Grad School: November

November was essentially the final month of the semester. (Exam week extended into the first week of December). So the final third of my semester was spent finishing assignments for my classes and rehearsing for final scenes.

The Directing 3 class was divided into three sections: History, Comedy, and Tragedy. For their final showcase on December 5 they considered all the scenes they had done and picked the ones they wanted to work on further. I was lucky enough to be in three tragedy scenes, and all three were picked for the final showcase.

The final showcase was such a rewarding experience because I got to play three very different roles under the guidance of three incredibly intelligent directors, certainly three of the best directors in the program, if not the best three: Linden Kueck, Tony Tambasco, and Zach Brown. All three challenged me as an actor, and as a result I think I learned and grew a considerable amount.


The most challenging scene at the outset was Tony’s. It was from the end of Coriolanus when Volumnia begs her son not to destroy Rome. The one where Volumnia has two massive, famous, unending monologues. As an actor under 30, I found the scene quite intimidating. And if it wasn’t intimidating enough in of itself, Tony challenged me in the rehearsal process in a way that took me completely out of my comfort zone.

Tony was interested in playing with rhetorical punctuation -- taking breaths at nearly every punctuation mark, and of a size guided by the punctuation. The smallest breath for commas, larger for colons and semi-colons, and largest of all at full stops. The full stops Tony described as, “Breathe and consider.”

The idea was hard to wrap my head around. I had been trained that in order to preserve the sense of Shakespeare’s line, I should only breathe at punctuation marks that occur at the end of the line.

But this technique isn’t just about the pause at these marks, it is about how much to breathe, specifically for the very next words. A bigger pause equals a bigger breath, which mean correlates to how much breath you use on the following phrase. Consider:

To his surname Coriolanus 'longs more pride
Than pity to our prayers. Down: an end;
This is the last: so we will home to Rome,
And die among our neighbors.

"Down: an end; this is the last." Three short phrases that are not punctuations with commas, but with larger marks. In this theory, because there is a full stop and a full breath before “down” Volumnia uses a massive amount of air on that single word, in order to need to breath at the colon, and so forth. When working this section, the rhetorical punctuation method makes it easy to find her desperation.

In the end, I was so proud of what we accomplished. I was surprised by the way my muscle memory recalled when and how to breath. The method was extremely helpful to me in another way. Thanks to the rhetorical breathing, I truly learned this scene one thought at a time. Not once did I think “Oh, boy, here comes a giant monologue.” I never felt like I was performing monologues. I felt like I was performing one thought, then another thought, then another thought. Which, really, is the way it should always feel. The rhetorical breathing also slowed. me. down. I have a tendency to rush through verse and verse moments, because I am so anti-dragging-Shakespeare. Untrained performers by and large perform Shakespeare at a deadly slow pace. For fear of that, I sometimes overcompensate by going to fast. The rhetorical punctuation approach forced me to give each bit of the language its full due.

Tony has also blogged about his thoughts on the process.


directed by Tony Tambasco, with James Bobby Byers, Cyndi Kimmel, and Celi Oliveto

My other two directors somewhat overlapped in their approaches. Linden and Zach have a similar approach in the sense that they are both interested in messing with gender, in questioning our assumptions of gender in performance, in providing opportunities to women, and in exploring the relationships of women. They both trust the audience to be able to figure it out, and those are the kind of directors I like.

Linden’s tragedy scene was from Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling. It’s the most famous scene in the play, where the creepy servant De Flores confronts the noble Beatrice Joanna about the murder he just committed for her. I don’t think it was Linden’s goal to say anything about gender with this specific scene, but she did cast a female actor as De Flores simply because she gave the best audition. But one way Linden’s point of view influenced the way the piece was performed was that I, as the female Beatrice Joanna, had my hair in an updo, and Mel, as the male De Flores, left her hair down. It worked, and even added to De Flores’ creepiness factor.

For this rehearsal process, we did a lot of character and relationship work. We did a past sharing exercise where Mel and I had to create a story of something De Flores and Beatrice Joanna went through together. We also had a day of rehearsal where Linden gave us each secretly various moments before or different scene objectives to play. In other words a lot of Stanislavsky-based exercises. This program is so heavily focused on text and early modern practices that it is lovely to get to do some emotional connection work along side that.


directed by Linden Kueck, with Mel Johnson

Zach’s scene was 1.2 from King Lear. Also well known. I got to play Edmund which meant I got to work on both the “Thou Nature” speech and the “This is the excellent foppery of the world” speech. See, best semester ever. Another fellow first year, Celi, was playing both Gloucester and Edgar. We are both women, and Zach wanted all three characters to be played as women.

We had an interesting experience with this. We had assumed that being women, simply walking onstage as ourselves would make our characters women. This was not the case. Zach’s classmates assumed that we were playing men because the characters were originally conceived as men and because in this program women often play men. So the students here are conditioned to see a woman onstage as a man. So we stepping onstage simply as women was not enough to make the characters be read as female. So we had to essentially play at femininity, to put on the accoutrements of femaleness.

This took the scene in a completely different direction. Basically, I wondered what the most obnoxious display of femaleness was that I could pull off. And I was also thinking in terms of what it would mean for the mother-daughter relationship between Gloucester and Edmund, and a sisters relationship between Edmund and Edgar. In this, I was inspired by Zach’s MFA directing production of Hamlet, which had occurred about a month before. In this production he cast Polonius and Laertes as women. Polonius wore a beautiful long red coat, which she gave to Laertes as she prepared to leave for school. It was a simple detail, yet instantly recognizable as something that would happen between a mother and a daughter. Celi and I looked for a similar way to create a mother-daughter relationship between Gloucester and Edmund.

So I grabbed an old pair of tights, my scissors, and went to it!


directed by Zach Brown, with Celi Oliveto