Getting Personal About Yale Drama School

excerpt

CHRIS NOTH

Actor

I started out acting at Marlboro College in Vermont. They had a good little repertory company in the summer. I fell in love with acting there. Then I came to New York and studied with Sanford Meisner. This was the 70's. There wasn't a lot of work for young actors; even trying to find a waiter's job was tough.

I knew you couldn't take yourself seriously as an actor if you didn't do Shakespeare, Shaw, Chekhov and Ibsen. Many of my friends were looking for agents and trying to get jobs on soaps. I had read a lot about Yale. So I cast my cap and got accepted and I was thrilled because, after three years in New York, I knew how lucky I was.

The first-year project, in 1983, was Gorki's "Lower Depths." I was ecstatic and eager to jump into Ibsen. Although after a year we would yell, "No! No more Ibsen! Not `Brand'!" It was wonderful, because the other students, the people in the other programs, were working their hearts out on the crafts they were giving themselves over to.

Of course, you can't make a living in the theater. And after 9 or 10 months in a television series, where the hours are relentless, the last thing you want to do is go into a play. After I did "Law and Order" for five years it was hard to think of doing a play. But now, with "The Best Man" on Broadway, it has been a terrific experience and it has made me want to do a play a year, though not for the money.

What is great about the theater is that we're not IBM computers. One night you get 95 percent of what you want to do and you nail it. And the next night it's 85. Live theater is full of treachery and excitement. In film, what you think is your best scene can be cut out. But you know that onstage everything you are giving is seen.

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