Uta Hagen

Uta Hagen (1919-2004) was a German-American actress and teacher. A huge Broadway star from the late 1930’s on and a two-time Tony winner, Hagen branched out into teaching in the late 1950’s, eventually becoming one of the most sought-after coaches in the country. While she never founded her own school (and consequently is perhaps not as well known as Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, or Sanford Meisner), she was a great theorist in her own right, developing a unique approach and terminology based on the writings of Stanislavski.

In her two books - Respect for Acting (1973) and A Challenge for the Actor (1991), Hagen described a system of representational theater, which (oddly enough) employs a technique known as presentational acting.* Presentational acting, which Hagen devised from an episode in Stanislavski’s book An Actor Prepares, involves complete immersion in a character’s emotions - so that by the time the actor reaches the stage, he no longer experiences a distinction between himself and the character he is playing.

In working towards this immersion, Hagen advocated the use of substitution - a method used early on by Stanislavski and most famously by Lee Strasberg. Substitution involves using memories and experiences from the actor’s own life in order to identify with the experiences of the character. Although Hagen stuck by this approach, she modified it slightly in A Challenge for the Actor - and qualified her earlier remarks by insisting that, “Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters' actions which reveal the character in the play.” Hagen also discarded the term “substitution,” renaming it transference. With the publication of her second book, Hagen stated that she “disassociated” herself from her first book, Respect for Acting - however, it is still used as a textbook in many college acting classes.

* “Representational theater” refers to a performance style in which the audience is ignored by the actor, who remains completely absorbed in his character and the dramatic action (thereby maintaining the proverbial “fourth wall.” This style is opposed to “presentational theater,” in which the fourth wall may be broken - for example, many soliloquies by Shakespeare require the actor to address the audience directly; and many plays by Ben Jonson and Bertolt Brecht direct the actors to question the entire theatrical illusion by meta-theatrically acknowledging the fact that they are in a play.

Confusingly (due mostly to an unfortunate choice of terms by both Stanislavski and Hagen), representational theater employs a technique known as “presentational acting” (“living the part” or “experiencing the role”), whereas presentational theater uses “representational acting” (“playing the part,” or pretending).

Notable students of Uta Hagen:
Matthew Broderick, Robert DeNiro, Judy Garland, Whoopi Goldberg, Christine Lahti, Jack Lemmon, Liza Minelli, Al Pacino, Geraldine Page, Amanda Peet, Charles Nelson Reilly, Jason Robards, Sigourney Weaver

Further reading:
* Hagen, Uta with Haskel Frankel: Respect for Acting
* Hagen, Uta: A Challenge for the Actor

Note
The following are common misspellings of Uta Hagen's name: Uda, Utta, Youta, Outa, Ota, Oota, Hagan, Hegen, Hagin, Hegin, Hagane, Hagine, Ube Hatin