“You’re no fun.”
That was Casey’s directing note to me.
Specifically, it was his suggestion for how my character, Duke Ferdinand, responds to the upright and earnest Antonio in the opening scene of The Duchess of Malfi. Ferdinand, under Casey’s direction, is a creature of impulse and action, with no checks on his behavior, even from his powerful brother the Cardinal.
And you know, that’s a lot of fun to play. Let’s chew some scenery! Let’s chew some other characters! Sure, he’s bad, but he’s fun.
Besides tragic villains, another fun thing about early modern drama is the dirty jokes. My character in The Changeling, Lollio, makes a lot of dirty jokes. While paraphrasing my script before rehearsals, I tried to bring out all the raunchy humor. (It’s a benefit of playing the clown.) Directing the comic scenes, Charlene paid close attention to my gloss of the text. “Did you see that as a bawdy reference? What about this one? You read that as dirty, right?” She ended up using sound cues to hammer in the jokes.
(I’ve been interested in listening to audiences’ reactions to our volley of punchline stings. They often laugh at first as though in disbelief that we’re actually doing this. Sometimes a fatigue sets in; there are just too many to respond to them all. Sometimes the laughter returns as we wear away at them. Sometimes the disbelieving snort lasts the whole show.)
While Charlene was directing me, she was also directing my scene partner, who has to respond (or not) to the jokes. The men in the scenes could usually do a take out to the audience. When my scene partner was Adrianne, playing my boss’s young wife — the target of most of my dirty jokes — how should she react? Politely laughing? Disarming? Deflecting? All of the above — Charlene’s directorial suggestion was that Isabella is not allowed to get angry at the men. “Keep it light, like it’s funny.”
I’ve played a number of early modern clowns from Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Some are raunchier than others. I enjoy bringing the dirty jokes out to the audience — the knowing look, the faux shock. It’s fun. But when you’re really focusing on the other character who has to deal with that humor, the fun dribbles away a little. You notice how incessant the come-ons are, even when the lowly clown character has no shot at the lady. You think about the much more flowery (but still incessant) come-ons that the higher-class characters make. The ladies still react politely, laughingly; disarming, deflecting. Until they can’t.
Outside of scene work, rehearsal discussions may turn to how many of these jokes and come-ons your castmates (especially the women) have heard in real life. All in good fun! Ha, ha, ha?
It’s fairly common to hear that comedy is hard, that it can be more work to play a comic character or scene because there’s so much technical detail to get right: timing, gesture, sound. All true. Certainly Lollio feels like a more athletic endeavor for me than Ferdinand. (The Duke’s a creature of violence and madness, but he’s cool with it.) I haven’t, though, often wrestled in a comedy (or comic subplot) with the whole idea of fun.
Duke Ferdinand’s having fun; Lollio’s having fun. Are the Duchess and Isabella? The audience, with their own experiences and memories? Who’s having fun? The dirty joke, the social media post, the catcall, the in-joke in the yearbook– whose fun? And who’s no fun?
– Ian Blackwell Rogers, Artistic Associate