Behind the Scenes: Filming MOLLY SWEENEY
Lantern Artistic Director Charles McMahon on bringing theater alive safely onscreen
Lantern Theater Company’s newly filmed production of Molly Sweeney, streaming January 22 through March 7, 2021, was a new endeavor for the company — rehearsing, designing, and producing a play all within strict Covid-19 safety parameters. This production was also the Lantern’s first project filmed under a SAG-AFTRA contract. Artistic Director Charles McMahon notes, “Making Molly Sweeney was all the more challenging by the external environment of these Covid-19 times, with particular attention to our moral and legal mandates to keep cast and crew safe during rehearsals and filming, including shooting most of the film through a carefully engineered air barrier.”
In addition to these safety precautions, the shift to film opens up possibilities and presents challenges for a theatrical piece like Molly Sweeney. In this post, McMahon discusses the move to film and how the immediacy of theater can be achieved in this new medium.
In making theater, you can rely on the audiences’ natural ability to decide — mostly unconsciously — what to look at on stage. Their field of vision is broad and encompasses the whole performance space, and their focus is largely self-determined. Audiences scan the stage constantly. They may not even be aware of this action, but nevertheless it is a crucial part of our experience of live theater.
In film, the filmmaker is compelled to make these decisions on the viewers’ behalf because the screen is a frame that holds limited and specific information. At its best, a film contains a series of carefully chosen and well-composed frames, much the way that a painter might choose a perfect perspective for an image, knowing that it must be suggestive of information and action that lies outside the frame. In practice, the great challenge for the filmmaker is to offer a variety of perspectives that mimics the natural movement of the live audience’s attention from one subject to the next.
In both theater and film, the director seeks to focus the viewer’s attention in ways that enhance rather than diminish the intensity of the dramatic moment. Typically our attention is refreshed each time we take a breath, and our eyes may shift slightly from one subject to another in these moments of refreshment. In theater, we often work to coax the audience to remain trained in fascinated attention on a specific character at a tense dramatic moment.
This cycle of perceptual refreshment is innate and necessary to keep us emotionally engaged in the experience of the story unfolding. In making Molly Sweeney, we have sought as much as possible to keep the feel of continuous live performance — while using the necessary techniques of filmmaking to recreate that experience, employing critical editing techniques sparingly in an effort to mimic the audiences’ natural flow of attention in live performance, focused on the rhythm of the language and the breathing of the actors in the scene.
As a theater director — particularly in the Lantern’s unusual venue with non-traditional playing angles — I have often made use of staging techniques that I have stolen from film when I want to emphasize a dramatic moment. I may try to draw the audience’s attention sharply from one part of the stage to a more distant part of the stage. Even the minuscule muscular effort to shift the eyes quickly and for the ears to adjust to a suddenly louder or softer volume of speaking can deliver a mild shock that serves to punctuate and enhance a critical dramatic moment. I would go so far as to say this is a characteristic Lantern directing technique that I have helped to develop with our core directors over the past 25 years.
In film, this punctuation can be easily affected through fast cuts, visual and sound effects, moving from a static to a moving shot — all techniques unavailable to us in live theater. In this season’s filmed version of our annual presentation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, our filmmaking team was able to capture the boisterous and kinetic quality of Anthony Lawton’s performance through subtle editing that underscored the action and worked seamlessly with the rhythm and narrative flow of the piece.
In Molly Sweeney, the challenge was a very different one. Playwright Brian Friel is giving voice to the very subtle and internal experience of his characters. There is no external visual representation of the rich and complex worlds inhabited by Molly Sweeney, Frank Sweeney, and Mr. Rice. Nonetheless, as with any great storytelling, we the audience are inevitably invited to create our own visual world of the events described by the characters. In this case, the work of the filmmaker must be very subtle and delicate. The goal is to allow the story to grow and fill out in its own time and rhythm, to keep the eye engaged, and to keep the technical work of the filmmaking from intruding on the experience of the story.
Molly Sweeney is driven entirely by internal experience processed through memory, and meaning is derived from the reexamination of those past events. It is about deep and vital truths of our humanity being revealed by the characters’ own honesty with and about themselves.
To bring the story alive, the work of the actor changes in the move from stage to film as well. In film, what the audience experiences as a smooth flow of action over roughly 90 to 120 minutes is in fact filmed in very brief segments and typically in no apparent chronological order. Of course, plays are performed in one long flow of action.
Thus the art of the film actor demands the ability to summon and recall the emotional pitch of scenes that were shot days ago or to imagine those that will be shot days later and to modulate their performance on any given day accordingly. Or, on a given day, to repeat the exact same performance multiple times so that it can be captured from multiple angles that can be edited together into a seamless whole.
By contrast, the art of the stage actor demands the ability to absorb hours’ worth of material and actions and to perform the whole story in a single event from start to finish. Although both film acting and stage acting are acting, they are fundamentally different skills. The precision of the film actor in being able to create and recreate minute perfection in a short scene is a wholly different skill than the power of the stage actor to give an entire and emotionally resonant performance of several hours in “a single take,” eight times a week.
In our Molly Sweeney, all three actors — Geneviève Perrier, Ian Merrill Peakes, and Anthony Lawton — have spent most of their careers on the stage, but all have film experience, which was of great value given the necessity to shoot out of sequence. In a live performance, all three actors would be on stage for the entire performance. In our production, health and safety requirements demanded that the film be shot in pieces and with only a single actor present on our sound stage at a time.
As you watch, we hope you’ll find that we have achieved a happy marriage of the theatrical and cinematic art forms in service of Brian Friel’s deeply moving story.
More behind the scenes: The Molly Sweeney cast and creative team on making theater in the age of Covid-19
Molly Sweeney was filmed at St. Stephen’s Theater in Center City Philadelphia in fall 2020, with strict adherence to all CDC, state, and local health and safety guidelines, and is streaming January 22 — March 7, 2021. Visit our website for tickets and information.
