"It's very helpful and exciting, and he's not dictatorial. He just wants to help you solve the problem."
Actress Joanne Camp is not talking about an acting teacher or a director but about voice and text coach Robert Neff Williams, a Juilliard instructor and a longtime associate of the Pearl Theatre Company, where Camp is artistic associate and an ensemble member. Devoted to classical theatre, the Pearl is just one of many theatre companies with Shakespeare in its repertoire to benefit from the services of a vocal coach.
Though you'll find them well beyond the realm of Shakespeare, it is there that the job of the vocal coach is particularly indispensable. "I think Shakespeare is, for the English language at any rate, possibly the best training tool of all, because the language is so packed, so dense," says Nancy Benjamin, one of two voice/text directors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
They're at rehearsals from day one, helping actors blend Shakespeare's poetry and their own voices. Whether they're called voice coaches, vocal coaches, vocal consultants, or voice and text directors, their job is two-tiered: to assist actors with technical precision and textual insight.
SUB: Clarifying, Not Correcting
Even the most trained and experienced actors can enhance their performances if they heed their vocal coach's advice. "Sometimes there are clues in the language," says Benjamin, "and when you're trying to remember your blocking, memorize lines, fill the space, follow through with your objective, and understand the thrust of what you're saying, you may miss something like a rhythm change or that the language feels different here, which may be a clue to something happening emotionally."
Also important is making sure that what the actor says is clearly audible. "Passion doesn't always lend itself to clarity when the language is very complex," says Sarah Felder, vocal consultant for Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre and Arena Stage. "A lot of my work has to do with helping make suggestions for phrasing, and pointing out syntax that helps illuminate the logic."
"We focus on the basic things: good support and having a variety of ways to use one's voice," explains Joan Cook, veteran vocal coach of the Utah Shakespearean Festival. "But more than anything, we feel we have a real commitment to having our audience members hear and understand, so a lot of my job has to do with making sure the actors have really good 'tongue-tip' articulation--being able to hit those consonants crisply and helping them to work with the idea that consonants identify the word, but the vowel in that word is the thing that can connote the emotion or the attitude."
Cook, along with other vocal coaches interviewed for this article, described her job as "fine tuning" actors' work, or helping them to overcome the "challenges" of a role or play, instead of correcting mistakes.
"I never approach it as correcting someone," says Ann Klautsch, voice and dialect coach of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. "I'm very aware that my authority is given to me by a director, but it really extends as far as an actor is willing to allow me into the creative process. Instead of it being something that they have to fix or correct, we're dealing with it from the very beginning of the rehearsal process as something that can enhance their performance."
The type and the degree of the challenge depends on which of the Bard's plays you attack. "The later plays are more difficult in that the verse style is more free; lines are broken in ways that are perhaps the most challenging in that they don't lend themselves to a simple reading," says Felder.
SUB: Coaches at Work
For the Idaho Shakespeare Festival's production of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," Klautsch, a three-year veteran of the festival, was faced with the challenge of establishing two different dialects: Welsh for Sir Hugh Evans and French for Doctor Caius. "We were constantly in rehearsal with the actors about how the sounds of the dialect bring out a particular part of the character. It's not dialect and character but the two of them blended together."
Voice and text coach Deborah Hecht's job for the New York Shakespeare Festival's staging of "Henry V" at the Delacorte Theater ranged from establishing a consistency of pronunciation with names and French words to working with director Douglas Hughes on "finding what needs to be brought out for the poetic structure, and the clues to the character and to the event of the moment."
Hecht's work started with the show's star, Andrƒ Braugher. She remembers an early rehearsal when a few technical tips helped him turn in a potent performance. It was the scene in which the three traitors are discovered.
"There was a certain trail of sound--closed vowels versus opened vowels, sharp consonants versus long, sustainable consonants--that seemed to me to be very reflective of the event at hand and also the emotional connection for Henry. We worked on this and when we went back and Andrƒ read that scene, it was so gripping to hear--everyone around the table was leaning in--you could just feel the tension and the depth. Andrƒ was getting quite emotional for this, but right toward the end of the speech he stopped and said, 'I don't know what this is about.' And everybody at the table thought it was great.
"He was having what I think is one of the most powerful things that happens to an actor doing Shakespeare. Shakespeare does so much for you--in terms of rhythm, in terms of visceral connection to the language, in terms of the actual feel and sound of the words--that it begins to take you somewhere when you speak it, if you really give over to it. Even if you haven't made complete acting choices yet, it is so rich that it will take you to an emotional place. It's scary initially, but it was a very powerful moment."
SUB: Sustaining Soliloquies
The length of Shakespeare's soliloquies presents actors with a unique problem not found in contemporary theatre, where dialogue bounces back and forth between characters more rapidly. Sustaining the "vocal energy" necessary for Shakespeare and keeping the language "active and not passive" kept Benjamin busy while working on OSF's current productions of "Love's Labour's Lost" and "Romeo and Juliet," which are running in repertory with "Coriolanus."
"In 'Romeo and Juliet,' " she explains, "the action is sustained by a relatively few number of people; it's a tragedy, it's one that's extremely well known, and the language is really quite accessible. 'Love's Labour's' is driven by eight people at least, and it's a much more complicated language use. It's nothing but word plays and puns--and many of them are archaic. We had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what on earth is being said, because some of the jokes simply don't work anymore. So it's important that the actors all be extremely specific. The concentration it requires is really phenomenal. The audience may not get every single joke or word but they certainly get if the actors get it."
Despite the challenging nature of "Love's Labour's," Benjamin recalls that she actually spent more time on "Romeo and Juliet," where her task involved making long speeches seem alive and "specific."
"In the balcony scene, Romeo talks for what must be close to 150 lines with only a couple of slight interruptions. For the actor, it's a real physical challenge. He's got to keep talking, and we're working in an outdoor theatre that seats 1,200 people so it demands quite a bit of vocal size. Yet he doesn't want to shout because then he loses all variety. We worked to keep the size full, the voice full, to find variety, and to be very specific with the images: What makes moonlight different from starlight? What makes the eyes in her head different from the eyes in the sky? Understanding that if I say this image, it's because I need to say it. If I don't say it, I haven't expressed myself fully."
SUB: All's Well if the Training's Well
With limited time to rehearse a play, vocal coaches can't also be remedial teachers. Of course chances are actors won't be cast in too many Shakespeare productions if they don't have some solid classical training. But a good vocal coach can always tell.
"Even if the training is quite diverse, or comes from different points of view, it's always better if you're working with trained actors--there's no question about that," says Hecht.
Cook has observed that "those who come from conservatories usually have better vocal training as it pertains to classical theatre." But she also sees room for improvement.
"If I were to encourage any kind of change in vocal training," she offers, "I would say that good articulation and developing a good ear are first and foremost. Secondly, I think that there has not been enough emphasis put on developing the ability to hear nuance, so that those subtleties of subtext can be clarified through the use o