PERFORMANCE: The Actors' Roundtable: "Rhythm"

Each week, Paden Fallis poses one question to a group of professional working actors from a variety of backgrounds. Our goal is not to demystify the work of the actor or explore their careers, but to dig a bit deeper into their artistic working process. ACTOR’S ROUNDTABLE: RHYTHM Rhythm. This is everything to me when playing a role. I work tirelessly through rehearsals, trying to find the rhythm of a character’s thoughts, movements, speech. A good performance can usually be traced to me being in rhythm with the role, a bad one usually means I’m out of their rhythm. Rhythm. Each actor accesses roles in a different way. Some actors do so through the emotional life of their character, others through the physicality, and others through their character’s costume. Of course, many things serve as triggers for us, but oftentimes one specific aspect puts us over the hump and squarely into that character’s skin. Give me a word (or two or three) that says how you access your roles and explain. - Paden Fallis, Performing Arts Contributing Editor

MANON HALLIBURTON I always start with imagining the emotional life and given circumstances of the character when reading a script for the first time. I sometimes catch myself experimenting with a line or two aloud when reading through, even before that first rehearsal. I believe it’s a habit that allows me to begin to access the outer layers of the character’s skin. It’s like trying on a new suit for the first time and seeing how it looks. Simply put, I jump right in with experimentation, whether it be vocally, physically, or otherwise. Usually a good trigger for me is when I am up on my feet for the first time in rehearsal. When I’m able to physically connect with the emotional life of a character, that’s when it really starts to come together. I have always been a visceral actor on the imaginative and physical level. This is not to say I don’t believe that table and text work is not absolutely valid. But I would rather have more time up on my feet in a rehearsal process than sitting behind a table any day. I would rather the director give a good platform with which to start, and then let the actor explore the myriad of choices.

LAURIE OKIN The way I access a role depends to some degree on the role itself. I don’t have any “standard” approach, other than that there’s always an initial perusal of the character and the play in which I try to be as disconnected from the person and the material as possible. I feel like the period of time I have to work with prior to my getting too involved is valuable time…it gives me an opportunity for perspective, an opportunity that will be lost as soon as I become intimately connected. After the first few readings and musings in my head, I try to engage my intuition and stay open to each niggling impulse, no matter how obtuse it may sometimes be. I try to make sure my general sense of who the person is feels solid, so that the choices and experimentation aren’t arbitrary but rather connected to an exploration of a new acquaintance who has real and specific psychology, history, and personality to them. I try to let the character surprise me, which can be tough when you’ve gone over and over and over the material as much as you do in a rehearsal process, yet it can be surprisingly easy and engaging to try and discover at least one new thing with each pass. When I feel stuck in the thoughts, I go to the body: How does this person stand? Walk? Hold objects? Do they feel like they are too tall or too short or too fat or too thin, and how does this materialize in the posture, the way of movement? I try not to spend too much time on things like back story, though I do like to develop some; I feel that the more I endow the character with that is not there on the page, the more liberties I am taking and the farther from the author’s intent I have strayed. There is plenty to explore with what the author has provided. I do have a friend who added the detail to his character of a wallet. Over the course of rehearsal, he would add things to his character’s wallet; items that he felt the character would carry around. For the performances, he carried this wallet in his pocket. I thought that was pretty cool.

MARK ORISTANO Your rhythm analogy is a good one on a couple of levels. Rhythm is a big part of any good theater experience, and it begins with the rhythm of the writer’s dialogue. Arthur Miller wrote very different dialogue than David Mamet. Mamet is jazz. Miller is more Pomp & Circumstance. I find I have to get my mind around what the author intends with the dialogue. Once I can find his/her rhythm, it’s a lot easier to find my own. I played Lafew in All’s Well… a few years ago for Shakespeare Dallas, and after a week of rehearsals, it occurred to me that the entire plot could have been engineered by Lafew and Helena. So, solely in my own mind, I played it almost like The Sting. I knew everything that was going to happen before it did. Nobody else may have known, but I did. On the other hand, a few years back, I played a German government functionary in Michael Frayn’s Democracy. I don’t speak German. I’ve never been to Bonn or Berlin. I don’t know what the Christian Democratic Party stands for, and I don’t care. What I do know is what it’s like to work for that awful boss who’ll do anything to raise the company stock price ten cents. So that’s the guy I tried to be. I think it worked. People kept telling me, “zer gut!”

ERIKA ROSE A character’s rhythm is always my biggest challenge. It’s my tendency to get everything going all at once during rehearsal. All four cylinders are blasting, which is mostly nerves, and I muscle through things. I speak quickly, my feet fall heavy on the ground, I grab as opposed to picking up, I plop in a chair as opposed to gracefully sitting. I have a lot of energy and my rhythm or internal clock is quick. The hardest and most rewarding roles for me have been the ones that ask me to slow my rhythm, my clock. I worked on a play called In Darfur a few years ago and it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Three weeks into rehearsal, when we were days away from tech, my director came to me and said, “This isn’t it. You’re capable of something greater. This will be fine. This will work, but you’re capable of something else. You just have to trust it.” My director had been working so hard to get me to buy into this woman’s rhythm. I was making strides, but always seemed to be slipping back to what was easy and safe for me. Eventually it started to sink in. I still didn’t trust that what I was doing was working, but I at least stopped backing away from my task. This woman I was playing did not have that thing that makes me, as a person, lean forward and try hard to please someone. She didn’t have that thing that needs to laugh loudly and make herself seen in a room. Her clock was slower and she lived in a different place in her body. She used wit and stillness instead of volume and muscle but she was just as engaging. I won a Helen Hayes Award for that role and it was the most satisfying, affirming gift. It’s my embarrassing actor problem, that my own rhythm is so powerful that it makes it hard to discover something outside of myself. I don’t trust the softer parts of myself because I don’t use them very often, but it’s unbelievably helpful to know that we’re all capable of the elements we need to play the characters we’re given.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Manon Halliburton is a regional theater actress who has worked all over the country. She has also appeared in television shows such as Law and Order and The Sopranos, and recently shot her first film this past year and closed August Osage County at Kansas City Rep to rave reviews. She lives in Kansas City with actor Bob Elliott. Laurie Okin is a Los Angeles-based actress who has been seen over the years in dozens of national commercials, as well as guest starring on The Office and as a series regular on PBS’s Copshop. She has also appeared in Samantha Who?, My Own Worst Enemy, Friends, and MadTV. Laurie also has an extensive background in the theatre and is a company member at The Road Theater and Rogue Machine Theater. Mark Oristano has worked a 30-year acting career in and around a 30-year sportscasting career, which included stints announcing for the Houston Oilers and Dallas Cowboys. On stage, Mark has appeared in works by Shakespeare, Mamet, Simon, Albee, and his own work, including his one-man show, And Crown Thy Good: A True Story of 9-11. Mark lives and acts in Dallas, Texas. Erika Rose is a Helen Hayes Award-winning actress living New York City. Regionally, she’s best known from her eight years of work on Washington, D.C. stages.

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