{"id":20117,"date":"2019-09-20T15:09:50","date_gmt":"2019-09-20T20:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/?p=20117"},"modified":"2019-09-20T15:09:50","modified_gmt":"2019-09-20T20:09:50","slug":"trippingly-on-the-tongue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2019\/09\/20\/trippingly-on-the-tongue\/","title":{"rendered":"Trippingly on the tongue"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I was fortunate enough to see The Height of the Storm<\/a> this past weekend on Broadway, with a cast featuring Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins. I may write about the playscript at some point\u2014it\u2019s a difficult and interesting script, one of several that in the last several years to address aging and\/or mental illness in provocative ways\u2014but what impels me to write at the moment is simply this: the performers spoke with tremendous clarity.\r\n

Was the acting good? It was terrific. The timing, the power, the attention to the other characters, the believable naturalism, the storytelling, all superb. A fantastic set of performances. But what impels me to write at the moment is simply this: the performers spoke with tremendous clarity.\r\n

People have been mocking Method actors for mumbling for as long as there have been Method actors to mock. You certainly don\u2019t need to be a Method actor to mumble, and you certainly don\u2019t need to mumble to be a Method actor. But to speak clearly, to speak quickly and quietly and still be understood in a large theater that may not have perfect acoustics requires good technique. It takes training and practice and perhaps most of all it takes attention.\r\n

In the amateur theater community I am part of, I have increasingly become irritated by the tendency to treat mushy, unclear speech as either a minor problem, not worth spending time on, or as an insurmountable problem, not worth spending time on. I know rehearsal time is at a premium, and we really don\u2019t have much time that isn\u2019t for blocking or character work. And indeed, most of the practice that we should be doing isn\u2019t a good use of rehearsal time\u2014there\u2019s a lot of one-to-one training and a ton of individual repetition. So I don\u2019t have any sort of solution to the problem. Still, it makes a huge, huge difference to the audience. And it\u2019s so delightful to hear dialogue spoken so clearly.\r\n

I have to admit, I wonder also if many amateur actors just don\u2019t want to be bothered with the work of clear diction. It\u2019s not creative work. To be clear, I don\u2019t do it myself, to the extent that I ought to, to keep my vocal instrument (as it is so pretentiously called) at its peak. I don\u2019t do half an hour of vocal exercises daily, or weekly, or even monthly. My vocal range has become narrower in pitch. My breath control is not what it was. I probably would enjoy doing some exercises for my voice\u2014I certainly would enjoy them more than I enjoy the daily exercise for my shoulders that I don\u2019t do either. But I don\u2019t. As I make my choices for what to put in to my daily twenty-four hours and what not to, vocal exercises don\u2019t make the cut.\r\n

Which is why I appreciate the amazing levels of skill that I hear in the people who do<\/i> put in the effort. In (the cinema broadcast of) The Lehman Brothers<\/cite> Simon Russell Beale has a remarkable monologue very early in the play that delivered a tremendous amount of information, factual and emotional, and he did it quickly, quietly and clearly. It was magnificent. To shout it would leave the audience alienated and disinclined to sympathize with the character; to do it slowly would leave the audience restless (at the beginning of a very long play); to do it unclearly would leave the audience baffled throughout the play. It\u2019s a difficult thing\u2014you know, when someone has a longish monologue, people ask how to you remember all those words<\/i>, when the really tricky part is pronouncing<\/i> them properly.\r\n

Still, while we won\u2019t all be Eileen Atkins (more\u2019s the pity) we can certainly do a lot better than we\u2019re doing. I\u2019ve heard many, many jokes not land because the audience didn\u2019t make out the words clearly enough. Clever references late in the play to something set up earlier don\u2019t seem clever if the sound was too mushy to connect. And those moments of hush that are the amateur actor\u2019s real reward simply do not happen if the actor is not able to drop lucid words into it. It\u2019s worth the effort.\r\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,<\/I>
-Vardibidian.\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger cannot adequately express the wonder and awe that the consonants inspired.","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20117","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20117"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20119,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20117\/revisions\/20119"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}