The Actors Speak: a Note to The Playwright

by Kate Konigisor

I am not a writer. But I make my living collaborating with writers, nearly always without ever meeting them, often long after they are dead. I am an actor, and it is my job to say their words. If the words flow, inspire, make emotional and dramatic sense, this is a joy. If the words are foreign to the character, if they are extraneous to the plot, theme or character development, if the words bore instead of engage, confuse instead of enlighten, then my job is not just much harder, but often nigh impossible. Silk purse, meet sow's ear.

A person who picks up a novel and finds the going tough, the writer's intention unfathomable, the prose clunky, or the characters cliche, can skim or skip what doesn't interest or make sense. If it's really bad, she can just put the book down. An actor has no such luxury. An actor must make sense of what is there, must bring it to life and communicate that life and sense to those expectant people waiting in the dark to get their money's worth. The writing is the foundation upon which all else rests. It is true that if the actors, director, designers and the myriad of others who collaborate to take a script from page to stage don't do their jobs, then bad productions can result from good writing. But without good writing there is no hope, and even in a poor production, good writing will, if not shine in its rightful splendor, still glimmer through. (In Deathtrap, the main character, Sidney, contemplates murdering a young, unknown playwright so that he can put his own name on a script he describes as "so good, a gifted director couldn't ruin it.")

Get It into Your Bones
Good writing allows an actor to concentrate on only the tasks that fall into the province of acting, which, after all, is all she signed on to do. When the general public asks a writer questions, someone inevitably says, "Where do you get your ideas?" (One writer I heard about has taken to replying, "Cleveland.") What actors are asked is, "How do you remember all those lines?" We actors laugh at the question, but it is actually a valid one. Bad writing is difficult to say and that makes it difficult to "get it into your bones." Dancers will tell you the same thing about choreography that makes strange transitions from one motion and body line to another. The muscle memory will be much longer in coming.

The better the writing, the easier it is to memorize. I was fortunate enough a little while back to be cast in the title role in Shirley Valentine, a one-woman, full-length play. Two hours and fifteen minutes of just Shirley up there . . . talking. When I accepted the part, I was thrilled -- and completely panicked. Good lord, how would I ever keep over two hours of words in my head with no other actors on stage to give me cues or bail me out should something go wrong? But once I got to work on the piece, I found that Willie Russell's writing had a logic that made transitions from one topic to another smooth and effortless. The lines were so interesting and so conversational that they stuck to me like glue. More than that, I couldn't wait to get out there every night to tell this wonderful story and become this marvelous, engaging woman.

Unfortunately, a joyful, seamless relationship between actor and writer doesn't always happen. There are lines so awful that actors just grit their teeth and hope not to be blamed. I learned this early, while playing the lead in our high school production of Brigadoon. Fiona brings the outsider, Tommy, to hear the story of how their town disappears except for one day out of every hundred years. She interrupts the story at one point to exclaim, "This part is so nice, I could cry thinkin' about it!" Even at age 17, that made me cringe. And though Brigadoon is for the most part a beautifully written musical, it also contains what I consider to be the world's most clunky lyric: "Lads, say a prayer; I'm afraid Harry Beaton is dead. Looks like he fell on a rock and it crushed in his head."

Hats off to Soap Opera Actors
When it comes to making something out of bad writing, my hat is off to the soap opera actors. For a while, I was watching one of the soaps just to get an idea of the style and format should I ever be fortunate enough to be called in to audition for one. While each episode offered entertainment of the "it's so bad, it's good" variety, one day the writers outdid themselves.

The situation: the Bad Guys have kidnapped Beau, a Good Guy, and imprisoned him in a small room. He fights and keeps screaming, "You've got the wrong man!" To keep him quiet, they give him a drug that knocks him out cold. What the bad guys don't know, but we faithful viewers do, is that they do, indeed, have the wrong guy. This is not Beau at all, but another Bad Guy who has had his face surgically altered to look like Beau's. Unfortunately, because he is completely unconscious when the scene starts, he is unable to communicate this knowledge to the two beautiful women, one of them Beau's wife, who are now flung willy-nilly into the room with them. Beau's wife immediately rushes to his side and tries to wake him. "Beau, Beau darling," she cries. Suddenly she recoils in horror, turns to her friend and says, "Delilah, this is isn't Beau." Delilah asks, "What do you mean? Of course it is--the hair, the nose, the chin." "Yes," says the wife, "but Beau's mouth was never that cruel." She deserved an Emmy just for getting the line out with a straight face.

So there's good writing and bad writing. But since every actor would prefer to be on stage buoyed up by good writing, it figures that we have a few ideas about how better writing might be accomplished. By E-mail, I asked my actor/director friends to finish this request to playwrights and screenwriters: "The next time you are working on a piece, please, ______." The response was huge and clamorous.

What I heard most often was "please, write the way people talk." Maureen Clark, actor and director, put it best. She said, "Stop thinking about how your words look on the page, and start listening to how they sound. Read your words out loud -- do they flow from your mouth, or do they tangle up your tongue?"

Listening with Your Eyes
She calls this "listening with your eyes," and cited this wonderful example (which may or may not be urban legend, but who cares? It's a great story). Years ago, the people at Kent cigarettes, in an attempt to be competitive with the then-brand-new Virginia Slims, created a chic cigarette for men and came up with an elegant and stylish name. The name had top-secret classification and was being kept under wraps until the grand unveiling -- with the result that no one was saying it out loud. Much money was spent on researching market strategy and developing an advertising campaign. This wonderful product name was "Kent Sir." Did you listen with your eyes? Then you know why it never hit the vending machines.

I would agree with all the actors who said "write the way people talk," but only to a point. Yes, write dialogue that flows when said out loud, but please write each word with a purpose in mind, to move the plot, to develop the character, to create the relationship. Real people, talking the way people really talk, are really boring to anyone except themselves and those who know them (and even those people can't be counted on to stay interested.) So I would say, write to keep our interest, to engage the better part of our minds and our hearts. Write to touch what is universal and to explore what is unusual. Write to create an image in our minds that is stronger than what we would find in real life. Distill real life and human experience into its essence. Maybe no real person, even in Elizabethan times, would actually say, "Oh, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!" But we couldn't be given a stronger image of how tortured Macbeth is by his thoughts of murdering his friend. That is actable.

Here is what else the actors had to say.
"Be sure it's what you want to say, not what you think the world wants to hear or what sounds a lot like the thing you saw last week that sounded good and sold a lot of tickets."

"Steal ruthlessly, be influenced by quality, but keep the integrity of your own voice. We will react to that integrity."

"Don't worry that the story has been told before. If you tell it, it will be different."

"Write in the voice of the character."

"Don't have the characters merely say what they mean, people rarely do."

"Try to follow each character through the entire piece and make sure you don't leave anyone hanging with egg on her face for a whole twenty minutes until you need her to talk again."

"Be open to the fact that it may be helpful to rewrite. Don't think of your words as children someone may want to murder."

"Remember the prop person. Guns, breakaway glass, fourteen-foot metal models of the human skeleton, space ships and severed heads are all very hard to come by."

"Please write interesting three-dimensional characters for women, especially mature women."

"When you are done, when you have written the very best thing that can possibly come off your pen, when you know in your heart that this is what you meant, let it go and trust the rest of the creative people involved. If you can't do that, write novels or one-person shows."

"Always remember that this is supposed to be fun."

And, finally, one that says it all: "The next time you write a piece, please make it poignant, touching, relevant and special so that I can send you a terrific telegram when you win the Pulitzer Prize."

-- KK
© 1998 Kate Konigisor

Kate Konigisor has been a working actor and director in New York for the past ten years with roles ranging from off-Broadway to summer stock, and from musicals to the classics. In the past two years she played Bella in Lost in Yonkers at Richmond's TheatreVirginia, appeared in The Good Doctor with Eddie Mekka (Laverne & Shirley), and played Emilia opposite Austin Pendleton in Othello. She understudied three female roles in Minor Demons Off-Broadway (Blake Edwards, producer), directed two productions of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), and played Belle and four other featured roles in a European tour of A Christmas Carol. She played Lady Macbeth in the Judith Shakespeare Company's award-winning production, and directed Eugenia for The Australian & New Zealand Artists' Alliance. Her directing experience includes Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare's Lovers at the Allenberry Playhouse, and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the West End Theatre. Favorite roles include Shirley Valentine, Kate in both The Taming of the Shrew and Kiss Me, Kate, and Aldonza in Man of Lamancha. Last winter she played Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing under the direction of Russell Treyz.