I Can't Believe It's Not Shakespeare

Anne Hathaway is tapped to play Viola in Shakespeare In The Park’s production of “Twelfth Night”. Hathaway is only the latest in a long string of Hollywood actors to tread the boards this year, including Daniel Radcliffe (my LOVE.), Tony nominated Jane Fonda and, infamously, Jeremy Piven.

Obviously film actors often possess an incredible talent and subtlety of expression which allow them to convey an emotion with a mere glance. But theater acting is sort of a specialized art; it goes beyond expression, it’s about body language, about projection, about voice. The recent surplus of Hollywood actors doing theater in New York has made me wonder: 

Besides being box-office draws, are Hollywood Actors as good on-stage as theatrically trained actors? Or is good acting good acting? 

 ”A lot of people think you can just saunter onstage after doing film and TV, but you can’t. Stage is far more technically demanding than doing film. Vocally, especially. I did a lot of training to go on stage. It’s a much tougher discipline.”-Daniel Radcliffe, 2007

Ok, I swear this isn’t going to turn in to an “I Love Daniel Radcliffe” entry. (I have a separate blog for that.) But I think Daniel’s point is a good one. Filmmaking is a process notorious for its amount of downtime: actors often have hours between shots, and can utilize this time to learn lines for an upcoming scene, rehearse, or just nap. Theater isn’t just artistically demanding; it’s physically draining to have to be onstage 8 shows a week, often for two hours at a time with very little break. Theater actors often complain about having no life during the run of the show, not for lack of free time (call isn’t until 5 or 6), but for lack of energy. Hollywood actors unaccustomed to the demands of a run may, like Jeremy Piven, come down with a mysterious case of mercury poisoning… 

According to gossip rags, however, it wasn’t just mercury poisoning that led Piven to leave Speed The Plow early. Rumor has it that Piven, despite getting ok reviews, couldn’t bear to compete with Raul Esparza’s captivating and technically impressive performance. Piven was good, but is it possible that Esparza’s training and experience as a theater actor gave him an advantage? Piven, after all, has received an Emmy award for playing a very similar role on television. Perhaps what works well on tv just doesn’t in front of a live audience. (Esparza, btw, will be starring alongside Hathaway this summer as Orsino).

In the fall of 2007 I saw a production of Pygmalion which was nearly perfect except for one major flaw: that flaw was Claire Danes. Her voice was terrible. She overacted. Her accent was incomprehensible and unreliable. It’s a pity she had to play against the incomparable Jefferson Mays, whose pitch-perfect performance only made Danes look more amateur.

Look, I love Claire Danes, and I LOVE Angela Chase. But Danes’ biggest asset lies in her expressive face. She wrinkles an eyebrow and you want to cry. But you can’t see her eyebrow from the back of a theater. You just hear her grating, grating, faux-English accent.  

 And then, there’s Carla Gugino. Gugino, who, from what I gather, had very little theater experience before taking on the role of Abby in the Goodman Theater’s production of “Desire Under The Elms”. This production was weird, included a strange Bob Dylan musical break, and closed three weeks early. And yet, I left in awe of Gugino’s performance. Her lines were delivered poignancy, vulnerability which easily carried to the back of the theater.

So will Annie be a Danes or a Gugino, a Piven or a Radcliffe? She’s playing against some pretty big heavyweights: Audra McDonald, Julie White, and Audra McDonald. Will she be able to hold her own?

And am I oversimplifying by differentiating between film acting and theater training? What do you guys think? Actors, especially, I want you to weigh in on this one!