA. For more information about the program and how to apply for the next session, please visit www.flyingswan.org.

I'd go but I am way past the age of 16-20, and that's as far as I am going on that one, so don't ask my age…please!!! Leave it to say, I am a mature man of a certain age with dignity. How's that? So, for now folks, I sign off again with ciao! And as always, remember…theatre is my life…even at 48. [I can't believe I just typed that…]  Bye!!!