The Story of “The Dead”

“How is your Irish?” he asked.

Now, normally I’d make a joke. Something like “It’s me lucky charm” or “I can watch ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ without subtitles.”

But this was a casting director I like a lot, and since we haven’t actually met face to face, I don’t know what his level of tolerance for silliness is, and I also don’t have a short hand with him on what he’s looking for.

For example, I was in Chicago when a wild-eyed casting director rushed up to me and breathlessly asked how my Italian was.

I had to meet the energy.

“Molto bene!” I said with the all too familiar hand gesture.

That got a laugh and a wink. I booked that gig.

So if this current producer was booking a multi-cast, being confident and a little silly might get me the gig, but if he’s looking for talent to cut “Finnegan’s Wake” I’d be out of my depth, and embarrass myself.

Best to play it very safe and describe my experience without embellishment.

“Character work, smoky Liam Neeson-esque, no experience in long form.”

He got back to me in seconds.

“Sorry this is a ten hour, multiple character. Maybe next time.”

And I trust him.

There will be a next time, there always is.

So I didn’t book that gig, and while it hurts, and feels like a defeat in one way or another, this particular gig wasn’t lost to the unfortunate side of serendipity, this was a skill issue.

A part of my craft that was missing from my personal tool kit.

Well, golly, that’s something I can work on.

So next time when a casting director asks me about my Irish, I can say “An-mhaith!” Which just means ‘molto bene’ in Irish Gaelic.

And is pronounced ‘awn-muah!’

Because letters are meaningless.

And there isn’t a hand gesture to go with it in case you wanted to know.

I also want to have at least one sizable production under my belt. A title I can point to and say, go have a listen.

I like my samples to be taken directly from commercially available titles. It’s just an aesthetic I believe in. Sample farms are shady, and I don’t like any system that profits off of ignorance and desperation.

So now I have an action plan, and I’m pretty excited about it. I haven’t done deep dialect work, since, well, it’s been a bit.

Not to say I don’t do dialect work daily, I do, and I’ve played dozens of Irish characters from Fae Lords to lovers beyond the actual Pale, but could I order a pint in Dublin without sounding like a tourist and getting my teeth kicked in?

Probably not.

Could I record a ten hour book with multiple characters and make it clean and consistent enough to tell the story without sounding like a community theater production of ‘Waiting for Godot’?

Probably not.

So where to start?

I like to break down dialect work into three buckets.

The Musicality of the Speech (cadence, rhythm, pace).

Then there’s the Pronunciation in Aggregate (general vowel and consonant sounds) Your ‘Ohs’ and your “Rs” and your “Tees”.

And finally Pronunciation in the Specific.

For example: In Andrew Scott’s performance of “The Dead” he pronounces ‘octave’ as ‘AWK-tayve’ instead of ‘AWK-tiv’

Not something a kid from California would figure out during a dry read through.

But it is details like that that make a professional difference.

Now the musicality is easy (at least for me, a musician). I can hear cadence and rhythm and dynamic and repeat it back without much effort. It can make me a bit lazy, and unfortunately, I can slip into cartoon voice if I’m not careful. I can also over do it especially with a dialect that is as musical as Irish. So a natural ear can be dangerous, but it is a bit of a cheat code otherwise.

Pronunciation in Aggregate is more technical and requires both a good ear and some exercises to practice to get the vowel shapes to become natural. A good coach is very helpful here - but none of the three coaches I reached out to got back to me - I hate it when people make it hard to pay them money.

However Irish is fairly common and there are good open resources.

The last bit, Pronunciation in the Specific, just requires a lot of time and familiarization.

So next came picking the piece. Gotta be public domain, cause I needed to have a sample to listen to, and something I can produce professionally without copyright infringement. Gotta be at least well known enough that someone might give it a try based on the name recognition, and its gotta be fun.

Sure I get paid to do this.

But I really do it for the fun.

The first thing that popped into my mind was “Finnegan’s Wake”

I have no idea why.

I just remembered it was one of those books that teenage me picked up in his ‘gotta read the classics’ phase and found it unreadable.

I didn’t remember anything more than that.

I figured I could take a crack at it now, as a fully grown man, as my wife likes to say.

It is still unreadable.

But in that same book search “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” popped up, and there’s an amazing performance of it by Colin Ferrel that I could use both to internalize the musicality of it and learn some specific word pronunciations.

However, it was too long. I just finished The Count of Monte Cristo, which took me two years, and though I’m not afraid of commitment, I needed a more chewable bite.

So I typed in James Joyce, and Short Stories, and voila, heralded by Hemmingway as one of the best short stories every written . . . The Dead.

And it was perfect.

110 minutes. Funny, dark, gloomy, packs an emotional punch at the end, there’s a magnificent Penguin Random House recording of it by the aforementioned Andrew Scott, and since this was September, and the story centers around a Christmas/New Years Eve Party, I can record it and have it distributed for my holiday card.

Cool.

I got to reading, listening, mumbling under my breath certain Irish phrases, and doing the kind of craft work I hadn’t done in a bit.

Plus, adjustments have to be made for the medium. It’s audio I’m producing, so there aren’t visual context clues you get from the page or from an image. A example might be like . . . in the Irish dialect the “th” sound is hard. So “A lot of thanks were shared about the table” will sound like ‘A lot of tanks were shared around the table” Which could be confusing or at lest a different story all together.

So you gotta be imprecise with precision.

Once I felt comfortable, I took it into the studio, recorded it in two sessions, sent it off to my proofer, who is also from the west coast and didn’t know that ‘octave’ is pronounced ‘AWK-tayve’ Did a few retakes where I really fell out of character. Some places where the accent slipped into British RP, and a few times it sounded downright Scottish, which is its own little monster.

I can’t grade my work, so I won’t.  And I’ll admit that working directly with a dialect coach on this particular piece would have made the experience faster and the recording cleaner, so that’s grist for the next mill.

But there did come a point during my final listen where I forgot it was me. I stopped fretting the dialect, and drifted into the kind of thrall that can only be achieved when a story is that good, the writing that genius, and the performance capable enough not to get in the way.

I hope you enjoy this journeyman’s piece. Have a safe and gentle holiday.

Josh