An Actor Prepares [for Medea]

CONGRESS IN SESSION

Medea is a role actresses wait their entire careers for. I am playing her at 23. It is quite the undertaking.

I have no equal parallel in my own life to what Medea goes through. But I have experienced the emotions - loss and love, hate and hope, anger and ardor. What makes her human is that she lives always between these contrasts and that is where I will find her.

The beauty of the way we are working on this project is that I do not need to recall sad memories to play this character truthfully. I need only to rely on the intricate text, to push it, analyze it, live in the sound of the words and the emotions will come.

We are using an approach, a system, very new to me on this production. I am like a recent convert to this way of working. It inspires and excites me and I have put all of my stock in it. But I also go through moments of doubt and frustration. I just have to trust it.

It is first and foremost about the text. Everything - character, emotions, honesty - will come from the form. Ryan Emmons, our fearless director, had me read Peter Hall’s Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players.

• "First comes the form and second comes the feeling."
• "Here is the paradox: by hiding the feeling you reveal it, by not indulging it, you express it. This is the contradiction of all great acting."
• "Shakespeare’s text is a complex score that demands to be read as a piece of music, learned like the steps of a dance, or practiced like the strokes of a duel."

Shakespeare may not have written Medea, but we are working with a finely crafted, rhetorical, verse play. Sir Peter has made me hyper-attuned to the sound of words. I dig at the script searching for antithesis, monosyllabic lines, onomatopoeia, and repeated sounds. To this I add the wisdom of Michael Chekhov (I’m currently reading his Lessons for the Professional Actor)

• "Whatever we are going to experience on the stage - even if it is terribly heavy and uneasy - the impressions that it is terribly heavy must be given, but how it is produced must be artistically light and easy always."

For me, at this moment, Medea is not a woman who kills her children. She is a woman in pain. She must sing though she only talks, dance though she only walks.

My mind is very full of ideas at the moment. It is excitingly overwhelming.

Written by Julie Congress