After - Beating . . .Shakespeare

Not a subject for battered persons, I should hasten to say! No, no, dear friends. I was with one of my talented clients the other day - a new actor - and we were working over Portia (The Merchant of Venice) - figuratively speaking. The beating thing again. Forgive me. And even though this lovely young woman was doing lovely things, there was something awry. Amiss. Eureka! The after beat.

For those of you who might have missed this in an earlier post, the after beat (my own term, I think - being a brilliant coiner of terms)is what you play after the last word leaves your mouth and which either helps you to demand a response from the other character, yourself or which connects you to the next word that's about to come out of your mouth. Making sure you play the after beat, guarantees you won't drop out of the scene. Guarantees it!

When doing Shakespeare, Iambic Pentameter in particular, the problem for the actor is amplified because there are no pauses for transition available. Real pauses would break the rhythm of the line. So the after beat is played as a "breath beat", usually at punctuation marks. Thus the integrity of the line is maintained.

My young friend knows all this, but was still beaten off (I'm really sorry - can't resist. Pun-ish me!)by after beat issues. I learned something important. What she hadn't done in her study of the monologue was to actually write the after beat down, in colloquial terms, and learn it as she learned the text.

I then insisted that after doing this, she rehearse the monologue at half speed, making sure the lines and the after beats were joined together into a consistent whole and only then, bring it up to speed. I love it when I learn something new. And I love my students for giving me the opportunity!

Take that, Sucker!

Every time I see an actor, especially before an opening, going furiously over lines, making sure he/she won't forget them at a critical moment, I think: "Sucker!" Perhaps something kinder, but the caution's the same.

The play's been rehearsed for 4 weeks, the lines at the last rehearsal were perfect - so why is the actor worried about forgetting? Probably because the lines were memorized, not learned properly. Psychologically, if you're worried about lines and go over them just prior to opening, you are creating a perfect scenario. You WILL forget. And you've set it up!

On the other hand (there are five fingers, yuk)if the lines have been learned, not memorized, then the implication is they've been assimilated through association with an inner emotional beat and become part of muscle memory. Actors who go about learning lines this way spend much less time studying the script and find themselves absorbing dialogue AS THEY REHEARSE.

About 15 years ago, I found myself having to take on Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, 4 days before opening. It was a 15 show run and the good Friar had to go on with "The Bible" in hand. What I found was that as I adapted to the environment and interacted with other actors, the text began to stick and I actually had very little "book" work to do. After the 5th performance, the Bible became a prop and I didn't have to refer to it again.

Try it. Not Friar Laurence, heaven forbid! But try dealing with your lines this way. It's far more organic and really helps keep you out of your head.

On Camera actors have a somewhat harder row to hoe. Get the sides 24 hours before the audition and show up ready to go. Memorization may be the only salvation in that case - or as in having to learn three scenes for tomorrow's shoot after putting in a 12 hour day on set. I suspect, however, that the best film actors will tell you lines are learned, not memorized. Take that, sucker!

More, More Shakespeare. . .Always be prepared for surprises!

With Shakespeare, you can't count on anything! It's true, for the most part, noble or high born characters speak in verse and low born folk in prose - BUT NOT ALWAYS. It's far safer to look at all of this in another way. Serious, passionate, elegant matters can be expressed in verse and lighter, witty matters can be expressed in prose.

Sometimes Wiley Will uses verse and prose in the same scene - with upper class and lower class characters uttering both. A great example of same is in Romeo and Julietwhere Romeo, in his encounter with The Nurse, (II,4)teases her, and not nicely, either, in prose, and she replies in kind. But when they turn to the serious business of Romeo's meeting with Juliet, Romeo speaks in verse and Nursie follows right along. So they're both speaking verse, low born and high born. When the matter's resolved, though, and the bantering resumes, they both revert to prose. Pretty tricky stuff, dear actor, and you have to deal with it seamlessly and without effort. Seeing and understanding the pattern is the key to success here.

I haven't touched on Rhymed Couplets yet, so here's a light, and I hope, deft touch. The young lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream are fools - or, more properly, foolish. Shakespeare emphasizes their shallowness by having them speak (not entirely, mind you) in rhymed couplets. They come off as silly things and again, actor friends, If you understand the purpose behind the writer's choice of style, it's a big help in discovering what to do with and how to play the text.

The other use Shakespeare devised for the rhymed couplet was to use them to end things. Scenes, acts and the like. As in Hamlet (II,2)

". . .- the play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

That ends Act II, Scene two of Hamlet - and, similarly, ends today's sermon.

More Shakespeare . . .

How to speak him. Well part of what you need to know, anyway.

Shakespeare wrote in three modalities.

Iambic Pentameter

Rhymed Couplets

Prose

Which mode he chose depended on many things, chief among them, the status of the character, the nature of the drama (or comedy) and the issue at hand.

In this post, I'm going to concern myself, primarily, with how the great man used Iambic Pentameter. To begin, Iambic Pentameter is usually spoken by noble or high-born characters. Prose, as a general rule, is reserved for lower born characters. A regular Iambic line has five "feet", or stressed syllables. There are irregular lines, but that's a subject for another day.

In a regular line - such as "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" (Hamlet, II,2)the stresses fall on O, Rogue, Peasant, Slave and I. The actor should find the pulse of the 5 beats in the line and be guided by them as he speaks it.

Amazingly, more often than not, the actor finds that the emotional content of the line is amplified by how he speaks/stresses the words. This isn't some airy-fairy fiction. It's fact. If you try it, you'll believe. It's not mysterious, but it's absolutely beyond the realm of imagining that Shakespeare was able, time and time again, to produce dramatic fiction, constrained by the rules of Iambic Pentameter, and create dialogue that surpasses anything ever written. That's genius, alright.

Anyway. In order to keep the meter, the actor can't take pauses, moments for reflection etc. as he might in a modern text. Shakespearean text depends on momentum in order to achieve its effect. The actor, therefore, must make his transitions either on the line itself or while other characters are speaking. But, in any event, he must make all the appropriate emotional shifts. The most important thing in this regard is to use the punctuation marks as keys for when emotion shifts - and you have to do it in rhythm. It's often appropriate to take a "breath" beat when you hit a period.

A fine example of a very good actor doing a breathtaking job with text can be found in Kenneth Branagh's delivery of the St. Crispin's day speech from Henry V. With a minor exception here and there, that, dear friends is how you do it! More about build and release in Shakespeare - "Surfing the Text" in a later post.

Long Ago and Far Away . . .

We're living in the early part of the 21st Century. Well . . .most of us are. There are parts of the world where they're still looking forward to 1600, but that's another story. Anyway - for those 21st Century actors reading this, please take a moment to contemplate a life in the 19th Century - say in the time of Dickens. Or in the late 16th Century in the time of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Those writers, indeed writers of every stripe in any century, wrote for their own audience. They weren't writing for posterity. At least I don't think they were. Imagine the look on Euripedes' mug if he knew that some 2,600 years after he wrote it, a University in Athens (Georgia)was going to produce Electra. Is it important, then, even if the director dresses his cast up like a womens basketball team for the company to know something about the playwrite and the time in which he lived?

The answer is yes. Even if the production strays far from the author's original intent. In order to sit on top of a ladder and drip paint onto a canvas, did Jackson Pollock have to know something about formal aspects of painting? Same answer. So in order to move away from the original play, it would behoove us to know where the original play came from.

But even if we're doing King Lear in spacesuits, odds are we'll be speaking Shakespeare's words, more or less as he wrote them. In order to do that convincingly, we have to understand every word, it's original context and how to pronounce it. The farther all that is from our own experience, the more work we have to do. It is, in fact, a translation issue. The actor has to translate archaic language into something that is easy and familiar

Recently, I coached an actress who had to shoot several scenes speaking Mandarin. She's oriental, but Canadian, and didn't speak Mandarin at all. She learned the Mandarin pronunciation and inflection and her father gave us the English translation. As we worked, she learned the beats, emotionally and physically, in English and then, by associating them with the Mandarin words, was finally able to play the scenes in Mandarin.

That's precisely what I'm suggesting you do with language that isn't your own. With Shakespeare, for example, put the text into your own words. Learn the beats by association, make sure everything is clear and well defined - then play the Shakespearean text. There are plenty of other things you have to do in order to play Shakespeare properly, but we'll save that for another day.

The Soloist. . .

Based on Steve Lopez' book about his relationship with former cello prodigy, Nathaniel Ayers, mentally ill and living in the Dickensian shadow world of Los Angeles' 90,000 homeless, The Soloist,while often moving - and filled with the glorious sounds of great music, comes up short.

What is of particular interest to actors, though, is how Jamie Foxx navigates his way through the tortured mind of a schizophrenic genius. To put it simply, an actor can't play a crazy person. It's impossible - in the same way as playing "God" or "The Devil" is impossible. Nor can you be "in limbo", as many writers suggest - unless you know the color of the rug and where the toilet is. But I digress.

The clear answer here is that when playing a mentally unbalanced person, as Leonardo DiCaprio did in Gilbert Grape,many years ago and Jamie Foxx does now in The Soloist, is to play each beat, accompanied by the appropriate emotional and physical support, string them together - and let the text create the impression of mental illness. In other words, dear actor, you simply organize the beats as you would with any other character and trust to the text and environment to do the rest of the work for you. The temptation is to generalize, to try and play a concept of crazy. It's a mistake.

Remember Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate or George Burns in Oh, God? These chaps went beat by beat doing horrible things and wonderful things in their respective movies and the circumstances prescribed by the writers and directors of these pictures made Pacino The Devil - and Burns a cigar smoking God with coke bottle eyeglasses. Just play the beats, trust the script to do the rest of the work for you.

Oh Dear . . .

I went to the theatre the other night and was disappointed. This isn't an unusual occurrence. From the perspective of the actors/acting it was a very mixed bag. The director misread the play. You've gathered by now I'm not going to tell you what show, where and who - because this isn't a review and those particulars are unimportant. What's important are the technique issues the production raised and what might have been done about them.

It is definitely an ensemble piece in which most of the actors contribute almost equally to the effect of the whole. But there is a central character who carries the core of the play. Discussing this with a couple of students last night and with the lady who accompanied me to the theatre, they were all equally at a loss as to who that character might be.

There are a couple of problems here. First of all, the director is, when all's said and done, the company leader. It's the director's job to build a vision for the play, and to guide the actors' performances so they all, as a unit, fulfill the writers intent. That didn't happen. And this is where the actors responsibility to himself comes in. In reading the play, one of the first things that needs to be done is to determine what your character arc is. In other words, how do you change from the beginning of the play to the end, what are the steps along the way and when do the changes occur. This just didn't happen. The actor might have been miscast, but that still doesn't excuse missing the critical business of finding the essence of the characters inner state. Both things, both bad, unfortunately happened: No character arc and no viable inner state of being.

And it wasn't just the main character. All of the performers played from the chest. Loud, technically laudable, but rarely did emotion drop down to the gut. Consequently, the performance had zero emotional effect. Maybe the company decided it wasn't meant to be emotionally engaging. Bertolt Brecht believed emotion took away from the audiences rational examination of the plays message and was astonished when he discovered he'd been oh so wrong for years. Audiences would dissolve in tears at the pain and passion of Helene Weigel's "Mother Courage", and our Bert didn't get it. Well, finally, he did - but that's another story.

I've come to believe that if you don't care about the emotional content of the play, if you aren't moved by the plight of the characters, the message, like the best Chinese meal you've ever eaten, will dissipate shortly after you leave the theatre, leaving you hungry once again. The message of a play is delivered through the struggles of the people personified in it. Actors take note. It's all about the feeling, not how loudly and/or competently you speak the words.