But now I’ve been given this other perspective and the tools to understand that art has the ability to effect social change. P: Acting, necessarily, is an extremely selfish enterprise, because we’re selling ourselves. Y: And that connects acting with your desire to make a difference. We can create the platform for a discussion. As important as we are to entertainment, to helping people laugh-and laughter is important-we also have the ability to help an audience break through on a topic. It has made me realize the power we do wield as artists. P: All of my experiences performing for the military have felt-not apolitical, but like I’m there on a human agenda, not a political agenda. Did that feel like service, or did it feel political? Y: With Outside the Wire, you performed for soldiers at Guantánamo, Kuwait, and Qatar. So it’s really about being able to do as much as you can with the position you’re in while you have it. P: Everyone who’s on Broadway knows that it doesn’t last forever. Y: Is it hard to maintain that sensibility while you’re also doing eight shows a week? By that I mean giving back to the community or serving the greater good. P: My relationship to service was given to me by my experience in the Boy Scouts, and, even though I’m not a Jesuit, there’s a strong Jesuit tradition of serving at Boston College. Y: When did service become part of your life? If they’re ready to go, then we can start having fun right away. If they’re playing hard to get, then I’ll ease them into the sly comedy of the piece. Every time, I try to find what this particular audience is feeling. P: More than any other show I’ve done, because my character is the direct link to the audience in this piece. Y: It might surprise the audience to know you’re listening to them for cues. But then, also, there are nights where it doesn’t get the same response, so we’ll back off. That’s something that’s grown out of them doing it and getting a laugh, and now it’s become this whole thing with us getting hit by these flying globs and wiping our faces with our napkins. We have a whole spit gag now, where the matriarch and the patriarch are barking at each other from the ends of the table, and now they bark and spit. We find new touches and nuances for different jokes every night. At this point in the run, are there still things to discover? But you’ve also done over 200 performances. Y: Gentleman’s Guide is certainly a complex, funny show, and you’ve got a lot to do as the guy who’s killing his relatives to inherit the family fortune. Plus, we did so much voice training at school, and part of this job has been to craft a performance that’s sustainable that uses a singing voice, a speaking voice, and a dialect. P: I have no doubt that my clown training is the reason I got this part. Y: Has your work at YSD affected what you’re doing in Gentleman’s Guide? Then, about halfway through college, I said to myself, “I think I can safely say I would regret it if I didn’t try this.” So that’s where the impetus to audition for Yale came from. And I was happy to know the theater program was going to provide plenty of opportunities for me to continue this serious hobby. I went to Boston College with a mind toward discovering what I was going to do with my life. I was very academically motivated in high school. Y: So you weren’t the kid who was lying to his parents about being premed when you were secretly in the drama society. And I’m thankful for that now, having been able to cultivate a number of different skill sets. P: That version of it sells short my acting bug-which I had fully caught-but I wasn’t willing to admit that’s what I wanted to do as a livelihood.
The summer musical is where all the girls were! P: I always did it as a serious hobby, growing up.
Bryce pinkham website professional#
Y: You didn’t always want to be a professional actor, right? He also performs regularly with the Brooklyn-based Outside the Wire, which tours classic plays to incite town-hall discussion of health and justice issues. The show itself, whose lead producer was Joey Parnes ’77, won the Tony for Best Musical Linda Cho ’98MFA won for Best Costume Design for a Musical.) When he’s not performing professionally, Pinkham coheads Zara Aina, a nonprofit collective that supports at-risk children in Madagascar through the creation of their own storytelling theater. (Along with his costar, Jefferson Mays ’87, he was nominated for Best Leading Actor in a Musical, though neither won. Once he became a Tony nominee for the cheeky musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Bryce Pinkham ’08MFA was firmly established as a Broadway leading man. This interview has been condensed and edited.
0 kommentar(er)
