Marco Barricelli
Marco Barricelli
Marco Barricelli is the artistic director for Shakespeare Santa Cruz. He played Hamlet at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among other roles.
Interview Excerpts
ON REACHING THE AUDIENCE
MARCO BARRICELLI: It may be that an audience doesn’t understand every single word that you speak, but the experience of watching a Shakespeare play, I think for an audience, is that the play starts and you’re sitting there and people are speaking in all this sort of weird, old language that you don’t quite understand and things are going by and you don’t quite understand it and you think you kind of get it and then things go by and you realize you don’t get it and then a character says one thing and, bang! — it lands on your head – it has a ripple effect. It’s a little epiphany, in a moment, that really speaks to you. And it may not speak to the person next to you, but that’s the way it works. And then more stuff goes by and more stuff goes by and you may not completely understand everything, but bang! — you have another little epiphany, another little phrase that is perfect — the perfect utterance. And then – this is sort of what goes on through the evening, through two-and-a-half hours of seeing a Shakespeare play. And by the end of the evening you will have had enough of those little epiphanies to really end up with a very full experience of what the character is going through and what is going on, what the story of the play is.
So I don’t – I mean, I say clarity of utterance is very important but I also at the same time don’t believe we should be — we should place so much importance on an audience understanding every little syllable that is uttered on the stage. I think because then it can lead to too much technique and too technical a performance. So, it’s somewhere in the middle ground. That’s what keeps, I think, actors sort of challenged, is finding out where that is. When am I too technical, when am I not technical enough and how do I ride that bike; how do I stay balanced on that thing.
ON LANGUAGE
MARCO BARRICELLI: So the language is really the way in for me. It’s like riding a wave. In body surfing you do all that work as the wave approaches and you do all the swimming and then at a certain point you stop and the wave takes you into shore. That’s sort of what happens with the language. You do all the prep work, everything you do in rehearsals, but then you just try to look for that rhythm and try to make sure that rhythm is in your blood and your bones and it like grabs the front of your shirt and pulls you along. And tells you where to go with the character. Guides you toward the emotion rather than your imposing some emotion on top of it.
So, I guess in that sense I would consider myself an outside-in actor because the language comes first. It’s all in the language and if I can identify those little signposts — it’s what they call Shakespeare’s road map. I learned all this through a brilliant director and teacher of mine at Julliard named Michael Langham, who really sort of opened up this world for me in a big, big way.
