#1566 How To Be a Chautauquan

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2023

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This week, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with actor Steven Duchrow about taking on historical characters. Steven has been performing as the poet Vachel Lindsay for many years, but now he is taking on the character of the poet Carl Sandburg. Where do you start? How do you figure out what has to be in any performance whether it is five minutes long or an hour and a half? Once you have done all the research, how do you turn that immense body of information into a solid and entertaining Chautauqua performance? Steven Dukrow provides several superb recitations of poems by Vachel Lindsay and—of course—performs Sandburg’s most famous poem: Chicago, Hog Butcher of the World.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, everyone. It's Clay Jenkins and with this podcast introduction to this week's program,
0:03.7	how to be a Shatokwin. You know, I've done, I suppose, up to 15 Shatokwin characters over time,
0:09.8	six or seven of them are still in my basic repertoire. I've been doing some
0:15.8	Oppenheimer performances and want to do more because of the sensational film of Oppenheimer,
0:22.6	that Christopher Nolan produced this summer. So how do you, how do you work one of these up?
0:27.2	What do you do? And I want you to know that in our our long conversation,
0:31.5	Stephen DeCrow of DeCalb, Illinois, and I, we never once mentioned costume.
0:38.4	I've made a number of Shatokwa rules over a lifetime of performing, and one of them is
0:43.9	anyone who starts with the costume is going to be a terrible Shatokwin. The costume is the last
0:50.7	and least part of it. The most important thing is to understand the character, to try to
0:56.8	sus out the mystery, to see what their basic view of life is, to be true, to their view of life.
1:02.4	It's not always pretty. A men's amount of reading, primary work, biographies, and actual works
1:09.2	written by these historical figures. And then secondary works, histories of that era, histories
1:17.7	of American poetry in the case of Steve's work. All those things are really important reading,
1:24.6	and so you can read 10, 15, 20, 30 books just to get the background to perform as Aaron Burr,
1:31.8	or Abigail Adams, or Elizabeth K.D. Stanton, or W.E.B. DeBoys.
1:42.5	Then you have to turn it into something, a piece of performance art, and that's a whole different
1:47.6	business. And memorization, memorization is always hard. It gets harder as you grow older,
1:54.0	but you have to memorize some of the literature. You can't paraphrase the Declaration of Independence.
2:01.2	You can't paraphrase Maryweather Lewis's exaltation on leaving Fort Mandan and heading into the wilderness
2:08.5	in April of 185. If you were doing Thoreau, you can't paraphrase the greatest passages in
2:16.3	the world, and you have to memorize them, and then you have to be able to deliver them on stage,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Listening to America, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Listening to America and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.