So I'm making my final exit two nights ago as Malvolio. It is for him (in my humble conceptualizaton of the role) a turning point, a defining moment. He has been, finally, betrayed by everyone....."Sir Toby and the lighter people", by the woman he thinks he loves (Olivia), and even by Feste, whom he believes, against all odds and good reason, has come to his aid in freeing him from the prison imposed by Toby. And worse than that, it is Maria rather than himself that has married out of the working class and into the power of the aristocracy.....his own long held dream. Worse than all that, he has been made into a laughing stock within his entire world, both upstairs and down.
What does he do? For me at least, the text suggests he fails to "get it", the why of what has happened to him. Instead, he hurls the now useless letter from "Olivia" to the ground, and spits out his revenge to the whole company "I'll be revenged!!!", and then to the audience themselves on all four sides of our arena staged production "....On the whole pack of you!!!"; he strides up the vom (stairs leading to the Lobby in this instance) and out of the theatre, having learned exactly nothing, Puritan-like in his dogmatic obstinacy to the end.
Except here's where it gets interesting. Instead of striding out up the stairs, desperate to maintain some shred of dignity and decorum, I played, as I occasionally do, more of the heat of the moment, and rushed the stairs, angry and desperate only to get out and away from them all. Unfortunately, the front of the rubber sole on my right shoe had come loose, caught the edge of the top step, and....well, you know where this is going.....down. I landed hard on my right knee, jamming it back up into my hip socket (apparently....this isn't that student doctor's blog); genuine pain, and for that matter, genuine humiliation. What I won't sacrifice for my art.
So the next day, I had to figure out how to do the role with a limp, and without the ability to work some very specific blocking on my knees. And here's where it gets interesting (finally, I promise). I perform the role that night, and because of the limitations imposed by my new injury, it gets better, and I have what feels at least like the best show I've had in weeks.
All right, so the actors among you are saying, "Well, of course, what did you expect? The whole show probably felt fresh and different, because it actually was. New choices, assuming they work on at least some level, are always going to seem sexier than what you've been performing for onto three months now! Doesn't necesarily make them "better" choices". Yes and no, but alright, point taken. I think it's a little more complicated than that; this kind of event resonates on deeper levels.
As an actor, we spend an awful lot of rehearsal time trying to get it right, whatever the hell that means. As a young actor if my craft suffered from any identifiable problem it was my need to set things in stone, to seek some kind of nearly attainable perhaps perfection, or my best shot equivalent, and then repeat it as perfectly as possible every night. That was for me the point. So at some stage hopefully you wake up to the absurdity of that particular quest, and learn to be flexible in what it is we do. And here again, clearly the idea isn't so much about trying to get "it" right, as it is trying to get it all right tonight. For a (somewhat) anal compulsive like myself, there is great value in being reminded of that.
But more than the straightforward point about craft, there is something else out there around the edges of the event that I can't easily articulate, but seems important somehow, like a scent that surprises you, deeply familiar in an unfamiliar place. Perhaps it is simply this; that change, expected or, as in this case, sudden and painful, is constant. And opening up to that idea is like breathing deeply......because sometimes, change turns out to be for the good.
Maybe the point is, or becomes, to practice the habit of unclenching for awhile......to see where the change might take us. Now there's a radical thought, at least for someone raised by slightly fanatical shanty NY Irish Catholics (if your not suffering or, alternately, drunk, what is the point?). Somewhere in the background, floating over the sound of the temple bells, we hear the mantra "...beter actor, better person, better actor....".
Of course, next time I think I'll just get the damn shoe fixed.
Saturday, June 10, 2006
Tuesday, June 06, 2006
Return Engagements.....Part 2
So..............What has it been like being back here for the past 4 months, you ask?
Lonely, strange, enjoyable, frustrating, enlightening, boring, depressing and instructive.
First of all, after nine and a half years of not just living together but working together as well, basically being in each other's company 24/7, being separated from the wife has been hard, harder than expected. We will celebrate our twentieth anniversary this November (cue trumpets and much champagne), and we've been together as a couple for twenty three, and so, as actors, we've gone through periods of separation before, and became accustomed to those breaks away from one another. The singular truth is that sometimes those breaks were as instrumental to our still being together as anything else. But this one has felt different, almost like we've forgotten how to do the whole separation thing, period. Yes, the circumstances are different; it's a much longer gig than usual, we haven't been apart very much recently, we've just gone through the stress of moving to a new city (and after helping us get settled for a month, I slipped out the door back to the familiarity of this job while she was left having to jump back on the audition-straight job bus), etc. But whatever the rationalizations in trying to understand it, the only thing that really matters is the feeling itself........I'm just lonely. I miss her.
Strange. Yes, it's been strange being back here in a season that has encompassed so much change. Working at this theatre in the past meant that you could assume certain core values in it's daily operation (I know whereof I speak here because I was also part of an elaborately painstaking process-by-committee that struggled to establish these kind of things, toward the goal of deciding on our, God help us, Mission Statement.....which we never did finish. The Managing Director was fired before a final draft made it to the table). The three core vlaues that always found on everyones' list were: Shakespeare, repertory theatre, and resident company. So let's see here.......The first thing the new artistic director did last Aug. was to disband the resident company; and in fact, this season's schedule has required that he create two, almost completely separate companies of actors to do the four shows currently in rep. And next season ('06-'07), it will be separated even further; the three shakespeare plays that will constitute some version of the Henry VI cycle and RIII will perform in rep in the Octagon, the smaller space, with a single company of players for just those shows. And speaking of rep, we've gone this year from performing six shows in a true rep schedule to four (not counting the bringing in of Anne Bogart's Midsummer company for a month), and next season as I say, only the Shakespeares in the 200-odd seat theatre will be performed in some form of rep. In the larger Festival theatre he has programed a more traditional (to be kind) series of plays to be performed in a standard "stock" or Lort schedule...rehearse for four weeks and perform for four, and then your done, those actors go back to NY (or Atlanta or wherever he's cast from in an attempt to save the costs of hiring Equity actors). So to recap then, resident company gone for good and scheduling changes dictating how actors work together, or not. Rep as a way of presenting theatre abreviated, at best. And their commitment to performing the plays of Shakespeare? Rather than three this year, one in house production (not counting Bogart and allowing for Trojan Women as a "classical" choice in their sted). Next year an ambitious project of performing the "War of the Roses" plays, albeit in abreviated form and restricted to the Octagon, where the stage is to be re-done to approximate the dimensions and character of the elizabethan Rose Theatre. That sounds exciting. My fear would be that if this clearly dificult-to-sell project here in Montgomery doesn't do well at the box office, is that grounds for the further abreviation of that commitment to producing the works of Shakespeare?
So yeah, it's been plenty strange being here and watching all of these changes get put into place. Perhaps after two or three years the adjustments will prove to have been largely successful, and this institution will flourish. Certainly it has been the mandate of the Board and this new artistic administration to make the changes it deemed necessary to revitalize the organization and it's place in this community. It's just not how I would have gone about it, so yes, it's been hard to watch and keep any kind of objectivity about it all. But that's life in the theatre (for all of you out there interested in what I would have done, let me know and I'll bore you in great detail). I guess that goes right to the heart of the matter. It's been strange being here not so much because I was fired and then re-hired, but because I have no faith in the efficacy of the ongoing changes he has instituted this season. I don't think he or his wife (the director of Trojan Women and major fan of Anne Bogart's work) or the people he has brought with him from his last job have any real understanding or appreciation for what it means to live in the South. I don't think they get it, and I don't think they particularly care to "get it". There is a kind of hubris in that admin hallway now that I think is going to be damaging to the organization long term. And that saddens me deeply, because the place was a very good home to me creatively for almost ten years, I still have many good friends who work here and believe in the place, and I hate to see that wasted. Vision is a tricky thing, but I don't think it's possible with out some degree of self-awareness and perhaps even humility. Right now, I don't see that happening at this institution.
So.........what about "enjoyable, frustrating, enlightening, boring, depressing, and instructive"?? Truth is everything I've discussed at too much length above holds the other elements in context. Working on Twelfth Night turned out to be mostly a joy; a strong ensemble, and ably directed. And whatever frustrations and other difficulties I've faced here over the past four plus months have been directly attributable to feeling a bit lost living back down here alone, at a place that once held real promise for me, but that has since turned into, well, just another job. I've learned a tremendous amount working on Malvolio, mostly about myself as an actor and the value of long runs, how I have worked in the past and the changes I want to instill in my craft in the future.....and that has been both instructive and perhaps even a little enlightening. Figuring out the "how" of what it is I do better, goes a long way toward explaining the "why" of it, the reason why I still want to act, why it's still important to me. And that has been a genuine gift.
And that, as they say, is that. Someone asked me the other day if I would consider coming back next year if asked......I know this business well enough to say "never say never" (and if I don't get the weeks worked I need to qualify again for my health insurance, my heart meds go up to $700 p/mo. instead of $100), but it feels like this is a wrap. Time to move on. I think this is the last entry for Return Engagements............
Lonely, strange, enjoyable, frustrating, enlightening, boring, depressing and instructive.
First of all, after nine and a half years of not just living together but working together as well, basically being in each other's company 24/7, being separated from the wife has been hard, harder than expected. We will celebrate our twentieth anniversary this November (cue trumpets and much champagne), and we've been together as a couple for twenty three, and so, as actors, we've gone through periods of separation before, and became accustomed to those breaks away from one another. The singular truth is that sometimes those breaks were as instrumental to our still being together as anything else. But this one has felt different, almost like we've forgotten how to do the whole separation thing, period. Yes, the circumstances are different; it's a much longer gig than usual, we haven't been apart very much recently, we've just gone through the stress of moving to a new city (and after helping us get settled for a month, I slipped out the door back to the familiarity of this job while she was left having to jump back on the audition-straight job bus), etc. But whatever the rationalizations in trying to understand it, the only thing that really matters is the feeling itself........I'm just lonely. I miss her.
Strange. Yes, it's been strange being back here in a season that has encompassed so much change. Working at this theatre in the past meant that you could assume certain core values in it's daily operation (I know whereof I speak here because I was also part of an elaborately painstaking process-by-committee that struggled to establish these kind of things, toward the goal of deciding on our, God help us, Mission Statement.....which we never did finish. The Managing Director was fired before a final draft made it to the table). The three core vlaues that always found on everyones' list were: Shakespeare, repertory theatre, and resident company. So let's see here.......The first thing the new artistic director did last Aug. was to disband the resident company; and in fact, this season's schedule has required that he create two, almost completely separate companies of actors to do the four shows currently in rep. And next season ('06-'07), it will be separated even further; the three shakespeare plays that will constitute some version of the Henry VI cycle and RIII will perform in rep in the Octagon, the smaller space, with a single company of players for just those shows. And speaking of rep, we've gone this year from performing six shows in a true rep schedule to four (not counting the bringing in of Anne Bogart's Midsummer company for a month), and next season as I say, only the Shakespeares in the 200-odd seat theatre will be performed in some form of rep. In the larger Festival theatre he has programed a more traditional (to be kind) series of plays to be performed in a standard "stock" or Lort schedule...rehearse for four weeks and perform for four, and then your done, those actors go back to NY (or Atlanta or wherever he's cast from in an attempt to save the costs of hiring Equity actors). So to recap then, resident company gone for good and scheduling changes dictating how actors work together, or not. Rep as a way of presenting theatre abreviated, at best. And their commitment to performing the plays of Shakespeare? Rather than three this year, one in house production (not counting Bogart and allowing for Trojan Women as a "classical" choice in their sted). Next year an ambitious project of performing the "War of the Roses" plays, albeit in abreviated form and restricted to the Octagon, where the stage is to be re-done to approximate the dimensions and character of the elizabethan Rose Theatre. That sounds exciting. My fear would be that if this clearly dificult-to-sell project here in Montgomery doesn't do well at the box office, is that grounds for the further abreviation of that commitment to producing the works of Shakespeare?
So yeah, it's been plenty strange being here and watching all of these changes get put into place. Perhaps after two or three years the adjustments will prove to have been largely successful, and this institution will flourish. Certainly it has been the mandate of the Board and this new artistic administration to make the changes it deemed necessary to revitalize the organization and it's place in this community. It's just not how I would have gone about it, so yes, it's been hard to watch and keep any kind of objectivity about it all. But that's life in the theatre (for all of you out there interested in what I would have done, let me know and I'll bore you in great detail). I guess that goes right to the heart of the matter. It's been strange being here not so much because I was fired and then re-hired, but because I have no faith in the efficacy of the ongoing changes he has instituted this season. I don't think he or his wife (the director of Trojan Women and major fan of Anne Bogart's work) or the people he has brought with him from his last job have any real understanding or appreciation for what it means to live in the South. I don't think they get it, and I don't think they particularly care to "get it". There is a kind of hubris in that admin hallway now that I think is going to be damaging to the organization long term. And that saddens me deeply, because the place was a very good home to me creatively for almost ten years, I still have many good friends who work here and believe in the place, and I hate to see that wasted. Vision is a tricky thing, but I don't think it's possible with out some degree of self-awareness and perhaps even humility. Right now, I don't see that happening at this institution.
So.........what about "enjoyable, frustrating, enlightening, boring, depressing, and instructive"?? Truth is everything I've discussed at too much length above holds the other elements in context. Working on Twelfth Night turned out to be mostly a joy; a strong ensemble, and ably directed. And whatever frustrations and other difficulties I've faced here over the past four plus months have been directly attributable to feeling a bit lost living back down here alone, at a place that once held real promise for me, but that has since turned into, well, just another job. I've learned a tremendous amount working on Malvolio, mostly about myself as an actor and the value of long runs, how I have worked in the past and the changes I want to instill in my craft in the future.....and that has been both instructive and perhaps even a little enlightening. Figuring out the "how" of what it is I do better, goes a long way toward explaining the "why" of it, the reason why I still want to act, why it's still important to me. And that has been a genuine gift.
And that, as they say, is that. Someone asked me the other day if I would consider coming back next year if asked......I know this business well enough to say "never say never" (and if I don't get the weeks worked I need to qualify again for my health insurance, my heart meds go up to $700 p/mo. instead of $100), but it feels like this is a wrap. Time to move on. I think this is the last entry for Return Engagements............
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Return Engagement, Part 1A....
Well, after an absense of roughly six months, I thought I'd come back, spruce up the ol' blog a bit (new name, a quote from Malvolio's letter speech in Twelfth Night.....the alternative was Bend Over Shakespeare. I think the quote does a better job than the original of capturing the idea behind the blog.....the full line is Olivia's supposed admonition to, among other things, "put thyself into the trick of singularity", every actor's goal and dilemma of somehow making oneself unique within the field by being specifically, and simply, who one intrinsically is). And before going on in any depth, just highlight some newsie kind of details.
We accomplished the move in two parts up to Philadelphia, and found a terrific place to live in a neighborhood called West Mt. Airy. Sonja, the wife, is up there now, back in the audition loop in NY and increasingly in Philly. She's found gainfull employment walking dogs with a pet sitting service and working with an attorney helping him rent his many properties to Temple Univ. students. Our dog Mac (short for the MacCallen, now the 14 year old kind) and orange tabby Spenser (yes, with an "s") are up in PA with her and flourishing. I am down here in the Deep South with my charmingly neurotic, epileptic white terrier mix Bea Lillie, still at the same Shakespeare Festival. Having accepted the job mentioned in the last entry, I've enjoyed greatly doing Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and the Barber in La Mancha has been OK....wonderful to be singing and great fun to perform, though the production itself is sort of hollow at the core. So it's turned out to be a positive experience and a good decision, however frustrating in the day to day details (more on that soon).
So there's the quick update.....I'll fill in more details as I post in the coming days and weeks. Thanks to those that have stayed in touch, and more to come later.
We accomplished the move in two parts up to Philadelphia, and found a terrific place to live in a neighborhood called West Mt. Airy. Sonja, the wife, is up there now, back in the audition loop in NY and increasingly in Philly. She's found gainfull employment walking dogs with a pet sitting service and working with an attorney helping him rent his many properties to Temple Univ. students. Our dog Mac (short for the MacCallen, now the 14 year old kind) and orange tabby Spenser (yes, with an "s") are up in PA with her and flourishing. I am down here in the Deep South with my charmingly neurotic, epileptic white terrier mix Bea Lillie, still at the same Shakespeare Festival. Having accepted the job mentioned in the last entry, I've enjoyed greatly doing Malvolio in Twelfth Night, and the Barber in La Mancha has been OK....wonderful to be singing and great fun to perform, though the production itself is sort of hollow at the core. So it's turned out to be a positive experience and a good decision, however frustrating in the day to day details (more on that soon).
So there's the quick update.....I'll fill in more details as I post in the coming days and weeks. Thanks to those that have stayed in touch, and more to come later.
Friday, October 07, 2005
Bardolph
Not his actual name, but I just love this smilin' guy, and it seems appropriate.......and hasn't everyone had a dog or cat that they wanted to re-name once they really got to know their personality? So I hereby claim the right to re-dub this mutt in honor of Shakespeare's poor red-nosed thief.
Thursday, October 06, 2005
Doing And Not Doing.....
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Wednesday, 5. October 2005, 19:30:18
So I was laying in bed the other morning thinking about meditation. I've been under a great deal of stress for some time, coming back from a relatively recent major surgery, and then completing a difficult season at the theatre. And this past spring seemed to be filled with deaths in the family. My brother and I have few remaining relatives; neither of us have kids, parents are long deceased, and then in May my crazy Aunt Arly (shanty Irish for Eileen)finally passed away at the age of 90. That leaves my older brother, myself, and my uncle Georgie (whose health hasn't been great of late either). In late winter my brother had lost two of his dogs to old age and illnesses, and then the real blow came in March when his partner of 31 years died suddenly of a heart attack. There for breakfast, dead by dinner. It's the kind of shock that's hard to absorb.
So over the past couple of months I decided that if I didn't get serious about handling the stress in my life I was likely to end up going down the same road as my brother's lover, and decided subsequently to go back to meditation. It's something I've toyed with for years, but never taken really very seriously. And lying there in bed I was struck by the irony of what my decision implied. I was going to grab this task, this activity, called meditating by the lapels and make it work for me, by god. Rather than doing the practice for itself, and consequently allowing it to become all about "not doing", I was going to wrestle it to the ground once again and turn it toward my ends, my goals.
Later that same day I was teaching a graduate student who is currently taking a class beng taught by my wife, what amounts to a scene study class, and his frustrations with his own work struck me as paralleling my earlier thoughts. He has taken on a long monologue to work on that is actually a patched together piece from a longer scene. It's a monologue that he's done before, for some time, but which he keeps coming back to because as he put it, "It haunts me, and I don't think I've ever really figured it out". And as he talked about it, it's structure and it's meaning (to him at least), it became clear that he is struggling to find something in the piece that is deeply personal to him, something that will perhaps help him figure out why he is who he is as a person. In other words he's too close to the material.
And in that process, in that rigourous if misplaced examination of self through that particular piece of literature, he had somewhere along the line stopped thinking like an actor and was thinking more like a therapist or a sociologist or a journalist or something. He was taking what we do as actors as part of our craft, the breaking down of text to better understand through it's structure and language and rhetoric who that character might be and what he might want, and turning that craft toward his own needs and goals. As a result he was getting no where with the material, because he was wanting it to tell some other story, some tale about himself that he doesn't fully understand yet, or won't yet allow himself to look at fully.
Acting, when it's done well, is done well because it proceeds from craft. And that craft is about, at least as a first step, putting aside one's own needs as a person and individual in order to, very simply, understand. Who is that person I'm being asked to transform myself into. And in the process of letting go of ego, in that task, the doing hopefully becomes its own reward; it becomes about "not doing". And the surprise, if one is aware enough I think, is that what one discovers then can often later provide answers to some of the questions and doubts and fears we all carry around on a daily basis.
Acting isn't therapy. It's a craft like any other that need to be respected for what it can and cannot offer, what it can and cannot do. If approached mindfully it can become its own reward. There is joy in the feel of wood in the master carpenter's hands that justifys itself, well before the wood is turned into some beautiful and useful shape.
Doing and not doing.........
Photo album
Links
Friends
About
Wednesday, 5. October 2005, 19:30:18
So I was laying in bed the other morning thinking about meditation. I've been under a great deal of stress for some time, coming back from a relatively recent major surgery, and then completing a difficult season at the theatre. And this past spring seemed to be filled with deaths in the family. My brother and I have few remaining relatives; neither of us have kids, parents are long deceased, and then in May my crazy Aunt Arly (shanty Irish for Eileen)finally passed away at the age of 90. That leaves my older brother, myself, and my uncle Georgie (whose health hasn't been great of late either). In late winter my brother had lost two of his dogs to old age and illnesses, and then the real blow came in March when his partner of 31 years died suddenly of a heart attack. There for breakfast, dead by dinner. It's the kind of shock that's hard to absorb.
So over the past couple of months I decided that if I didn't get serious about handling the stress in my life I was likely to end up going down the same road as my brother's lover, and decided subsequently to go back to meditation. It's something I've toyed with for years, but never taken really very seriously. And lying there in bed I was struck by the irony of what my decision implied. I was going to grab this task, this activity, called meditating by the lapels and make it work for me, by god. Rather than doing the practice for itself, and consequently allowing it to become all about "not doing", I was going to wrestle it to the ground once again and turn it toward my ends, my goals.
Later that same day I was teaching a graduate student who is currently taking a class beng taught by my wife, what amounts to a scene study class, and his frustrations with his own work struck me as paralleling my earlier thoughts. He has taken on a long monologue to work on that is actually a patched together piece from a longer scene. It's a monologue that he's done before, for some time, but which he keeps coming back to because as he put it, "It haunts me, and I don't think I've ever really figured it out". And as he talked about it, it's structure and it's meaning (to him at least), it became clear that he is struggling to find something in the piece that is deeply personal to him, something that will perhaps help him figure out why he is who he is as a person. In other words he's too close to the material.
And in that process, in that rigourous if misplaced examination of self through that particular piece of literature, he had somewhere along the line stopped thinking like an actor and was thinking more like a therapist or a sociologist or a journalist or something. He was taking what we do as actors as part of our craft, the breaking down of text to better understand through it's structure and language and rhetoric who that character might be and what he might want, and turning that craft toward his own needs and goals. As a result he was getting no where with the material, because he was wanting it to tell some other story, some tale about himself that he doesn't fully understand yet, or won't yet allow himself to look at fully.
Acting, when it's done well, is done well because it proceeds from craft. And that craft is about, at least as a first step, putting aside one's own needs as a person and individual in order to, very simply, understand. Who is that person I'm being asked to transform myself into. And in the process of letting go of ego, in that task, the doing hopefully becomes its own reward; it becomes about "not doing". And the surprise, if one is aware enough I think, is that what one discovers then can often later provide answers to some of the questions and doubts and fears we all carry around on a daily basis.
Acting isn't therapy. It's a craft like any other that need to be respected for what it can and cannot offer, what it can and cannot do. If approached mindfully it can become its own reward. There is joy in the feel of wood in the master carpenter's hands that justifys itself, well before the wood is turned into some beautiful and useful shape.
Doing and not doing.........
So How Do You Do That Voodoo That You Do So Well....
Friday, 30. September 2005, 13:14:33
This is really a post about teaching Shakespeare in performance, something I've been pondering a lot lately. One fo the great things about working at this Nameless Southern Theatre is that there is an MFA Program associated with it, and one of my tasks over the years as an associate artist here as been to teach as an adjunct faculty member. And in that conversation one of the questions that comes up both in one's own preparation and in the classroom itself is "How do you approach the work? What's your process??". And the answer to that is often fairly amorphous.
There might have been "rules" or a path early in one's career, but over time, doing the work, every actor develops a sort of short hand for him or herself about how to go about creating a character (an alien concept to Elizabethan actors). And recently as I've been tutoring a couple of students on material they've been working on from the canon for class purposes, it occurred to me that such a shorthand often becomes more a shortcut than anything else. We get lazy. And the result is that we don't do the calibre of work that is actually possible to do.
So I thought I'd put down some ideas here, that are more specific to the way that I would teach a class on Shakespeare than anything having to do with how one might work on more modern material.
First I have to point out what anyone familiar with the landscape will recognise immediately; my background is heavily based in the writings and ideas of John Barton. There is, to my mind, no better text dedicated to the acting of Shakespeare than his compilation taken from his series for the BBC, Playing Shakespeare. It is still the bible.
That said, it's helpful to me at least to think about how I would approach the work from four perspectives, or areas of interest.
A. Reading the text, be it play, scene or solioquey, first for overall meaning. This involves doing whatever OED or other research is necessary to make clear for oneself exactly what is being said. It is the first step, and ultimately the last, because the function of the actor in the performance of Shakespeare (or Moliere, or Chekhov, or Mamet) is to clearly and effectively communicate the ideas of the playwright. It is definitely NOT about getting past all that pesky language so that one can get to the actual acting of the scene (most bad Shakespeare in performance is such because the actor is generalizing and throwing ideas aside in order to "get to the point").
B. Next is all about structure. This means do the scansion work. It means studying the nature of the verse (or prose), to see how complex the sentences are, whether the speaker shifts from verse to prose or visa versa, are their shared lines or not, how many caesuras occur within the sentences, how many relative clauses are used within a sentence. This part could also be called checking the grammer I suppose but it really is more than that. For example, if the speaker has a sentence that contains many relative clauses within a sentence before he gets to the end of the full thought (such as Marcus in Titus)), the actor must recognise that it is their responsibility to make ALL of the ideas contained by those clauses as clear as the main idea itself. This means acting techniques like "operative word" have no place in the performance of Shakespeare. If you don't respect this structure there isn't a prayer that as an audience member I'll ever be able to follow a complex sentence; I'll drop out trying to comprehend what I just heard contained in the clause, missing the continuing thread or line of the thought. In Shakespeare, It ALL counts.
C. What should I recognize about the use of rhetoric in the language being used? Things like aliteration, assonace, onomatopeia, repetition, personification, etc. were the tools that Shakespeare and his contemporaries used to make clear to the actor, in the quickest possible way, what he as a playwright intended to be happening on stage. The repeated use of the word "honourable" in Julius Caesar is a good example of how a rhetorical device could quickly suggest to the actor how to play the speech. And chief among these devices would be the use of antithesis, the setting off of one word or groups of words against another...."To be or not to be" is the most famous example. Shakespeare thought antithetically, and it runs throughout his work. Indeed, as biographers like Park Honan and Stephen Greenblatt have pointed out brilliantly, there was a duality in Shakespeare's whole life that expressed itself in varying ways in his art, driven by the tension between the young man raised in the countryside, and the sophisticated poet, actor and playwright who lived and worked at the center of the world as he knew it, London.
D. And finally, how do I want to approach the work from the perspective of "verbal relish"? This language was meant to be played before somewhere around 3000 people, whether at the Globe or the Rose or the Theatre, out of doors. It was language that was meant to be used in a muscular, full voiced, fully realized way. No Pinter pauses here, no kitchen sink, Method mumblings in the name of "honesty" or "truth", whatever the hell that means. Use the rehtoric!!! Embrace the sound of the language. Grapple with it. It is always instructive to remember that if the balcony above the stage and the tiring house, what was refered to as "the heavens", wasn't in use as part of the play, or as a platform for musicians, it was sold as seating to the wealthiest of the gentry, come to see the play. That's right, the most expensive seats in the house were often the ones BEHIND the physical action of the ongoing play. That meant that this was a theatre, however much swayed by spectacle and later by elaborate court masque, that was based on and driven by language first.
And then finally the point. That A through D are really in the service of one thing, and that is to provide the actor with better ideas about how to play the material. There are no rules, but aren't we better off knowing a little bit of perhaps what Shakespeare intended us to do, whether we have the temerity to then ignore it or not??? It IS all about meaning, and these are tools that can point us down a clearer road, toward possible choices to be made in the development of a character.
Now that it's down on screen, maybe I can think about this all some more and see if it makes any sense after all........
This is really a post about teaching Shakespeare in performance, something I've been pondering a lot lately. One fo the great things about working at this Nameless Southern Theatre is that there is an MFA Program associated with it, and one of my tasks over the years as an associate artist here as been to teach as an adjunct faculty member. And in that conversation one of the questions that comes up both in one's own preparation and in the classroom itself is "How do you approach the work? What's your process??". And the answer to that is often fairly amorphous.
There might have been "rules" or a path early in one's career, but over time, doing the work, every actor develops a sort of short hand for him or herself about how to go about creating a character (an alien concept to Elizabethan actors). And recently as I've been tutoring a couple of students on material they've been working on from the canon for class purposes, it occurred to me that such a shorthand often becomes more a shortcut than anything else. We get lazy. And the result is that we don't do the calibre of work that is actually possible to do.
So I thought I'd put down some ideas here, that are more specific to the way that I would teach a class on Shakespeare than anything having to do with how one might work on more modern material.
First I have to point out what anyone familiar with the landscape will recognise immediately; my background is heavily based in the writings and ideas of John Barton. There is, to my mind, no better text dedicated to the acting of Shakespeare than his compilation taken from his series for the BBC, Playing Shakespeare. It is still the bible.
That said, it's helpful to me at least to think about how I would approach the work from four perspectives, or areas of interest.
A. Reading the text, be it play, scene or solioquey, first for overall meaning. This involves doing whatever OED or other research is necessary to make clear for oneself exactly what is being said. It is the first step, and ultimately the last, because the function of the actor in the performance of Shakespeare (or Moliere, or Chekhov, or Mamet) is to clearly and effectively communicate the ideas of the playwright. It is definitely NOT about getting past all that pesky language so that one can get to the actual acting of the scene (most bad Shakespeare in performance is such because the actor is generalizing and throwing ideas aside in order to "get to the point").
B. Next is all about structure. This means do the scansion work. It means studying the nature of the verse (or prose), to see how complex the sentences are, whether the speaker shifts from verse to prose or visa versa, are their shared lines or not, how many caesuras occur within the sentences, how many relative clauses are used within a sentence. This part could also be called checking the grammer I suppose but it really is more than that. For example, if the speaker has a sentence that contains many relative clauses within a sentence before he gets to the end of the full thought (such as Marcus in Titus)), the actor must recognise that it is their responsibility to make ALL of the ideas contained by those clauses as clear as the main idea itself. This means acting techniques like "operative word" have no place in the performance of Shakespeare. If you don't respect this structure there isn't a prayer that as an audience member I'll ever be able to follow a complex sentence; I'll drop out trying to comprehend what I just heard contained in the clause, missing the continuing thread or line of the thought. In Shakespeare, It ALL counts.
C. What should I recognize about the use of rhetoric in the language being used? Things like aliteration, assonace, onomatopeia, repetition, personification, etc. were the tools that Shakespeare and his contemporaries used to make clear to the actor, in the quickest possible way, what he as a playwright intended to be happening on stage. The repeated use of the word "honourable" in Julius Caesar is a good example of how a rhetorical device could quickly suggest to the actor how to play the speech. And chief among these devices would be the use of antithesis, the setting off of one word or groups of words against another...."To be or not to be" is the most famous example. Shakespeare thought antithetically, and it runs throughout his work. Indeed, as biographers like Park Honan and Stephen Greenblatt have pointed out brilliantly, there was a duality in Shakespeare's whole life that expressed itself in varying ways in his art, driven by the tension between the young man raised in the countryside, and the sophisticated poet, actor and playwright who lived and worked at the center of the world as he knew it, London.
D. And finally, how do I want to approach the work from the perspective of "verbal relish"? This language was meant to be played before somewhere around 3000 people, whether at the Globe or the Rose or the Theatre, out of doors. It was language that was meant to be used in a muscular, full voiced, fully realized way. No Pinter pauses here, no kitchen sink, Method mumblings in the name of "honesty" or "truth", whatever the hell that means. Use the rehtoric!!! Embrace the sound of the language. Grapple with it. It is always instructive to remember that if the balcony above the stage and the tiring house, what was refered to as "the heavens", wasn't in use as part of the play, or as a platform for musicians, it was sold as seating to the wealthiest of the gentry, come to see the play. That's right, the most expensive seats in the house were often the ones BEHIND the physical action of the ongoing play. That meant that this was a theatre, however much swayed by spectacle and later by elaborate court masque, that was based on and driven by language first.
And then finally the point. That A through D are really in the service of one thing, and that is to provide the actor with better ideas about how to play the material. There are no rules, but aren't we better off knowing a little bit of perhaps what Shakespeare intended us to do, whether we have the temerity to then ignore it or not??? It IS all about meaning, and these are tools that can point us down a clearer road, toward possible choices to be made in the development of a character.
Now that it's down on screen, maybe I can think about this all some more and see if it makes any sense after all........
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