Acting Shakespeare and Peanuts
Monday, May 12th by scott malia
A recent interview with Boston-area actor/playwright John Kuntz was entitled “From Snoopy to Shakespeare.” The title refers to a school production in which he appeared onstage for the very first time as a musical version of the pooch from Peanuts. The title, while amusing and anecdotal, reflects a real challenge facing actors today: how to perform the works of different playwrights written in vastly different styles. How does an actor change working styles depending on what type of play she/he is in?
The answer for some actors is….they don’t. They develop an approach to their work over time and apply it to each character they portray, whether it was written two thousand years ago or yesterday. Yet, for an actor like Kuntz, who has appeared in everything from Shakespeare to dark, disturbing contemporary pieces like The Pillowman or Mr. Marmalade, this is not as easy as it might appear.
Shakespeare demands something very different from actors than twenty-first-century realistic pieces do. As a result, some actors reinvent their process from production to production. This may sound ideal, but there are benefits and drawbacks to both approaches. The one-system approach keeps an actor grounded in his process, but risks being too narrow for works that are too disparate. Actors with a chameleon-like process may be adaptable, but highly inconsistent. While Kuntz does not delve into which approach he follows, he does speak to the universal truth that of the exhausting nature of investing so much in one’s work, no matter who wrote it.
