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Academics
 Curriculum and Areas of Study
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Acting in High Comedy, with Drama Faculty Member Jean Randich
Image: Dan Wilcox '08 and Lise Johnson '01 performing a scene. Photo by Lisa Dietrich '07. Course description for
With the restoration of Charles II to the English throne in 1660, the theaters reopened and a new style of comedy burst forth. Women actresses began to appear on the London stage and the Restoration comedy of manners, rife with liaisons, seduction, desired and abhorred marriages, dazzling repartee, and biting social satire emerged. We will work in depth with plays by Congreve, Sheridan, Wilde, and possibly contemporary texts, to explore how character is created, the use of flaunting, the task of masking emotion, the art of the verbal duel, and conventions of public and private discourse. Physical and vocal technique, such as the role of rhythm, tempo, pitch, and timing in the creation of comedy, will also be a focus. Though these plays are notoriously difficult to master, when played right they are hilarious. The final presentation will be an evening of scenes. * * * If you’ve ever seen Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, then you know the comic genius of satire; the show is a contemporary example of a centuries-old tack. “Today, a lot of critical thinking and rebellion is being expressed through satirical comedy: Borat, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report,” says actor and drama faculty member Jean Randich. “These tools were honed in Restoration comedy: epigrams and witticisms using inversion. For Borat, Sacha [Baron Cohen] assumes a false identity. He pretends to be a dimwit, a witless fool, and he does that in order to draw out the true nature of the people he is encountering. Once he establishes he’s of inferior status, he adopts an objectionable stance, then when they applaud it, he outs them as sexist or racist.” While her new course Delicious Dissembling: Acting in High Comedy doesn’t include Borat, it does introduce students to contemporary plays like Private Lives and Dinner at Eight alongside seventeenth-century Restoration works. “By teaching more contemporary texts with Restoration plays, I want to impart the basic principles that abide in all high comedy.”
Over and over, Randich reminds her students that only the pairing of true feeling on the inside with affected or dissembling behavior on the outside will prompt laughter. One without the other won’t. To illustrate the double nature of these plays, Randich cites William Congreve’s The Way of the World, in which a pair of lovers negotiates the conditions for marriage. “This scene between Mirabell and Millamant is so delightful and so incisive in its observations of what women hate about men and men hate about women,” Randich says. “With the most high-flown, seductively barbed wit, they negotiate to maintain their freedom in marriage. It is a very sexy, very funny, delicious scene. And in the end Millamant accepts his proposal with the words ‘I’ll endure you.’ What she really means is, I love you more than anything, more than any woman has ever loved a man.” “One of my lines is, ‘Oh, I feel so awful,’ when really I’m just trying to get my maid to tell me I look good,” says Juliet Tondowski ’09. Tondowski goes on to describe an exercise in which she says what her character is thinking before she delivers each line. “It gave the text far greater intention,” she says, “and made the scene much funnier.” For Dan Wilcox ’08, “asides” (lines delivered directly to the audience) were new. Yet he soon realized they “make the audience feel like they’re participating in the scene and have a hand in the circumstances, and they enjoy that.” Wilcox confides to his audience, “’Tis plain she loves him, yet she has not love enough to conceal it from me; but the sight of him will increase her aversion for me and love for him, and that love instruct her how to deceive me and satisfy him!” His classmates howl.
Students in Delicious Dissembling spend almost half of each four-hour class just limbering up, both physically and mentally. They might do rigorous yoga-style exercises, or play a version of musical chairs that entails singing like a lounge lizard and seducing someone out of his seat. Or they might combine the poses of vintage Vogue models into one long action, then add lines. Then “dab” the lines. Then “punch” the lines. Maybe “float” or “glide” most of the lines, and “flick” or “press,” for emphasis, the operative words. Randich might even ask a student to stack and un-stack a tower of chairs during her monologue. Ayla Kapiloff BA ’07/MAT ’08 says she signed up for the class in order to do more of that sort of physical acting. “A lot of acting classes require you to create mostly an inner character, and in this one I wanted to focus on creating the character through my body and movement.”
As Randich has designed it, Delicious Dissembling is not just a dramatic literature course, but a performance class as well. The course will culminate with an evening of scenes from comedies of manners by Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, among others, as well as comedies of the Restoration period. Bringing these Restoration plays to life is a feat of mental and physical dexterity. Randich says that in some ways, they are “harder to perform than Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s language is so lush and rich and emotional and musical, its poetry can happen in the mind of the audience, whereas Restoration language won’t carry itself.” To get a picture of what Randich is asking her students to do, imagine balancing a ball on a jet of water. Now imagine embodying the jet of water, and floating your words like a ball. “You have to give it that lift,” she says, “with the energy of your thinking and the energy of what you want.” More: Click here to browse the archive of campus feature stories.
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