Character by Association #2

This production is an Equity co-op by Main Street Theatre, a new outfit put together by a few young and enormously talented actors, Daryl King, Ryan Beale, and Josh Drebit. So no one’s getting paid… much. We’re working when we have the time. I’ve been tossing around the idea of using a dialect. I like doing dialects, but I like doing them right. So I’ve got to get started right away. Problem is Al Pacino again. His insistent voice. And his dialect, which is distinctly Italian New York, I think. The play takes place in Chicago. I checked out a bunch of Chicago dialects. None of them sounded anything like Pacino. Of course the salesman could be from New York, and with a name like Roma, he’s probably Italian. But I’m uncomfortable with doing that dialect, which sounds a bit cliché to me. The Chicago dialects are suprisingly subtle. What to do? I’m also a little worried that the director might not want dialects. This is just my paranoid imagination running over. I haven’t talked to the director about it yet. But I look at the lines on the page and they sound so very American. I don’t want to sound like a Canuck. It would ruin Mamet’s poetry.
 
Chicago…what is that? I try to bring my associations into focus: the windy city, great universities, a great theatre scene (home of Steppenwolf), a 2nd tier American city, gangsters—but that was in the past, blacks and whites, inner city decay (or renewal?), mafia, a highschool friend was teaching rhetoric there (still?) (I heard he was one of the top five rhetoriticians in the US; I saw him at the beach one Vancouver afternoon years ago and he mocked me for suggesting life had a purpose — I think he meant it has whatever purpose you give it), I also think of the Greek-American woman I met at the World Council of Hellenes (Greeks) Abroad in New York a few years ago – she was a professor from Chicago, very urbane, but in a different way from NY urbane, yes I think she had something identifiably Chicagan about her. But that’s a different sphere than the one the salesmen in Glengarry orbit.
 
Okay, I don’t know what to do with these associations. I do know that acting is a mystery and these associations will make themselves felt, either by their presence or their absence, in one way or another, at some moment or other, in rehearsal or in performance. Do they have anything to do with the fact that we’re not getting paid, or the dialect issue? Yes. No pay means more freedom. And no two people speak a dialect the same way. Associations matter.
 
First rehearsal comes. I haven’t really been studying the dialect. I just go for a generic thing for now. Flattening out the ‘a’s and such. Just to break some of my Canadian habits. The director, Stephen Malloy, does nothing to suggest approval or disapproval. Maybe it’s irrelevant to him.
 
Who Roma is now: A Chicago salesman who doesn’t sound like Al Pacino but doesn’t sound Canadian either, he’s a master of rhetoric (he is in the script), he’s not a professor but he cops from philosophers (fits with the script), he’s more urbane than the other salesmen, he’s not sure life has a purpose but he still feels the sting of being mocked in the past for suggesting it had, so he can play both sides of that fence (he does in the script), he might be Italian…which is close to Greece…which is where my family comes from. The Italians have a saying regarding themselves and Greeks: “One face, one race.” Greeks don’t use this saying. Looking back over this paragraph it’s impossible for me to tell if art is imitating life or if it’s the other way around.