Action to Word

When I worked at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, the acting company consisted of British actors, Canadian actors, French-Canadian actors, as well as American actors. The actors spoke a wide range of texts, and they did not attempt to adhere to a particular standard of speech or "house sound." Insteadthey worked together to clearly tell the stories of some 12 to 14 plays each season. I can remember always scurrying from rehearsal hall to rehearsal hall and theatre to...
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When I worked at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada, the acting company consisted of British actors, Canadian actors, French-Canadian actors, as well as American actors. The actors spoke a wide range of texts, and they did not attempt to adhere to a particular standard of speech or "house sound." Insteadthey worked together to clearly tell the stories of some 12 to 14 plays each season. I can remember always scurrying from rehearsal hall to rehearsal hall and theatre to theatre, coaching actors in Shakespeare, Chekhov, Moliere, Euripides, and Ibsen plays, as well as the musicals Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, and The Pirates of Penzance, shifting coaching gears en route. The thing that stayed constant throughout the entire experience was mygiven goal of enabling the actors to achieve clarity. Whether working in verse, prose, or song, clarity is always my coaching objective.Amid directors' sometimes terse commands, such as: "She's hitting the wrong words, work with her!" or "Those women are going to have to be tortured into speaking their consonants," as well as my notes to directors, "Piano music too loud at opening scene, can't understand actors," "He's too emotionally top heavy, can't understand the storyin the opening scene," or "You've got the lights so dim in the openingscene that we think we can't hear the actor. Bring them up! You aresacrificing clarity for atmosphere!" and so forth. It was always aboutclarity. It became evident to me through my time at Stratford that as long as the actors strove for clarity of speech, the audience was not distracted by any actual differences in their speech. The lesson we can all learn from Stratford is that good acting is absolutely dependent on being as clear, as open, and as distinct as you can possibly be in your speech. The challenge in working with this large repertory company, therefore, was to achieve clarity of acting through clarity of speech. Indeed, if your speech is held, blocked, murky, or not clear, then your acting is held, blocked, murky, and not clear. The two go hand in hand. Clarity of acting can be accomplished when actors possess the muscular knowledge of how they create their speech and then utilize that knowledge in their acting. In other words, if I know that the way to make p is with the two lips, that there is a certain degree of tension in the two lips, and with that knowledge I have practiced the muscular action required to make the p, then I can use that knowledge to connect my speech to playing an action (such as, flatter, insult, bribe). Fads and fashions and ways of speaking may come and go. But that can result in the actor losing his own voice in the production of a layered speech that sounds watered down. This book will help you fix that.