Lights Rise on…Gary Logan
Voice plays a crucial role in Lights Rise on Grace. As the three central characters navigate their histories with the audience, putting words to memories both joyful and painful, the audience soon realizes that not only is the content of their utterances important, but the form, as well. This is where Gary Logan, director of the Academy for Classical Acting and distinguished voice, text, and dialect coach comes in. We are very lucky to have Gary on board as our voice coach for this production and thrilled to have the chance to ask him a few questions about voice and language work, and the dialectician’s take on Lights Rise on Grace.
Can you tell us about your background as a dialect coach?
I’ve always been attracted to language arts and really took to the actor training I had in dialects and ear-training. I was fortunate enough to have studied with Edith Skinner, who, as one of the greats when it comes to this sort of work, encouraged me to go further into the world of voice and speech. I wasn’t actually training to become a dialects person, per se; I was an actor. But when the Denver Center Theatre Company reached out to me over twenty years ago for a particular project, I began what was to become a long and fulfilling career in language arts in theatre, from an actor’s point of view.
What was the most challenging aspect of the dialect work for Lights Rise on Grace?
Definitely the Mandarin Chinese spoken by each of the three actors in the show was the most challenging. Usually, I teach actors how to shift sound in order to speak a different dialect or accent (dialect refers to the variance of sounds within — in this case — English, and accent refers to the variances heard when someone from another language speaks English). In Lights Rise on Grace, not only do the actors have to speak various dialects for the many different characters they play, they also have to speak Mandarin Chinese. My job was to teach them how to convincingly speak in another tongue altogether. Another challenge to that task was that Chinese is a tonal language, unlike English. Specific pitch intonation of words matters more in Chinese than in English, and that’s something the actors had to learn, almost like music.
How did you begin the process of coaching for Grace? Was there preparation that happened before getting in a room with the actors?
Someone — a native Mandarin Chinese speaker — had to record the Chinese spoken in the play. I then listened to it and transcribed it into the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet). Fortunately, the actors had a working knowledge of IPA, making my job a whole lot simpler. Recordings (by the native speaker) were circulated to everyone, so we were always working from the same source. Then, once in the studio with the actors, we worked on resonance placement, tone focus, and the myriad different shapes of sound. After that, it was about making them sound conversational, as if they had spoken it their whole lives.
Is there a special significance to voice and dialect work in an international city like DC?
Well, I have to especially keep on my toes working in a city like DC. The audiences are very smart, very often multicultural and multilingual, and very accustomed to hearing different languages, or different dialects and accents. They can hear (or at least discern at a gut level) the ring of truth in an actor’s attempts at various dialects. My job is to make them sound convincing, and to give the actor enough to feel confident that they are 1) being believed, and 2) not offending anyone with mockish stereotypes.
Your book The Eloquent Shakespeare: A Pronouncing Dictionary for the Complete Dramatic Works has become a staple for companies producing Shakespeare. Are there lessons that companies producing contemporary works can glean from it as well?
Although The Eloquent Shakespeare concerns itself mainly with words found in Shakespeare, it is also a reference for thousands of words commonly used in contemporary plays. That being said, it provides pronunciations in what is referred to as a Standard American Stage Dialect, so really, when it comes to contemporary works, it would be handy only to get an idea of where the “base camp” is. The world of the (contemporary) play would be the ascent onto other trails, as it were.
From a dialectician’s perspective, what’s your favorite moment in Lights Rise on Grace?
Anytime I forget that I am watching a play and fall into the world of these peoples’ lives is a favorite moment; and I’m happy to say, Lights Rise on Grace (and the actors in it) does that for me throughout. Every dialect is there, yes, to distinguish one character from another, but mostly they are there to transport me and the rest of the audience to another world. And these three actors do an exceptional job of doing that.
Gary Logan is the director of the Academy for Classical Acting (ACA) in Washington, D.C., an MFA program under the auspices of Michael Kahn and the Shakespeare Theatre Company and The George Washington University. He is also a voice, text, and dialect coach for the Shakespeare Theatre Company.
