The Road Back: APT's Voice & Text Program

Learn more about the impact of voice and text work on furthering our art in the latest Road Back blog. Photo of Sara Becker, Director Voice & Text, at a Backstage Talk in 2019.

In the last edition of The Road Back, we talked about the Core Acting Company and what a difference it makes to our work at APT. Today, I want to tell you a little more about another element that we believe is vital to APT’s success: The Voice & Text Program.

Of course, voice and text has been an APT focus since the beginning, but in the last 20 years it has taken on greater importance. Or maybe more accurately, it’s become a more integrated and intentional part of the production process.

Each play in the APT season has a full-time voice and text coach. They split their time between doing private coaching sessions with individual actors, and in the rehearsal rooms listening. During outdoor rehearsals, you can usually spot them up in the corner of the back row, making sure each actor can be heard from the seats furthest from the stage.

But aside from voice production, voice and text coaches help the actors make sense of the words as scripted. They can help dissect the text, paying attention to all the clues the playwright left there, including word choice, rhythm and punctuation. They work with the actors and director to explore meaning beneath the surface of the text.

APT performs in a 1075-seat outdoor theater. Voices need to be big, be trained and be healthy. The coaches who work at APT often say that APT actors – especially Core Company members who have been with us a long time – are like Olympic athletes of voice. The muscles (both literal and figurative) that they need to develop to produce enough sound in the theater and keep their voices healthy takes incredible endurance, and is very rare in our field where actors are increasingly being trained for film and television.

It used to be that one or two coaches had to work on all of APT’s productions simultaneously, attending only to the most urgent challenges for each play. Now each play has a full-time voice and text coach, which I also understand to be rare in the field. In fact, in filling out a recent survey from Theatre Communications Group – the trade association for professional theaters – they didn’t even have a spot to record the number of voice and text coaches we employed. Rather, they had a spot for “dialect coach.” To be clear, if a play calls for it, dialects also fall to the voice and text coach. (Brief side track: remember the dialects in Once Upon a Bridge last year? Three different characters using three different dialects – beautiful).

Brenda DeVita has been a fierce proponent of this work since before she was Artistic Director, and she and Former Artistic Director David Frank developed the Voice & Text Program to be what it is today. We are so grateful to our voice and text staff, led by Sara Becker who has been coaching at APT for 15 years, and has been APT’s Director of Voice & Text since 2018. She’ll be joined by seven other coaches this season, including Eva Breneman, Jan Gist, Elisa Gonzales, Adrianne Moore, Santiago Sosa, Jacqueline Springfield and Rosie Ward. They won’t be on the stage, but their hard work certainly will.

It’s impossible to talk about APT’s Voice & Text Program without acknowledging the Birkhauser Family Charitable Fund. Their generous lead-sponsorship for more than a decade has made all the difference in building the robust program that we have today. Bob and Caryn Birkhauser recognized years ago the immense impact skilled voice and text work has on the plays, and how important it is to have resources to keep the work going. We are grateful for their ongoing support.

If you are interested in sponsoring APT’s Voice & Text Program, you will find more information here.