My Part Perform'd

I had a plane to catch. It was the middle of the second night of auditions; I was getting ready to catch the cab that would take me to Hobby, to catch the plane that would take me to Austin. And I had the note all written. I was holding the paper, folded quarterwise, tapping it against the knuckle of the other hand; I'd written the following:

Karin --

Don't know if this will affect casting, but I don't know if I can deal with being Leontes for six weeks. I'd rather not play that part.

-- Peter

... or something like that. I glanced at Karin, and worried the corner of the note between my teeth. I crumpled the note in my pocket and went out the Baker Library door.

I don't regret it, though who really knows what would have happened otherwise. There were times, particularly after the long trial rehearsals, when all I wanted was to take a long shower and not be conscious for eight hours. Part of that was fatigue. Part of it was not being able to untangle all the guilt and sorrow of the part from my psyche, at least not without a good night's sleep. So the note was partly right.

It was also the toughest role I've had. It had the most seemingly garbled verse of anything I've tackled. It required the most range. And still, it was something of a playground: I could go coaxing macabre humor out of dire circumstances, and unload endless aggression, and play at situations that (I hope) I'll never experience in real life. In every performance, when Hermione's statue blinked her eyes open, and slowly looked up, that part of my mind that goes with the flow of the play believed in the scene completely, and was as happy as anything.

What made it difficult? Mostly it was figuring out Leontes' perspective. I often joked about a Gary Larson cartoon that showed a psychiatric patient, lying on a couch, talking; the psychiatrist (in the foreground) holds his notepad. The notepad reads, "Just plain nuts!" It was dangerous, and tempting, to take that attitude towards Leontes. He acts irrationally. It's hard work to justify how a man could get from Point A to point B to point C the way he does. It's easy to throw up one's hands and say that he's just crazy.

Of course, if you try that, the audience writes him off the same way. He's just crazy, acting nutty for the sake of moving the plot. The most thought the audience gives him is "I'm glad I'm not crazy; being crazy is bad." If, instead, you find the internal, bizarre logic to the character, you can elicit fear from the audience when realize that a real human being -- a person like you or me -- in his own uniquely wrong circumstances, can do the unthinkable. He can betray his friends, destroy his family, and reduce his own life to an interminable, miserable period of ennui. Ideally, you can kill the response of "Thank God I'm different from that." With some measure of identification, the audience feels every step of the inexorably tragic events viscerally. When they see a man in tears haltingly ask to be led to the bodies of his wife and son, the audience feels that infinite loss, and even (perhaps) that it has happened to a man worth redeeming.

So that was my intent. I kept telling myself, "By his own lights, he's doing the right thing." For Leontes, that was tough. Karin [Kross, assistant director] helped a lot by telling me how INFJ's (a personality type -- "introverted-intuitive-feeling-judging" -- spit out by those standardized tests; I am an INFJ) can focus so internally (I consistently score 100% introverted on such tests) on any idea they come up with, that such people forget that it's an idea. They forget that it has no connection to reality until some irreconcilable mismatch to reality occurs. I knew what she was talking about.

Suddenly, a lot of Leontes started untangling. The jealousy comes about, and the character who thought it up works over the idea, not with respect to what's around him, but with respect to what's within him. The musings and rants on infidelity cement the idea in place by assuming it to be correct. Soon he cannot be dissuaded from its 'truth,' and the whole play takes on a topsy-turvy aspect. And all along, Leontes feels he is doing right.

One thing that I'm proud of is the sense of betrayal I (think I) put into I.ii -- to Leontes, it appears that those he cares about the most -- Hermione and Polixenes and Camillo -- is stabbing him in the back. "I have trusted thee, Camillo" was its own clause and hung in the air, colored with the emotion of "how could you do this to me?" By the start of II.i, he's more and more a cat backed into a corner, betrayed by everyone, with danger in all directions, hissing, spitting, snarling, and ready to claw out the eyes of anyone who comes near.

I know I can play that. I have trouble playing jealousy -- I know I'm capable of it, but the emotion won't come on command so I generally end up faking it -- but paranoia comes by nature.

With all of that in place, the parts of the play that may seem toughest to emote -- the ends of the trial scene and the statue scene -- actually became the easiest. The pain that went along with the lashing-out in the first half set a precedent for regret in both scenes. In the trial scene, it finally occurred to me that Leontes should be staring straight forward, saying his line: "Apollo's angry / And the gods themselves do strike at my injustice!" as Hermione swoons and falls. He mentally recounts all of that Hell -- the Hell he'd blamed on those around him -- bringing the fault rightly on himself. In true introverted fashion, he has to shake himself out of his thoughts to see what's happening right in front of him. This regret lasts all through the second half, culminating in V.iii. Leontes' attitude towards the living Hermione is, I thought, best summarized by a line to the statue:

Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed
Thou art Hermione; or rather thou
Art she in thy not chiding for she was
As tender as infancy and grace.

She is (he feels) one who should rebuke him even in art, but who had the grace to refrain, perhaps even to forgive him. His reaction is one of total regret and outlandish hope.

I remember when we talked to each other, in character, roughly halfway through rehearsals. Perdita (Laura) asked me if I would ever be happy again. I had to fight back tears. The truth is that Leontes can never, never forget.

So, what did I learn? What morsels of knowledge can be passed down in conveniently predigested form? Certainly some tidbits about things Shakespearean:

Unless you have a strong penchant for talking to yourself at theatrical volumes, direct soliloquies at the audience. Otherwise, you have to talk to yourself at theatrical volumes, which forces you to add another level of faking (and difficulty) to your already difficult job. When you talk to yourself, you're talking to somebody -- make the audience that somebody. You'll feel more natural, and the audience will have to pay attention. If you have verse, try to carry on a good relationship with the verse structure. I am neither absolutely loyal ("Never pause within a line. Pause after every line.") nor absolutely oblivious ("I'll pause where I damn well please -- think William Shatner") to the verse form. I think it boils down to the fact that if you sacrifice freedom of pausing, you gain a lot of tools in return. The better an actor you are, the easier you can "act around" (i. e. deal with) the constraints of "Never pause in a line" and "Pause after every line." But the more that the verse pattern is respected, the clearer it becomes (subconsciously perhaps) a pattern for the audience. This pattern provides a richness of context something like the rhythm section behind a guitar solo (I play guitar somewhat, so bear with me) -- you can play the same notes on their own, but then they are just notes, in isolation to everything but each other. It means more to have them be notes on a backbeat, or notes ringing out with the last emphatic chord of a I-IV-V sequence. And as any Shakespearean devotee will tell you ad nauseum, it brings all of Shakespeare's poetic techniques out to play. Accented off-beats ring out loud and unexpected. Half-lines left unfinished leave sudden pauses, and leave the audience feeling like Wile E. Coyote after walking off the cliff and before looking down. It's a big gain in both ways. I try to work with the verse when I can, but take what odd pauses I have to take. (Otherwise I am always sitting around justifying pauses, which I find is not the most efficient way to get at a character.) This annoys directors, since if you can hit the pauses without tripping yourself up, the verse offers you a lot in return. Parallelism and antithesis are your friends. Particularly in this play. Particularly in this role. Of course, all of this and more is available in the "Playing Shakespeare" series in Fondren. Watch it, and learn.

As for acting in general, there's not much I know; I was a student moonlighting as an actor, not the other way around. To me, the only fundamentally important thing is to respect one's character. It is a real entity, or at least real within the confine s and oddities of its world. The lines that don't make sense are not the blunders or sadistic whims of the playwright, but are the only way the characters can express themselves. And in the end, all of the refined techniques of voice and poise are only tools for conveying to the audience something half-discovered, half-created that is, at least by its own peculiar lights, real.

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      |\     _,,,---,,_         Peter Rogers
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