Her singing made me cry!

One of the most often heard adages in theater is "Don't do the audience's work for them!"

This phrase is used to discourage actors from doing one thing in particular: cry on stage. Crying, though occasionally called for in the stage directions or indicated in the actual text, is (more often than not) an unnecessary overlay by an actor attempting to raise the emotional stakes of a scene. Curiously, crying on stage is thought of by many aspiring actors as "proof" of their ability to act.

Well, crying on stage may reflect a certain level of ability; but its effectiveness with the audience should be debated. Crying by an actor when not specified in the text of a script does a disservice to the play and the playwright, and can insult an intelligent audience.

If you can't move the audience using only the text, if you must resort to tricks like crying on stage, then there is something wrong at the heart of the script, or with the direction, or with you, the actor.

Because here's what's true: in real life, people never really cry when other people are crying. It's rude. When we see people cry, we are moved to be strong for them, to offer them comfort and encouragement. It is when we see people not cry in the face of adversity that we are moved to tears.

Dozens of plays and movies come to my mind now, in which a character has just received the news of a death, or has been abandoned or betrayed, or has witnessed some cruel injustice, or has been dealt an unfair blow from life. What moved us to cry was not the character's weakening to tears, but his ability to remain dignified, to be strong for himself or others, to make his next choice from a core of inner strength. When a character on stage is being strong in the face of hardship, we in the audience are given implicit permission to cry on his behalf. Oedipus doesn't cry: he accepts his cruel fate and plucks out his eyes. We weep for him. When Lear realizes too late that Cordelia loves him, he does not cry; he is brutally honest about his shortsighted cruelty to his loving daughter. We weep for him. When the little boy who wanted so desperately to win the spelling bee places second but does not cry, we weep for him.

Because here's what's also true: when we weep for the character on stage or screen, we are really weeping for ourselves and our common human condition. That is the catharsis theater is meant to provide to an audience. Crying is the business of the audience, not the job of the actor. It is the actor's job to move us, not to make us watch him be moved.

I have given this piece of advice to actors and singers throughout my teaching career; but recently I was the lucky witness to one of my students discovering for herself the truth of this aspect of acting.

My student, Hannah Knapp, a lovely young actress who is working to put singing roles onto her resumé, began a few weeks ago to work on a great tune by Jason Robert Brown called "Stars and the Moon." This song is in three parts, each part telling a story about three men with whom the singer fell in love. The first man offered her romance, the second offered her freedom. They both offered her "the moon." But what she wanted was material comfort, financial security, a life that was "scripted and planned." Then she meets Man Number Three, who had "retired at age 30, set for life." And she marries him. And she gets everything she ever wanted, until she wakes one day and realizes, "My God! I'll never have the moon."

When Hannah first heard me sing this song to her, she was so moved by the lyric that she cried when I had finished. But she loved the song and wanted to learn it. So the next week we began to work on it. To our mutual dismay, the lyric again moved Hannah so deeply, that she couldn't finish the song. She could get to the spoken words "My God!" but could not then follow with the singing of "I'll never have the moon." The lump in her throat just would not give way to that lyric!

I told Hannah that, in my experience, when a lyric moves you so much that you can't help but cry, you just have to keep singing it and singing it, until you become inured to the emotional subtext. But I also told her to hang on to that feeling of vulnerability when she comes to those words, because that's the thing the audience wants to believe about her — that she really was hurt by the realization that she'd "never have the moon."

Weeks went by. Every time we tried to sing the song, we'd get right to the end and Hannah would choke. She'd reach for the kleenex and swallow a little water and we'd try again, to no avail.

Last week, Hannah and I gave it another shot. We got to the end of the piece, and I played the chord that holds under the spoken "My God!" Hannah said, "My God," and then stopped. A beat went by. Then another beat. And then I heard Hannah "powering through" her own emotional bottleneck. Out came "I'll never have the moon," in a voice that had nearly but not quite gone to tears. I got goosebumps. When we finally ended the song together, I was the one reaching for the kleenex. We had a good laugh/cry, and congratulated ourselves on being able finally to get through it.

Hannah had found that staying strong after the discovery of her loss was a powerful, moving moment for her audience.

And I had received unbidden, serendipitous, positive proof that an actor's not crying is what will move people to tears.

Women's Vocal Cord Damage from Speaking

Recently I listened to a radio discussion by two men and a woman on the subject of the state of education in America. As interested as I was in the subject, about one minute into the broadcast, I began to listen to an entirely different aspect of the interview: the pitch of the woman's speaking voice.

Her speaking style provided a clear example of a modern woman attempting to sound "like a man." She was speaking at what voice professionals call the "fry," the very lowest pitches capable of phonation by the vocal cords.

Since the 1970s, the speaking pitch of women's voices in the West has been dropping, in every field of employment — from communication and education to politics and business. In those years when women first entered the workforce in large numbers, experiments in business psychology discovered that women who lowered their overall vocal pitch moved ahead in their jobs, held others' attention longer, and got better performance from their subordinates than did women who spoke at high pitches. I think one study referred to it as "Big Dog Bark," or something like that. I even remember women being professionally coached to lower the pitches of their speaking voices.

This culture-wide lowering of female vocal speaking pitch mirrored a rising awareness by women of their age-old attempts to achieve the opposite effect, namely, of maintaining a youthful, even childlike timbre to the voice. Women suddenly became eager to throw off anything that made them appear weak, incapable, or dependent — including the sound of their voices. Though there were plenty of 20th-Century women who spoke with naturally low voices (strong actors like Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, Rosalind Russell, right up to Meryl Streep), women in the 1970s and 1980s, in an effort to be perceived as "strong," began to move toward ever-lowered vocal pitch — lower (I and many other voice professionals feel) than was needed to achieve the effect they sought.

But a relaxed, natural, even tone of voice (as opposed to an ultra-feminine, high-pitched voice) is not the same as a voice being lowered to its fundamental tone, or fry. Nowadays, almost all female news anchors, weathercasters, and entertainment hosts speak at the vocal fry, as do many women of power in business and politics.

Though occasionally a teenaged girl will begin study at my vocal studio with a high-pitched, "girl-like" speaking voice, many more young women arrive with unnaturally lowered voices, pitched at the vocal fry. These girls are often the leaders and high achievers of their schools. The subtext in their voices is: Please take me seriously! These voices are often already damaged from the acceptance of a new cultural "norm." This speech "affect" is unnecessarily harming the cords, actually creating an inability to sing, and prematurely aging the vocal cords from daily misuse.

This lowering of pitch has become so accepted by the culture at large that we no longer hear the vocal fry in women as aesthetically displeasing. Aside from being displeasing, this kind of speaking is extremely damaging to any vocal mechanism, male or female. When a person speaks at the fry, he or she is using pitches that cause the cords actually to "chafe" against each other — a phenomenon you can easily recognize in a speaker's low, gravelly tone, or in the raspy drop in pitch, especially at the ends of phrases and sentences. Compared to the voices of men — who have no reason to pitch their voices lower than their natural registers — women's voices may often be the lowest-pitched in any random group.

I would recommend to all women — but to young women especially — that each of you allow your voice to find it's natural speaking register, rather than attempting to force it to stay in a dark, low, rumbling area. With good diction, diaphragmatic support, and moderate tempo in your speech, you will find that your naturally-pitched voice can still be quite effective in communication, perhaps even more so, because listeners naturally trust a natural sounding voice in both women and men.