Creating a Character: The Moni Yakim Legacy
**”Creating a Character” is currently available to rent as a “Virtual Theatre” screening, with 50% of the proceeds going to support Studio Movie Grill sites in Georgia.**
It’s a good bet that one of your favorite actors has studied with Moni Yakim. In this documentary, chronicling the life and inspiration of Julliard’s dramatic arts instructor, who was one of the founders of the school’s dramatics program, we hear from Jessica Chastain, Anthony Mackie, Michael Stuhlbarg, Oscar Issac, Laura Linney and Kevin Kline, as well as see images of Meryl Streep, Viola Davis and Will Smith. In other words, his reach is considerable, and seeing him operate, and speak about his life, we can see why he inspires such devotion, and why those people are so great.
This is the second documentary I’ve seen in about six months involving a famed instructor focus so much on delving into movement as a way to get to fresh performance- last year’s “Cunningham” was the other one. It’s interesting to see how such ways of thinking are applicable both to dance and acting, and we follow a recent graduate of Yakim’s, Alex Sharp, as he goes through his last year at Julliard, and looks to forge his own path, and how Yakim inspired him along the way. At one point in that fourth year, Sharp brings him the idea of staging a play of Alex Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, which Yakim would direct. Yakim is intrigued by the ideas Sharp has on the material, but he doesn’t want to work on material so dark. Sharp ends up directing it himself, and hearing the two work through what was good, and not so good, in Sharp’s production, we do not get the impression that Yakim is scolding him for his effort or feeling like he could have done better, but simply giving constructive criticism on what Sharp might have done differently to really take it to a new level; this is what being a good instructor is about. Two years after Sharp graduated as part of Yakim’s 43rd group of students, he won a Tony for his work in a Broadway production, and you’ve probably seen him in a movie or two since.
A documentary like this is about looking at the reach of a life, and showing us why that life was so inspirational to so many people. We hear about Yakim’s early years, how he studied mime, and became interested in acting, and how that led to his own studio at New York before being asked to head the dramatic arts school at Julliard. We get a glimpse of his classes, how he asks students to do the unconventional in a way of getting to some truth in their character, and how he views the physical abilities of an actor to convey character and emotion to being just as vital to performance as reading the lines. It’s a lesson that, if you watch the performers listed above, you can tell sticks with each person who comes through Yakim’s studio. All of those people are pretty damn good at their job, and can elevate material on their own. It’s a tribute to the man who helped instruct them that we see that in every performance they give.
