Artist Interview: Actor Joanna Liao
Hear from the performer taking on the central role of Viola in the Lantern’s production of TWELFTH NIGHT
After enjoying Joanna Liao’s nimble and crystal-clear performance as Viola (and her in-disguise alter ego, the young man Cesario) in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night — onstage at the Lantern May 18 through June 18, 2023 — you may be surprised to learn that she is not a Shakespeare specialist. “This is basically my fourth Shakespeare — that’s about it!” she says, having worked on a post-college summer stage production of Love’s Labour’s Lost and two previous Lantern Shakespeare productions (A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2011 and the as the titular Kate in The Taming of the Shrew in 2015).
But though Shakespeare’s work does not dominate Liao’s resume, she is comfortable with his text. “I do find that if you are a text actor as I am — I am very much a playwright’s actor — I don’t find it radically different,” Liao says. “Learning your lines in Shakespeare versus regular things — they’re exactly the same to me. You just learn your lines. If it’s a decent playwright, that is exactly the same in every play. But I do observe all of the commas and the periods and the punctuation, because he is the playwright who wrote it!”
When asked what being “a playwright’s actor” means to her, Liao talks excitedly about language and process. “I was always very faithful to the text. I was never one of those actors who wanted to change things. What I like about being an actor is being in somebody else’s world and not being me for a while. So, I 100% want to create the world that they created,” Liao says. “I want to put it up the way they imagined it. And so, I was always very faithful and very attentive to things like punctuation and the exact phrasing of lines. A lot of times actors will put it in their own grammar, and I’m like, ‘No! There’s so much information in the [playwright’s chosen] grammar!’”
This attentiveness to a playwright’s vision led to much work in new play development for Liao. “When I moved to New York, I got into a new play circuit. I worked at the Lark a lot and I was at New Dramatists constantly. For a couple of years, I had my fingerprints on every good script, because it was so fun and I really got a great sense of how useful I was in that situation.” Liao enjoyed using her skills to help playwrights hear when their text was working — and when it needed tweaks. “You could feel when they were like, ‘Yes, that was it! That is right.’ I also felt that if there was language that I was having a particularly hard time with, if there was something I was stumbling over, that was also crucial information for the playwright.”
That grounding in text and careful attention to word choice and punctuation is a huge benefit to an actor tackling Shakespeare — particularly a role like Viola, where the character spends much of the play in disguise as someone else, requiring an actor to clearly portray two personas of the same person. For Liao, that meant taking a physical approach first, rather than a text-based one. “I’m usually an inside-out person. The character physicality usually just arrives on me at some point. It’s not something I build. Sometimes in rehearsal I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m now in their body. This is the way that they move,’” Liao says. “But for this, since I was supposed to be just like [Viola’s brother] Sebastian, I really started from watching Tyler [Elliot, playing Sebastian] walk around the room. So, I just started from there — that when I was Cesario I was going to stand very widely and with my feet turned out, and that Viola was not. So it’s an unusual process for me, because it did start with a very specific physicality.”
Cesario had one more important physical distinction for Liao: “Of course, man spreading. You have to man spread!”
Just as her physical work informed her interpretation of Viola, Liao’s extensive work in contemporary plays also colored her take on Shakespeare’s centuries-old heroine. Liao brings a playful delight to Viola, allowing her to revel in the freedoms and complications of her disguise, in a way that many other interpretations don’t. “The very first time I read to myself the monologue with the ring, I just heard ‘I am the maaaan,’” Liao says, emphasizing the colloquial compliment version of the phrase, rather than the purely gendered. “It was the contemporary language of ‘Yes! Score!’ And so that’s where that started to spill out—immediately I heard ‘I am the man. How cool am I? I have the best catch in the county, me!’ And then I was like, ‘Oh, she’s going to laugh a bunch.’”
All that physical and textual work takes a toll, though, and when asked what her favorite moment in the play is, Liao has a perfectly valid answer: “When Fabian [played by Damon Bonetti] gives me a massage. We rehearsed that moment a lot and I was like, ‘Yeah, I think we need to rehearse it some more. Take it back. Oh, you want to go through this fight scene again? I think we need to start from a little further back.’”
Liao’s work in the rehearsal room laid the groundwork for her Viola, but as with all plays — and comedies in particular — actors need an audience to help them hone their performances. “A lot of the pacing was worked out slowly over the week of previews,” Liao says. “A lot of this play is prose, so it’s not as dogmatic about its rhythm. But also, I just feel like the only way to make a lot of this language legible to the audience is to completely change the rhythm and make the rhythm of the language inform their ear in a way — not to just be like, ‘This is the keyword in the phrase and this is the pentameter,’ but that you phrase it in a contemporary way that they get. I am unafraid to take breaths in the middle of the line, which purists will be horrified by — ‘You’re breathing in the middle! There’s not a period there!’”
The audience was particularly helpful in developing the moments when Viola takes stock of her situation and speaks about her dilemma alone onstage. “Especially soliloquies, they’re not just interior — I’m talking about it with [the audience],” Liao says.
Ultimately, Liao hopes that forging such a relationship with the audience will relay some important messages about gender, empathy, and self-worth: “I hope that if there’s anybody who comes who is still concerned about whether it changes you intrinsically as a human being — or changes your worth — to wear different clothing or cut your hair differently or walk in a different way, that they can learn that, well, it doesn’t really make any difference.”
Lantern Theater Company’s production of Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare is onstage May 18 through June 18, 2023, at St. Stephen’s Theater. Visit our website for tickets and information.
