Choice Voice: Sing To Me Through Open Windows

According to renowned early 20th century Italian actor Tomasso Salvini, the three most potent elements of acting are: “Voice! Voice! Voice!” 

 You might expect that sentiment from an old-school actor like Salvini, or even actor and director John Gielgud, who suggested that while attention is often lavished on other aspects of performance, how the words are spoken “can have more effect than anything else.”

 But open almost any book on stage directing or acting, and they proclaim the importance of voice. The purported Stanislavski “Method” may have enshrined mumbling on American stages, but director Robert Lewis quotes Stanislavski writing at length about vocal acting: “Letters, syllables, words—these are the musical notes of speech, out of which to fashion measures, arias, whole symphonies.”

Harold Clurman (another Method-influenced director) writes about it—even Jerzy Grotowski devotes some 30 pages to vocal technique in Towards a Poor Theatre.

 A revelatory object lesson in vocal acting is available this weekend at the Arcata Playhouse, where Bob Wells performs in a short play by Arthur Kopit, directed by Dan Stone. First of all, every word Wells says can be heard, and every word can be understood. With these foundations in place, Wells goes on to act with his voice—his intonations, pronunciations, the words he stresses hard, the syllables he lets linger and float away.

 Beginning with his surprising “entrance,” Wells captivates, even when he does almost nothing except create this character with sound. He’s masterful: both poetic and clear. We know who this man is, and we attend to what he has to say.

 The play, called Sing to Me Through Open Windows, is more problematic. Arthur Kopit is a contemporary American playwright with a long career that began with revolutionary absurdist romps like Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad, but more recently has included musicals, including Nine, which reached the silver screen this year with Kopit as an executive producer.

 Whether Kopit has copped out or America has caught up to his absurdism is an open question, but this early play is at best an exercise in poetic symbolism that for me remained fairly elusive in this production. There’s the old magician (Wells), the boy who visits him (played by newcomer Zachery Davis with appropriate vulnerability) and a clown whose relationship to the others is difficult to assess (played with appropriate physicality by Craig Klapman.)

This is the kind of challenging work that Dan Stone often chooses. Figuring out what was happening was more difficult because Bob Wells was the only one who was clearly audible all the time. Even so, a kind of ambiguity is inherent in this play. The stage imagery, including the music (all created by Dan Stone), worked well. The lighting was especially clarifying, but other choices (like the puppets) less so.

 The themes of life’s transitions and mythic cycles are there when you think about it, but the impact of aging was absolutely clear as an experience. That’s the work of Wells, playing a magician who is in the process of himself vanishing.

 “Fear is like regret,” he concludes, “only with fear, there’s not much time left.” Remarkable words to come from a 22 year-old playwright (as Kopit was when he wrote this), but very powerful when spoken by a veteran actor in conscious control of a superior vocal instrument. I particularly urge young actors to experience—and listen to--this performance.

 This Sanctuary Stage production plays Thursday through Saturday at 8 at the Arcata Playhouse.

 Speaking of voices, the Arcata Playhouse recently hosted a live original radio comedy, broadcast on KHSU. Both Ferndale Rep and Redwood Curtain have done these, and the full house at the Playhouse also attests to their popularity. What’s weird about watching a radio show is that it isn’t weird at all. The talent—too numerous to name—was great, the script (a detective story parody involving KHSU) was mostly funny, pocked with puns and other psychic detritus (you know, crazy people from Detroit.)

 Afterwards some participants recalled the great audio artists called Firesign Theatre, of “Temporarily Humboldt County” and “Nick Danger, Third Eye” fame. Get their CDs—still funny, and not insane.

 Coming Up: Still speaking of voices, completing its run this weekend at the HSU Studio Theatre is The Homecoming by Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, known for his unique dialogue, and among the ensemble is another notable North Coast actor who excels at vocal acting, Jabari Morgan. Remaining performances are Thurs.-Sat. at 7:30 and Sunday at 2. Info at HSUStage.blogspot.com.

 On Friday, Saturday and Sunday at 8, the Dell’Arte Company Cabaret features your favorite Dell’Artesans plus special guests and a sneak preview of their epic work-in-progress: Blue Lake: The Opera. Then on Monday, Dell’Arte hosts visiting Le Cabaret Noir’s “Sin on Heels,” advertised as “a tawdry blend of burlesque and gender-bending performances.” For more on both cabarets, check dellarte.com.

 On Saturday March 13, Ferndale Rep holds its annual fundraiser, “RepFest: Comedy Tonight” at the Ferndale Community Center. Auction items and other information posted on ferndale-rep.org.

Talk

The first season of The West Wing created symphonies of dialogue that stirred television and led to multiple Emmy awards--and it all began with a kid who watched plays just to hear the people talk.

We've been watching The West Wing on DVD, beginning from the beginning. What a treat to re-watch this truly great series--one of the three or four best ever--without commercials, and with subtitles (they talk so fast that I often had to tape episodes just so I could watch them later and catch what I missed.)

For the uninitiated, The West Wing aired for 7 seasons beginning in 2000, and centered on the West Wing of the White House. I'll leave the political commentary it inspires for another blog. Here I want to mention something about the series that was said on one of the "special feature" featurettes on the final DVD of season 1. (The special features are terrific, the episode commentaries not so much. Producer/director Tommy Schlame and writer Aaron Sorkin do the commentaries but don't actually say much, except how neat it is to see an episode they hadn't seen in awhile. Sorkin especially wants people to shut up and listen to the dialogue.)

The series had fine acting by Martin Sheen as President Bartlet and an ensemble cast, but it got its spark and notoriety from the writing of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote all but one of the show's first 88 episodes, to the end of its fourth season. As cast members in one of the featurettes note, they soon learned to speak Sorkin's scripts word for word, because everything was in the language. The words were not only precise for comedic and dramatic moments, but in weaving the episodes together.

Now here's the comment that jumped out at me. Sorkin said that his parents started taking him to the theatre at an early age, and even before he understood the stories, he loved the dialogue, and how they created symphonies of words. It was the dialogue he heard in plays that inspired him to write.

If you know The West Wing, you know it is dialogue-driven. It's people in rooms--and famously, walking between rooms--talking. Talk became the music that made a multiple Emmy-award winning television series.

A couple of days after I first saw this featurette, I happened to read a review of a volume of Gore Vidal's essays in the New York Review of Books. The review writer, Jonathan Raban, noted that Vidal began as a playwright, and that his experience writing dramatic (and comedic) dialogue became the distinctive voice of his essays. "His best essays are aural performances," Raban writes. "...I can think of no other modern writer, with the possible exception of the playwright Alan Bennett, in his published diaries, who has succeeded as well as Vidal in transforming lines of cold print into an instantly audible speaking voice."

So having been hit over the head with this point twice, I got it: dialogue--words, talk--on stage can become the essence of an individual and successful voice in other media, like television and print.

But this point tends to reinforce another that I also read this week, which gently suggests that talk is as important--possibly more important--in theatre than the visual and conceptual elements that tend to dominate these days. Shakespeare was the specific case in point, and the matter of assigning some priority in staging and direction to making it easier for audiences to hear those words.

Now where did I read that bit...? Oh yes, in my column in the Journal. So here's the relevant passage, with a few more words...

Northcoast Prep doing King Lear got me thinking about Ronald Harwood’s play, The Dresser (also a movie with Albert Finney), which was about a small Shakespeare company playing the English provinces during World War II, based loosely on Donald Wolfit, reputedly one of the great Lears of the century. He was a last exemplar of the “actor/manager” school, and the theatrical style emphasizing the star, declaiming the great Shakespeare parts.

That rejected style had its excesses, but as a general comment, today’s emphasis on concepts and creating “stage pictures” may have gone too far in other directions. Those old-style actors knew how to make sure they were seen and heard clearly. They created the stage equivalent of close-ups. It’s really not that Shakespeare’s language is so difficult; just that there’s a lot of it. Instead of devising distractions, I’m in favor of making it easier to see and hear the words spoken.

That's partly a matter of projection and diction, but it is also a matter of making sure the speaker is seen. That's something those old actors of the classics knew in their very experienced bones: in order to be heard, the words must be seen. Not in phony hand gestures, but in the faces of the speaker.