Do actors’ accents perplex you?

I’m not the only person who has trouble understanding accents.

Many people complain about having difficulty on the phone with a customer service person whose native language is not English.

Those interactions bother me, too, but what I’m particularly vexed by is having trouble understanding accents on stage.

Earlier this month I saw Last Night and the Night Before at the Steppenwolf Theatre. In the program playwright Donnetta Lavinia Grays extols “the language I grew up speaking in the Southeastern United States.” She writes, “To me, there is no richer sound than the melodies in the voices of Southern Black folks.” The speech did sound melodic, but I couldn’t decipher much of it. I got the gist of the plot but missed many nuances of the dialogue.

At least this time I didn’t waste my money. I was ushering and hadn’t paid for a ticket. That wasn’t the case last summer when I saw Playboy of the Western World at City Lit Theater. The characters in John Millington Synge’s play, set on the west coast of Ireland in the early 1900s, spoke with a brogue that to my ear obscured the words.  

Synge, like Grays, wrote with the intention of lifting up his native speech. He wanted to show the rural Irish ways of speaking English as rich, poetic, and authentic. 

Given the intentions of both Grays and Synge, it was appropriate for the actors to speak with accents. But what if the audience then can’t make out the words?

“When acting with accents on stage or screen, it doesn’t matter how authentic you sound if you can’t be understood,” long-time dialect coach David Alan Stern wrote in a blog post. … “Your goal should be to combine the impression of authenticity with total intelligibility. … [A]fter 40+ years of accent coaching, I can now support directors’ choices to violate accent purity for artistic or aesthetic reasons.”

It’s not a problem for everyone, however. Ability to understand accents differs from person to person. 

As I recall, some critics mentioned intelligibility problems with Playboy of the Western World. I was surprised that only one reviewer of Last Night and the Night Before at theatreinchicago.com commented about difficulty understanding the speech. The reviewer called out one actress not for her accent but for an “overly excited line delivery [that] makes what she’s saying unintelligible.” Since no other critic mentioned a problem with comprehension, I wonder whether I should have my hearing aids adjusted for clarity. I found only one reviewer in Denver, where the play premiered, who shared my problem: “I did at times have trouble understanding [Monique] and [Sam] with their Southern accents,” he wrote. “I’d say maybe that’s due to my Yankee ear, but my Alabama wife had the same problem.” 

I’ve read that people who are exposed to a greater variety of accents have less trouble with comprehension. I live in a big city where I hear the speech of immigrants from all over the world, and I still have difficulty understanding. In conversation you can ask someone to repeat what she said, but you can’t say “Pardon?” to an actor on stage. 

To avoid plays with heavy accents seems a narrow-minded solution, but I might have to do so.