Audi-Turgy
Adding Flourishes
"There's a saying in the world of Commedia.‘The play you’re doing tonight is not the play you did in rehearsal,’” muses Faction of Fools Theatre Company Managing Director Toby Mulford. He’s explaining how the troupe’s latest project, an improvisation-based production of a 17th century Italian farce, is different from the usual Faction of Fools show. For one thing, there’s no playwright. For another, there’s no play - or at least no script. Mulford, who is making his area directorial debut, is creating a script based on what comes from several weeks of rehearsal.
“A lot changes as we move along,” Mulford says of the process of using improvisation to flesh out a narrative. “There are surprises every day. You just look for the best things that come out of it and run with them.”
Mulford and his group of eight performers, including two deaf actors from Gallaudet University, the Fools’ home base, have been working from a conventional Commedia dell’ Arte plot scenario that originated in 17th century Naples. From that thin outline, they have been improvising language and plot developments for The Lady Becomes Him. Their task is all the more complicated and comedic because this is bilingual, involving both spoken English and American Sign Language.
“We have had some collision of languages,” laughs Rachel Spicknall Mulford, who plays the servant Rosetta and also provides some of the incidental music for the show. “Not so much misinterpretations as different interpretations and that collision of interpretations can be funny.”
With its repertoire of stock figures and what Spicknall Mulford calls "a set vocabulary of movement and gesture," Commedia invites experimentation on a theme, much like music. But while improvisation has a role in many Faction of Fools productions, most start with a written script or piece of literature that the company adapts to its own purposes. Such was the case with last year's very successful A Commedia Christmas Carol. There's a greater degree of uncertainty when it comes to improvising a script out of whole cloth.
"There are always pitfalls in devising a show," Director Toby Mulford asserts. "They're just different with this [improvisational] approach. It takes a lot of rehearsal time to find the really good stuff, and you have to go through a bigger process of clarifying and pairing down."
Clarity has been important on several fronts in the rehearsal experience. The storyline must be clear, of course, and the actors have to understand one another, especially in the fast-paced world of comedic improvisation. At times, this has presented a challenge for the show's two Gallaudet actors, Amelia Hensley and James McGowan, who must simultaneously keep an eye on the other performers and on their ASL interpreter.
"At first, it was difficult because I couldn't hear what [the speaking actors] were saying," says Hensley, who plays the love interest Isabella. “I had to depend on their body movements. . . . We had to use gestures. Then I had to look at the interpreter to catch up. It's not easy, but I’ve had a lot fun working with [the speaking actors].”
For his part, McGowan, who plays Isabella’s admirer, Luzio, feels that the timing issue, so important to comedy, cuts both ways.
“When I improvise, it's a bit hard to translate to English, and harder to react to spoken English than to ASL,” he asserts. “So, it's hard to keep the dialogue speedy, because both languages require time to mentally translate and to react.”
Fortunately, audiences can take their time reading the stageside caption board that displays supertitles for both hearing and deaf patrons. While the board will interpret most of what the speaking and signing actors say, there may still be a little room for improvisation once the curtain rises. That won’t be a problem for audiences, Toby Mulford insists, because Commedia is such a visual art form.
“We say to actors, ‘Stop trying to tell stories in words.’ You have to communicate gesturally. That’s when everything really gets exciting for both deaf and hearing audiences.’”
Mulford believes that working with deaf actors in bilingual shows fits squarely in Commedia’s time-honored tradition. In the art form’s early years, its home country, Italy, didn’t have a common language, so traveling players had to make themselves understood any way they could.
“Commedia has been multilingual from the beginning,” Mulford says. “We’re just adding some fluorishes.”
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