It’s a matter of convention

Your Humble Blogger is in rehearsals for a sort of filmish play, or perhaps playish film—it was written as a play, but will be filmed—filmed in actual person (carefully) rather than over Zoom or some such, but without a live audience, and with the opportunity for editing and more visuals than the single set it was written for. It’s exciting to be back in the saddle, but daunting to be doing something new. I’ve never done (or wanted to) film or television; my hobby is theater.

The script has a cast of three playing a bunch of parts—well, the three of us play one character at different ages, but also play a bunch of other characters over the course of the play. My part, particularly, is written to make use of my accent shtick: I play ten parts, most of which have a single paragraph-long line to make my point. It’s a lot of fun, but… I feel like an audience watching a staged production, whether live or recorded, can fully accept the genre convention of doubling and tripling parts. The constraints of the theater make it easy to for an audience with any experience of theater to say: yep, he’s the guy who is playing all the little roles. I feel like that’s not a convention of film.

Of course, sometimes someone will play more than one part in a film, too, but the convention there is that doubling means something—if the same actor plays a mother and daughter-in-law, we are being told something about the son/husband and his feelings about women. Or, of course, an actor playing twins or dopplegangers or otherwise playing two identical characters where the plot requires it. I can only remember a few instances where an actor played multiple parts just for fun: Kevin Smith lets some actors do this, I believe, and also Jack Nicholson does it in in Mars Attacks!, and Mel Brooks plays multiple parts in some of his own movies. And there are sketch comedy groups, Monty Python or the Kids in the Hall, or Eddie Murphy on his own, that make a gag out of it. But that’s another different film convention, and the performers are more clowns than actors (meant with the utmost respect for the conventions of clowning).

I don’t know how much this will be a filmish play, and how much it will be a playish film. The more filmish it is, the more I think any viewer will wonder why they didn’t just get somebody else to read the other parts. Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.