'Truth? Who are you kidding — you're actors!'
by Andrew Seguin
 “Would you mind starting out mock-calm?”
Drama teacher and director Caroline Wood asked this of Lizzy Mantel, Class 10, who was rehearsing a monologue from Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, the Upper School play. Lizzy, whose character is a stage manager, considered this advice and then started the monologue again. This time, her voice hit a different set of highs and lows, and the calmness that gloved the words at the beginning of her speech was pulled off, revealing a lively rant about actors being self-involved and indulging in overly particular tastes. (You can imagine: “I only drink from square vessels.”) Both Lizzy and Ms. Wood were pleased with the results.
Such back-and-forth between actor and director is how a play is put together, but with this play, that exchange is also its subject. The six characters of Pirandello’s title are literally that: They are characters from a play whose author has abandoned them, and they show up at a theater where another group of actors and a director are rehearsing a different play. The characters interrupt the rehearsal and demand that their story be told instead. Sound fantastic? It is.
Ms. Wood chose the play because of its intellectual demands, but also because it forces the girls to examine their chosen art. “I like that the play gives the girls an unusual sense of the actors’ process,” Ms. Wood said. “They have to ask, ‘At what point does acting become ridiculous?’”
The girls also got a look at the director’s process, as Ms. Wood adapted the play to better fit her students. “Pirandello left a lot to improvisation, so I really wanted to flesh out some of the characters,” she said. Ms. Wood rewrote and added dialogue, even changing some of it again later to incorporate improvisations the students came up with during rehearsals. “The students definitely had a role in the adaptation,” Ms. Wood said.
To see all of the students’ roles, you need to see the play for yourself. Six Characters in Search of an Author is being performed February 9 and 10 in the Black Box Theater at 7:00 p.m. If you can’t make it but still want to hear that rant about actors being self-involved and having overly particular tastes, you can click here to download an mp3 of the aforementioned monologue. (Note: The file is large at 1.3 megabytes, and your computer must have a program that plays mp3s on it in order to hear it.)
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