Adam's blog

BEHROUZ
It doesn’t help
Talking about it
It’s just words

(Pause)

IRINA
Words?
Yes.

BEHROUZ
Nobody believes in them
I don’t either
--from Fucking Parasites by Ninna Tersman

I was at my fourth real rehearsal for Fucking Parasites last night, and enjoyed one of those moments that reminds you why you love your job.

I don't know if you know this about me, but I really like words. I like saying and hearing and writing and reading them and making them up. In my theatrical endeavours, I'm a text-first kind of guy. I don't necessarily mean that I'm a capable memorizer...oh no. Wherever I am in the production roster, though, I've always got an eye on the page and nothing annoys me more than when actors think that part of their artistic prerogative involves judicious rewrites of their lines. That's not true, I guess: the thing that annoys me more is when I see a performance with absolute textual gems completely neglected by actors and the directors whose job it is to catch those things.

The hard work as a director is to make the actors love the words as much as they deserve. I've certainly seen people overdo it: it's not impossible to so elevate the script as to remove the dialogue entirely from the world of the play. In Fucking Parasites, the characters are fifteen and sixteen, from different countries, speaking to each other in a language that is not natural to either of them. Their communication is challenging enough without adding extra layers of poetic theory to the mix, right?

I'm not so sure. Ninna Tersman's play is so rich, and the words so perfect, that I don't want a single one of them to be taken for granted. I didn't know how to present this without adding undue pressure to my hard-working cast until I had a light bulb moment just before rehearsal ended.

Riso, who's playing Behrouz, speaks fluent Japanese. Olivia, playing Irina, speaks French. I picked about four or five words spoken by the teenage characters and I asked (paraphrasing a lot):

"'Incongruent', 'Embellishing', 'Contradictory', 'Embroidering', 'Endeavoring'...how many of those words can you translate into another language?"

They both hesitated.

"How comfortable would you be translating a legal brief or document from one language to another?"

The both asserted that they would not be.

"How much, then, can we infer about two teenagers who have already lived lives that warrant a legalistic, bureaucratic vocabulary in at least one foreign language? When an Iranian kid and a Uyghur kid say words like "incongruent" to each other--in English!--and they understand each other, how heart-breakingly efficient is the story those words convey?"

From the expressions on their faces and the speed with which both of them were writing notes, I think I must have been on the right track.

My producer is concerned about the dialects.

He asked me why I think they're necessary and I told him: the two characters, from two different parts of the world, connect and share their experiences with each other via a third language; common to both, but natural to neither. Behrouz doesn't think in English, he thinks in Persian. Irina thinks in Uyghur. Mutual adaptation facilitates their communication, and the result has its idiosyncrasies. To the listener, the byproducts of those imperfections are unique richness and musicality and there's nothing wrong with that.

I'm not staging Gladiator (if that's what you're worried about), with Joaquin Phoenix agonizing his way through faux-Brit just because his character's supposed to be the king of all the other kind-of-British people in Rome.

TA hasn't expressed a problem with the motives behind my position. He's very concerned that dialect work will get in the way of the acting work.

It's heartbreaking to concede it, but there is a valid point there.

In the Chicago storefront scene at large, I see three big deficiencies which sadden me. The first is makeup, the second is movement style, and the third is actors pretending they're other people on stage.

A shortage of makeup is easy to defend: stage makeup is expensive, needs constant replenishing, and anyway the stages are too small to make it necessary. Nobody believes or wants to believe that you (the actor) actually stabbed that guy in scene 3, and at four feet from the audience, the only deep sucking chest wound we can afford on our budget would smell like Hershey's and Palmolive anyway.

Movement style is a bit trickier. "But, Adam," you say, "I keep going out to see imaginative shows in which the actors create all sorts of inventive creatures through movement." I respond "don't count the goblinprowlers and the birdwomen," and if you've seen as much of this stuff as I have, you sadly nod, try to come up with a retort, and sadly nod again. People know the goblinprowler because it's not only easy, it's also a 'level' and Anne Bogart is made happy by it. They do the birdwoman because...I don't really know. I've never worked with a movement choreographer in Chicago. Nobody can afford one, for one thing. Fight choreographers are necessary because you don't want anyone to get hurt, and if there's a dance, somebody usually comes in to stage it and leaves. More dangerous to most directors, though, is that old crime of telling the actors what to do, which is not only bad for creativity but also bruises the poor artist immeasurably. Directors don't want to hear it when you say "Yes, the characters in the Misanthrope were trained to walk and stand a certain way. They were taught that experientially if not formally through living in a society that expected different things from a person." Unfortunately, I know what it looks like when you ask actors to rest on the laurels of their training and create. All the organic creativity you can foster does not guarantee a successful stage picture.

This brings me to that third little tidbit. I had similar conservatory performance training to a lot actors out there. I went to school more recently than some, but the majority of twenty-somethings I work with consider my education positively Smithsonian. I can understand that your eight acting classes focused on "finding the truth" in the work. I only got two semesters of stage movement (and one of those was really combat) and two semesters of dialects. I know that some folks get less. That doesn't mean it's right! That doesn't mean that being able to depart from your own corporal limitations onstage can be considered an elective! That doesn't mean I teachers aren't remiss when they don't address Acting 101 thus: "The job you are pursuing is that of the make-believer. If who you are and what you feel is interesting enough to satisfy an audience, you don't need to do plays or films or voiceovers...you can become a televangelist and make more money. What an actor needs to do is go out there and be somebody else. You are learning to be a liar. A bad actor is one who the audience knows is lying, but a really bad actor is the only one who thinks s/he's telling the truth up there."

Do you know how to tell that actors don't know this? It's one simple sentence which I'm sure each of us has said at least once:

"I don't think my character would do that."

In response to this, most directors either capitulate or spend scads of man-hours helping the actor search for a justification for the action the play needs. Seldom does a director give the efficient answer: "Yes, your character certainly does that. I know this because it's in the play. The play is a history of a fiction and you are simply a re-enactor of that preexisting record."

We (directors) never say that because we (actors) are always mortified to hear it. It's because we don't trust us with our work unless we know we really care.

And vice-versa. Still with me?

Why is so much emphasis placed on making sure creativity feels good for the artist and so little on making sure it feels good for the consumer? Why can't we say "you would be better at what you do if you had a broader arsenal of dialects and movement vocabulary and you stopped trying so hard to find yourself in the text"?

I want to see a world where acting teachers can compartmentalize that old sense memory and emotional recall stuff into a big box and label it JUST PART OF THE ART (does not allow user to fly). That little utopia, though, is contingent on an agreement to shrug off the timeless myth that Creative People Are Just Touchy That Way. We need to trust the artist with the truth that s/he's a liar. S/he needs to deserve that trust be being good at lying. We can graduate to that "lie which is nearest to the truth" stuff only once the first part's been established.

So, seriously, should I expect actors to be able and willing to speak in funny voices, walk in unnatural ways and throttle a swan without trying to rationalize what would catalyze themselves to throttle a swan? Should I be able to ask them to do all this convincingly? I think I should. The fact that so many can't or won't is institutional--I recognize that. The actor who knows and trusts enough to do these things has become the exception to the rule. Until the happy day arrives, I guess, we just have to work with exceptional actors.

The cast of Fucking Parasites, by the way, are exceptional actors.

Last weekend I read a new play, submitted to me by a good writer with whom I'm acquainted. Even before I started reading though, I had to call this writer to clarify: was this really a one-act play? Was it really intended to be performed without intermission? It's 91 pages long!

She told me that in Buffalo, where she's currently enjoying a very well-received world premiere, the producing theatre company had opted to split her "Play in One Act" to allow for a break. I told her I thought that was a good idea and then sat down to read it.

The Buffalo company made the right choice. Preliminarily, I'd feared that this writer, who'd previously worked mostly in print fiction and journalism, might not have had the playwriting instinct to sufficiently feel out the arcs of the play that make an intermission feasible. Fortunately she turns out to be savvier that I gave her credit for, and Buffalo's director found a great place to drop in the break.

The whole thing got me to thinking, though. This play (which I'm quite consciously not naming at the moment as I'm selfishly guarding it so that Halcyon might consider mounting it...it's really good) is running at a buck forty-five...far shorter than a lot of contemporary films, especially the Oscar-y ones. Why does it need an intermission? Cinemas rarely offer intermissions (I think they stopped for five or ten when I went to see Braveheart and Schindler's List). It can't possibly be that live theatre audiences have a shorter attention span than the movie-going crowd. Can't we expect a good, smart viewer to sit tight for the duration of a good, smart play?

I bounced the question off of Tony, who very succinctly listed a lot of great, mechanical sorts of rationales. Movie viewers take their own breaks, he pointed out, getting up and pushing past other folks for that familiar fifty-yard-dash. It's certainly easier to do in a big, dark, anonymous cinema with newly renovated stadium seating than it would be in most of our North Side Storefronts, where one often has to walk on or through the stage just to leave the room.

As I continued to ponder it, though, I decided that fixing the traffic flow for antsy-dancy audience members wouldn't satisfy me. There's another (big) factor to consider.

I think that a good play demands a relationship with the audience that film doesn't ask. We've all heard folks like Francis Hodge and Harold Clurman refer to the audience as "the other actor" or some such. When I participate in a play, I hope, if not expect, that the audience will also participate, cerebrally and emotionally, on a level that they wouldn't if they were home with Netflix and Doritos. Especially as a director, I want to wipe you out. I want you to leave the theatre feeling something equivalent to leaving the gym: satisfied, fulfilled, better for having showed up, but at the same time, like you've exerted something. If the play is good and the production is good, the audience will be working. Unfortunately I've yet to come across the theatre that pays its audience. Thus, you'll need and deserve a stretch somewhere in there.