 First Wednesdays is sponsored by the Vermont Humanities Council and by the Kellogg Hubbard Library, with video production supported by Orca Media. Thank you, Chris. I make me really nervous having a director here. I'm the director of The Gap. It's true I'm a stutterer, and I've been a stutterer all my life. And it's true that I write books, and every book that I've ever written has been a book about somebody who's trying to find his or her voice. My whole study of my life has been, well, why was I born this way? How can I find my voice? How can I find my true voice? So I'm going to take you on a little journey, and you don't have to worry or feel threatened about the interactiveness of the journey you're about to go on tonight. If you just want to sit back and observe, that's fine. Not as fine as actually jumping up and taking part too, but it's completely not unthreatening. Nobody will hear a word you're saying because you'll be speaking in unison completely. And also the interactiveness of the lecture will begin right now. If I ask you a question, I say, has anybody ever had that experience? I say, yeah. Don't just sit there like bumps and luck. Get it? Yeah. Okay, so when I say get it, you say got it. Get it? Got it. And when you say got it, I say good. Get it? Got it. Good. And then you say, huh? I said okay. Okay, so then I go get it. You go got it. I go good. And you go okay. And make the okay be really like bored. Out of your board, okay? Get it? Got it. Good. Fine. Let's go on to the next thing then. Okay. And then that's the way that that'll be the thread run through the whole lecture, I hope. So how many people here have ever had the experience of having some kind of a problem that really weighs them down? Okay? I hope everybody's okay. How many people have ever had a problem like, it's even gotten you the point of saying, why was I born? This problem is so horrible. I think I have the worst problem in the whole world ever had. Of course, this was my constant thought when I was growing up. And I used to think that the problems that I had were worse than anybody else in the world. Because nobody else in my whole classroom studied, but I studied really badly. I made an arrangement with the teachers in my class in middle school. And then the high school, don't call on me. Because I will do the work. I'll do really well on the test. I'll be your best student. Just don't call on me in the class. And that arrangement stayed for a long time. Harder to do that in a Spanish language class because it's all about speaking up. So I tried my best, but it was really hard. Joe Biden stutters, okay? How many people know that? I never knew that because he kept it hidden. And I go, of course, people who stutter try to hide it. How do you hide that? People used to tease him so much because he seemed to blurt out stuff that he wasn't even thinking about. Well, I'm here to tell you that he was thinking a lot. He was thinking about the next sentence he was about to say. And he was realizing, oh, that's the word I've stuttered on before. Is there something else I can say instead of that? And that's why so much of what he says seems to be off the mark. It's because he says stutterer, lifelong stutterer. And if you're a lifelong stutterer like me, you're always a couple minutes ahead of yourself in the conversation, surveying the words which you're about to come through your pipeline, analyzing the history of your association with that word. How many times have you stuttered on it? How many times have you succeeded? And then you sort of weigh whether or not you should say that word. And if you decide not to, then you have to think of a synonym really quickly. And the synonym might not be exactly the word that you want to say. This is incredibly occupying on the mind. So it gave me an advantage over other people because I tended to explore parts of my mind that for many people might do on it. Get it? Good. I'm going to move on to the next thing about it. A lot of stutterers don't shut up. I've had that experience because I've gone to some stutterer events and these workshops where people talk, talk, talk. No matter how horrible they sound. And I had a realization about that. I realized that I was born with a gene. And maybe a lot of other stutterers are born with a gene. It's a happy gene. I think it's almost the secret of the happiness that I have in life. Every good thing that I have in life is because of the fact that I'm a stutterer, not in spite of it. And I think I realized at an earlier time in my life that this happy gene enabled me to get over humiliation. How many people here have ever carried a grudge about something that humiliated you and it went on for days and days and days. You thought about it when you woke up in the morning. You thought about it when you went to sleep. It was like a gestalt, like a bubble that sat inside of you. I never had that happen because I would come home from school. I'd had three or four humiliating experiences. I would sit down at the piano and I would bang out tunes and then I'd start to sing along with it and realize, oh, I can carry a tune. I actually have a nice voice. And this was in spite of what happened to me that day at school. I'd get over it. I'd go to the fridge. I'd open up a ginger ale. I'd eat some pretzels and it was all gone. I was able to just let it go. And I've been able to do that for the whole life just because of an accident at birth. It came along with my stutter. Get it? Good. Enough about that. But I had to get out my voice in something and everything. I was going to be a writer so I wrote books and I published my first book at the age of 25. But that was written. It wasn't really my voice. It was a written voice. And then I met these mimes that I studied in mind. Oh boy. Let's do this. This is good. The first thing on your list of techniques there, they're called prems. I had to learn about five or six or seven or eight or nine techniques of mime and pantomime that led over into Shakespeare in order to become a better Shakespeare teacher. And the first thing on your list is what? What does it say? It says prems. That's enough. Prems is just a basic idea. Simply stated, the premise of the famous mime wall piece is there's a wall there. Everybody say that. There's a wall. Put your hand on the wall. And when you put your hand on the wall, you work it. You work it. You let go. The wall isn't there. A lot of people go, look, I'm doing a wall, but they forget that when you're not touching, you should be not touching. And when you're not touching, the hands are really limp, and then the fists are almost fists. So touch. But touch. To the side. Think for it really fast. I just set up an expectation and then gave you a deflection. We'll talk a little bit more about that. I learned how to do mime. I studied in Maine. I studied in Mexico. I took workshops. I became a silent mime. And I learned how to actually make a living as a silent mime going around to schools and doing mime shows about climbing ropes and blowing up a balloon and letting it go and doing walls and doing this sort of stuff. But was that my voice? It would satisfy me in a certain way, but it really wasn't my voice. My voice was still inside. I stayed inside for a long time. I was an adamant opponent of the Vietnam War. Just meant he needs a program. I was an adamant opponent at the Vietnam War and I wanted to burn my draft card and I wanted to go up in front of all these people on the Common in Boston and make a speech about it. But I didn't do it. Why not? Because I started because I was afraid because I would never ever speak in public at all. I actually took an advanced English class in high school and we had to give impromptu speeches every six weeks. I couldn't get out of it no matter how much I rationalized it with myself. I couldn't get out of it. So we had to stand up in front of the class and there was a microphone in front. You put a microphone in front of a stutterer and it's just disaster. And it was attached to a real, real tape recorder that squeaked and I went, whoa. And then there was a sound of the wall clock ticking. We had to talk for two minutes and for two minutes I could do nothing but just groan and mutter. I couldn't get a single word out for two minutes. Was this good for my self-esteem? And it didn't give me any idea that I could ever go up in front of people and speak. In fact, my fellow high school students from advanced English and Ms. Roth's AP English class in Valentine High School knew that I was doing this. They went slap their knee in Latin, not Peter. He would never be able to do that. How many people here have ever said, I would never do that? How many people have ever said, never. And then you end up doing this. It's so crazy. So opposing to the Vietnam War, opposing to the Vietnam War, I couldn't make the speech. I couldn't do really anything except go and move to a farm in Vermont where I stayed for about nine years and slowly, slowly I got relaxed and I realized I couldn't, for days and I didn't even try to talk. And once I went to Lassen for 10 days, I talked to the trees. I whispered to the moon. I leaned my head against the flag of the cow. While I was milking the cow, I would speak to her. And gradually my voice began to feel a lot more fluid. And I got totally immersed in my life at the farm. Hippie farm, not really, but that's what they called it, but it wasn't. It was a hard-working farm, an organic farm. We started at the farmer's market in Brown Road. It became the most successful one in the state. And everything was going on fine. I had a son at the farm. He was about three years old. And then in 1976, Shakespeare came to, came to live at the farm. We had a long process in which we would invite people to live at the farm. They were holding maybe 12 people or so. Oh, here's what I'm talking about. I might have not. I'm gonna toast it. That's my dog. A old pal. This book sold about 10,000 copies around the United States. I still get people who come up to me and say, did you ever toast? I did. That was a long, a long while ago. So things were working out okay. And then we had a while, we invited this person to come out from Boston to live at the farm, because he was a friend of the friend, and he brought Shakespeare along with him to the farm. And he said, we're gonna do Shakespeare. What a beautiful place. And you're gonna be in it. And I was like, no, I'll never do that. First of all, I don't talk in public. First of all, I don't prance around and do stuff like that. And I got a lot of work to do with it. We have a garden on the person who fixes the baler and the rake and make the hay for the cow and we're just starting to farmer's market. What I want to do is Shakespeare. Well, he said, this is John Carroll. Will you do a little part? I said, yeah. Okay. If I could sing my role. So I played a very low ranking fairy in a Midsummer Night's Dream. And a few lines to say, which I sang, are you not the that taunts the names of the village, the tree, skin milk, and sometimes labor in the word and make the breathless housewife turn was okay. And I found, oh, I'm not silent on stage anymore. I can actually hear my voice. And we was outdoors on Midsummer Eve and the full moon was rising and my voice was going all echoed between the barn and the hill. And it was nice. And the next year, he said, we're doing Shakespeare again. We're doing the tepest. And I want you to play Cali Bottom. In my memory, I actually asked if I could have that role. Have you ever had it happen that you have a friend that you suddenly meet and you don't know it, but that friend is going to be your best friend for the rest of your life. But what if your best friend said, have you ever had that happen? It's amazing when it happens. And you didn't even know it. And there's no way you can know it, but somehow that friend knows it and you invite them in. And that's what happened with Cali Bottom. Maybe you don't know the story. For some of you who might not know the story, this guy, Prospero, he's a magician. He's been Prospero. He's been Prospero. And he gets cast out of his kingdom by his brother and gets put on a rotten old boat with his little daughter Miranda and they're floating in the ocean off to sea. And everybody fully expects that he's going to drown. He's going to die. And he's crying and crying. She doesn't know what's so bad about that. So she's trying to cheer her up. Dad, it's all going to be okay. They land on the island and there's two beings living on the island. There's Ariel and there's Cali Bottom. And Ariel is invisible, but you can see Cali Bottom. And Shakespeare describes him as a savage and deformed slave. And in my view, having read the play, he's not savage and deformed at all. Everybody else at the play is. Because they're wearing their ruffs and their colors and they have their makeup and their spray and their wigs and stuff like that. And he's like, wow, down low. And I was so excited to play this role that if you look at pictures of the Brownmore Farmer's Market from the year 1977 and if you see pictures of my stall, I had dreads, great big hair. I was getting ready for the part. I made a buckskin loincloth. I'll be killed in a calf or with a bull. No, it was a steer that we had. And we put it for our food and I kept all the bones and I made myself a necklace on the bones and a buckskin loincloth. I did wear compression shorts on endurance. Well, I didn't want to suffer more humiliations. So, we built an island on Sweet Pond. And I had never really spoken in public before. I had sung a few lines a year before. And there I was and everybody else was nervous and for some reason I was filled with this ethereal calm, this cold-blooded calm, because I was so excited because I knew that my best new friend was with me and I was going to be okay and everything was going to be okay. My mother was in the audience. My mother had never heard me speak in public, ever. She'd been around when I had served with some of the worst experiences of my life. When I had begged, I was Jewish and I had begged, don't bar mitzvah me because I don't want to talk in public on the stage. I had had a confirmation at the age of 15 that I was having to speak two lines on stage and the 30 other members of my class were just, whoa, how's he going to do this? Take a tranquilizer. A milk towel in order to say from generation to generation to clear that greatness in it and throughout the graduate. It's still in my mind that you're branded there. So my mother had never heard me talk and I'm waiting backstage in my dark-skinned white cloth and my dress and we were on a pond so I had dogged my whole body with clay and was drying and starting to look really, really good. And Prospero says, come forth, you vile slave and I just came out and there were like 500 people on the hillside and I went, I must eat my dinner! This island is mine! My sycorax, my mother, which thou dost take from me but when thou came as first thou wouldst make much of me would give me water with berries in it and teach me how to name the bigger light and how the less, the less, that burn by day and night and then I loved thee I showed thee all the qualities in the aisle the fresh springs the brine bits the barren places the fertile constantly I had then saw all the charms of sycorax toads, beetles, bats lay on you for I am all the subjects that you have which first was mine own king and hear you sty me in this hard rock one you do keep from me the rest of my island and the way that the island was built on sweet pond and where the audience was stacked up there you could just hear the voice echoing and reverberating up to the house and beyond me to the hills and around and I was so intoxicated and it came from some confidence because I was beginning to master some techniques of lifting Shakespeare off of the page get it? come on it was like a revelation and I who had fought the idea that we would do Shakespeare on the farm and get in the way of our work on the farm I embraced it so totally that since then I've been involved in about 90 productions of Shakespeare I've only been in a couple of them myself I direct young people in Shakespeare I have my caps get you to the fundery and also the brawl row at the women youth theater and started three or four other funderies around the state because I think if it can happen to me if I could this is a problem we live a life of rhythm when we breathe everybody breathes when we blink our hearts beat things like that we have these incredible natural rhythms that go throughout our whole body and if you stutter or stammer you have no control over in training the rhythm that's natural to you and your breath and your heartbeat and your blinking and all those systems you can't get that involved in your speech something goes wrong in the inner ear it's a kind of autism I think because I think if you were to slice my brain please don't slice your brain if you did you would find that there are similarities to what happens with the brain that's autistic and I think the reason I think that is because I've been with good friends of mine who stutter really deeply and when I see them stutter they get so totally lost in themselves that they have the complete ability to pick up any social cue and it's even to the point of not even remembering that other people exist which is one of the hallmarks of autism so that's a crazy theory it's my theory I've talked to scientists about it and they say you're so completely wrong fine that's it I just eventually and you can read all about it in this book which is just out now the second edition they'll get a copy at the library but I actually did a reading at Bearpod last year and I wanted to support independent bookstores too as much as you support a library so you get your own copy but it's in there I left the farm and I entered into a life of theater and writing and I began to direct young people in Shakespeare and I was so lucky because I studied in all these different places with wonderful teachers and I assembled the list that you have there which is just a small list of partialists and some of my favorite techniques in theater which helped me to perform and which helped all the students within my work to live Shakespeare and then any other kind of drama that would have gone off the page you all understand this so far? are you with me? so we're going to try it we're just going to try it one of the techniques that I teach in my Shakespeare camp I don't think that I learned it from anybody else it could be but I don't remember I think it's my own it's called vector training and we're going to do some of that here tonight it's my theory that when a human being is involved in a critical conversation with somebody their arc or their narrative in their speech is not a complete straight line they might be trying to get somewhere but they turn and turn and turn as new thoughts occur as new inputs come to their mind and that they get distracted as they suddenly realize that they're talking to one person and this thing really ought to be aimed at this person over there or they suddenly remember something else that is very that could really help them to make their point so that they suddenly reach behind and put it into the conversation and this is all a part of what I call vector training I'm going to read you a speech out loud it's actually do you want me to have that? yeah, if you can now this is I have, there's another piece of paper here and on this piece of paper are two famous monologues by Shakespeare and one of them the first one we're going to do is from Make That and the second one is from Romeo and Juliet I always assume that there's some people in a room who do not know the complete plot I would play so I'll just say if we were to take some of the ideas that we were beginning to develop like premise and let me add a couple more right now everybody take a breath in everybody hold breath for a second let it out everybody look down then look up at me and see me and breathe in so that's four of them first look down then look up at me see me and breathe in and then breathe out so associating breath with the words on the Shakespeare page is the absolute first step the second step is looking to see whether there's any punctuation the third step would be looking to see whether there's any stage direction and very often in Shakespeare there's not there is some punctuation but it's my theory that in order to live on the Shakespeare page you have to add a lot of punctuation of your own a good director will help the actress that she's working with to actually figure out where is some other opportunity for some new punctuation in Macbeth Macbeth is a soldier and he's a duker or accountant whatever and he's a thinker and he's just proved himself amazingly in battle and so he's been preferred by the king what's the king's name Duncan and Macbeth has a wife what's her name Lady Macbeth right so Lady Macbeth and Macbeth have seen to it that Duncan gets invited to Macbeth's castle a picture of Macbeth's castle it's not a kind of castle like Windsor or something like that it's hewn out of rock and it's on the coast of Scotland and it's like 200 feet above ocean waves crashing into into the rocks it's cold there's no central heat there's no heat bumps there's barely even fireplace to keep the to keep your place warm because the forest there's some forest but they're getting chummed down there they burn some forest they burn some peat right but the castle's a freezer hole and at night you know people just go into their beds and they heat themselves up and stuff to sleep in and comforters and quilts and they try to last until the morning right there's some seats up here and so Macbeth is invited Duncan to come to Macbeth's castle because he's on his way somewhere else and Macbeth doesn't even go to the banquet for the king because he's already under the spell sort of of his wife sort of under the spell of him and they're both under the spell of these three sisters who have told him to push their ambition further and Macbeth can't even sit down to eat with his own king at the banquet because he's in the hall outside and they kill him tonight and they kill him tonight oh my god I feel awful about this I don't know what do you think he's my guest he's my king I should offer him hospitality not murder but he's gonna do it he's gonna do it and so he puts and his wife says don't worry there's guards there we'll offer them some a nice mile back and I'll put some sleeping sleeping drops in it so they'll fall asleep and not guard the king I don't know why Lady Macbeth is so into this doesn't do the deed herself but that would harm the clock so yeah, your hand is up um she says I would have done it had he not resembled my father exactly thank you so much give me five give me five thank you so much I forgot that did you all get that lady Macbeth later on says okay you do it I would have done it myself but he looks so much like my dad that I just couldn't do it thank you so put yourself there right and and it's the job of the director it's the job of the actor to guarantee that the audience for Shakespeare sticks around for one generation to the next and I have seen in my own theater where I teach Shakespeare that is absolutely guaranteed to scare the audience away you have two Shakespeare actors up here on stage talking to each other they don't broadcast love to the audience they don't hear everybody put your arms up this is one of my techniques it's called the projectional shelf you're not going to do this on stage when you act but you're going to pretend that your heart is as big as your whole wingspan and you're inviting people into your heart to warm you with your acting and with Shakespeare's text I've seen performances of Shakespeare I've even seen it at the instructor on Eva where it was so terrible and the direction was so awful and the acting was so terrible and the actors were just talking to each other that nobody in the audience was having a good time and yo I'm seeing Shakespeare has performed by the by the old Vic and this is incredible but it was terrible and we are job to ensure the continuation of the audience for Shakespeare and we do it by involving the audience completely and making our speeches so crystal clear and we do it by physicalizing the text so McBeth and we'll just read through the speech I'll do it first he says is this a dagger which I see before the handle toward my hand but the way that the actor should do it with the director's help is to see the the dagger right over the heads of the audience behind so he's about to do it and everybody breath in is this a dagger that I see before me the handle toward my hand come let me clutch thee so you got a in breath out breath emotion feeling so that the audience is like continually off balance and we can do this we'll read it through in unison all together and then we'll add the vector training you need to have in breath you need to have out breath I've added a whole lot of punctuation punctuation are really you know if you see a period to stop you can see an exclamation point to stop if you see a question mark to stop if you don't see any punctuation you don't stop or if you don't see any punctuation I've added a slash or two slashes or three slashes that's a stop and each one is an opportunity to breathe in or to breathe out and the purpose of your breathing in is to command the focus of the audience so they're with you with every word every thought so there's takes there's double takes there's triple takes let's read this all together okay read it with me is this the dagger which I see before me the handle toward my hand come let me touch see I cannot and yet I see these still heartfelt fatal vision central to the feeling every time that I put a slash in there there is a stop it's a vector change it's like you're suddenly trying to play and talking to it and it's really important to consider that you can interrupt at any point if there's a word that you don't understand or if there's a placement of word because our motto at the camp is we don't go on to the next line until everybody in the whole camp understands everything that this one person is saying okay so or a heartfelt but a dagger of the mind a false creation from the heat when you see an oppressive with the full ed you pronounce it as a syllable if it were just a possible ed then it's meant that the line stands to not say it and I gave you a little accent mark just to remind you of that but didn't I just say that the castle is really cold and wet and damp why would this brain be oppressive with heat we don't have any speculation fever or basically his guilt his emotion the fever of his emotion and the guilt and the fact that he's been storming around from like dinner time until midnight with this purpose in his mind and his brain is getting hotter and hotter and hotter that's the heat, it's not the heat from the castle so look again at a big in-breath I see in form as this but you don't quite draw you're about to draw and you give a deflection because now suddenly the knife the dagger he's seeing turns on its axis and it's now pointing down the hall even more specifically to where Duncan is king of sleeping thou marshalest be the way that I was going and such an instrument I was to use my eyes are in the pools of the other senses I see this still and all I play and touch drops of blood the only word I had to look up today was just me, was dutching and even though there's more meanings to that word like it means kind of upset and fury and brouhaha and stuff like that there is one one meaning of the word which is like a wooden handle so this is a very specific old fashioned dagger that has a wooden handle and now he's seeing it again so you can see now he's seen it three or four times already and this time it's got drops of blood which was not so before there's no such thing it is this explosion more on us and then I put four slashes in there there's a complete vector change in the speech now where big Beth is stopped and he's suddenly painting the picture of what's going on in the outside world and he says now over half the world nature seems dead somebody explain what that means now over half the world nature seems dead 20 or so 20 or so a lot everyone in half the world because it's night time here but it's only night time in half the world did Shakespeare know that the world was round and then there was night time on half the world while there's daytime in here clearly well maybe Shakespeare did but Macbeth sure did now over half the world nature seems dead and we can dream of views of the earth and sleep which now celebrates hell and heck and by dispensable the wolf who's howls his watch thus with the stealthy face towards his eye moves like a ghost there's a lot of metaphor going on here he's sort of picturing in his own mind the graphic image of himself stealing down the hall on the stone hallway floor towards the chamber where Duncan is sleeping about the darkness in the hall and he's associated with the darkness outside and he's thinking there about how wicked deeds happen at night and at night you also hear the howling of the wolf and this watch it doesn't mean the watch that he's wearing like that it's sort of an economical watch like the watch you ring a bell every hour to let people know what time at night it is and he's saying what we do is we hear the wolf howling who's howls his watch he moves like a ghost and now he's invoking he's speaking directly to the earth and says here in not my sess which with for fear neither his stones nor my wearer that's so cool because Macbeth lives in this place in the master bedroom to Duncan and so he knows exactly which stones rattle a little bit in his setting and which stones are firm and he knows exactly where to step but he doesn't want any sound to wake up the king and the only sound that could possibly wake him up at this point because the watchman is the creek of his footstep he's invoked the wolf outside because the wolf is so stealthy and walks through the night so stealthily get it mindless going to the end of the speech and he says while I thread he lives words to the heat of the deeds and that's a line from that's like a thought from another Shakespeare play what other Shakespeare plays is that remind you of Hamlet Hamlet definitely was often saying well I'm going to do this but I'm not going to do it yet so for act one, two, or three, or four he's just speaking, he's very wordy until he actually does the deed words to the heat of deeds a bell rings he hears it ding, ding I go and it is done with a bell in a bite scene hearing your heart thumping for it is a bell does anybody have any observation or comment about the speech thus far is it everything completely understandable okay in order for an actor to really learn this then this is what I apply what we call vector training so anybody who wants to and I hope everybody wants to you just stand up and now you're going to say it out loud but now and still it's completely not threatening nobody's going to hear you you're going to go at your own rate of speech to us it'll sound like a cacophony because there won't be any rhythm to it all go at your own rate and with your new total understanding of the speech and every time you come to a vector change either it's punctuation and Shakespeare put in or it's punctuation and somebody who actually recorded the play for Shakespeare put in or it's one of the slashes that I added every time that you do that just turn your body so that your the muscle memory of your body will record how the changes in the speech work and make a violent so make a violent change with every slash every punctuation every stop and give me a lot of breath and start oh wait a second I'll sit down a second this is amazing because because another thing we teach is alright Lady Macbeth is not there there's a servant there the servant is going oh my god there's this this vibe tonight I don't like it at all and Macbeth says go tell my wife to to strike upon the bell and the servant is like alright I should really go go go and so I would ask the actress give me 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 ideas that Macbeth could do before he sends a single word of this speech because I went up to Leucord and taught the one-axe there and the one-axe that the students had written were so good and there were like 50 of them and we could never get through them so what we did was we just read a dozen of them and thought about give me some actions that would happen before a single word and send so give me some ideas what could happen yeah she would probably check is this open actually gone am I alone right he could look two or three times and make sure that that servant when he sent away is actually gone great what else the emotional woman's face would change like he might be nervous or like he might like have an expression of okay I guess I actually have to do this right you could see the play of emotion so for this case he hasn't stepped he hasn't stepped down all yet and in fact he will not take a step until he's someone in the speech what else he might be pacing back and forth right he might be pacing back and forth yeah because you know there's this vector going down the hall and there's this parlor outside where he can be looking down the hall to make sure that those the watch people are asleep what else could he do he wipes the sweat off his palm yeah wipes the sweat the fever in his brain comes to his palms too he wipes it down there wipes the sweat he could change his mind I'm not going to do this and just take that almost to the point where the other things he's going to change his mind and then come back to give them a deflection he could reach out maybe unlike the funnery which has no costumes no props and no set we're performing this on a stage maybe there's a table and maybe there's a bottle and maybe there's a glass and maybe he could shake it and pour himself himself a drink like some hard cider and drink it you know anything anything to postpone the inevitable which is walking down the hall any other ideas what else does he have a dagger on his person yes he does have a dagger oh I happen to have one a dagger half the dagger to make sure half the dagger to make sure it's there double check it maybe he might pull out his hair pull out his hair so this is so amazing because you're directing the scene with like a 14 year old who's playing who has a starring role for the first time at the time of her life and you share ideas back and forth about what he can do to prepare for lifting the words off the page you know when I was a kid and I studied my parents sent me to psychiatrists then they sent me to a psychoanalyst not the right thing for somebody like me the shit is sent me to Shakespeare there wasn't a Shakespeare they should have sent me to northern harmony to sing but there was no northern harmony in the token notes but sharing ideas with kids back and forth to figure out you get amazing ideas there's a lot to do before you actually speak so think of that now we'll stand up alright and now at your own rate turning yourself every time you have a vector change a punctuation change a breath in a breath out let me hear you don't all speak in unison and go so does that before I go on to the next does anybody have any quick reaction or feedback to the way that was or Phil? I'm a little confused I should have said earlier but I don't know this one Shakespeare's place why does he want to fill the game? because he's had the experience of meeting these three weird sisters to call weird not meaning strange but weird the sisters of fate that have told him that he is going to be king and rather than just wait for the natural courts and events to take place he decides to take the person who was organized kill the king so that he will be king and also makes a good story things don't work I'd like to point out that maybe you know which is knew that if as I told him this he wouldn't choose to do this and he said and told him it would not have happened at all you know so like I said I've connected maybe 75 or more Shakespeare collections with young people and some of my older friends have asked me would you do an adult Shakespeare sometime and I'm like well I wouldn't do that so much more fun to exchange ideas with young people and to hear really intelligent stuff like like that come forth thank you any other response or reaction to this anyway I can tell that I can hear even though it's you know that you were really understanding what you were saying the idea is that every actor in Shakespeare has to understand every single word you're saying on an emotional level on an intellectual level we say that we teach our camp under the sign of the form and that's a quadrant dividing a page into four sections the heart and the mind and the body and the voice and our job every day is to teach the students in a way that helps them to grow in all four areas the heart, the mind and the body and the voice obviously when we go out on stage to perform this the speech they're not going to vector change like that but their bodies remember the physicalization of the changes and then once we start to rehearse we can say okay here we have a we have a take a double take a triple take he says no there's no such thing and he can from his eyes look again and every time he looks he's not expecting to see it but he sees it and there's a breath in again and every time he looks he's there's one time that he can look fearful slowly hoping not to see it and yet there it is and playing with breath with focus getting keeping the audience on the edge of the sea that's going to guarantee that they come back to see more shakes get it? good just a question about this vector changes when I see this there's a punctuation there's single slashes and there's many slides what how are you changing vector on every single of those? yes if I have more time of course this is just a lecture and I don't have time to speak too deeply but when I have like six slashes like that after he says there's which was not so before I want people to think just like I thought about what are all the things that Macbeth could do before he speaks what are the things that Macbeth could do in between that thought and this next thought which is kind of just so different there's no such thing he could stop he could walk back he could look and see people just work on that and if there's five slashes it means there's no hurry there's time we don't have to rush from one thought to the next from one word to the next I can't stand Shakespeare where people are just showing off they are intelligent they are spouting stuff that just rolls off the top not caring whether the audience is with them or not Shakespeare production is a slow train leaving a station and it breaks my heart if somebody is left behind the platform where the train pulls away so if you were playing that role and I was directing it you would just look how many what is the first thought these are my slashes and I might take this bare speech and do it again and puncture it again it helps there's a speech on the other side and for all of you who don't know the plot of Romeo and Juliet well anyway just to say that Juliet and Romeo have one lovely marriage night one wedding night it's legal they've been married by the friar but Romeo has been banished or if he's scared in a different way he's been banished and so they do they only have this one night together and who knows when they will ever meet again it says Romeo and he jumps off the balcony and runs away from in order to mantle up just in any time before the watch is set and Juliet would be okay with that cause she's young she knows that she'll have a chance to get together again except that a few minutes after after Romeo leaves her father bursts in and says you're gonna get married to the to the county Paris and she's like don't you give me a week now please please and she's like no we're getting married and so she runs to them she asks if she can go to Schrift to confession and runs to see friar Lawrence and friar Lawrence gives her a potion right because he does a medicine a herbal medicine and he mixes up some stuff and gives her a potion that will make her appear like dead but she'll actually only be in a deep sleep for 42 hours he knows exactly how many hours and she'll appear almost no pulse almost no breath everybody will think she's dead and that gives him time to hear about the fact that she's dead to hold the funeral to get her into the to the tomb and to send word to Romeo and match her to come so that when 42 hours later Juliet wakes up in the tomb hey you're in I have a horse for you and let's right away to match her up and everything's gonna be fine so she gets this this sleeping a medicine from the friar and this scene she's gonna be all alone about to take it and now you know the drill okay so the other techniques that are teaching here another way to get the audience involved in such a way that they're gonna become a reliable dependable audience for Shakespeare is to know that every scene if it's an important scene it should have escalation and I was skiing today and the woods thinking about how best to describe that escalation you think about a wet snow and you're up on the hill and you pack it and you roll that snowball down this long steep hill and it builds up right it builds up inside it builds up in volume it builds up in bounce it builds up in loco-ness it builds up in metaphor it just comes rolling down the hill faster and faster and at the end you're not gonna want to just see it flattened out onto a flat place you want to see it smash into something right that's called a pay off that escalation has to have a pay off and at least if it doesn't you want to see what's called a deflection so this whole scene of Julia by herself is an escalation towards a pay off and we'll get that at the end big time but before that there's four or five deflections and the director has to tell has to work with the actress how many how many times can we bring this cup to the lip and be about to take it and everybody in the audience thinks she's gonna do enough and then put it away and it's a famous it's really a famous comic routine if you're old enough to watch Jackie Gleason or Sid Caesar or Art Carney or any one of those people on Black and White TV they gave you deflections all of the time when something was about to happen and then it didn't that was funny and then it's about to happen so we're going to see how many times in this scene in this speech that that'll happen and then finally at the end we have the opportunity to place the actual drinking of this in our own way at our own time it doesn't have to happen exactly where the first reading of the text might indicate to you that it's gonna happen so let's read this all together once do a stage whisper when she calls for the nurse because halfway into calling the nurse she already decides that she's not going to because she wants to go alone so so it's night time it's the night before her wedding it's just a few hours before her father who's been up all night is gonna come in to wake her up and to bring her to Mary Paris and she says to her mother who's out of the door all together good night farewell okay don't forget to breathe breathe in breathe out I'll call her back again to comfort me so what she's doing here might be seen come vile that's the personification she's come vile and this is the first time when you see that slash there without five slashes at the light come vile and then what if this mixture doesn't work at all shall I be married then tomorrow morning no And she personifies the daggers and says, why not that? So she knows if this doesn't work, she's going to kill herself. And now, that's there. She's safe. She knows that she has a backup plan, picks up the vial, and what if it was the poison, which the friar suddenly had a minister to help him did? Lest it is married, maybe she's just honored because he married even more of a ceremonial. I will not entertain so bad a thought. Number three, what if, when I'm late into the tune, I wait for the time that Romeo comes to redeem me. Well, there's a very important point. Shall I not let him be cycled in the vault to whose foul mouth the opal some air breathes in, and that their guise strangle, where my Romeo comes? That they're in the vault, where there this many hundred years does the bones of all my caring ancestors are packed? Isn't that amazing that Shakespeare used the word packed? Packed bones. There's so many generations of capitalists in there that the bones have been pushed aside, and more bones have been packed in. But the latest bones that are in there are still attached to festering flesh and tippled, who's just killed. He's not bones. He's flesh. He's festering flesh. We're bloody tippled, yet but green in earth, light's festering in his shadow. Then, when I'm not so early waking, escalate, escalate, escalate, what with loopholes and smells and shrieks like mandricks torn out of the earth, in harmony with all these hideous fears, I'll never be playing with my father's joys, and pluck the mango-tibble out of his shroud and indiscriminate with some great caveman's bone as with a clogged dash out my desperate brains, and then big breath in. He thinks I see my cousins go seeking out Romeo, that this bitch is fucking up on a rapier's point. Stay into it. Stay. Romeo, I come. This is what I want to drink to thee. And I was thinking today about this a lot, and she could say this, and then drink it, and then with staggering jagged breath, do I drink to thee in the dark sea? You don't have to. There's no instruction, there's exactly where in those two lives she has to drink. It's completely up to you. So why don't we practice the vector changes? OK, everybody, help out. And again, do this speech that same way on your own time. Remember, don't forget to breathe. Breathing is really important. Breathing is your greatest weapon against porcelain. It's your greatest bond with the audience. Because if you give a nice out-breath, a breath in, the audience will sit up. If you give an out-breath, the audience will relax. Breath is your best tool. So go, OK? Yes. Watch what you do here. Or feedback or some insight about anything? I was wondering, you can do it like she takes little sips all the way and she's getting a little more poofy and seeing things and then it will be fantastic. Yes. But I've never seen anybody do that. That would be really fun to try. But keeping in mind that the whole team has to escalate toward this incredible finish. Oh, we're nearly there. She gets a little awkward. When I taught this play at Governor's Institute of the Arts, they don't let the students off campus. But I said, can I just take this one person off campus just for an hour? And he and I went to the graveyard that was near where the Institute took place. I filmed him. I filmed him wrapped in chains, which I got at the tractor shed at Castleton State College. And I filmed him coming up behind the grave, walking. And I didn't tell anybody in the Shakespeare class that I was going to do this. And suddenly when she was doing that, I projected him like 30 foot tall. And you know, on the back of the stage, and the audience was going like that. And she was giving a line. She's like, what are they doing? And then she looked, and she went, oh, look at that. So cool, so, so great. Does anybody have any reaction to the idea here of breath? And now breath can help you out here? Anybody can, aren't you going to give it that, yeah? I mean, for me, I mean, sort of like what we said before, this speech, she's just getting more and more hysterical, I feel. So her breathing has become quickal and shallowal until, like, by the time she's nearly hyperventilating. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that in the beginning, goodnight, model. Oh, should I call them back? And then at the end of the voice, yeah. She's in this like panic, almost like panic attack, where she's like, what if I, what if I would track with the corpses and the bones and I'd go insane there? And that's, yeah. And she brings, and with the help of the director, she brings the audience right to that point. Everybody, by the time that she's finished that speech with the escalation, with all of the deflections, we put in to the payoff at the end. Everybody should be so with Julie at that point that they completely feel what's going on. And I never have the chance to really, really use breath and focus in that way. If I had been trained in it from an early age, I probably would have left my stage fright and my stutter way behind at a much an earlier age. It's my feeling that this kind of work not only doesn't lift Shakespeare off the page, but it lifts your voice out of a certain place where you're routinely accustomed to having it and putting it in a whole different place, which you could use to your advantage. I had farmers in the Northeast Kingdom come up to me and say, you know, my boy John, he spoke up at town with me and supported the school. And he would never have done that if it weren't for the funnery. And with the funnery, in Brattleboro, I gave the role of laertes to a girl and she gave her some fencing lessons. And she fought on that who was also a female to a duel to the death. And she went on to become the class speaker at the Coast Guard Academy and her mother said, if it weren't for Shakespeare or for the father, she would never have done that, had that chance. Yes? I was forgetting to do the breathing until you reminded us. And I can see just how that connects with the audience, putting myself in the audience, that that pause, that audible that you can see, you can hear the person, the speaker is pausing and you see it. And if you're, if you have trouble with Shakespeare and other things like that, where you're trying to keep them engaging, you know, you're moving in concentration, that that is your, you have this momentary pause to get back into it. You know, I don't know about the first time that I ever saw Shakespeare perform really well live, I gravitated right to the breath. Oh my God, look at how they're breathing. You can see the chest even, you can see the breath, you can hear the breath, and it's so, it's such an important part of getting the audience on your side. It's so important to me as a stutterer for so many years of my life, that it's my ambition and maybe the Vermont community, not the community, but the Vermont humanities council will help me with this. I wanna do a Shakespeare camp for stutterers. And I'm gonna add the t-shirt instead of saying get thee to the funnery, we'll say get thee to the fa fa funnery. And there will be a complete, a money-back guarantee on that at the end of two weeks, the actress, no matter how bad their speech impediment and everybody has a speech impediment, that's all the lecture I can give. But no matter how bad it is, they will have a successful, they'll succeed in their part because of the voice training, the vector training, the focus training. And it's also easy for me to give a money-back guarantee because between you and me, we don't charge that much. For the camp. If you know any other self-employed artists in the state, we're not in it for the money. We're in it for the reward. And so to give somebody a money-back guarantee, even though I know that I know that whatever asked for, it sounds a lot like Vermont, but it's not. Speaking of reward, it's been really rewarding for me to be with you tonight. And to get you, I can see the gears in your brain's working. I hope it's been that much rewarding. For you all, as it's been for me, it's been a hard time to settle in. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Welcome. It's one of your applause first. Yeah. Let me do it. Okay. You mentioned earlier how funny it could be when things don't come as expected. Uh-huh. There are other, I had a great high school English teacher who pointed out that Shakespeare sometimes makes something funny happen just before something hard. Right? I'm just sort of blowing you off. Okay? And I bet that there's the drunken guards. Yeah. Okay, it's a comedy scene, not many ghosts have ever heard of it. So is Juliet intended to be funny? Because it's sort of, it's almost a cliche that she sort of did see, you know? She's gonna take the boys and go, she's not. Well, the several times she backs up could be almost a comedy scene. I've seen some productions of Romeo and Juliet where it's funny from the get-go until after the scene. There's so many laughs in there. And I think that's, I definitely think that's what Shakespeare has in mind. With the knocking at the gate, I'll just tell you that right before they noticed that the king has been killed and there's blood everywhere. Instead of just having a porter wake up in the famous porter scene, I had an 18-year-old young woman who was in the cab dressed in a leopard skin on a two-piece, right? And they were, she was in bed with the porter. And the porter was completely drunk in the sleep. And it was she who heard the knocking. And so there's the knocking and she just elbows him, knock, knock. And he's like, knock, knock. And then finally, finally he wakes up and he tries to kiss her and she says, no, no, I've had your chance. And then once we got that going, as a premise, as a basic idea, there were so many new funny things in that speech and I challenge you to look at that and picture that, that it's two people. And see all the different ways. We didn't change a word in the scene, but it was funny. But that's a very good point. How could you point to the same thing? Yeah, and that's a very good point. We have ways to get the audience on our side with breath and focus, everybody. As I said before, when the person on stage breathes out, everybody in the audience breathes out and when you can work with that and play it out. Anyway, thank you very much for having me. Thank you.