by Eleanor Wood
Managing Director

Paul Bernstein is a performing artist who combines disciplines as an actor-director-playwright with his own vision of physical theater and film. This broad range of possibilities continually shapes and reshapes his approach to composition and performance making. He has focused extensively on revolutionary performance innovations from recent history, now taught in history books and yet rarely invoked on stage; an oversight that has cost the theater dearly as it puts the inceptive reins too often solely in the hands of the playwright. No doubt, Bernstein has benefitted from the production of plays, but he has come to see writing as one of several key compositional ingredients of performance making. Does anything imperatively new ever get made through tried and true or low-risk approaches to the scripted theater? Not often enough. There are exceptions to this rule if you look hard for them, but the market that keeps theaters afloat requires full-length “plays” that bring the price of a ticket and content or names that audiences find familiar, digestible. Experimental risks for the theater and the vulnerability that comes with it is far too unpredictable to fit into the business-minded careers of the United States. We know the traditional, “professional” process inside-out. Alternative methods became dated as quickly as they were developed. Advancing the Stanislavski school of acting has covered 100+ years, and Bernstein expresses some dismay at theater’s repetitious behavior after the staggering amount of innovation that filled the decades following World War II.

Bernstein argues that American theater was never properly compelled to implement compositional training for actors, relegating them instead to the collaborative tradition of play production where everyone has an integral role in the process but largely in support of the playwright’s literary vision and the interpretation of the director. Trainings have acquiesced to correspond to this overall system, one that has become the only way to paying, “professional” work. So, Paul Bernstein had to go looking far and wide to find a new approach and discovered a simple truth: that the paths to the future of acting were already cleared and paved, then abandoned for the most part. This performing artist had to turn around and go back in time, to another set of basics as a starting place. Painters often return to drawing skills, musicians play scales over and over, Bernstein needed to find out what practices he could return to again and again as a foundation for making new performances. You can see the darkly comic influences of Pina Bausch, the psychological and physical abandon of Jerzy Grotowski, and the playful, precise language of dance. He displays a thoroughly unique sense of freedom with vocal choreography and musical approaches to language. This must come from his attachment to the works of Meredith Monk - he has drawn from many international sources and built upon those methods for himself and for others. That is what originally attracted me to Paul’s work – his skillful integration of various traditions from which he has created his own distinctive voice.

There was something about the experimental performance that was both exciting and a counter-culture option for Bernstein. Originally from rural Ohio, he has mused that, contrary to stereotypes, there was plenty of strong theater around him (if not the kind he would later make himself) from childhood onward. His transplanted Hungarian grandparents met in a fancy movie theater where she worked the box office and he was a union projectionist suspended high above the audience. Hopalong Cassidy stood outside of that Cleveland theater at night in full cowboy regalia, swinging a lariat, talking Hollywood cowboy talk to the gathered crowds, and inviting them into his movie house. The boss was a big movie star, and actors were also honored citizens back in Hungary. In the USA, they liked “cowboys” too, once they understood what it meant. With parents who also saw through an immigrant’s eyes in this juxtaposed setting, no one ever said a discouraging word about a world they simply called show business. Springfield had already yielded up Jonathon Winters and the Gish sisters. “Why not?” they would shrug. Maybe it was as simple as that here in this country where they ended up.    

Bernstein landed in downtown New York after college, in the semi-raunchy East Village which glowed with eccentricity and retro show window humor. The downtown theater of the ’80s and part of the ’90s was vibrant and overflowing with new works from a community remarkably outgoing and supportive of outside-the-box performances. The responsibility for making new work can change a person, and it can also be quite scary. But commitment levels were jacked up in New York at that time. People lived and studied on the cutting edge. The city was where the master teachers lived, and it was those early practitioners who held the community together by clarifying objectives that were worth an artists’ time and energy. He became a product of NYC. His stories of performing at midnight at the Gusto Cabaret, a popular late-night dive catering to wild theater on one night and wild music on the next, describe packed audiences hanging over the balcony cheering with bottles of Rolling Rock in one hand and a worn-out wooden railing in the other. They were reverent of the performers and raucous as a way of showing it. Down below on the stage, the work had to be made with matching energy and a like-minded abandon. The next day he would audition as a midtown actor, usually playing the good guys in plays, films, voiceovers. He managed to create a small existence as a secretary at New Dramatists, and a script reader for The O’Neill Theater where the high production standards made him envious on the subway ride back downtown. Still writing until late into the night, he did become established, and soon thereafter he received a windfall of his own productions in New York. Perhaps more importantly, he managed to keep evolving.

Bernstein became a playwright-in-residence at HOME for Contemporary Theater for five years. His play Looking in the Dark For was directed by Robert Woodruff at the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival. He had a solo number in the original cast recording of Robin Lerner’s musical, Stilllife of a Woodpecker, adapted from the Tom Robbins novel. Everything he wrote in NY between 1987 and 1995 ended up in production. He did not foresee that the fabulous downtown NY art scene would quickly slide from under our feet. Many noted the gentrification of the entire area; Bernstein saw commercial hype and conservative standards moving in on the coattails of the changeover. The shift in tone made him uncomfortable. As the works getting produced were becoming safer, his work was obviously going the other way. The motley downtown theater venues were closing, but in contrast, his first play for dance-theater, Through Darkest Ohio, was running at The Public Theater. At a crossroads when the show closed, he packed up what he knew, and traveled to take a teaching position in Amsterdam.    

Dancing and acting in other countries with performers of varying backgrounds provided exactly what Bernstein needed to keep growing as a performer and as a writer. In one of his published articles, he relates how the dancers in Europe were able to use acting in ways he had only imagined, with fleeting characterizations, and dreamlike, internal stories to express. There was a “different sense of intellectual integrity” and he found the visions around him to be expansive for his own thinking. He became more comfortable in his own skin.

While performing in Europe, Bernstein taught Physical Theater Studies for six years as faculty of Amsterdam University and the International Theater School. He studied dance, wrote with a sense of urgency, made his own work with intensity, and collaborated with individuals and theater companies. Life was simple, subsidized, healthy, and focused. He returned briefly to New York, accepting a leading role on 42nd Street across from Kyra Sedgewick in the Off-Broadway premiere of Dakota’s Belly, Wyoming, directed by Brian Mertes, and written by Erin Cressida Wilson. But he had a different vision of this play altogether. The mysterious quality of this mind-bending work proved to be pivotal, and Bernstein went on to direct his own production in London for 35 performances at the New Grove Theater and receiving 2nd Place in TimeOut Magazine’s Best New Play in London Award. This established his work in another world of theater. With the help of agent Micheline Steinberg, he would then direct production of Sam Shepard’s True West at London’s New End Theater, and act in Wilson’s Rio Esmerelda at The Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and in Reykjavik, directed by Peter Brosius. Then, in Amsterdam, his de Murker Uland was produced at Theatre de Leifde, and Tunnel to Bridge was performed with dancer Felice Wolfzahn at de Melkweg Fontanzaal Theatre, and at the Tanz Ombrosa Festival in Vienna.

It’s not that all skills from theater and dance came together as one but rather an acquired taste and experience that allowed this artist to tread between two worlds and two conceptual frameworks. He returned to the United States as a sort of polymath of the performing arts.

Artist and audience expectations can be so very telling of our conditioning. Much has gotten lost and there is much that people have not learned to “read” in performances that move forward by both dramatic and visual/choreographic means – such is physical theater and dance. Theater audiences don’t tend to love the abstract meanings inherent in dance, and dance audiences don’t seek out the literal meanings because it seems heavy-handed. Bernstein insists that theater audiences will naturally expand and learn - we don’t need to give them what they already know and like. The alternatives may be financially risky, but they are also imperative. The theater has been stuck chasing its artistic tail in pursuit of ticket sales, pandering for production money and squashed between television and cinema, where the purveyors of conversational realism have ended up in control of the dials. 

He advocates acting training with expansive skills in order to achieve different and sometimes more exciting results in film and on the stage. In his own words: “I was aware since high school that actors were not trained or trusted to make new work unless they could write a play like the playwrights, or a screenplay, or a series of long story monologues that pass for the new theater. I read about Richard Forman’s work, The Wooster Group, and international companies with directors like Peter Brook. They all used the artistry of actors to make the work, but I saw no opportunities to develop my potential as an individual or inceptive theater artist with a modicum of freedom.” Other approaches to theater were difficult to conceive of without further context, and even harder to control without experienced guidance and examples of alternative works with the power to hold new audiences.  

A brief review of Bernstein’s career as a creator-performer display the international and multi-disciplinary nature of his art. I’ve described some of his performance works as ‘dramatized choreographies like waking dreams’. His comic choreography Guernica was performed with eight dancers/actors at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, followed by three Budapest works in his family’s homeland: soloLUMU and HARRING at the Ludwig Museum of Modern Art, and the madcap duet Vita Nuova Hrabal which premiered at L1 Dance Theater. A video compilation of these works of dance theater were shown at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, where documentation of “The New Experimental” were featured during the summer of 2015.

From an interdisciplinary perspective, he has published numerous articles: “What We Will Witness - New Forms of Acting”, and “Artistic Imperatives: Merging Theater and Film”, published in 2009 and 2015 by CG Publishing and The International Journal of New Media and the Arts. He wrote “Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as Dance-Theater” for the American Literature Association, “Leading Up To Showing” for Contact Quarterly Journal of Dance, and “Odds Bodkin, Master Storyteller” for Lincoln Center. The University of London Press commissioned him to write a chapter for a new book on Cuban-born playwright Maria Irene Fornes whom he served under for 2 years as a teaching assistant. In 2019 he was invited to Cuba to speak and to direct a Fornes play, The Conduct of Life as a formal staged reading for audiences at the University of Havana.

As an Associate Professor of Theater and Film, Bernstein has been able to integrate his vision with the rigorous requirements of a major in Theater and Film. He has directed 13 mainstage productions with the students of Rutgers University in Camden. Particularly striking in these theater works has been the staged integration of film with screens on ceilings, walls, floors, and even costumes - the actors themselves. 

As an actor with Anthony George Artist Management, Bernstein appeared in 2015 as Hans Christian Anderson in the musical, The Snow Queen at HERE Arts Center in NYC, and he performed at HERE and the Hudson Opera House in Aunt Leaf, both plays by Barbara Wiechmann and directed by Jeffrey Mouseau. Other recent credits include Hershel in Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins with Gas and Electric Theater at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia, and a Butoh-style Estragon in Yattekita Godot, adapted by Minoru Betsuyaku, directed by Suzi Takadashi at New York Theater Workshop. With Ripe Time Theater Company, he performed for physical theater director Rachel Dickstein in The Secret of Steep Ravines at Lincoln Center and at the Coe Theater Festival in Amherst. In 2019 he performed in Night Train Passing, and Hoyt Jenks Greatest Hits at PhilaMOCA, a theater where he also appeared in 2018 in the film premiere of Sickos Making Movies by Joe Tropea and Robert A. Emmons Jr.

Paul Bernstein represented the United States in 2017 as a congressional member of ISPA, presenting at the International Society of the Performing Arts in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. In June of 2022, he will teach and deliver a paper, “Abstraction Begets Meaning: Lending Form to Physical Theater” for The International Arts in Society Conference in Madrid.

The past year was spent completing a 10-year body of written work consisting of full-length and one-act plays, film scripts, performance texts, and solo, duet, and trio works for the stage.

None of the Above * Selected Performance Writing 2010–2020 * paul bernstein