Creative Team Interview #6: David Sedgwick, Dialect Coach for THE LOVER and DANNY

Welcome to our exciting series of interviews, where you can get to know the cast & creative team in our Summer Series, a double-header of John Patrick Shanley's Danny and the Deep Blue Sea and Harold Pinter's The Lover. The Summer Series is a true repertory event - both shows perform on the same evening with the same cast, creative team, and design concept.

The shows run back to back July 27 - August 12, 2012

Wed-Sat at 7pm;  Sat & Sun at 2pm, in New York City.

To donate (it's a worthy cause!), click here.

For tickets, click here.

For more info about The Seeing Place, click here.

Your Name:

David Sedgwick

Role in this Production:

Accent coach for "The Lover" and "Danny and the Deep Blue Sea" / Director for the Free Reading Series

How long have you been coaching/directing?

I've been an actor for about 20 years now! Directing and accent-coaching are much newer endeavors for me; they have their own unique challenges that are very different from my work as an actor.

How long have you been in NYC?

Six-and-a-half years. The time has flown by somehow...

Where are you from originally?

Sydney, Australia.

What's been your favorite project, to date?

I always feel like I learn something new with each project, so my recent turn as Vershinin in Three Sisters for The Seeing Place is a favorite. Then there's also the 3 years I spent traveling around Japan performing for little kids, singing silly songs whilst wearing primary colors. That was pretty good fun.

What do you like about being involved with The Seeing Place?

I feel that my acting has developed in unexpected ways by being exposed to the company's rehearsal and performance style. I feel a lot freer now on stage, and more prepared to take risks. I love that as a company member I'm encouraged to explore other interests such as directing and working with dialects.

What's a fun story about an experience you've had in your field?

I had a gig at the Tokyo branch of Temple University where I directed non-acting students in short plays, just for fun. Some of the students were not overly confident in English. I remember one young 20-something Japanese girl who was absolutely terrified of the idea of people watching her perform. It was like regular stage-fright, but mixed with the fear of public speaking, plus using a second language, accent issues, etc. She kept on telling me she was quitting but then she'd change her mind, and I could see she was really fascinated by the whole idea of being an actor. So of course when the time came for the (one night only) presentation, she was great! Really funny and with very good stage presence. I like to imagine that I helped her to catch the acting "bug"...

What's your previous experience with these two plays (THE LOVER and DANNY....)?

I must have read The Lover before, and then recently a friend self-produced the play (go Anna Wood!) so I saw the play not long ago. But the thing about Pinter is that so much is unspoken that I don't expect this production to be very similar at all! As for Danny, I've read quite a few of Shanley's plays, but I'd never read or seen this one before, so I'm excited to see it on its feet.

What's been the most challenging thing about preparing for these projects?

For the mainstage shows, the challenge and general strangeness of asking two Californians to take accent suggestions about a New York dialect from an Australian is... self-evident? For the reading series, the biggest challenge has been trying to secure rights to plays that we'd like to do....

What excites you about The Summer Series?

I think it's going to be really fun seeing two actors take on such different characters, and do both plays back-to-back. It should be a real roller-coaster ride for the audience.

What is your website?

www.davidsedgwick.com - check out my reels! One of these days I'll figure out how to link it with my Facebook page and Twitter...

To donate to support this project, please click here.

How Do You Remember All Those Lines?

We asked for suggestions.  Of course, this was at the top of the list.  And though I could scoff at it, like every actor does in any talk-back...why not answer it?

This paragraph is for the laymen out there.  If you are a seasoned actor, you may skip down.  I give you permission.  The reason why every actor cringes when asked this question is because acting holds a far greater challenge than remembering lines.  It's much harder to believe a situation and live it out truthfully, as if if were the first time, at 8pm every night.  Line memorization is the simplest part of acting.  It requires repetition - in the same way that remembering the words and notes of a song requires you to play it over and over.  After a certain amount of times, the lines should be able to be fired off with the same kind of ease that most people sing "Happy Birthday".  Also, memorization is easier to do when you do it frequently.  It works like any other muscle.

That said, line memorization poses a big problem to actors.  Most of the time, actors have such engrained patterns of speech that there is no way for the truth of the moment to be expressed.  Many actors spend so much time planning out their thoughts in a given scene that there is no possibility for anything other than a planned response.  Thus, much of the work we see onstage carries very little life. 

It's a rare day that I work with an actor, who knows how to discover new meanings in a scene.  And that's an important part of being alive onstage.  Many actors respond with the same meaning no matter what stimulus is given them.  You could be screaming or crying or whispering, and you'll still get your true blue response from your scene partner.  I've known plenty of actors to wear that badge as though it's a medal ("I didn't change a thing tonight.")  But they did.  They changed their belief in the situation.  They stopped talking and listening.  And as Bobby Lewis said, "If it's not talking and listening, it really doesn't matter how much more it is."

So...HOW DO YOU REMEMBER ALL THOSE LINES?  How do you do it in such a way that you retain enough flexibility for your moment to moment responses to come through?  Nobody ever seems to talk about line memorization.  Yet it is an important part of acting.  And to do it in a manner that will serve you is much more difficult than it seems.

Here are some tricks I've learned to allow you freedom in your work:

1.)  You need to know the lines so well that you don't have to think in order to remember them.  That way, they can take on whatever meaning or interpretation exists impulsively in you.  Often times, when we learn lines quickly, we have to group them into settled meanings in order for our short-term memory to grab ahold.  It is necessary that you don't need to reach for your words, so you can put your attention on the circumstances of the play, your own creative and imaginative work, and your scene partner.  That, in and of itself, will do wonders for your work.

2.)  Try writing them out without punctuation to disassociate the structure from the thoughts.  I suggest writing, because it's more active than typing, but either works.  Keep in mind that people do not speak, using syntax.  That is a writer's device to express thought on a page.  Very frequently, people do not pause for commas or make full-stops at periods when talking.  So, you have to have the same kind of freedom in your speech to emphasize wherever makes the best sense in the moment. 

3.)  Try to keep your mind off of the meanings and focus more on the sound of the words.  This is an incredibly difficult way to memorize lines, but if you can hold off from making acting choices while repeating lines for the purposes of memorization, you'll be half-way there.  Trust that you will be able to add the meaning in performance, because you are a living human being in a situation.  In order to memorize this way, I often have to go one sentence at a time.  After I say it ten times, I can add the next sentence.  And then I do that ten times.  It's a painstaking process, but well worth it.

4.)  Try using different accents.  On top of the fact that it's just FUN, it's also a good way to keep yourself from emphasizing the same words or sticking to the same verbal patterns.

5.)  Mess with the pacing.  Go through very quickly and then very slowly.  That will force your brain to think differently and help break or avoid patterns.

6.)  Sing the words.  This is the most helpful thing you can do.  It forces you to provide a completely new structure to the lines.  I almost always forget the lines when I do this.  Don't worry.  You're building new synapses, so you'll be able to play more in your work onstage.

I'm sure that some alarms are going off.  But keep in mind...

Jimmy Cagney's famous quote is "Look 'em in the eye, and tell them the TRUTH." - It's not 'Tell them the LINE'.  That's immensely important.  You have to be able to express the truth of the moment.  Not last night's truth.  Not the truth you wish were there.  The truth that is going on with YOU right then, right there. 

Thoughts?  Stories?  I'll even take horror stories from those days when either you or your scene partner went up.  Those are always fun.  Let's hear it!

:O)