On an early November Friday afternoon in a fifth-floor studio of the stately old Tiffany Center near downtown Portland, six first-year students at The Actors Conservatory are sitting in a semicircle on folding chairs.

Sitting in front of the students on a stool at the point of the pie wedge is Michael Mendelson, the veteran Portland actor and director who is also the managing artistic director of the almost 40-year-old professional acting school. A second stool beside him is holding assorted papers and a well-worn hardcover Riverside Shakespeare with lots of sticky notes sprouting from its pages.

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THE ART OF LEARNING: An Occasional Series

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This is the conservatory’s first-term Shakespeare class, and on this day the students – two from Iowa, two from Washington state, one from Brooklyn and Haiti, one from Indiana, and ranging in age from an 18-year-old recently out of high school to college graduates – are working on passages from As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, as well as some of the sonnets.

“The most important thing in Shakespeare is wit. And these are very witty plays,” Mendelson declares at one point. And yet, he adds, it’s not all fun and games: “To appreciate the light side, you have to also see the dark side.”

What’s going on in this two-and-a-half-hour session and the many other classes at the conservatory is something of a trade-school education, taught by working professionals who go beyond textbooks to teach the everyday realities of an age-old and continually evolving art. The students are learning a highly skilled craft, one that involves both the brain and the body, and that requires both an intensity and a looseness of approach.

It calls on specific skills: elocution, musicality, rhythm, an understanding of how the words work together and how best to convey their emotional message in a convincing way. Which are the most important words in a passage? How should they be stressed? Don’t slide past them or let them slip downward, Mendelson advises: Play them on the upswing; let your voice rise so that the key words ring out. Acting, he declares, involves a kind of melding of performer and role: “You have such power in you,” he tells student Kancess Polidor, at The Actors Conservatory from Brooklyn and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. “And I want you to amplify that.”

Each of these students has been chosen in the belief that they will go on to have successful professional careers. “This work is not for everyone,” Mendelson says in a separate conversation. “You have to come to this with a passion, and a drive, and resilience.”

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

Left: Beth Harper, who founded The Actors Conservatory (then known as The Training Ground Actors Studio) in 1985 and led it until 2022. Right: Michael Mendelson, who began teaching at the conservatory in 2009 and became artistic director in 2022.

Passion, drive, and resilience have been at the heart of the conservatory since actor and director Beth Harper founded the school in 1985 as The Training Ground Actors Studio, in an upstairs former dentist’s office in Portland’s eastside Hollywood District.

Born and raised in Tennessee, Harper became a leading actor and director after moving to Portland, working often with Artists Rep and also for a time producing an eagerly anticipated annual one-act festival. But teaching was in her bones. What inspired her to start the school?

“One. I come from a family of incredible teachers and mentors,” she says. “I have a degree in education and worked in public education as soon as I graduated. So yeah, it’s no lie. I’ve always been a teacher.

“Two. I’m passionate about guiding, inspiring, and mentoring emerging artists.

“Three. Selfishly, I always wanted to pay my rent, and later my mortgage.

“In that order. You can’t be successful without these elements. No one reason can stand alone.”

Following the dentist’s office the young school moved to an unheated space at the old Sumus Theatre, in a one-time car dealership building at 1313 West Burnside Street.

“Then we moved to that space on Southwest First Avenue where we did our first shows, and we called our space ‘Lost in Space,’” Harper, who led the company until she retired in 2022, recalls.

An old firehouse building on the hill above the Portland State University campus was next, and in many ways ideal for the growing school, which by this point was known as Portland Actors Conservatory. It had good office and tech space, ample classrooms, and a small but inviting performance space that allowed for public performances, giving students valuable onstage experience. Neighbors enjoyed having the school there, Harper says. Unfortunately, the city’s parks and recreation department, which controlled the property, eventually evicted the school, saying it had other uses for the building – but nothing else moved in, and it remains vacant. “I was so disappointed when our own city treated us with such disregard and indifference,” Harper says.

In 2016 the school, renamed The Actors Conservatory, moved into Artists Rep’s home space about a block west of its current location, sharing space with the theater company. In 2020 the Covid pandemic hit, and along with several other companies the school and Artists Rep moved to temporary quarters on the south waterfront. Finally came the move to the Tiffany Center, at first sharing space with another theater school, Bridgetown Conservatory of Musical Theatre (which has recently expanded to a second location in Salem; see David Bates’s ArtsWatch story about Bridgetown’s expansion) before realizing that it needed space of its own and moving upstairs to the Tiffany’s fifth floor.

Along the way the school went through the arduous process of becoming nationally accredited, in the process developing its two-year conservatory program in addition to its more general studio classes. The accreditation process was both rigorous and important.

“To become accredited you must make sure that you adhere to the standards of the National Association of Schools of Theatre,” Harper says. That involves writing a self-study “which is more than equivalent to a huge thesis or a very long nonfiction novel,” being inspected first-hand by a visiting team, going through several rounds of back-and-forth reports, and also being approved by the federal Housing and Urban Development department’s Federal Financial Assistance program. The Actors Conservatory won accreditation in 2008. “What accreditation means is that our school meets the high standards required to be a member,” Harper says. “Once you are accredited you are eligible to receive federal financial aid.”

That’s significant, as Kerie Darner, the conservatory’s board chair, points out: TAC is the only stand-alone certified acting program in the Pacific Northwest.

Meanwhile, the school continues its dual offerings of studio classes and its more intensive two-year conservatory program. “The studio program was an evening program for students who were interested in actor training but couldn’t give or have the time to dedicate to an immersive two-year program,” Harper says. “We continued to have kids’ classes until ART moved to the waterfront, and then there wasn’t enough space.”

And to keep things moving ahead, the conservatory has just launched a 40th year, $440,440 fund drive.

CARRYING THE CONSERVATORY FORWARD

One of the keys to the conservatory’s long success as it embarks on its 40^th year is the people who work there: The school’s teachers are themselves notable professionals. “What makes the experience for students so exhilarating is that every one of our teachers is active, out there doing the work,” says Mendelson.

Mendelson, who began teaching at the conservatory in 2009 and took over as managing artistic director when Harper retired in 2022, is a superb, imaginative actor and a skilled director. He is also a resident artist at Artists Rep, and founding artistic director of the Portland Shakespeare Project. At The Actors Conservatory he works with Academic Director Erin Jackson Caron.

Among the school’s other faculty, teaching in the conservatory program or the studio program or both, are such leading Portland theater figures as actors Chris Harder, Sarah Lucht, Jacklyn Maddux, Michael O’Connor, Darius Pearce, William Earl Ray, Kailey Rhodes, and Luisa Sermol; Lecoq-trained movement teacher Sascha Blocker; Shaking the Tree Theatre founder Samantha Van Der Merwe; stage combat specialist Kristen Mun-Van Noy; and Luan Schooler, Artists Rep’s director of artistic programming.

In a way, both faculty and students are involved in a reinvention. The pandemic years, Mendelson believes, were particularly hard on performing arts companies, because arts like acting are social arts – you do them together, cooperatively, as a group. Pandemic-style isolation is the opposite of that.

And if the pandemic was bad for theater people, it was bad for audiences, too, many of whom lost the habit of being together, an essential aspect of theater: A small crowd performs in front of a larger crowd, and the two groups somehow bond. Today’s audience, and tomorrow’s, is different from the pre-pandemic audience of 2019. “Our goal now,” Mendelson says, “is to give the new audience a reason to gather together again.”

That cultural shift, he believes, extends to the teacher/student relationship, too: “We’re not changing what we do – which is working with the actors from the top of their head to the bottom of their feet, and inside, to their emotions – we’re not changing that. We’re changing how we go about doing that.”

That means, he believes, that the interactions between teachers and students need to be more open: “I think there’s more care in how we work with actors. … As teachers, we have to be willing to look at how we were taught,” and consider whether those approaches still work, or whether they need to be changed for a new generation with its own experiences and ways of looking at the world.

“One of the first things we look for is the truth of the work,” Mendelson says. “Are you being truthful?” And how do you present that truth? “You’re on this journey to discover what your process is.”

One thing that makes this interesting is that different actors can have very different processes for getting to the same place. Indeed, they can be wildly different. Some actors, for instance, arrive at first rehearsal with all of their lines memorized. Others are still working on their lines during tech rehearsals (“and sometimes beyond that,” Mendelson adds with a wry smile).

“The two-year program is the nuts and bolts of what we have,” Mendelson says. Year One covers a lot of the basics of the profession. “Second year is the bridge from the classroom to the stage.” (Four conservatory second-year students, in fact, performed in Artists Rep’s October and November production of the new play The Event!)

Studio classes, which take up a good deal of the school’s time and effort, are different. They’re open to pretty much anyone who signs up, and they tend to be about learning particular skills, from beginning acting to comedy acting to acting on film. They’re offered in a variety of ways to fit students’ schedules: evening classes, or one-day classes, for instance, or a summer intensive.

PASSING THE KNOWLEDGE ALONG

Like some other professions, theater demands constant learning and rethinking, which means that professional performers will often sign up for a class or two. What’s tricky about the theater is that you have to become comfortable not only with your own approach to performing, but also with the sometimes exciting and sometimes stressful process of making what you do fit with what everyone else is doing – the other actors in the cast; and the director, who may have a very specific idea of what to emphasize in the play’s story and how the script should be approached.

With their deep experience, the school’s teachers are on hand to help students learn how to roll with the punches. And it’s not just the teachers who can rely on their own backgrounds.

Kerie Darner, the board chair, is herself a performer, and in fact, a graduate of The Actors Conservatory in 2020, just before the pandemic shut everything down. She’s been seen onstage in shows including 2023’s Woman and Scarecrow, at Corrib Theatre – “a huge part. I never left the stage” – and 21ten Theatre’s November 2024 production of Oregon playwright E.M. Lewis’s two-hander Dorothy’s Dictionary. She’s kept up her training, too, doing intensive study this summer at the Royal Academy of Performing Arts in London and the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York City.

Darner worked for 10 years as a technical recruiter for Apple and then quit. She’s now considering a new career as a personal trainer: “I have a full gym in my garage, which I’ve had for 20 years.” That ties in with managing the physical rigors of the theater, she believes: “Especially in acting, women as they age are not so strong, and they need physical stamina.”

“One of my goals in going to the conservatory was being able to hold my own without just my voice. I’m a singer,” she says. Her TAC training has allowed her to expand to non-singing, dramatic roles.

As board chair, she’s placing a priority on raising the conservatory’s profile: “One of the biggest things we want to do … it is still somewhat frustrating that we aren’t better known than we are.”

That might mean doing workshops with high schools and community colleges, she says – “build awareness that we’re an option. Building top-of-mind awareness that we’re here.”

The Conservatory program is limited to 20 students, with 10 students at most for each year of the two-year program. The Studio program, Darner adds, casts a much wider net: “If you lumped everything together I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a couple hundred people” taking classes.

And she expresses satisfaction with what the conservatory has accomplished: “It’s worth it when you see all these grads, and they’re out there working.”

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Left: Actor, director and conservatory teacher William Earl Ray. Right: Actor and conservatory teacher Sarah Lucht.

Much of the credit for that, of course, goes to the teachers who’ve passed along their own working knowledge. Take William Earl (Bill) Ray, for instance, who came to the theater in part thanks to the Army. An actor and director with more than 40 years’ experience, he did his first show – A Raisin in the Sun – in 1978 while stationed in the Army at Ft. Lewis, in Washington state.

Raised in Texas, he’s performed and directed extensively there and around the country, including Seattle, and Portland, where he’s lived since 2020 after several years of coming to town to direct or act in shows.  He also performed in Annie Get Your Gun at Ft. Lewis, and Guys and Dolls at the nearby Tacoma Actors Guild. Ray used the G.I. Bill to go to The Evergreen State College in Olympia, where “you were able to do work out in the field.”

His first show in Portland was another production of A Raisin in the Sun, directed by the late Michael Griggs for the old New Rose Theatre; Griggs, who taught at the Conservatory, recruited him to teach at TAC. (Raisin is one of two plays Ray has done six times; the other is August Wilson’s Two Trains Running.) He’s also involved with PassinArt: A Theatre Company, Portland’s longest-running Black theater company. He runs the company’s Play Reading Monday series of staged readings, most recently directing an October reading of Dominique Morriseau’s Detroit ’67. For January’s reading he’ll direct “one of my favorite plays, The Glass Menagerie. And I’ve already cast a couple of my students in it.”

“It’s all hands on deck,” Ray says of the conservatory’s faculty. “All the people there work. They’re working actors. Working directors. So the students are getting practical training. I have to get them ready to go out in the world.”

“I’ve been teaching now for three years, and I’m enjoying it,” he says. “I’m giving back to these young students. … You can’t take it with you, but you can leave it here.”

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Actor Sarah Lucht, who teaches among other things text analysis, theory into practice, and monologue development, has been around the conservatory pretty much since Harper started it up. “My relationship with Beth and the conservatory covers 40 years, too,” she says.

Like Mendelson, Lucht is a resident artist at Artists Rep. “When TAC was at ART … I really felt that was a special, vital time,” she says. “I’ve been enmeshed in this world for so long. It’s been such a long journey for me with this school, and I’m very happy with where it is now.” Echoing Mendelson and Darner, she adds: “I just wish it were better known.”

“One of the most wonderful things about the conservatory,” she adds, “is how Beth would say, ‘I need somebody to teach this class, and I want you to do it.’ The way she supplied opportunities for people is just wonderful. It means a lot to me. I feel very proud to be a part of something that provides so much.”

The conservatory teaches acting, but it also teaches that acting fits in with broader aspects of theater: “One of the best ways to teach acting students to perform well is to also have a playwrighting aspect in your program.”

Lucht would like the conservatory to have a playwriting sequence, a directing course, and “our own proscenium that has maybe 200 seats. That’d be good.”

In the Studio program for adults, she says, “I have a chunk of maybe 10 or 12 students who take my classes repeatedly. And then there are of course new people all the time. How the business works changes all the time. That’s one of the reasons I like having new people coming in.

“And there’s a lot of value in giving students some historical context. It’ll be more interesting for you if you learn to read and know the plays that came before. It’ll be a lot more fun.”

MEANWHILE, BACK IN SHAKESPEARE CLASS

The Actors Conservatory is nicely ensconced now in its relatively new digs. The school spreads across the fifth floor of the historic Tiffany Center (which for many years was known as Neighbors of Woodcraft), on Southwest 14^th Avenue and Morrison Street, a scant block east of Artists Rep. There are no performance halls but plenty of classroom spaces, storage, offices (Mendelson’s is small but neatly set up, with a desk, a couple of comfortable armchairs, and a sofa) and the like. It’s a workspace, which is what the school needs.

The Tiffany Center is on the eastern edge of Goose Hollow, a pleasantly worn, comfortably in-between neighborhood close to downtown but not quite in it: a neighborhood in a kind of quiet and accessible pause. Across 14^th Avenue to the east is the I-405 freeway canyon dividing downtown from this little tuckaway corner of the city. Around the corner to the west is the comfortable old Hotel deLuxe (remembered by long-timers as the Mallory Hotel); it was a hop and a skip, too, to where the old Portland Civic Theatre, during its heyday one of the biggest and most successful community theaters in the nation, attracted audiences to its two performance spaces, which have since been demolished. Three blocks past Artists Rep to the west is Providence Park, where the Portland Timbers and Portland Thorns play their home games. There, the streets rise to Washington Park and the Portland Japanese Garden and the West Hills.

But on this Friday afternoon in this fifth-floor studio, the outside world may as well not exist: There is Shakespeare going on here, and Shakespeare provides his own universe. On Thursday, the day before class, the students receive their monologues to work on in preparation for class. Each will read her or his monologue in front of the full class, and Mendelson will work with them on it, a combination teacher, coach, director, and linguistic advisor. He’s concentrating on the movement from text to speech to meaning, and how the three work together.

“Pay attention in particular to the punctuation,” he advises at one point. “That’s how you breathe.” He returns to the theme later: “Use the punctuation. Let it slow you down. Don’t be so quick to get to the end.” Still later: “We can play with alliteration. Point of view. Point of view is going to be huge. Shakespeare is all about finding yourself.”

And he emphasizes the balance between intellect and emotion in bringing a written script to life in front of an audience. “I think sometimes actors can be too smart,” he says reassuringly. “We want just enough smart, and a lot of heart.”

A historical understanding of the passages is important: How did these plays and these lines resonate within the culture and expectations and world view of their original audiences? How do those original meanings and expectations shift or hold up with modern audiences?

One student, Kencess Polidor, is working on a scene from Act III, Scene V of As You Like It. “And why, I pray you,” the actor, playing Rosalind, begins.

Rosalind is one of the larger roles in the Canon, Mendelson notes, and then points out that Shakespeare’s women were performed originally as “pants roles,” played by young men pretending to be women, and sometimes by young men pretending to be women who were pretending to be men.

The audience was well aware of the gender flip-flops, Mendelson stresses: It was an in-joke, a bit of wit underlying the action that played with the culture’s gender expectations, as in Viola’s plaint in Twelfth Night, a passage assigned to Allanah Walker, from Okoboji, Iowa, who, as it turns out, has done this role before and has her lines memorized. “Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,” she cries, a modern-day woman playing an Elizabethan boy playing a girl declaring herself a member of the “weaker sex” when the action of the play and Viola’s determination make it clear that she is strong, indeed.

That strength, and the growing awareness of it, crosses from play to play, as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, when Julia, disguised as Sebastian, declares, “Alas, how love can trifle with itself!” “Like the Viola speech,” Mendelson tells the class, “this is a speech about comparison and discovery.” And the play, he adds, speaks less than kindly about its young gentlemen: “These two guys, they’re kind of cads. It’s a real bro play.”

Mendelson tears the sentences down, word by word, breath by breath, idea by idea, shift by shift. As he speaks with the young actors, he moves about the studio briskly, gesticulating, moving his arms in explanation almost like an orchestra conductor shaping the rhythm and sound. It’s an unspoken lesson that acting is active; like dancers, actors express themselves physically.

With the plays and the teacher and the students, some connections are already made. “Do you know Twelfth Night?” Mendelson asks Damian Lewis, a young man wearing a backwards baseball cap and a Garfield sweatshirt. “Yeah!” the student replies. “This is the play that actually inspired me to be an actor.”

The here and the now

So it goes, and so it continues, this preparation for a special sort of life and career. “Mostly I’m proud that we’ve made a difference in artists’ lives,” Harper, the conservatory’s founder, says. “Once somebody said to me, ‘I can always tell a PAC graduate because they know how to listen.’ Nothing better than that. Nothing.”

And Mendelson, declaring that conservatory students need to learn more than what they perhaps think they need to learn: “Our job is to train everyone for everything. Because you don’t know where your career is going to take you.”