Hi, I’m Billy Crudup and I’m going to teach you how to pull off a one-man play. When the stage manager calls places, it’s abundantly clear to me that that really should be singular. It’s just me. O.K.? Just say place. I could always do an immaculate English accent. Lois he’s speaking in the goddamn English accent again. Don’t get your knickers in a twist darling. What are you doing now? Maybe he’ll play it for Sade. The way that you go about describing different accents is phonetic symbolism. On the script, you write the symbol. And it’s really tedious. But once you’ve done that, internalized the way that each of those characters speak, it’s not very difficult then to make the scene come alive. My father calls out, “Lois, he’s speaking in the goddamn English accent again.” And my mother comes running into the shot and says, “Don’t upset your father.” And I say, “But it’s my real voice.” “And my dad loses it.” “Phil, you’re an American. You were born in Illinois. No one in this family has ever been to Europe.” Many of the characters occupy wildly different vocal ranges. From high — to low. You warm up your body. And then you begin warming up your voice. I don’t know if anybody out there has ever been to a sports game. The next morning you wake up and inevitably you sound a little bit hoarse. When you’re doing a play, you can’t afford to have that. “I ask him what he means.” “Well you know suddenly, we’d be in the middle of making love and she would say something like, ‘Mark don’t do that with your tongue.‘” When we go to see a play we can learn a lot of information by the way that a person is carrying themself on stage. “Harry? Harry!” “And at first I’m disoriented, but I turn around and there’s a girl there with her red hair pulled into a wool cap.” “Stephanie! Mark Schmidt’s sister.” So some people are a little bit like this. Some people are kind of like this. Some people are like this. “What did you do to my crazy brother?” “What do you mean?” “Well, he came back from that weekend with you on the boat and straight away proposed to his yoga teacher, who he’d been dating for about a minute, and three weeks later, they were married.” So you don’t have to do a whole lot. I can do this, and I’m a different person. “Yeah, I thought I would see you at the wedding.” “Guess I wasn’t invited.” “Well, you didn’t miss anything. It was him and all of his awful jock friends. Macho, jock friends.” Something interesting happened while I was delivering that there. I stumbled over one of the words which inevitably happens every night because the pace of the show is really quick and the pace of my mind is very slow. But one thing I’ve discovered in working on this is that the audience is most interested in the story and the material. So, as long as I keep returning back to the story, It doesn’t matter how much I stumble. Even though I don’t stumble too much, I just stumble a little bit.