The Love of Three Oranges Mailbag: Teaching commedia dell’arte, movement, masks and more

Commedia dell’arte mask. We didn’t use anything even remotely like this for our production of The Love of Three Oranges.

I frequently get emails from students who are studying or performing The Love of Three Oranges in school and have some questions. I love to hear from people about the show and I welcome messages of any kind. If you’ve got a question or just want to say Hi, please don’t be shy.

Many are pretty simple questions, mostly from actors looking for some clarification about a part. Others… well… I’m not gonna lie, guys, a couple of times these emails seem suspiciously like you are just typing out your assignment and expecting me to do it for you. You realize that I’m the daughter of two teachers and that is never, ever going to fly, right? But I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and I always try to answer as best as I can even if I’m suspicious about the motives of some messages.

I thought it might be useful to start posting some of these questions and answers for the benefit of future students. I’m going to take out the personal details of the askers but otherwise just share exactly what I told them in the event that someone else is wondering the same thing. To get this started, here’s three questions I got from a student recently.

What sort of exercises did you use to prepare the actor to play the role of Prince Tartaglia and are these exercises similar to traditional ones or are they different?

Our production was very specifically an exercise in showing that  plays like Three Oranges were still in the spirit of commedia dell’arte without having to adhere to the somewhat rigid rules of classical commedia. To that end, we prepared much like any normal modern theatre group would (actually, the cast used to recite the lyrics of the refrain to Ludacris’ What’s Your Fantasy? as a diction warm-up which probably isn’t all that normal now that I think of it.) We did work with a great guest artist, Mark Olsen, who worked with us on stage combat but also gave us a foundation on some of the principles of physical comedy like pratfalls and takes that informed some of the acting choices we made later on. He came in at the very beginning of the process so, while he gave us a great starting point, we diverged from his lessons in our own ways by the end.

Tartaglia was played by Patrick Halley in the original cast and he’s a fantastic actor (but don’t tell him I said that because, lord knows, the kid doesn’t need his head any bigger ;-)). I can’t say that we really did anything specific for him than we did for anything else. We just tried to give everyone the same foundation of comedy and let them run with it.

How would you teach certain concepts of Commedia to your actors, especially Prince Tartaglia?

Other than the aforementioned lessons in physical movement that we all got in the very beginning, we tried to steer away from traditional commedia as much as possible and let our modern sensibilities inform the production within the classical context.

How did you practice using the masks for the masked ball scene? Are there certain ways to practice with Commedia masks?

Our actors had only half-face masks such as you’d see at a modern masked ball. Brighella in the Scream mask was the only one in a full face mask. We didn’t use traditional commedia masks and we didn’t specifically practice anything related to the masks and their use.

Digging all the way back to high school, I personally had some training on movement and traditional commedia that dealt with adjusting your center of gravity for each character. I can’t say for sure that I didn’t mention this teaching once or twice during the production but I certainly didn’t do lessons in it or anything.

You have to understand, you’re picturing a director that’s an experienced adult teaching student actors. We were all college students (yes, including me) and pretty much at the same level of education. It was much less me teaching anybody anything and more of a collaborative spirit which, I think, was more in line with the theme of commedia dell’arte anyway.