I need to play.   My acting has gotten too serious lately.  Time to stick my tongue out and make funny faces - and funny voices and make a fool of myself and fall flat on my face. There's a workshop with a casting director who does cartoon voiceover animation and video games.  I've never done anything like that.  It's a SAG actors' workshop.  It's free.  So I go.

The casting director - I'll call him "Z" - is such a regular guy - so anti Hollywood.  I like him.  He's full of gems of advice.  Even with cartoon characters, it seems, you have to have real intentions, real emotions, real stuff.  It's not just about the funny voice.  No, I did not know that.  I thought it was about the funny voice.  Well, yes, it is about the funny voice and funny sounds, but it's got to be supported by real stuff.  Those with just the funny voice and nothing else sound as flat as an outdated 50's cartoon strip.  Those with the funny voice and the other "stuff" stand out like the wheat from the chaff, he says. 

 Even Bugs Bunny and Popeye must have real stuff cooking inside. 

"Let's play a game," Z says.   He flashes cards in front of us - giant  flash cards,  the type you use with kids learning the alphabet.  Only these have all kinds of outlandish cartoon-like characters on them - animals you won't find in a zoology book, humans you won't find in your anatomy charts, creatures with outsize mouths and gigantic horse teeth, with cyclops eyes, snout-like noses, and tentacle arms.

You can't think.  You just have to come out with a sound and a voice, Z says.  The idea is to short circuit your brain - and go with the primitive limbic system thing.  I get a picture of a little girl with big buck teeth the first time around, and a weirdo Tasmanian devilish animal the next.  Strange croaks come out of me.  I don't let myself fully go, but it's a start.  By our second round, we're laughing uproariously at the sounds coming out of us.  Yes, PLAY.  Of course.  How easily we forget.

OK, time for our "scenes".  He hands out scenes we have to make choices with.  I get some mermaid-like vamp fish called "Angel", who lives underwater and is a nightclub singer.  Fun, right?  Except, suddenly, my mind freezes.  What do I do with this thing?

I opt for the "vampish" thing, then I ludicrously decide to add some phlegm-like breathing sounds to suggest underwater gills.  That kills it.  I sound like an eighty year old man dying of pneumonia, who's trying to be a vamp.  Even that would be funny.  But - somehow, it isn't.  Not enough commitment?  Not enough intention?  What?  Z suggests I drop the phlegm-like death rattles and go faster - oh, and sound like a moll.  A moll?  What's a moll?  You know, a Mafia girlfriend from the 50's, like in a film noir. I rack my brains for examples of 50's Mafia molls in film noirs I've come in contact with.  Not a one materializes in my brain.

I try to remember some of his gems of wisdom - play with your voice, stretch it, compress it, change the resonance in your face, contract, expand, heighten the pitch, lower the pitch, go faster, slower, make unintelligible sounds.  Get out of your head.    Play play play.

Once I'm done, he suggests Marilyn Monroe.  Oh, now he tells me.  That I actually have a picture of.  I could have done that.  I think.  Happy Birthday, Mr. President...

Too late.  It's time now to shake me up.    As if I'm not already shaken up enough.  Z takes out a list of adjectives and nouns - which he combines in any haphazard way.  I get "flighty, scared drunkard".   I now have to drop the vamp-moll thing and do "flighty, scared drunkard".  I do my darnedest.  But I notice I'm stumbling physically as a drunk, rather than doing it with my voice.  Darn, this voiceover acting is hard when you don't get out of your own way.

I feel like I'm in fifth grade all over again, that shy fifth grade girl, that totally incapable fifth grade girl who got up in front of the class once with her first book report ever.  It was supposed to be about witchcraft.  I didn't know about plagiarism yet.  I had copied from the encyclopedia verbatim, starting quite grandly, I thought.  "Heretofore let it thus be known, it shall be decreed thus - all witches will thereupon forthwith be burn-ed at the stake...".  The teacher stared for a long moment,  then asked me to explain it in my own words.  I hadn't a clue.  I had no words of my own.  I stood blushing for what seemed like an hour before she ordered me to sit down.  

That's how I feel right now.   Teacher, can I please sit down now?

Somehow, on the second and third go, I manage to get some laughs here and there.  I'm blushing like a fifth grade girl.

People aren't as free or as funny as they were with the flash cards, myself included.  The flash cards managed to short circuit our brains.  Now, with words and a script, we've had too much time to "think" about our choices.  We forget to play.

A few gems stand out.  The woman who is asked to be a "pompous, stupid donkey".  Now what are you going to do with that?  Well, she doesn't question.  She just does it.  She is pompous, she is stupid, and she does it by stretching her voice in different directions.  And yes, every so often, she even breaks out in a howling braying donkey sound.  It's  pretty hilarious.  There's a guy whose cartoon character looks like a horsey-faced guy, and his voice sounds - well - "horsey".  Again, that stretching voice thing.  I marvel at other people's talent.

The biggest advice I have for myself is - play more.  

I try it again at home.  At the risk of ruining my acting reputation, here goes. 

Thanks, Mr. Z, for reminding me to play once in a while - just for the silliness of it.