Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 171
Directing comedy is an art in itself, and Dominique Serrand scored a brilliant success in a Shakespearean play that
demands theatrical humor in its very title: The Comedy of Errors. Serrand directed this play at the Guthrie Theatre in
2002 with what one reviewer called “fantastical . . . madcap panache”—as clearly shown in the mouth-stuffing scene
between Laura Esping as an irate Luciana and Judson Pearce Morgan as a bewildered Antipholus. © Michal Daniel
arguments escalate toward climaxes. Deeply psychological
dramas present a third pattern, often profiting by
an even slower pace that fosters the audience’s deeper
understanding of the play’s characters and their issues.
Sympathy in these plays is more likely to be engendered
when audience members have an opportunity to compare
the characters’ lives with their own, and are able to put
themselves in the characters’ situations to ponder the
subtle meanings that emerge from the onstage actions.
But there is no one-size-fits-all pace for each genre;
no pace is simply mechanical or unvaried. Just as a symphony
is composed of several movements, a well-paced
theatrical production inevitably has its range of tempos,
from a stately march to a frantic waltz. Faster tempos
tend to excite, bedazzle, and sharpen audience attention;
slower ones give audience members a chance to consider
and to augment the play’s actions and ideas with their
own reflections. Often directors speak about “setting
up” an audience with a rapid pace and then delivering a
“payoff” with a powerful, more deliberately paced dramatic
catharsis. The sheer mechanics of theatrical pacing
demand the greatest skill and concentration from both
actor and director, and for both, the perfection of dramatic
timing (and most notably comic timing) is a mark
of great theatrical artistry.
Directors vary in their manner of pacing plays. Some
wait until final rehearsals and then stamp out rhythms on
the stage floor with a stick or clap their hands in the back
of the house. Some experiment with different patterns in
the early rehearsals and explore them in great detail with
the actors. Directorial intervention of some sort is almost
always present in the achievement of an excellent dramatic
pace; it rarely occurs spontaneously. Actors trained
in the realist manner often tend to work through material
too slowly; actors trained in a more technical manner
tend to proceed so quickly they leave the audience
lost. And when a variety of actors, trained in different
schools, come together in production for the first time,