Kickstart

Well, it’s the morning of the first day of rehearsal. Today Lynne & I are going to go over the whole play and correct my bloody English accent. This is a serious task and lengthy process mainly due to the number of characters and variety of classes among them. Over the last few weeks, my ear has become more “in tune” with RP English—and when I deviate from it. It’s especially difficult when I get more into character development that I start to have problems melding the characer with the accent since my mouth is shaped differently. So those are the rough spots I’ll be working on…

Most audiences can’t tell the difference between Cockney and London accents. But it really irritates me when I see a play set in another country and all the actors each have their own accent (or none at all). It’s distracting and pulls me out of the world the play because it’s less authentic. There are limits on how casual an actors’ (or director’s) approach in the presentation of a role/play, and this is beyond it. It’s just plain laziness on their part. Unfortunately, I’m very picky about this point so that makes me work all the harder on my own accents. It pays off because people come up to me after shows and want to know how I really speak (like my Georgian accent in The Foreigner) or try to speak Russian to me (because of my character Sasha in Room Service). They’re really convinced. Since I speak several languages, I wonder if there’s a correlation among multilingual actors and accent work. Hmm…

When I say “first day of rehearsal” I didn’t mean that I haven’t been rehearsing up until now. It just means that Julian & I haven’t been meeting, primarily because of his hectic schedule doing Ice Glen at the Aurora. We’ve had a bunch of conversations through the editing of the script about the process of “page to stage,” but today we actually do it. It’ll be interesting to get Julian’s take on the work I’ve been doing alone so far. Sometimes… or oftentimes…when I’m working alone I can get stuck inside a “me bubble” that distorts my perspective on my work (that’s why directors exist…duh), so it’s great to have someone (especially someone who knows what they’re talking about) to tell you to stop picking your nose or whatever…

We added some new photos in the press section that are kinda funny. I don’t really care for them too much but people seem to really like them so I guess we’ll use them. I guess I’m just too picky…