This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:00] Brian Sedita: Hey everyone, welcome to Page to Stage.

[0:03] Mary Dina: A conversation with theater makers.

[0:04] Brian Sedita: We're your hosts.

[0:05] Mary Dina: That's Brian.

[0:06] Brian Sedita: And that's Mary.

[0:07] Mary Dina: Join us as we focus the spotlight back on the theater maker to uncover their process.

[0:12] Brian Sedita: We speak with folks in the industry that often aren't heard from.

[0:15] Mary Dina: Such as stage managers, producers, crew members, marketing professionals.

[0:19] Brian Sedita: And everything in between.

[0:20] Mary Dina: We hope you enjoy this episode.

[0:25] Carole Healey: Hello, my name is Carole Healey, and I am an actor, director, and a teacher.

[0:46] Brian Sedita: Well, wow.

[0:47] Mary Dina: Made me feel very old.

[0:50] Brian Sedita: And for all of our listeners out there, Carole was my voice and speech teacher in undergrad.

[0:55] Mary Dina: And she's been somebody that I wanted on the podcast for quite some time.

[0:59] Brian Sedita: So I'm so, so excited to have this conversation to talk all about your process.

[1:05] Mary Dina: I think you have such an expansive now 40-year career, it seems.

[1:10] Brian Sedita: So I'm excited.

[1:12] Mary Dina: But can you begin by describing the difference between voice and speech as it's related to the theatrical process?

[1:20] Carole Healey: Voice is the actual production of the sound that we make with our bodies. So that would involve breath, you know, first of all. And second of all, it would be that breath then coming up through your instrument and then basically vibrating the vocal folds here in the larynx, and then using all of the bone and space in the face and the chest to create a resonance, which then sends the sound out into the theater or the space that you're in. Whereas speech would involve diction, annunciation, the taking of that reverberating sound and parsing it into bits that we understand as language. So it's not only the production of those sounds, and that's, you know, lips, teeth, tip of the tongue, but it's also has to do with now we're getting into the field of interpretation, also emphasis, stress, rhythm, the music of your language.

And so all of that goes into speech. And voice can sometimes involve poetry and we use text sometimes as we teach voice in order to take all of the sound being produced and put it into something. So there is some overlap in the two fields of study. It's just convenient, I think, for most academic and conservatories to separate the two, and then in the speech class, spend more time actually on that enunciation part and interpretive part.

[3:05] Mary Dina: As you were just talking there, I like my the top of my head got like goosebumps, which is such a weird thing to say. But it brought me back to my junior year of college.

[3:15] Brian Sedita: I totally forgot about this, but I took a voice in speech class as well in college, and just hearing you talk about like the voice like that, it just completely snapped me back to 2010 or whatever it was.

[3:28] Mary Dina: Um, but I'm curious, are there I remember we had like a journal, we had to like do exercises every morning as a group, but then also she had the expectation of us to do exercises on our own because it wasn't it was a morning class, so she had us do exercises before we got to class, and then obviously as a group.

[3:46] Brian Sedita: Are there anything that you do in your daily life that you would recommend to anybody, whether they're an actor really, really utilizing that tool or not?

[3:57] Carole Healey: Because just for context, also Mary did not go to school for performing.

[4:00] Mary Dina: No, I did not.

[4:02] Carole Healey: I would recommend it to almost anyone that has to speak in life, which pretty much includes everyone, just because what you know, there's a book that's written by a master voice teacher who just recently passed, her name is Kristen Linklater, and the book that she wrote is called Freeing the Natural Voice. And so I think so many of us, you know, as children, if you look at a baby, for instance, in the cradle, and babies, you know, are the ultimate egomaniacs. They don't care if you haven't had any sleep. If they want something like food or a dry diaper or to be picked up, they just let their voices express what they need and what they want. There is no difference between what they their objective and what they're demanding.

Do you know? They're not sensitive to others' feelings. So that's the ultimate egomaniac. And we could say that a baby probably has one of the freest voices of all human beings. You notice they don't get laryngitis, even though they might spend a lot of time screaming, because all of the apparatus, the larynx, the vocal folds, all of that, are relaxed and free. And they're using their abdominal muscles, their rib cage, every part of their being is wrapped up in that demand or that need or that want. So that voice is very free.

[5:46] Carole Healey: Then imagine a toddler going with his mother to the grocery store, and as they're checking out at the grocery store, the little toddler sees all of that candy. Isn't it funny how they put all that in the checkout line? And so the little toddler just reaches for it because now they have some autonomy, right? And they reach for that chocolate or that the sweets, and the mother says, No. And the toddler looks and it's like, but I want it, I'm frustrated, right? So the toddler might express themselves and starting to have a temper tantrum, at which point the mother, horribly embarrassed, says, No, be quiet, shh, and starts to hush the child so that it doesn't create a huge public scene, and a lot of people judging the mother or the father on their parenting skills.

So the great sort of hush begins, and parents begin to use all sorts of techniques and tactics to kind of quiet that child down and teach them what we call self-control, right? And that continues through life. It's not just the parents, it also becomes the teacher, the nanny, the babysitter, the other children, which are the really strong. So then you start to get into junior high peer groups, and there's a lot of influence on people to sound a certain way, to either be, you know, if you're in a group of theater friends, you might be loud and expressive, like that's the way we talk in our group, or let's say you're with a group of kind of like cool kids, and you know, like everybody talks like the son, you know, we like swallow everything back because that's the way we talk, and then you begin to adopt that voice, that speech, that whole way of being, in order to belong, because that's your primary objective when you're a teenager, right? It's just let me belong.

[7:55] Carole Healey: So by the time we get into, you know, a university or a conservatory situation, we're to the point where we're pretty much shut down. So my job and all of the voice and speech teachers in the world is to kind of help our students to find that inner child again, to use a kind of corny phrase, but to find the freedom to be able to express themselves again without all of the parental and societal pressures that have taken that voice and shoved it down and actually caused us to become shallow breathers, to lose parts of our resonators because it's not acceptable to sound a certain way, or so it's a process of really unconcealing the voice, you know, or if, like if you were to use a sculptural metaphor to kind of, you know, Michelangelo said every sculpture is already contained in the block of marble. It's just a question of unconcealing that shape, you know.

[9:09] Mary Dina: And so that's what we have to try and do.

[9:11] Carole Healey: And it's very hard. I think also, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like at the college level, especially you're not just dealing with people who are from the same area like you probably are in high school or younger. You're having students come from all over the world, even, you know, the country, but even also the world.

[9:28] Mary Dina: So you even have dialects, you have accents, you have all those other things.

[9:33] Carole Healey: Well, I actually remember the first day of my class, I asked my class to I think say a sentence or two, and I would try and guess where they were from in the country.

[9:43] Mary Dina: And you were, yeah, I remember.

[9:45] Carole Healey: And it was you were spot on. You got everybody, you know, down to Dalton who was from Mississippi, and I found that that was so interesting, and that's also part of like the chipping away, but I think it's more of like going back to like a blank slate is neutralizing your own personal habits, because people still tell me now after college, they say, Wow, it doesn't sound like you're from New Jersey anymore. Like, what happened?

[10:09] Mary Dina: It sounds like you have a very standard American accent.

[10:13] Carole Healey: And I said, you know, if you really get me with the Jersey people, I'll start saying chocolate and dog and talk, and but I I'm very proud of that, that I accomplished that in your class.

[10:25] Brian Sedita: Yeah.

[10:25] Carole Healey: It's important, I think, for actors to kind of come to a neutral place so that then they can go wherever they want. And you know, in my class, we learned what Brian learned, Mary, was this what we called stage standard, which is really out of style now. In fact, I got a lot of pressure from, you know, administrative people to sort of stop teaching that because there were sounds in there that they said, oh, it sounds just so white, you know. Like there's a sound that people don't use very much in general American speech, and that's what we call the ask sound. So it's like the sentence is I can't ask Francis for half the dance, whereas general Americans say, I can't ask Francis for half the dance, you know, it's much brighter.

And so I had to fight to be able to teach that funny little sound, because my point was is that that we also want to study, for instance, received pronunciation, which is a, you know, the British dialect. And they use I can't ask Francis, the Hof the Dons. And the ask sound is the sort of bridge in between.

[11:43] Carole Healey: So it sort of falls in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. So I think it's fun to learn a sound, even if you might not choose to use it in a particular characterization. It's nice that, as Brian was saying, you sort of have a palette to choose from as an actor. And just like you would say, you know, I think this guy is gonna, I'm playing Richard III. And my idea of him is that he has, I don't know, you know, a back like this, and I'm gonna give him, you know, some walking sticks or something like that. Just like we make those kinds of choices as actors, we can choose from a variety of sounds and places to resonate from, and even breathing patterns to give an idea of character. Can you think back to a specific process in your acting career where maybe things clicked into place a little bit for you in terms of voice and speech?

[12:40] Carole Healey: Yeah. Because as an undergrad, I voice and speech was a pain in my neck. I just wanted to get to the acting, you know. And so I thought all of it was very pedantic and, you know, to sit in a chair for an actor and learn sounds, you know. Lee will let Pat pass. I was like, oh God, get me out of here. I want to do Chekhov and Shakespeare and Williams, you know. But what I think that there was this one time I was actually just had finished my first year of grad school, which was grueling in the extreme for voice and speech especially and they were very adamant that you had to speak stage standard at all times, even when you were in a private conference with your faculty, you had to use stage standard and it drove us all crazy.

So I just wanted to be free and I went out I was cast at the Utah Shakespeare Festival and I went out and we got to see Titus Andronicus was one of the productions. I mean and it was great because how often do you get to see Titus Andronicus? And there was an actor named Ken Ruta, who was at the time like he was sort of one of the great American actors. He did regional theater. Look, Broadway people didn't know him that well, but oh my gosh, he was famous in certain circles, especially in classical theater. And this guy comes out, he was old, he was in his 70s, I guess. And he came out, and his first line was Hail Rome. And he stood on the stage in the center stage, and I was out in the audience, and this is a replica of the globe they have, you know, so it's an octagonal theater with an opening at the top and a tiring house in the back and the whole thing.

And when he stepped onto the stage, I was out in the audience. I felt my bones vibrate. Like actual goal like this. And I was like, what is that? And I'd never experienced it before that I actually felt a voice as well as heard a voice. And I got very, very curious about this. And I also had gone to Carnegie Hall, and I had sat in the 10th row center, and you know, I liked music, you know, but I wasn't a freak about music. But when I sat in Carnegie Hall and I had a full orchestra playing, and I was in the middle seat in the 10th row, because I was sitting next to the composer, I felt the music vibrating my bones. And it was a three-dimensional experience for me. It wasn't just my ears, it was my body experiencing the music.

Just like when Ken Ruta said Hail Rome, my body experienced his voice. And I said, this is at a totally different level. This is like surround sound, you know, it's like Dolby or something like that. And I got very, very interested in it. You know, how do you make someone feel your voice? Not just like hear it, or it's not about making pretty sounds. There is a connection to our the core of our humanity that's being drawn up, resonated, and passed out. And that's all we've got over film. You know, it's that live presence. That's what we've got to give to a live audience. And that's why we go through, you know, all the pain in the neck of like getting a ticket or maybe traveling and waiting and going into a theater with a mask on. You know what I mean? Now it's so hard. But people go there for the presence of those actors, so we can feel it instead of just having this kind of flat two-dimensional experience of film.

[17:07] Carole Healey: And I remember there was a play that we did at Montclair where they use microphones instead of just letting the natural voice speak for itself. I think back to that moment when I see a play now, and they're using microphones instead of just letting the voices carry through the space. Can you talk about that? In the way that you were just speaking about the production of TV and film and the artificial nature of that?

[17:33] Carole Healey: Yeah, I mean, it's very tricky. It also has to do with sound design, which is just I have a friend named his name is Barry Funderberg. Isn't that a great name for a sound designer? And he talks a lot about this. He waxes philosophical quite a bit about, you know, because this is his job is to kind of deliver this text. And all of us have noticed in this little group of friends that we're having a harder and harder time. And I don't think it's just age of hearing dialogue, even in films, you know, especially action films. I was watching The Matrix, I don't know which one it was, reloaded or one of the sequels, and I was straining so hard, and we have like really excellent sound bar and you know, with surround sound and speakers, and it because my husband is just crazy for that stuff, and I had to go boop, boop, boop and go up all the way to 47 to hear the dialogue.

But then my ears would get assaulted with the bam, crash, boom, and the back of you know, that tension filled telling me what I'm supposed to feel kind of stuff, was like blasting me at 47. So I spend my time going this with the volume, this with the volume, and so what that tells me is that we're really being manipulated as audience people, you know, they're telling us this is a very tense moment, you know, or this is a moment of dread. I mean, look at the like bottom but uh but uh but uh, I mean, and we're like ah on the edge of our seats with Jaws, right? If we didn't have that, it wouldn't be just a girl jumping into the ocean and swimming at night, you know. But in the theater, hopefully we're not manipulating our audience quite so it's so obviously.

I think, you know, especially thinking as a director now, there is a certain trajectory that you hope the audience goes on. You want them to go on a journey, especially with the protagonist, the lead character. You're hoping that they walk with Lear onto the Heath and welcome that storm on, you know. But that live presence is what is leading us there, hopefully, rather than that manipulative quality of the voice.

[20:19] Carole Healey: And so when we use microphones, which I think sometimes I think we're stuck with that, because so little attention has been paid to sound in architecture. So we have a lot of dead spaces now where it's very hard to get a ping back, you know, like theaters aren't constructed for sound like they used to be. Like you look at you, if you go into Carnegie Hall, you can really get that sense, or go to the Met. You know, it's like that's a huge orchestra, and those opera singers are singing over, I don't know what it is, a 75-piece orchestra. They're not mic'd. You know, a lot of young actors are now coming and saying, well, it allows me to be really subtle and really natural. So I can just, you know, say whatever and kind of mumble it.

And there's a lot of that now. This that naturalism, which is of course complete BS. It's the illusion of naturalism. I mean, what does the actor think? I'm not in a theater, that I'm really in Moscow and 18, whatever. No, it's the ill we're giving the illusion of naturalism, right? That that's what's happening. Instead of, you know, my number one job as an actor, number one, especially when I'm speaking the words of William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, etc., Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, is that the text is the star. That is what is leading me. That is what I'm using as my objective, that is what I want my audience to experience. Number one. So every single word should be clear as a bell.

Because some tortured sucker, like Tennessee Williams, labored in pain over, have always depended upon the kindness of strangers. And if it's mumbled, we I'm against microphones in general, but I understand that, you know, especially in musicals, they're often required. I just hope that sound designers understand that the idea is to presence the voice rather than to manipulate the voice. I found it really fascinating when you said that you have maybe ni more so now than in years past, st young performers coming in who use the natural speaking volume or tone.

[23:25] Brian Sedita: And is that truly the case where like over the last recent years you're seeing more and more of that?

[23:31] Carole Healey: And do you think that has sure? I wonder if that has anything to do with like the TikTok generation where they're used to speaking to their phone, which is you know, inches away from their face, where they're not having to use it to project, or if they're you know, becoming more fascinated with the TV film idea of how you know how film and TV actors speak compared to live theatrical performers.

[23:55] Brian Sedita: I do think all of that is a part of it. Everything you mentioned, uh I think it's a great observation that you make. And I also I think that especially at a certain age, people are very, you know, sort of impressed, I would say, by this idea of like, oh, he was so real, you know. Ever since basically, I would say the actor's studio and Marlon Brando and this kind of uh turn, especially in American acting, towards uh as I'm gonna say, the illusion of naturalism, that a lot of people have revered that over someone that say like Mark Rylance, who um they would say oh well he's sort of stylized or something that he is um what would be the word it's not stylized as much as it's like theatrical which has become a kind of dirty word for a lot of people that they think you know somebody just got a tongue like this and like you strain even the way writers are writing now they're writing to that a lot of ellipses and and I I think for instance in oh the vocal frail gota does get me started on that oh it's it's just to me it's it's not only hurts me because for me of course it's like fingernails on a chalkboard that sound because it's so terribly unhealthy.

[25:34] Carole Healey: So not only is there that element but it also so sad to me because what it is is it's a swallowing back of communication. So it's you know it's it's a very, you know, there's no power in it. There's no taking responsibility and saying here's what I need to say to you but instead it's like well I'm I'm gonna say this thing to you but I'm gonna kind of inhale at the same time so it's like an it it's a weird thing. It's an inhale at the same time that you're speaking.

[26:17] Brian Sedita: So you're not exhaling.

[26:17] Carole Healey: It's exhausting. Yeah and and there's no commitment from it whatsoever. You can always pull it further back. You know? But it's that's what it is. It's it's a variety, it's another version of the up speak, which you know became so popular in the 90s. Um, because if I speak in declarative sentences, you might disagree with me, you know, that would be terrible. So nothing is ever spoken, nothing is ever affirmed. There are no declarative sentences. And I hate to say this, but it's much more prevalent in women.

[27:02] Brian Sedita: Carole, I remember you said that you coached uh corporate professionals on speaking.

[27:07] Carole Healey: Yes.

[27:08] Brian Sedita: Can you talk a little bit about that work that you do and maybe the differences between that and the theater?

[27:14] Carole Healey: Oh, sure. So I worked um for a company called Paquetti Consulting, and she um is a a therapist, a social worker, and she worked all of her life on presentation skills, and she developed a kind of workshop that basically, if you put these people through these exercises by the end of the 16-hour period, uh they could, they were vastly improved. It was a very impressive workshop.

[27:47] Carole Healey: It was succinct, it was quick, and you could take um a sort of young middle manager. Let's say we I worked for Gray Advertising once, and you know, they have one of their clients is Procter and Gamble, and so I would always get the junior suite executives, and they were maybe making their very first pitch to a client as to their ideas for how to sell. I don't know, shampoo. And um, and of course, they relied heavily on PowerPoint.

[28:21] Carole Healey: They mostly faced the PowerPoint and clicked and clicked and clicked and read the slides that were up there as if we were incapable of seeing them and reading them ourselves. So it was basically they were a bore and very um, you know, mumbling a lot. And so we had to um we had to bring them up and out of that. And and we worked a lot on content as well as you know, the voice and speech.

[28:53] Carole Healey: Um, it was funny because often I had I'll take, for example, one one group that they were hedge fund managers and young, they were uh it was all men except for one woman, and they all basically made you know over 10 million dollars a year. And they came into the room looking at me like, what the hell are you gonna teach me? You've got on a banana republic suit. I'm not impressed, you know. And they were trying to, you know, look at their phones the entire time.

[29:33] Carole Healey: So the first thing I had to do was to address the elephant in the room, which was the lack of respect and the lack of commitment to the work, and uh and get them to put their phones down and commit to the work itself. And the arrogance was finally uh chipped away a bit when they got up to speak. Because of course they spoke terribly. And they had ticks and filler language. And they were terrified, these $10 million a year guys.

[30:09] Carole Healey: So arrogant. And all of a sudden they'd met their match, which was public speaking. And you could take her to a freshman actor from a university BFA program, and you could have them blow away a $10 million a year hedge fund manager. You know, on that playing field, we were sparing. So it was interesting to take them through that and to and to have them humble themselves enough to realize that they needed a few skills.

[30:50] Carole Healey: It was fascinating work and very lucrative. So that was nice too.

[30:54] Brian Sedita: It's those stories I love to hear of the connection with you know what I learned in actor school, right? And and the real world connections that that corporate people may not see where we have our strengths and how they're transferable to what they do.

[31:13] Carole Healey: Yeah. I went through a real um uh I guess it would say like a my conscience was bothered going into teaching acting because I was teaching people that were going into a profession where their chances for employment were exceedingly low, um, where we didn't need them in the workplace. You know, it's like in the workforce. We had tons of actors, people that were interested.

[31:41] Carole Healey: So I had a little crisis of conscience. And then I I remembered an article that when I was temping right out of of grad school, I had to go get a temp job in New York, and I worked for Business Week magazine, and I was, you know, editing an article, and the article, this'll this will really age me, was before the year 2000. Um, and they were asking CEOs of Fortune 500 companies what they wanted for their workers in the next millennium.

[32:18] Carole Healey: And they said this was what their wish list was. Number one, the ability to communicate effectively. Okay. Number two, the ability to state an objective and to understand the obstacles in overcoming that objective. And I thought to myself, well, that's acting 101. And number three was the ability to role play and improvise. And I said, Well, that's an actor.

[32:52] Carole Healey: So even if these students graduate in four years with a BFA in acting, they can do anything. As I went through my little temp career, where I've whatever corporation I landed at would offer me full time employment. And because these are the skills that they required.

[33:18] Carole Healey: We're the very skills that we studied. It's like it's like people skills, essentially. That's how I view it. It's it feels like it's people skills. Like you're you're learning how to, you know, be a human, but you're studying what it is to be a human in various forms.

[33:33] Carole Healey: Also that that other pieces, this idea of what is the objective? How can I be uh effective in overcoming the obstacles to achieve that objective? That streamlines everything, you know. So it's a great skill to be able to do that.

[33:49] Brian Sedita: Yeah, serious skill. Um, I was gonna just pivot a little bit because you were talking about working in the corporate world and training um those those junior executives, switching gears a little bit into Shakespeare, something that has always intimidated me. Again, I'm not a performer. Um my uh undergrad degree is in is in English literature.

[34:11] Brian Sedita: Um, so I took a whole course on Shakespeare where we had to read 12 of his plays, which felt as a theater person felt so wrong. So I really struggled with that because I wasn't able to see it, experience it the way that it was meant to. Um so going into it just solely reading it and then having a discussion in class about it, I found the language so difficult to like really get into the world.

[34:40] Brian Sedita: I felt like even though I would took I read 12 plays in what is it, 12 weeks or so, I was constantly in his world, but I just felt like the language was I was constantly having to like re-learn, like re-learn the language every single week. So I'm curious with and your experience with working with actors, working in Shakespeare. Um how do you how do you advise actors and directors, theater makers to really get into the world of Shakespeare if there's not their like if it's not their niche?

[35:14] Carole Healey: Well, I think very few people, you know, just come to it and find that it's their niche. You know, it's like nobody just can just pick up Shakespeare and start reading it. But soft with lie through yonder window bricks. I mean, nobody just picks up that and reads it like that. So first of all, you know, we the process I use is that we take the first of all the poetry that we learn verse and what is verse and what is its presence doing there. And it, you know, there is a kind of drumbeat underneath Shakespeare. That was the reason that I think so many of so many illiterate people, which was the majority of his audience, remember, um, certainly everyone that was standing on the ground, that what they call the groundlings, the common people, they didn't, they weren't English majors, you know, they just liked a really good story, which all of the stories are.

I mean, the plots are fantastic. I mean, just take it on that level. But he also wrote it in iambic pentameter, which is this beat, right? It's so so like rap music or or even pop's pop music, it's got a certain rhythm to it that somehow gets to us on a visceral, non-intellectual level. It enters through our emotional core. And so he chose iambic pentameter because you know, it's unaccent accent. So it's bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum. And what is that? The human heartbeat. So he came using language that was on the same rhythm as what was inside of our bodies. So I mean, now did the groundlings understand this? That, oh, I see, he's writing an iambic pentameter which imitates the human heart.

They didn't understand that. They just, you know, kind of like hip hop or rap. It's like it's got this beat to it that affects us somehow. We don't have to understand it or explain it. And I think a lot of people, because they come to Shakespeare with such fear, and they they are like, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do everything I can to understand what they're saying. And because they come to it that way, they don't allow the very basic idea of, oh, it's this old guy, and he's got three daughters, and he wants to retire. And so, you know, he does this, and oh my gosh, look what happens. I mean, kids would watch that and and figure the story out and not feel stupid that they didn't understand, you know, half of the language.

So I start there. I start with the verse and kind of recognizing that rhythm. And then after we recognize that rhythm, we start to understand that some words carry more meanings than others, right? And we call that the operative word, you know? To be or not to be. That is the question. And so maybe question becomes more important than to. Or that, to be or not to be, that is the question. No, because Shakespeare didn't write it that way. That is not what he is emphasizing with the verse. That's on an unstressed position, right? So we start to learn that. What is the operative word? Is it in the stress position? Oh, it is. So that could be the operative word. What do you think is the second most?

So secondary, tertiary. And then why does it, why does he end the verse line there? Because the sentence isn't finished. So we learn to kind of push into the next line. And in so in analyzing this and doing this, what I call detective work, we begin to see how he's constructed this thing. It's like pulling it apart and saying, oh, I see. So this is the foundation, and these are the walls that are holding it up, and this is the roof. And we get into it in a you know, with real curiosity and enthusiasm. And then we can begin to understand, oh, I see why he wrote it that way. And then we say, okay, so Shakespeare wrote it this way. If that's the most important word, but soft, what light through yonder window breaks?

Breaks is the most important word, right? So why? Why how does that how does that relate back to the character? How does that become part of the character's objective? Romeo sees a light, which pulls him away from his friends, Mircutio and everybody sort of making fun of him. He turns, he sees a light, he doesn't know why it's there, but soft. What what's that? What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east. And Juliet is the sun. That is the big the dawning of understanding, where he gets that girl I just met at the dance is standing on the balcony. And so the breath comes, right? That breath of understanding, it is the East and Juliet is the sun, right? And Shakespeare will write that in for you.

So that you begin to understand this guy is having a big aha moment here. It's that girl from the dance. And so much of is revealed to us by understanding how Shakespeare constructed the language. And I'm sure it's similar for musicians. It's like, why did Beethoven put a rest there? Or why is that a whole note instead of a quarter note? And when we begin to understand the construction of something, we can begin then to sort of say, oh, I see why he does he did that, because Romeo is having a moment of discovery. And then we can say, okay, he's got to make that connection that now he's in the Capulet's orchard. You see, and all of these things can be revealed to us as actors for having taken some time to do that detective work. For me, that was half the fun of it. Was doing the detective work.

[42:36] Mary Dina: Yeah, would you like to move into our lightning round?

[42:38] Carole Healey: Yeah, let's do it.

[42:39] Mary Dina: First question for you is what is one thing in the theater industry that confuses you?

[42:44] Carole Healey: Casting.

[42:45] Mary Dina: What are three adjectives that describe your ideal working environment?

[42:49] Carole Healey: Open, curious, fun loving.

[42:52] Mary Dina: Is there something in your process that you find unique to you?

[42:56] Carole Healey: My own soul, my own experiences in my life, my collection of uh lessons learned.

[43:04] Mary Dina: What's one job in the theater industry that you would consider trading jobs with for one week?

[43:09] Carole Healey: Artistic director choosing a season. I wouldn't want all the other um jobs associated with artistic director, like raising the money. But I think choosing a season would be fascinating.

[43:21] Mary Dina: What is one Shakespeare play that you've already directed or a role that you've played that you would like to have another go at?

[43:29] Carole Healey: God, because this there's a big long list of ones that I haven't had a shot at.

[43:33] Mary Dina: What is one that maybe you haven't gotten a chance to do?

[43:37] Carole Healey: Well, now I've aged out of so many roles. Uh uh, I would have liked to have had a shot at Rosalind. I was cast, but I didn't take it. Um I would have liked to have played some of the male roles. I got to play Julius Caesar before COVID, and I played uh the director wrote, you know, used changed the pronouns. And so Julius Caesar was now a woman, the most powerful person in the world. Um I would have I would love a shot at Iago, Macbeth, Lear, Prospero, all those male roles. There's you know, they're they're they're bigger and they're meatier and more challenging, um, even though I've played some of the great, great female roles.

[44:31] Mary Dina: What is one hobby that you have outside of the theater?

[44:34] Carole Healey: Travel. Traveling.

[44:38] Mary Dina: Yeah, and and it and it really feeds the the process.

[44:44] Carole Healey: I think it's you know, it's been inspiring on so many levels.

[44:48] Mary Dina: What is the last great piece of theater you saw?

[44:51] Carole Healey: Because I cast your mind back, back, back before COVID, because I haven't been to the theater since COVID because now I have cancer and I'm extremely vulnerable. I have no immune system left. Um, oh I know. I'm going to say it was in London, and I flew over especially to see Mark Rylance in Jerusalem. It was perhaps the most thrilling performance I've ever seen in my life. And to put it, a friend of mine who basically comes into the theater and always falls asleep, like the lights go down and he falls asleep. He was on the edge of his seat. Like it was a concert, like a rock concert for him. So that was fascinating. I love those moments.

[45:40] Mary Dina: Carol, thank you so so much for um for coming on here and sharing your words of wisdom with us. It was really amazing to see you again and and hear hear some stories. I I love hearing your stories. Really.

[45:54] Carole Healey: Yeah, it's fun to tell them. Sometimes you get so carried away that you don't you don't get on with your work in class. But uh but yeah, it's been a joy, guys. It's fun.

[46:06] Brian Sedita: Thank you so much. It was so great to meet you virtually, of course. Um, I'm actually a little bummed that during my time at Montclair that we didn't cross paths at all. Um I was there for a master's program.

[46:18] Carole Healey: But it was nice to get to chat with you as well.

[46:21] Brian Sedita: So thank you.

[46:22] Carole Healey: Thank you.

[46:22] Brian Sedita: Of course, my pleasure. Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of Page to Stage. To keep up with us, you can find us on Instagram and Facebook at Page2Stage Podcast. And if you're enjoying these conversations, we would really appreciate it if you could take a couple minutes to rate and review us wherever you're listening to this podcast. Until next time. That's Brian. That's Mary. We will see you later. Bye.