Louder. Faster. Funnier – A Directors Afternoon with his Funniest Friend
When I first read Steven Moffat’s The Unfriend, it was like spending an afternoon with an old friend, my funniest friend. The time flew by. I could hear the play from the first line. I found myself laughing out loud and even talking back at the pages. “I can’t believe she just said that” and “Oh no, don’t go there.”
As I now prepare for the start of rehearsals, I have been thinking a lot about my first encounter with the play and how to capture what I heard in my head in real space and time. I have been working with a fantastic team of designers on how to best set the stage for one laugh after another. In a way, comedy is more science than art. The scenic design process has been less about creative whimsy and more about architecture and logistics:figuring out the amount of time it should take to get from the top of the stairs to the telephone for that one joke, and where the front door should be in relationship to the kitchen island for that other joke.
My primary job when staging a play is to create movement in service of the language. The physicality needs to amplify the rhythms and the tempos of the text. We often joke in the theatre that the most useful suggestions that a director could make are: Louder. Faster. Funnier. In my experience faster can be the greatest challenge, to have the play travel at the speed of life.
We all know people who choose their words carefully, but for the most part people speak in thoughts, not in words. Actors however have to speak in words. They must memorize a play word by word and can only move as fast as memorization allows. And in comedy an added syllable here or a couple of inverted words there can absolutely kill a joke. Speaking in words is typically slower than speaking in thoughts, so the rehearsal process needs to facilitate that progression, that acceleration. Only then are we moving at the rate of thought like we do in our day-to-day lives. So, by opening night the play is traveling at the speed of life.
Enough for today’s lecture, back to spending an afternoon with my funniest friend:
When I stop to think about it, half the fun of sharing a joke is the actual sharing of it. For me there is as much joy in seeing the delight of the joke-teller as there is in the joke itself. I hope audiences can experience both the delight of Steven Moffat’s hilarious comedy and our delight in sharing it.