Grow Your Craft One Night a Week

Workshops meet once a week, for 3 hours. Actors prepare scene work, solo and in pairings, which they then perform. Their performance is given critique and direction by either Lorinne Vozoff, Artistic Director of TGS, or by Kate Vozoff, the Director-in-Residence. Scene work is assigned by the workshop instructor, in consideration of each actor’s individual strengths and challenges.

Everyone gets stage time every workshop.

Although material that you’ll work on will vary and evolve, all workshops gives emphasis to core Method technique:

• Objective
• Problem
• Action

You’ll also devote time each week to honing specific skills intrinsic to the Method:

• Improv
• Emotional Memory
• Imagination
• Communication

Your Artistic Community

When time permits, workshops might incorporate writing exercises. These exercises deal with your character’s human condition. They can be instrumental in helping you to advance your individual execution of the Method in your craft. Some actors find them to be life-changing.

There is a question and answer period each week.

Often, there are also brief discussion of current theatre, film and performance art events. Cultural camaraderie frequently develops between TGS members, which is encouraged and supported. This is your art, and your craft. Workshop members are your peers, and your artistic community.

Acting Is the Search for the Soul

Not everyone understands the Method. In fact, even a lot of highly trained actors are confused by what it is. And what it is not.

At essence, the art of acting is the search for the soul. It’s about finding and revealing what makes you both unique and universally human.

This is what’s meant by “find the truth in your character.” You’re not making up backstories – we call those “alternative facts” in today’s parlance – you’re revealing what is authentic and real inside you.

When you have an authentic emotional experience on stage, or in front of the camera, other actors feel it. The audience/viewer feels it. Disbelief is suspended and you all enter the realm of performance as art together.

As an actor, it’s your responsibility to find truth in imaginary circumstances. It’s essential that you first identify feelings inside yourself that are analogous to your character’s feelings. This is what we all learned in acting classes. And sometimes we get lucky. So wonderfully lucky. There’s a transcendent spark in your performance. Everyone feels it. It’s magic.

But then things get tricky because you can’t repeat it. You go from the thrill of heaven to the despair of hell.

The burning question becomes how can you consistently achieve that emotional reality, on demand, night after night, shot after shot?

There Are Many Styles of Acting, But Only One Stanislavski Method

Constantin Stanislavski defined a Method for acting that allows you to directly access your feelings.

“Directly” means that you don’t demand that your psyche produce these feelings. Rather, you already have these feelings. They’re intrinsically part of you. And the Method enables you to access them, consistently.

No hit-or-miss. No maybe tonight, maybe not. Each performance will be fresh and original exactly because it is emotionally real.

Acting ceases to be a confining rote craft and becomes instead a fresh new moment, every performance.

Stanislavski proved that highly personal, and very real, feelings could be lured from the unconscious of the actor through a specific technique.

Today, we have many and varied styles of acting: representational, presentational, mechanical, exploitative, etc. Stanislavski’s principles provide serious actors of all stripes with a learnable Method of accessing personal emotional material and converting that to character performance.

By any name, it’s the very heart of an authentic, dynamic performance. On demand, night after night, shot after shot.

A Bit of Background About TGS

Theatre Group Studio (TGS) is a creative environment for actors serious about their craft. All studio members have gone through an audition process to make sure that their needs, and the needs of other members, will be met through the Workshop. This page has some background info on the Studio and the actors who teach there. We encourage you to Contact Us if you’d like more info or to request an interview/audition. We keenly believe in kindness, and we treat each audition with respect.

The legacy of TGS began many years ago. Founder Lorinne Vozoff began teaching the Method while still studying it with Jack Garfein at the Actor and Director’s Lab. Mr. Garfein, or “Maestro” to those fortunate enough to have studied with him, is an American film and theatre director. A teacher par excellence, he was the creative driving force force behind The Actors and Directors Lab in both Los Angeles and New York. He was also the artistic director of The Harold Clurman Theatre in New York. He now lives and teaches in Paris.

While working and teaching at The Lab in Los Angeles, Lorinne had the opportunity to study and work directly with Harold Clurman. If you know American theatre history, that name is legendary. The founder of Group Theatre in the 1930’s, Mr. Clurman was a director, writer and all-around “man of the theatre”. For Lorinne, working with Mr. Clurman was a joy, a challenge, an adventure. And literally the opportunity of a lifetime. One of his most famous quotes is a mantra for every actor, and director, to remember:

“The first law of the theatre is Action.
The second law of the theatre is Action.
The third law of the theatre is Action.
Action. Acting. Actor. Action.”

Study Method Acting with Method Actors

TGS teachers are, first and foremost, Method actors themselves. They understand the Method firsthand, and they keep its practice alive because they believe strongly in its essential artistic merit for actors. They’ve also been teaching it for many years.

LORINNE VOZOFF, Founder and Artistic Director

Lorinne Vozoff is an actor, director, playwright, and teacher. She is also the author of CHANGING CIRCUMSTANCES: AN ACTING MANUAL, a study book used at colleges and universities across the United States.

After studying Method acting with Harold Clurman and Jack Garfein, Lorinne began teaching Method acting at Mr. Garfein’s legendary Actor and Director’s Lab. She soon began working consistently in theatre, film and television and continued to teach because of her interest in preserving the Method. Over the years, she’s accepted teaching engagements at LaVerne College in Claremont, California, and at the University of New Mexico Las Cruces. She was a guest artist at Birmingham Southern College in Alabama, where she lectured and performed in MEDEA and THE GLASS MENAGERIE. And, of course, she continues to teach at her own Theatre Group Studio in Los Angeles.

In her capacity as the Artistic Director of TGS, Lorinne has spearheaded productions of classic and original dramas, in both a traditional and experimental contexts. In October 2016, she produced and co-directed LIFE MASKS, a month-long run of three one acts with Cuban American playwright Eduardo Machado at the Theater for the New City in New York. And already in 2017, she’s guest-starred in two episodes of the new BET Network hit, REBEL. Keeping busy in theatre, network and cable TV, and feature films, Lorinne has worked with a variety of wonderful actors, including George Clooney, Robert Downey, Jr., Drew Barrymore, Danny De Vito, and many others.

Personal highlights of her career include having received guidance from Dame Judith Anderson, which inspired her enormously while working on the prize-winning Los Angeles production of MEDEA. And a long friendship with Henry Miller inspired her to write (and host dinner parties with fantastic conversationalists whenever possible). More recently, she continued her studies of playwriting with Donald Freed, whose encouragement to find relevant social and political themes were especially inspiring. It has never been more true than today that all art is political.

Lorinne is a proud voting member of Actors Equity Association and SAG/AFTRA.

KATE VOZOFF, Director-in-Residence

Kate Vozoff grew up in the Method. Literally. As Lorinne’s daughter, and first-born child, she’s the scion of the Method legacy. It’s work she deeply believes in. “Very few people teach the Method, and TGS is focused on the real source material…the Method that Stanislavski created. It evolves differently for each actor, but it’s important that we keep this legacy alive for future generations of artists. I do this for the love of the Work, the Method itself.”

Kate’s background in theatre includes classical theatre, modern theatre, performance art, and independent film. Highlights from her long list of credits include:

• Emilia in Shakespeare’s OTHELLO
• Mertuel in Christopher Hampton’s DANGEROUS LIAISONS
• Ellida in Henrik Ibsen’s LADY FROM THE SEA
• Kyra in SKYLIGHT and The Actress in THE BLUE ROOM, both by David Hare
• Mrs. X in August Strindberg’s THE STRONGER
• Lady in Tennessee Williams’ ORPHEUS DESCENDING
• Emma in BETRAYAL and Sarah in THE LOVER, both by Harold Pinter

Her Los Angeles credits include an outstanding performance as Hester in Athol Fugard’s HELLO AND GOODBYE. One critic described her performance as “captivatingly powerful” and suggested that she was a cross between “a young Shelly Winters and Gena Rowlands”.She was memorable as the bewildered, tipsy Natalie in a reading of THE POWDER ROOM at the Loft Studio. She’s worked in traditional theatre and experimental performance art, including Slawomir Mrozek’s STRIPTEASE, with L.A. artists Gronk, Diane Gamboa and Kevin Gunn.

For the past 12 years, Kate has taught Technique I of Method Acting at TGS, and is often asked to do private coaching of actors for auditions and performances. And as a leading actor in the Theatre Group Acting Company, she brings her experience and knowledge to the weekly Workshop, as both a teacher and as a member.

In addition to acting and teaching, Kate is the author of FATHER Q BALL and an adaptation of THE DEAD by James Joyce. She has also ghost written countless books for interesting people. She can’t tell you about those, however, because if she did, she’d have to…well, you know the expression.

Study the Original Stanislavski Method Acting Technique

The Stanislavski Method Acting Technique has intrigued and benefited many serious actors, with each generation renewing and refreshing the Method as an expression of their era.

If you’d like, be sure to read more about the Stanislavski Method Acting Technique here on this website.

We also offer background information about TGS and its teachers.

Contact Theatre Group Studio

Interested in discussing the workshop schedule and eligibility to join? Membership to the workshops is determined through interview and audition in a supportive, artistic environment. TGS workshops are held on the westside of Los Angeles, near Sony Studio. If you have questions, or if you’d like to discuss with one of our Method actor/teachers, please message us here. Be sure to include your phone number, so that we can get back to you within 24 hours.

We look forward to speaking with you soon.