Ursula Meyer, Actor

Ursula Meyer

Ursula Meyer Actress Ursula Meyer  has worked as an actor and  a voice coach at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for numerous seasons.

Audio Excerpt

Meyer talks about As You Like It

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Interview Excerpts

ON VOICE CHOICES

URSULA MEYER: There’s lots of what I call voice choices that can make it work.  Sometimes it’s just making the actor aware that sun and moon and – “Arise fair sun, and kill the envious moon . . .”  And I’m just thinking opposites, I’m not doing something that fancy with my voice, but I hopefully will get the difference between Juliet and the moon.  She was far more fair than the moon.

And then there’s fancier ones.  You know, personification – “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank. . .”  Just asking an actor to take a minute and picture moonlight as a woman, you know, with watery hair.  And then suddenly the image comes to life a little more.

I mean, some of it you don’t have to do with professional actors.  Or sometimes you just have to point it out and then they’ll go away and magically it’ll come to life.  Setting with the young actors, sometimes I say, “Let’s just draw this.”  If Proteus has In Two Gents all kinds of tricky – If I love her, then I lose him.  If I stay with him, then I lose her and I lose my other girlfriend, you know – and it’s almost like math; we have to help him find focal points.  Sometimes that does it for the audience.  And to walk the audience through this sort of mine field of a clever text.

ON CICELY BERRY

URUSLA MEYER:  She started the idea of voice and text directing, as Scott calls it here.  Scott Keizer is our head of voice here, now. And Cicely was the original one at the Royal Shakespeare Company and started the idea that there needs to be someone in the room who is not a policeman of the text, but watchful of it.  And can help the actors when the director is busy figuring out a thing to be hanging upside down or if they need to be dressed in green.  Or what the shape of the crowd scene is.  We can take them off and say, “Let’s see if we can make this speech come more alive.  Let’s see if we can help you with the emotion of this speech without tensing up your voice.  Let’s see if we can make a differentiation between what you are at the beginning of the play and what you are at the end.”

ON THE LANGUAGE OF SHAKESPEARE

URSULA MEYER: Shakespeare had a tendency, more than any of the other playwrights to make the image a physical act.  So instead of describing the blue bird, she talks about, as Juliet does, how it hops a little – she says to Romeo, “You are like a bird I would like to have on a little string so I can let it hop a little from my hand and then pluck it back again, loving, jealous of its liberty.”  He talks about Beatrice running along the ground like a lapwing, flapping her arms.  This idea of the bird movement, of the hawk taking off, or the cormorant diving, that is so – I think that’s so useful.

Because I think when you see a good Shakespeare show, the language is just leaping, jumping, doing spins, driving forward.  Just taking you on a – I mean, I think of Juliet’s potion speech like a psychedelic roller coaster ride.  And if the actress can just get on, get on the roller coaster and just let the language take you.  I mean, she’s terrified and she’s about to take this unbelievably, supernatural herb that’s going to cause her death, and her mind and her imagination – which is so sophisticated anyway – just goes to this – all these unbelievable places.