At a Trinity Rep rehearsal one afternoon, I watched Brian McEleney change someone's life. The actor was well-experienced, an Equity pro, but she hadn't worked at Trinity before. It was a scene where she had mainly to listen while another actor spoke to her. McEleney, who was directing, noticed that the exchange was missing tension because she was losing concentration in the exchange. He practiced a simple technique as he sat down across from her and demonstrated how to maintain a connection even when eye contact is broken. His explaining and their practicing couldn't have taken more than three or four minutes, but when they were done she was quite eager to try again. Her mute performance now was entirely different, energized and connected as though by an invisible electrical wire to the actor rehearsing the scene with her. It wasn't likely that her acting would be the same again.

The actor was preparing for a main stage production at Trinity Repertory Company, but many such lessons and epiphanies have taken place as young actors at Trinity Conservatory have prepared to step out into the rest of their careers.

It's likely that similar stories could be told of Stephen Berenson, co-director of the conservatory with McEleney since they took it over 12 years ago. They've always shared teaching as well as administrative duties. As Berenson notes, "We often hear that students who are working on a new project are meeting with professional people who say, `I can't believe how well you're trained.' "

They led a tour of the conservatory's spacious quarters across the street from the theater. Trinity artistic director Oskar Eustis was lecturing to an attentive semi-circle in one class, while in another room a student was stretched out, trying to take a nap. Even under the best of circumstances, successful theaters have always encouraged sleep deprivation.

That was never more necessary than in 1990, when the two 40something men -- who for 26 years have been partners apart from work as well -- took a collective deep breath and accepted leadership of Trinity Conservatory. (As of this September, the acting and directing MFA program no longer goes by that name. But more about that later.) The year before, hot avant-garde New York director Anne Bogart -- who had been recruited to liven things up as artistic director and ended up plunging the theater into its bleakest financial point in history -- gave Berenson and McEleney permanent company slots. But she also gave the season away to her favorite directors, who were told to do their favorite plays. In the Bogart season of 1989-90, subscribers fled in head-shaking droves. By the time the new co-directors sat down at the desk they shared, conservatory founder David Eliet having been replaced by Bogart's man, who left with her, there wasn't even enough money for an office assistant. They shared one phone. When prospective students wrote in for brochures, Berenson says they were the ones who stuffed them into envelopes.

When former company member Richard Jenkins took over as interim artistic director in 1990, he asked the two to take charge of the Conservatory so it wouldn't have to be shut down.

"We were in such financial trouble at the time," Jenkins says. "I told Brian and Stephen, 'If you can run this without it costing the theater money, go to it. It's your baby.' "

They hit the ground running wearing both administrator and teacher hats. Jenkins remarks, "I could sense that they had a tremendous commitment to the students. It wasn't a learning process."

They could slice and dice the duties any way they wanted, such as one being in charge and the other being associate or assistant if he wanted less time involvement and responsibility. They were still actors in the company, after all.

"So Brian came up with the term 'co-director,' so that neither of us would be in charge," Berenson says. "We'd both be in charge."

"That's the best thing I ever did," McEleney adds.

"Because it always leads to the line, `Oh, I don't know -- I'll have to check with my co-director,' " Berenson jokes.

That is characteristic of Berenson, the shorter of the two and the more jocular. (Ask him for the one about George W., Ariel Sharon, and the matzo ball soup.) McEleney has a drier sort of humor, though he can be as impish as he looks. You know this if you saw his quietly droll Malvolio in Trinity's 1992 Twelfth Night; in one rehearsal I saw company members -- who had been seeing him perform as the cross-gartered prig for weeks -- beside themselves with laughter.

Jenkins was as actor-oriented as Bogart had been director-oriented, so he certainly hired the right guys. At the time, McEleney had been teaching there for nine years, Berenson for six part-time, commuting from New York.

"This is really a very unique environment to study acting," McEleney says, "because it's a place in which the actors really have an aesthetic voice in the work. I think this school is also unique in that when we took over, at least, there were actors running the program. And that's incredibly rare, and I think important. We have to prove what we're teaching every day on the stage."

Berenson got interested in acting at a younger age than did McEleney, growing up on Long Island in a family that caught a lot of musicals in Manhattan. "The first show I saw was Mary Martin in The Sound of Music -- which had kids on stage, so I felt, 'Well, I can do that!' " he recalls. He applied to the top undergraduate colleges that had strong theater programs and was accepted by all of them. Since Juilliard, his first choice, wanted the 17-year-old to wait a year, he went instead to Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. One of his instructors, the most impressive, was Edith Skinner, whom he says was perhaps the greatest voice and speech teacher of the century.

"She was extremely influential to me, because I had a --" and here Berenson mimics his nearly Brooklynese accent of the time -- "horrible New Yawk accent.

"She really made me into an actor by dealing with my speech," he continues, adding that when he complained that his friends said his careful diction sounded affected, she suggested that he get new friends.

McEleney didn't know that he wanted to be an actor until he arrived at Trinity College in Hartford, where he entered expecting to come out an English teacher. But his theater instructors -- he had a double major -- were united in encouraging his talent.

"I remember doing a production of Peer Gynt in college, which started out seeming impossible but ended up being a lot of fun," he says. "Of course, when you're that young you don't know how difficult it is. You just jump in and do it and say, `Ooh, this is great!' Basically all you have at that age is enthusiasm."

Enthusiasm, and apparently skill, in the early 1970s got him accepted for the best MFA acting program in the country, at Yale School of Drama, which in that decade was turning out actors like Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver, and playwrights like Christopher Durang and Wendy Wasserstein. Subsequently, McEleney taught acting at Princeton University for nine years while also plying the craft in New York City.

In 1976, McEleney and Berenson met because of the precursor of Trinity Conservatory. The Hartman Theatre Conservatory was operating in Stamford, Connecticut, for three years before Trinity founder Adrian Hall invited it to set up shop in Providence in 1978. Berenson had trained at the Connecticut conservatory for a while, and McEleney took a class from its director, Larry Arrick, at the nearby O'Neill Theater Center. In the small world of New England theater, this additional common connection made their meeting inevitable. McEleney came to Providence in 1981 to teach at Trinity Conservatory, and he also began acting in the company the following year. A couple of years later, Berenson came to Trinity to direct a Conservatory production, then did a Christmas Carol production, and so on. By 1990, when the two were tapped to take over the Conservatory, Berenson was a familiar face around here.

At the beginning of their tenure, they nursed the Conservatory through lean years when its survival, and the theater's, was in jeopardy. This year the co-directors have traded in that title as the Conservatory has merged into Brown's Department of Theater, Speech, and Dance graduate programs. Trinity Conservatory is no more. Long live the "Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium" -- a prestigious synergy, however hard on the ear. Berenson's new title is Chair of the MFA Programs, and McEleney is Head of the MFA Acting Program. Kevin Moriarity, a 1994 Conservatory grad, is Head of the MFA Directing Program.

Word is out that Trinity is even more special a place to train for the theater. More than 70 directors were interviewed for the graduate program, two were accepted and both are attending. For acting students, there was also an impressively high "yield" -- admissions shorthand for the percentage of those chosen who return the compliment -- of more than half of the consortium's first choices. Considering that the competition is Juilliard, NYU, and Yale Rep, that's some accomplishment. Rhode Island College -- through which the Conservatory offered their MFA -- may come aboard to expand the program to technical theater and stage management, as may the Rhode Island School of Design for set, lighting, and possibly sound design. If that all happens, Berenson says, there will be no other graduate theater program in the nation like that in Providence. Tuition is as awe-inspiring, at about $29,000 -- compared to about $12,000 last year -- but financial aid, Berenson says, bridges the gap "considerably."

McEleney and Berenson have made a considerable mark on off-Trinity theater, as many graduates have remained around Providence and elevated the theatrical opportunities. Just as they will continue to act at Trinity -- both will play Scrooge this season -- they are adamant about continuing to teach. "We've been masters of time management so far," McEleney points out.

Oskar Eustis, Trinity artistic director and consortium chair, is one person relieved that that is so. He says they work harder than anybody in the building.

"They have taken a wonderful but somewhat sleepy program and they have spent 12 years now turning it into what I am confident is going to be one of the top-ranked training programs in the country in two or three years," he says, calling "extraordinary" the way they have been able to integrate the life of the conservatory into the live of the theater. "So much so, that I feel that the course of my life has been changed by them, because they have essentially, in their quiet way, completely converted me to the importance of the program they run."

Issue Date: October 25 - 31, 2002