Hi all,
I have this one problem actor in my hands. This is my third show working with him, and the whole production team was aware of the various problems he has before hiring him for this latest show. I'm really not sure if the problem is his "style" or a growing memory problem, but what it comes down to is that he never does the same blocking twice (he never seems to know what scene is coming next, and has left actors hanging in previous shows) and he improvises his way through the text. He seems to think he's a better writer than the playwright, so he'll deliver the same lines the same wrong way every single time and ignore my line notes, even when given verbally and even when the director or a fellow actor repeats the note to him. He also mumbles a lot and will keep adding lines ("I'm sorry, forgive me" becomes "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, please forgive me, I won't do it again, I'm sorry").
My questions are:
1) Is there anything I can do to make him, or actors like him, get his lines right? The whole production team knows he isn't getting them, and the director himself has said that he'll be happy if the actor can paraphrase his way through the show. But I don't know what I, as the SM, can do past writing the same notes every day and talking to him about learning the text.
2) How do I defuse some of the tension at work? The rest of the cast and the director are getting incredibly frustrated and rehearsals are getting really heated because he gets furious when a different actor messes up a line, but he won't take accountability for skipping a whole scene or jumping back to the beginning of a scene when it should be ending. The director has sent him home twice to learn his lines, but there's been no improvement. And we're 2 rehearsals away from tech!
3) Of course it won't help in this situation, but has anyone come up with a good way to note added sentences when giving line notes? I've been writing the accurate part and drawing an arrow with "added line" where the rambling begins, but I'm not sure if there's a better way to do this.