Today we worked on mumbling. I asked Charles, the actor who plays the mortician, to make his lines border on inaudible, 40% of the time. My work with Charles has been so much about diminishing his expressive qualities as classical actor. Today was a breakthrough in mumbling.
Don't get me wrong. I'm wildly interested in clarity. It's just that articulating every word, as actors are taught to do at mfa programs around the country, can lead to a flatness of expression that is worse than any mumble -- it can make the action, in fact, less clear. Overarticulating kills richness of expression in the human animal. We trade in understanding theater as theater -- as bodies moving and voicing on the stage -- for understanding theater as literature and nothing more, as a writer's expression of ideas through text. And theater can be much more than that.
This Shakespeare-inspired piece (because, no, this isn't Shakespeare's play, not by a long shot) is a revolt against all the "pretty-talking" and plummy British(ish) accents that have come to infect most of the Shakespeare performance I've seen. It's an invitation to experience all the joys of awkward utterances, stumbling, and mumbling.
Right now we're struggling to pitch our mumbles just right in the Ice Box, a concrete former fish freezer that's been converted into a gallery -- and now into a theater for our Live Arts Festival performances. 6 concrete surfaces make for an echo that undoes all our efforts. So the past week has been a combination of efforts on sound designer Nick Kourtides's part to dampen the space with soft goods, curtains and panels, and to create an ingenious way to add subtle amplification into the show. We need the audience to hear clearly when they are supposed to hear words and when they are supposed to hear muddied sounds.
Tomorrow we try the full array of microphone possibilities as we begin technical rehearsals.