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.