So I've happened upon a concept that has only occurred to me by doing my current play and talking to people about the process of it. It might not mean anything to you (or it might!), but it feels like a bit of a revelation to me.
In every piece of live theatre I've ever been in prior to this one, I arrived at opening night with a performance I was proud of, and I continued to fine-tune my performance throughout the run of the show. My goal in this was to improve my performance, and to ideally get better and better until I arrived at my best performance on closing night.
What I've come to realize doing my this play is that it's not necessarily about trying to achieve "the best performance," as if there was only one right or best way to do it. I've discovered with this play that it's about giving the best performance possible for that audience on that night. Whatever performance that particular audience needs the most, within the confines of it still being this particular play - that's the performance I'm trying to give.
Just as stand-up comedians and rock bands can change their set to adapt to their audience, I've been trying something similar with my acting work in this production.
I've been in many comedies, and in a comedy you often have to hold for laughs. It's not always the same every night (despite a fellow actor calling me a "robot" because I got laughs in the same spots in each performance of a comedy we did together), so sometimes you have to pause a longer or shorter time before saying the next line (and sometimes, lucky you, you don't have to pause at all, because they just aren't laughing). So there you have a small example of changing your performance for an audience.
In college, I was in a comedy improv group. Something I picked up while doing that is being able to read an audience somewhat. The improv was primarily comedy-based, so we could tell when the audience members were enjoying themselves by how much they were laughing. But we could also tell if they were into it by how they responded to the quieter moments. There's a guy I worked with who, if you've ever seen him miming making a sandwich in his kitchen, you know it can be captivating to watch even if there aren't any jokes - just the beauty of improv; making something from nothing, right there on the spot. And some audiences could appreciate that. Also, when we performers weren't in a scene, the set-up was such that we could actually look directly at the audience and see their reactions. So reading an audience and doing some minor adjustments to pace and energy was par for the course in my improv days.
But it wasn't until doing the show I'm in now that I realized just how much adjusting to the audience you can do with a play.
This play is called Dublin Carol - it's written by modern playwright Conor McPherson, who got his start writing one-man shows, which are heavy on dialogue and low on plot. Dublin Carol, while a three-person play, is very dialogue-based, and there's almost no plot at all. The entire play is just three two-person scenes of talk. The main actions the characters have is reaction, and a lot of what they're reacting to happens off-stage. So as dramas go, it's kind of anti-dramatic. I still find it a compelling work, as do many audience members, but it's not traditional theatre. It's also the most realistic play I've ever acted in. It's mostly serious, and gets pretty dark in places, but there is also a sprinkling of comedy throughout the piece that stems from the characters and the dialogue. There aren't jokes so much as dialogue that can be played for comedy.
Comedy often requires precision. Farce requires a lot of precision. Performing in Noises Off was great fun, but as I told someone recently, while that's like playing in an orchestra, performing in Dublin Carol has been like playing in a jazz band. It's a small, intimate group, and the one actor I appear with is someone I've worked with twice before, so there's a level of trust, intimacy, and understanding there that you don't always have. There's a rapport, good chemistry. And the style of actor he is, he can change things up without trouble. So he's a great scene partner for anyone to have, but even moreso for me in the here and now, since we've worked together before. So in this show, because of the lack of plot, the intimacy, the simplicity, the realism of the dialogue, and perhaps other reasons, there's a looseness to the piece that invites improvisation. And so I've been doing more improvisation in Dublin Carol than in any other scripted work to date.
As far as lines go, we do stick to the script, word-perfect aside from adding a few extra "eh?"s and "yeah"s here and there. And we keep out blocking generally the same - we cross the stage where and when we've been directed to. But the speed, rhythm, and inflection of the dialogue, and the body language we use is all malleable. I've been enjoying experimenting with my performance across the span of this show - earning as many pauses as I can, sometimes stretching a silence to a breaking point before releasing it with my next line. Making the awkwardness between the characters palpable.
The comedy in the show is such that we can hit it strongly as comedy, or just pass over it as dialogue if we're keeping it more dramatic and serious.* If the audience seems to be full of laughers, we hit the jokes firmly - never at the expense of the honesty of the piece, but I suppose a bit at the expense of the realism. If they don't seem interested in the comedy, we keep it more realistic and less funny. All this is something I haven't talked about explicitly with my scene partner, so I don't know how conscious of it he is, but I myself am very aware of it.
Friday night, we had our first bad audience. I initially thought "oh, they aren't laughers - it's a straight drama tonight, then." But it became apparent to me later that they were just bored. They just generally did not want to be there. Why they came to the theatre that night was beyond me. But it felt like performing into an emptiness - or worse, a vacuum. So upon my entrance in the final part (I'm in the first and last parts of the three), I decided to change things up a bit. Beginning with my knock on the door at the start of the scene, I gave a higher-energy, faster-paced performance than I'd given thus far into the run. None of it compromised the piece or the character, but I felt it was a good idea to stir things up a bit for this audience, especially since there was a couple in the front row trying their best to take a nap.
There's a moment at the end of the play when my scene partner has a line that can be read as sad or funny. I think it's better for the line to be taken as sad - a nice little poignant moment just before the anti-climactic finish, heh. So when the audience takes it as sad, I give a reaction to him and his line that has a softness to it, but keeps the sadness mostly hidden - the audience already knows it's sad, so I don't need to tell them. But there have been a couple of shows where that line has provoked laughter, and in those instances I let a little more sadness show on my face, to communicate the weight of that moment to the audience, as some of them had missed it. Acting is storytelling.
Saturday night was our strongest show yet. The audience was ready to receive it, and we gave them a powerful drama shot through with as much comedy as the text was willing to bear. I felt a great connection with my fellow actor and with the audience, and it was the most satisfying time I've had in this run.
I know that this concept of adjusting to the audience is not something that can work as well for an orchestra-like farce as it does for this jazz band play, and it's something I'm just beginning to formulate. But it's a concept I hope to play with for the rest of my days as a theatre actor.
[Originally written December 7, 2008.]
*After I watched Stranger Than Fiction on DVD, for some reason I was curious how good the dubbing actors were. There's a scene in the film where Dustin Hoffman is trying to figure out Will Ferrell's mysterious ailment - he hears a woman narrating his life, as if he's a character in someone's book. Hoffman's character is asking a series of questions to narrow down what genre of story they might be dealing with. For Hoffman's character, this is serious business, and Hoffman plays it that way, as does the actor dubbing the performance into a different language. But while the dubbing actor plays it serious and straight, what he doesn't do is make choices that, while true to the character and the seriousness the character believes the situation to have, are funny choices. Hoffman plays the character straight, but plays the scene funny. I have yet to articulate quite how he does that, but he finds a way to play the character truthfully (that is, in this case, seriously) while still hitting the comedy.
