In the Cause of Freer Speech

“The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain” is not just a catchy old refrain.

Yes, it’s the number from “My Fair Lady” in which professor Henry Higgins coaxes the cockney girl Eliza Doolittle to speak like a proper lady. But it also illustrates the dominant method used to teach generations of American actors to speak like, well, proper actors.

Now comes Dudley Knight, a UC Irvine theater professor, to challenge a speech-training tradition that harks back more than 100 years to the man who was the model for Henry Higgins.

Knight’s target: the teaching methods of Edith Skinner, the elegant, eccentric, 19-years-dead grand dame of American speech training. Her 1942 text, “Speak With Distinction,” remains a standard work for actors seeking help with their diction. A la Henry Higgins, the 400-page volume features page after page of rhyming or like-sounding syllables, words, phrases and sentences to help students drill themselves on correct sounds.

One exercise in the 1989 updated edition reads, puckishly, “The rain in Spain mainly makes me crazy.”

Knight’s antagonists: speech teachers at some of the leading academies for actors, including the Juilliard School in New York and San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater, as well as some of the top dialect coaches in Hollywood.

As students of Skinner and keepers of her flame, they think Knight is mainly just a pain.

The controversy, Knight says, “is as much sturm und drang as you get in the normally sedate world of speech and voice training.”

Knight’s criticism--disputed every inch of the way by his opponents--boils down to this:

Skinner taught a highfalutin, vaguely British mode of speaking that she dubbed “Good American Speech.” She taught it as the standard, correct sound for actors to use in playing Shakespeare and other classic texts that do not call for a particular regional accent. Deliberately or not, Knight contends, Skinner teachers operate from principles that are unavoidably elitist. In emphasizing “Good American Speech” as an ideal, or at least as a primary dialect, they hinder students’ quest to find their own way of speaking, and perpetuate an ideal of unified sound for actors that is outmoded in today’s multicultural artistic world.

Skinner’s method, Knight argues in a lightning-rod article published recently in the academic journal Voice & Speech Review, is “mired in a self-serving and archaic notion of Euphony, and in a model of class, ethnic and racial hierarchy that is irrelevant to the acting of classical texts and repellent to the sensibilities of most theater artists.”

Instead of training in a single standard dialect, Knight says, actors need to learn every sound found in the world’s languages. They should learn them not just by ear--the “rain in Spain” method--but even more by feel, recognizing with their faces, mouths, torso muscles, in fact, with their very bones, what it is to produce those sounds. Master the physicality of sound, acquire a body-memory of the possibilities of speech, and you are ready to jump into whatever accent, whatever mode of talking, may be required.

It isn’t hard to find heavy hitters who defend Skinner’s teachings. They include such actors as Kelsey Grammer and Kevin Kline, who studied under Skinner at Juilliard, and top Hollywood dialect coaches who, trained by Skinner, can claim a client list that reads like a who’s who of filmdom.

Skinner partisans say her legacy is not outdated elitism but enduring high standards. Some of them feel outraged and wounded by what they see as Knight’s mischaracterization of their demanding but loving and impassioned teacher. To them, she was a veritable Mrs. Chips; they think Knight’s article wrongly casts her as a classroom martinet obsessed with drilling away students’ natural speech patterns.

Most of all they say, the proof is in the playing. “Gladiator,” “Forrest Gump,” “Dead Man Walking,” “Schindler’s List,” “Six Degrees of Separation,” “Thelma & Louise,” “L.A. Confidential,” “JFK”--in all of them, the lead actors learned their accents with coaching from dialect experts trained by Skinner.

Grammer says the method he learned from Skinner comes through in Frasier Crane, the lovably pompous character he has played since 1984 on the television comedies “Cheers” and “Frasier.”

Skinner suffered a fatal stroke in 1981 while giving a college seminar. She was 79.

“I loved her and she changed my life,” says dialect coach Jessica Drake, one of Skinner’s last crop of students.

Collectively, Drake and others whom Skinner taught--including Timothy Monich, the dialect coach who is considered her leading torch-bearer--paint a picture of a magical teacher and personality.

When she taught at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, Monich recalls, Skinner would leave two boxes of groceries in the back seat of her unlocked parked car so penniless acting students could raid it. Skinner spent a good chunk of her salary on elegant clothes, including a mink dress she festooned with a plastic label reading “A dress” because people kept mistaking it for a coat.

“She was worth the price of admission,” says Kline, who studied under Skinner at New York’s Juilliard during the early 1970s. “A true character, something along the lines of Miss Jean Brodie.”

Grammer’s favorite memory of Skinner concerns a fellow student from South Philadelphia who returned upset from Christmas break: He had carried out her directive to use “Good American Speech” in daily life, and all it had gotten him was ridicule and rejection from old friends who thought he was putting on airs. “She said, ‘Tommy, change your friends.’ ”

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Knight has his fans too. His supporters in academia use terms such as “visionary” and “a breath of fresh air.” He also gets a strong vote from Hollywood.

“I think he’s on a very practical path,” says Robert Easton, the dean of Hollywood voice coaches. Easton has compiled a resume par excellence since 1964 that includes teaching accents to Robin Williams (who also studied under Skinner at Juilliard) in “Good Will Hunting,” Charlton Heston in a television remake of “A Man for All Seasons,” Melanie Griffith and Joan Cusack in “Working Girl,” and Gregory Peck in “The Boys From Brazil.”

Easton doesn’t use the Skinner method; he lampoons it.

“I don’t want to mention names of some of the Skinnerites, but on many occasions I’ve been called in . . . and had to clean up for them.”

Monich, he emphasizes, is an exception who has his utmost respect. But some of them “tend to be quite rigid and bossy” and make actors feel insecure. “There are so many of them,” he says, “and they’re all in a phalanx and they all march in lock-step and protect each other. It’s like religious fanatics who say, ‘We’re the only ones who understand the holy Scriptures, you have to come to us for the correct interpretation.’ ”

Knight says he never intended to attack Skinner personally, although it’s easy to see how some droll turns of phrase in his articles would press Skinner followers’ hot buttons. Still, he insists, it is time to reevaluate her premises.

“She was a person of her time, sharing the concepts and, let’s face it, the biases of her time,” he says. “It’s not a service to a teacher to simply freeze her teaching. I’m not trying to conduct a war with [Skinner partisans], I’m just trying to get them to open up a bit.”

Knight is a tall, white-bearded man of 61, hefty enough to have played Sir John Falstaff three times on stage. Along with his teaching and dialect coaching for theaters such as South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, he spends most summers acting at Shakespeare festivals across the country. He speaks evenly in a deep, rich voice; playfully deadpan quips are a chief adornment of his conversation. His own accent, he says, “is always suspect because I’ve been a speech teacher so long. It’s probably something fake-o.”

For Knight, spoken language has been something to fight over since childhood. He was 6 when his physician father moved the family from New Orleans to Middletown, Conn. After a few weeks of ridicule and fisticuffs, he had lost his first skirmish over dialect: Discretion proved the better part of valor, and he quickly unlearned his Louisiana accent so he could fit in.

He fell hard and early for Shakespeare. At the age of 9, valor proved the better part of discretion during a grade-school outing to see the Laurence Olivier film “Henry V.” Waiting in line for the bus back to school, a classmate started mocking as sissified the Shakespearean speech of Olivier and his cohorts. Knight says he hauled off and punched the kid.

He graduated from the Yale School of Drama, acted in plays up and down the West Coast and played character-actor parts on film and television. He taught on the side and, in 1985, joined the UC Irvine drama faculty full time.

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On a recent morning, Knight’s flock--the 27 actors in UCI’s graduate department of drama--begins a session by greeting each other with hand slaps, hugs and lively chatter. Soon enough, the professor, in the most amiable way possible, has thrust them into what seems like a scene from Dante’s “Inferno.”

They assume body-stretching postures that make their arms and legs tremble involuntarily, as if in a seizure. Knight encourages them to make whatever sounds their bodies need to emit. The moans and grunts of the damned fill the gym-like acting studio. When the ordeal is over, there is a collective sigh, like wind whipping through a cave.

“You hear? These are the sounds of people having fun,” Knight says.

Soon, everyone is in a circle, making hideous funny-faces like a bunch of naughty first-graders. They follow Knight’s lead in a call-and-response exchange of odd sputtering trills and tongue clicks.

“The first day I showed up, I thought it was incredibly surreal and bizarre. I felt like I was in a cult,” Allen Liu, a third-year grad student, says after the session. But Liu noticed that the upperclassmen also had powerful, well-controlled voices, apparently the result of these strange exercises intended to relax and fortify the body’s sound-making apparatus.

Another element of Knight’s method is Omnish--a completely improvised language that exists only in UCI speech classes and employs every spoken sound humanity can make. On this day, Knight is helping his second-year students learn to sound out Omnish nonsense words using the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standard tool devised by Henry Sweet, G.B. Shaw’s friend and inspiration for Henry Higgins. Sweet taught William Tilly; Skinner was one of Tilly’s star pupils.

“Pahn-gnyol . . . va-shuh-khlay-fuh . . . noi-dyeh-rrabel-peep . . .”

Knight gently scolds the class for its questionable mastery of today’s reading lesson in elementary Omnish. “I get the feeling that, brilliant as you guys are, there was not a huge amount of preparation.” They’ll have to buckle down to make it through upcoming assignments he has in mind: a political stump speech, delivered in Omnish, and an Omnish translation--from English--of a serious stage text. The object: train the voice to create sounds and cadences that have meaning, even when the words themselves are gibberish.

Knight teaches four classes this day; only his third-year students get to do something an outsider would consider clearly related to acting: They sit in a semicircle and practice reading theatrical pieces with a French accent.

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After seven or eight years of this at UCI, Knight’s method is gaining followers elsewhere.

“Dudley has broken with orthodoxy, and thank God for that,” says J. Michael Miller, who heads the Actors Center, a continuing education school in New York for professional actors and theater teachers. “It’s such a breath of fresh air and brings the actor, the human being, back into play.”

Catherine Fitzmaurice, a visiting professor at Yale whom Knight cites as a mentor, taught alongside Skinner at Juilliard and at the American Conservatory Theater.

“I find it strange that people who are so attached to [Skinner’s] model can’t see that the world has shifted,” Fitzmaurice says. “I think Dudley’s work is the wave of the future.”

Knight’s approach, or at least parts of it, recently won a prominent new forum: Evan Yionoulis, a stage director who is chairman of the acting department at the Yale School of Drama, is incorporating some of Knight’s ideas in Yale’s speech training, starting with this year’s new graduate students.

Yionoulis has had Knight coach dialects for two productions at South Coast Repertory, including a stuttering character in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain,” and New York Jewish and California beach-kid accents in the recent world premiere of Greenberg’s “Everett Beekin.”

She likes Knight’s physical approach. Although she has worked regularly with Skinner coaches and actors and found them first-rate, Yionoulis says that some Skinner-trained actors tend to lose the forest for the trees by concentrating on speaking well and forgetting about acting persuasively. “They sound like they’re doing it for their speech teacher, and the goal is to bring to life the character.” She thinks Knight’s methods have the potential to make things more natural for actors, so they become “like a dancer having the freedom to let go, versus somebody else who is going, ‘One, two, three, four; one, two, three, four.’

If there is common ground in the debate, it is that, all theory aside, speech and dialect coaches need to be very flexible and have a variety of approaches to get through to their clients. One actor might need to do the “rain in Spain”-type drilling and ear training found in Skinner’s book; another might have to listen over and over to a recording of the accent he or she is trying to learn; yet another might need to feel the required sound’s physical contours in the face and throat before being able to hear and speak it.

Skinner herself urged flexibility and recognized that the sound of spoken English inevitably will change over time, her students say.

“She gave me the methodology” to approach any dialect, says actor Kline. “Each actor will be the filter of what’s usable and what’s discardable at any different point. You’ve got to do the work, but she opens the door for you.”

Knight is more than ready to end his jousting with Skinner’s followers; he says he would rather concentrate on spreading his method than dissecting theirs. He is writing a book about his training techniques and hopes to see it published within two years.

“I’ve made the points as much as I want to,” he says. “But I’m sure the debate will go on.”