When a student in Nagle Jackson’s dramatic action class told him, "I’ve been acting since I was five," the visiting professor noted that the student must be exhausted.
After working in professional theater for more than 30 years, Jackson knows how much energy the art demands. His career has taken him across the country and around the world, with his latest adventure bringing him to Carleton College, where he is teaching a class in dramatic action and directing students in his play, "The Elevation of Thieves." The play opens at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 13 and runs through Saturday, Feb. 18 in the Arena Theater at Carleton. The event is free and open to the public.
Though it meant spending the coldest months of the year here, away from his wife and home in Princeton, N.J., Jackson was encouraged to accept the invitation to work at Carleton by an old friend, professor of English Frank Morral. Jackson and Morral met at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., where they were roommates.
In the years since Jackson graduated from Whitman with degrees in French and English, his career in the theater has led to his involvement in a variety of productions at home and abroad. His first experience in professional theater was at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he acted and directed. He went on to serve as resident director at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, artistic director at the Milwaukee Repertory Theater and artistic director of the McCarter Theater in Princeton. He has directed at numerous other venues in the U.S. and abroad, including the Trondelag Theater in Trondheim, Norway and the Gorky Theater in Leningrad, Russia. Jackson currently serves as Master Director at the Directors’ Company of New York and principal director of the professional company, Shakespeare in Santa Fe.
In addition to directing, Jackson is the author of several plays. The 1998 Onassis International Playwrighting Award he won for "The Elevation of Thieves" was the largest cash award ever presented for a play. He is directing Carleton student actors in the play, which has taken on a relevance in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, Jackson said, that it didn’t have when he wrote it. "Much of it is about the Muslims moving into Europe and changing European culture, the incursion of the Third World and how some people just can’t deal with it," Jackson said.
Students in the play are enjoying the advantages of working with the renowned playwright. Senior actor Chris Leslie-Hynan, describing the benefits of Jackson directing his own work, said "You never ask him ‘What does this mean?’ and receive ‘I don’t know’ as an answer… Nagle’s put more behind the words of his play than can really ever be communicated to an audience, but it’s nice to get all of his insight."
Other students noted the value of Jackson’s three decades of experience as a director. Senior theater major Megan Orwig, said "You sit in rehearsal and you feel as though you’re in good hands. There’s no sense of rush or pressure; he seems to know exactly what he needs to get done that night, and when it’s done, he’s satisfied. There’s something calming for an actor to have a director who’s at ease with where he’s at in the process."
Members of the theater faculty agree that working with Jackson is an important opportunity for the student actors. "It's exciting for the theater program to have as talented and experienced a playwright/director as Nagle Jackson. His term here gives our students a chance to work with a top professional in the field," said Ruth Weiner, director of theater arts at Carleton.
Though the Carleton students in Nagle Jackson’s dramatic action class are among many who have benefited from his experience, they have used his teachings in ways that even the visiting professor could not have anticipated. In a recent game of broomball, for example, a team of his students used vocabulary from Jackson’s class to shout instructions, managing to confuse the other team and win the game.
The five-part system of dramatic action that Jackson invented and teaches is helping the budding actors and actresses, directors and playwrights find and convey the significance of a scene. The system also helps actors make performances more believable, Jackson said. "The hardest thing about stage-acting is making it look perfectly natural, because it’s not. Beginning actors will skip things that they would normally do, such as not taking time to prepare or release a movement. We do it naturally without thinking about it, but on stage you have to think about it," he said. The system is particularly useful when actors or actresses are struggling to understand the natural progression or function of a scene.
Leslie-Hynan appreciates the problem-solving capabilities of Jackson’s system: "It gives us a vocabulary. It takes something implicit and makes it explicit, and that’s very useful. It takes all these sort of vague, airy notions and sets them in concrete, which allows us to play with them, like blocks."