Teaching Monroe to Stutter
By Glenn Weybright
You never know what will come your way when you get up in the morning. One day in November 2014, I was contacted by a representative of a Portland, Oregon theatre company, Portland Center Stage, about consulting with an actor who was going to play a character who stutters. The play was Three Days of Rain, by Richard Greenberg, a Pulitzer prize-nominated playwright, written in 1997.
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I met Mitchell a few weeks later, an actor in his 40s and was immediately impressed. He listened patiently to my preemptive speech aimed at the stage and film stereotypes about stuttering: how most stuttering is not caused by emotions or anxiety or pain but certainly results in all those. How, unlike those individuals portrayed on the stage and movies, the vast majority of people who stutter are not sociopaths or weaklings or misfits or mentally slow or unstable. They are just people with a brain-based communication disorder who talk in a different way. I told Mitchell I was not interested in just teaching him how people who stutter sound so he could put those sounds in his own mouth, but that I was very interested in his understanding the whole of stuttering. I had not finished my sermon when I noticed him nodding in assent. Mitchell said he couldn’t agree more and was very interested in learning as much as he could about stuttering and about people who stutter, and that he had plenty of time since the fourth season of Grimm was winding down and the play would not be staged until May, 2015.
So we began. I saw Mitchell for six one hour meetings. I assigned reading which he devoured, including the book Stuttering: Inspiring Stories and Professional Wisdom (edited by Peter Reitzes).
We looked at videos of many people who stuttered. I introduced him to several people in Portland, including Michael Turner, the young filmmaker/director of the documentary film The Way We Talk.
Together Mitchell and I attended a monthly meeting of the Portland chapter of the National Stuttering Association and I answered his many questions about the origin of stuttering. And we practiced stuttering, putting it in our own mouths.
Near the end of our work together I asked him how he thought Ned would sound. To paraphrase him, “I don’t really know. I just need to soak up as much of the experience of stuttering as I can and trust that Ned’s genuine voice will emerge.”
My wife and I got to see the play during the second week of its month-long run. The theater was full on a warm early June night in Portland. We sat through the first act and then met Ned in the second act.
I was a bit nervous as I waited for Ned to stutter. When he did, the stutter was natural and organic, not obtrusive and not blurring Ned’s character, fitting in, not overwhelming. I was very impressed. Silas had internalized the reading and viewing and study and with sensitivity created a very believable non -stereotyped character who happens to stutter. Clearly he had met Ned and realized that his stuttering was part of him but just a part: that he had a life to lead and emerging talents to hone and relationships to establish and a career to build. Silas Weir Mitchell clearly understood that Ned’s stuttering was just the way he talked and not a character flaw.
My joy in this project took two paths. First, I got to meet an actor who took stuttering seriously, who was genuinely interested in learning all he could, who treated people who stuttered with empathy and respect and who took seriously the task of learning all he could about stuttering to help him put flesh to the playwright’s words. Second, for the first time in my career as a speech language pathologist, I got to teach someone to stutter.
One very interesting fact: When this play was premiered in the UK in 1999, the character of Ned Janeway was played by a young actor named Colin Firth. And we all know how that turned out.
From the Winter 2016 Newsletter