Line of the Week

"What the storyteller is doing, of course, is looking through the windows of his imagination, trying to see things more clearly, hoping to help and enlighten and entertain others at the same time.
And sometimes, if the panes in the windows are clear, he does." --Arthur Gordon

May we all find clean, clear windows.

Lines, please!

Behold. Here recorded are the events of last night’s rehearsal.

5:05 pm: The actors start trickling in. Late, as usual. I’ll refer to each of them by their character names: Suzie, Roger, Julia, Terrence, Khalid, Jeff, and Lydia (me). Our director Stuart is impatient to start.

5:13: Everyone has assembled, and the actors begin their vocal warm-up: a series of tongue twisters that are prime both the brain and the mouth for maximum vocal performance. Since the play rests so heavily on the action within conversation, this exercise is an important one, and who doesn’t have fun saying: “A box of biscuits. A box of mixed biscuits, and a biscuit mixer,” as fast as they can? ( You know you want to try it!)

5:20: Stuart instructs us to pace: which is just theatre lingo for going through the play and saying lines as fast as we can without acting them. It’s a good refresher for remembering one’s lines, but its also important for rhythm. Conversations have a natural beat to them, like music, and in order for a play to be believable onstage, actors must tap into that rhythm. Pacing drills the lines into the actor’s brain so that they become second nature, natural reactions for the character, therefore allowing the actor to worry less about what they are saying, but how they are saying a line.

6:24: After a couple of line snafus (read dropped, mixed-up, or wrong lines and people who aren’t off-book) we finish pacing. Stuart declares a five-minute break. After we come back we will work on several moments in the play where conversations aren’t working. There is a mass exodus to the vending machines.

6:42: Late, as always, we begin working on a scene that involves fast-paced dialogue and passing a dish of relish. It’s about a 50 second bit of conversation hell. In order for it to work, lines must be said with the correct intensity (building!) and exactly at the right moment (mimicking natural conversation) to give focus to the words over the business of the relish passing. Who knew it was so hard to talk and pass relish at the same time?

6:56: We go to a scene at the top of the play that moves from genial, fast-paced, witty conversation to a full-out screaming match. Again, here the issues are in the intensity and the timing. The words are the focus and we have to make them as active and interesting as possible in order to keep the audience attentive and not sleeping in their chairs.

6:03: Pronunciation meltdown. The actors playing Suzie and Khalid speak English as a second language. Suzie just said sal-mon instead of salmon.

6:05: In an OT conversation, ‘Roger’ asks ‘Suzie:’ “Do we (Americans) sound like we have accents to you?”
She just looks at him.
‘Jeff’: (to ‘Roger’) Ethnocentric motherf****er!

6:07: Back on track. Stuart constantly tweaks bits of timing and line delivery to give focus and make sentences more clear to an imagined audience.

6:46: That scene is nailed down. We move to a scene at the end of the show where ‘Khalid’ has a lot of lines. I’ve been drafted to go through the script and mark where he mispronounces a word or circle places where his accent makes it difficult to understand him.

7:26: ‘Khalid’s scene has made progress. We are rewarded with another short break.

7:44: We start at the top of the show for a run-through. Stuart will not stop us until the play ends or we run out of time, and then he will give notes (God save us!). He reminds us especially to focus on the language, watching rhythm and intensity. “Keep it moving!”

9:11: (A rather symbolic time for the content of the play!) We finish the show. A good run, but by no mans perfect. ‘Roger’ must watch his mush-mouth-ness and his volume (too loud!) . ‘Suzie’ gets a little whiny at times, which is hard for audiences to physically listen to, ‘Khalid’ needs to keep working on his pronunciation and line memorization, while ‘Terrance’ has to tap into the natural rhythms and cadences of speech–he’s sounding artificial. ‘Julia’ has to up her intensity, ‘Jeff’ suffers from the same problem, but he also is having problems with volume. I need to watch my volume at times, as well as my mid-western accent–Stuart doesn’t want it to be too strong for the show.

It’s nit-picky stuff. I’m suddenly realizing how many complex factors go into communicating and communicating well. We hardly have to think about it in regular conversation, but it is imperative in theatre’s artificial conversations. Ultimately, Omnium’s success lies in the power of language and the actor’s mastery of it.

An Actor's Life for Me

Mini eureka in play rehearsal the other night: This is fabulous fodder for bloggage!

By ‘this’, I mean all of the ways the actors and director have to tackle issues of language: rhythm, tone, believability. After all, the script is merely words put into the actor’s mouth by someone else. Our job is to relate them in a way that is both natural and consistent to our ‘character’ and furthers the larger moral or themes of the play as interpreted by the director.

The play I’m in: Omnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Gersten-Vassilaros, is lingually challenging (My director lovingly refers to it as ‘a talky piece of shit.’). The script itself is intelligent, witty, and sharp, and the main action of the play is not physical, but verbal. The attention here is solely on the language: what we, the actor, say, and how we say it.

I’ll be pseudo live-blogging a rehearsal (no laptop!), noting especially issues that involve language for a different approach to Line, Please!’s central theme.

More to come.

Line of the Week

"Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water." --Dave Barry

New Girl In Town

Ah, the Thursday night slump. The day-after-hump-day blues.

Kind of makes you want something fun, right? And savvy? And hip?

This is beginning to sound like one of those pervy dating sites, so I’ll get to the point.

Never fear, Grammar Girl is here!

Yes, I just referred to grammar as fun, savvy, and hip. No, I haven’t been hanging with Count Crackula.

I’m totally in love with this site. Click on or search for an episode that looks interesting and voile! Concise, easy to understand answers about grammar rules and issues in no-frills English. Plus you can opt to either read or listen to the episode (they’re podcasts)–a huge bonus for all rabid multitaskers. (Grammar while I eat! Yessss!)

And since you’re there: check out the ad on the home page for those cheeky grammar t-shirts. It doesn’t get any better than “Don’t verbify me, bro!”

Good Conversationalist

Here's to meaningful conversations!

Line of the Week

In the telling, we tell ourselves.

"You read books to borrow therefore the force to stimulate your activity...but I read books searching for the man who has written them." --Vincent Van Gogh

Lost In Translation

I was chatting with a good friend of mine this afternoon in Starbucks. She’s an international student hailing from Germany, and the sweetest, most mild-mannered, blonde-haired, blue-eyed thing you’d ever want to see.

Which is why I nearly shot iced caramel macchiato out of my nose when she dropped the mother of all nasty, horrible, not-fit-to-print words quite casually during our conversation.

“Did you just say ‘$#?!*@’?” I managed to squeak.

She laughed aloud. “Oh yes! It’s my favorite American word!” After which she proceeded to rattle it off at least a jillion times in quick succession, adding a little sing-song cadence for dramatic effect. Needless to say, it was a move that caught the attention of the boys sitting kitty-corner to us, and sent them into gales of laughter.

She finished with a smile, while I, breathlessly singing praises to the Lord God Almighty that I had gotten a venti rather than a tall, hid behind my coffee cup and the paper bag that had once contained my blueberry pound cake.

“Your favorite WORD?!”

She nodded. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. We don’t have a word like that in Germany. I just think it sounds funny.”

I said it to myself once or twice in my head, and thought to myself that yes, it did sound a little funny.

Yet the fact that a word I found so utterly repulsive was quite meaningless to her knocked my brain into left field.

Words, by nature are just symbols. They are merely inconsequential bits of sound that we, as a culture, have arbitrarily attached imagined definitions to in order to communicate.

My German friend had no concept of the American culture's imagined definition of the word, allowing her to so freely spout such a rotten thing without a moment’s thought. It was a meaningless bit of gibberish. It was just a word, a naked sound, devoid of any and all cultural implication.

It’s startling to think that to someone who speaks another language, all of our finely wrought sentences are just scribbles in the sand, curious patterns of arabesques; and each perfectly delivered line like the chatter of birds or the gabble of a small child: strange and nuanced, but utterly meaningless.

Brain-Food

Question: What do you get when you mix vocab and world hunger?

What is Free Rice, Alex?

This little game is crack for word junkies. Don’t fight the addiction. (Current top score: Level 42)

Plus, for each word you get right, Free Rice donates 20 grains of rice to The United Nations World Food Program to help feed the hungry: all the more incentive for you to keep playing.

I know what you’re thinking: “Hoo-boy Katie, this sounds too good to be true!”

Negatron.

The rice is paid for by the advertisements that you see at the bottom of the screen during game play.

C’mon, do the world (and your vocab) a favor.