Sam Chwat has one of those last names related to what he does for a living. Pronounced with a silent "t," it's a homonym of schwa, which is defined in my dictionary as "the neutral mid-central vowel sound of most unstressed syllables in English." So here's Chwat—whose parents pronounced their surname's final "t"—turning up as the founder and chief employee of New York Speech Improvement Services.
Since 1977 Chwat, who holds a degree in speech pathology and audiology, has specialized in helping people—often actors—eliminate their accents or take on new ones for a particular assignment. In other words, he listens for weak and strong vowel sounds, weak and strong consonant sounds, and whatever additional weak and strong sounds people make that tie them to a specific country or region when they want to be less easily labeled. And yes, among other things, therapist Chwat listens for the schwa.
If you want the five qualities required for his approach to proper speech—standard American English (SEA, or what he terms "the accent without an accent")—here goes:
Good ability to imitate (self-explanatory).
Good hearing faculties (the ability to hear what correct speech is when spoken by others and when you hear yourself speaking it).
Motivation (also self-explanatory).
Willingness to self-correct (you hear yourself mispronounce a vowel, a consonant, a diphthong, and immediately rectify the mistake).
Normal hearing ability.
If you have these qualities—and Chwat believes just about everyone does—you can master the technique.
He does say that "there's a limit to how much [someone] can do individually," which is where he and his eight licensed speech therapists come in. Motivated clients come to see Chwat and staff at his lower Chelsea headquarters (he also runs an office in Great Neck, Long Island, where on weekends he caters to business people looking to brush up their speech), where a small waiting room is hung with so many framed photographs of grateful clients and newspaper clippings ballyhooing Chwat's impressive career that you wonder how the walls have the strength to hold the load up. Hey, there's a pic of Robert De Niro, there's Tony Danza, there's Isabella Rossellini (why, you ask yourself, would she want to lose that seductive accent?), there's James Gandolfini, there's Naomi Campbell, there's John Leguizamo.
And hey, look, there are a few framed Back Stage features about the guy. But nothing recent, which is why yours truly has dropped in and been invited into Chwat's inner office, which features stacks of the books he consults to bone up on his field. Just behind his desk and chair, leaning against a poster of Julia Roberts' Sleeping With the Enemy, is a large plastic ear. It instantly strikes you as a metaphor for his talent at listening well.
Chwat is all about hearing, and it occurred to me that the quickest way to get a handle on what he does and therefore pass it along in print would be to ask him about my speech. His response would reveal his method. Stressing that he avoids "detective work" (despite often being compared to George Bernard Shaw's Henry Higgins) and explaining that by speech he means "the articulation, the diction, the mechanics, the pronunciation," he says of the few sentences I've uttered, "I can't really tell where you're from by the way you speak. There's a type of accent in America called an elevated or elitist American accent. If anything, I would pigeonhole it as that type. I'm not saying it's a pretentious way of speaking, because that would mean there's some choice or some conscious decision about speaking in a particular way. It's your normal pattern of speech, but it reflects a certain elevated educational level. And a particular era—let's say anywhere from the '50s through the '60s. There is this Orson Wellesian aspect to it. There are certain glides to it. The 's' that you have is a little too thick, almost on a 'sh' side. Many of the s's that you're using should be z's to begin with."
Without going into detail, I'll report he's close to the mark. He snared my particular speech DNA and therefore established his bona fides with me. More than that, he indicated there was more for him to talk about than would fit comfortably into a single interview. Which is to say, Chwat is so authoritative that you want him to spill everything he knows. He continues to learn, too, if his comments on how speech constantly evolves are any indication. At one time in England, he says, speech was tied to "where you went to school and who your father is." But in the last couple of decades, English speech has more frequently been synonymous with "what you do for a living and how much money you have—sort of conforming to an American standard."
Then he adds, "But I tell you it's an ongoing struggle, because something as fluid as speech is like trying to grab mercury, trying to herd cats. Even in New York, the old comedians would make fun of New York speech by talking about 'I'll meet you at Toity-Toid and Toid.' That accent is virtually a dead accent. You can't make fun of New Yorkers in that way anymore, because nobody speaks that way anymore."
Chwat's credentials have accumulated since he inaugurated his business. He was trained to deal with patients suffering from speech impediments. Working with "normal" speakers "was looked down on," he says of his early schooling. Yet one day he had a call from a Pathmark store manager worried that his Latino accent might put him at risk with his new bosses: He wanted to change his dress and his speech. Working with him, Chwat had what he calls his "click," a sudden realization that speech is "coded" and that the 44 sounds common to American English could be taught, explained, made easy. Sometime later, Andie MacDowell became his first celebrity client when she was referred by someone at Elite, her modeling agency.
Word got around among actors. Roberto Benigni, Kathleen Turner, Vincent D'Onofrio, Kate Hudson, Sean Combs, Linda Evangelista (I'll ask Chwat more about her next time), and others too numerous to mention stampeded to Chwat's door. One of the most recent was Richard Gere, who needed to affect an Upper West Side Manhattan accent for The Hoax, a soon-to-be-released flick in which Gere plays Clifford Irving. Chwat, who often gets referrals from acting coaches like Harold Guskin, also advised the entire cast of last season's Broadway revival of Glengarry Glen Ross (Liev Schreiber, Alan Alda, et al.) to assure there was a consistency to the Chicago accents playwright David Mamet calls for. He's had a hand in Oscar, Tony, and Grammy nominations and wins. Ask how many and he says he doesn't keep count. An actor with whom Chwat hasn't worked but who repeatedly "staggered" him is Russell Crowe. He praises Crowe's Cinderella Man accent but adds, "It's not period."
Chwat is insistent that "an accent is an accent is an accent." He staunchly refuses to judge any accent. He recognizes that "speech is ego-related behavior" but emphasizes that ego should be left out of it. For him—and he hopes for the actors with whom he collaborates—an accent is more in the line of a business proposition. He differentiates speech work from personality or attitude, calling what he does "choreography for the mouth, blocking for the mouth." He encourages actors to bring in sides they're working on, but he also encourages them to apply what they learn from the time they get up to the time they retire. "The entire day," he says, "should be a dress rehearsal for the acting moment."