dAVid JOseph Photo: Kevin Sprague
Photo: Sabine von Falken David Joseph
interview by Harryet Candee Photographs by Sabine von Falken
Harryet Candee: david, i went to see henry V at shakespeare & Co. and enjoyed it very much. The bernstein Theatre is a wonderful space and i was thrilled to be able to see you in this play, and playing quite a few different roles! David Joseph: Thank you so much for coming to see the show! i really enjoyed playing such a wide variety of characters. i got to play five! The Dauphin, The Archbishop of Canterbury, Nym, York and English Soldier. i worked very hard at making each of them as clear and as different from the other as i could. i wanted a distinct vocal change for each character, in range and meter, as well as clear shifts of physical postures. i was hoping to serve Shakespeare’s text and tell the clearest possible story. My hope is that the audience forgot who the actor was altogether and just followed the story of these individuals in the play. I was very busy following your change in roles! You must have had an awful lot of training to do acting like that! i have been a working actor since i was about thirteen, and have had the good fortune of working with and learning from
10 • september 2015
The ArTful Mind
so many wonderful actors and directors. i am proud to say that most of my formal acting training was done at Shakespeare & Company. What is the training like at shakespeare & Co.? i thoroughly enjoy the approach to the work and the esthetic at Shakespeare & Company. i find the most open and truthful work comes out of me when i’m there, surrounded by so many huge minds and huge hearts. it’s always a very collaborative process, focused on language and the truth of the moment. i trained there in voice, text, fight and movement.
so many different areas of study, for sure. What sort of acting have you enjoyed doing in addition to that at shakespeare & Co.? Before i found Shakespeare & Company, or they found me, i was performing in NYC, doing mostly musicals and commercial work. There was a larger concentration of work as an actor if you could sing and dance, so i did much of both. i also enjoy
The Real Inspector, David Joseph
Actor
film work very much. it’s a very different form of acting and expression, smaller and more delicate than stage work. i enjoy the medium of film especially now, with the use of digital cameras. i’ve done a few films actually ON FiLM which is very expensive and doesn’t allow for as many “takes.” The quality of film equipment and of digital cameras now allow processing to be less expensive, giving the actors and directors the ability to shoot on a much smaller budget. i really enjoy it, and it’s quite a shift from stage acting, where your energy and thought must fill an entire theatre full of people. i worked with Kale Brown recently on a feature film and he was telling me about one of the approaches he uses when teaching his newer film students… “Just think it… it’s amazing what the camera picks up on.” i’ve done a few horror shorts, in one of which i get stabbed in the back with a tripod! My audition for that film involved about thirty on-camera takes of different ways i could die or be killed… i may have had nightmares for a few days after.