Theater Tech

There’s a good article in Britain’s Telegraph about Milton Katselas and his Beverly Hills Playhouse, one of the most respected acting classes in Los Angeles.

Students have left Katselas’s school, the Beverly Hills Playhouse, because of the unspoken pressure they felt to join the Church of Scientology, the controversial religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard in the 1950s. Nobody ever told them to join, but they could not ignore how many of their classmates and teachers were Scientologists. Or the fact that Milton Katselas, the master himself, credits Hubbard for much of his success. And the assorted weirdness: one of Katselas’s students has a day job at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, where Tom Cruise and John Travolta study, and one zealous television star left the Playhouse because she said she believed that Katselas wasn’t committed enough to Scientology.

Katselas is a Scientologist and uses a lot of Hubbard in his coursework but from this article he sounds more like a Freezoner.

Katselas’s stubbornness, and his sheer ego, are the keys to understanding his relationship to Scientology. He takes what he can from the teachings, but he can be contemptuous of the church. ‘I know [Hubbard] made a statement once that Scientology is not the people in it,’ Katselas said. ‘Scientology is a technology that he’s developed that is really powerful, and these artists respond to it because it cleans up certain things that they’re looking to or that they’re dealing with, and that helps them in their quest or in their way, and there’s no doubt of that.’ But, he added: ‘I don’t go to parties, I don’t go to Scientology events. I just don’t do it. And they’re not enthralled with me because of that.’ He agreed that some Scientologists were ‘zealots’.

The wife of a good friend studied with Katselas for a few years.  She was never in Scientology but talked about how it was run with Scientology principles.  She even was the Ethics Officer for awhile.

It’s an interesting read.

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