Snook, who played Shiv Roy on Succession, was just nominated for a Tony for playing all the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray on Broadway. "I don't know what comes after this," she says. She talks about playing 26 different parts in Dorian, why she almost didn't audition for Succession, and the word she could never quite say in an American accent. Also, Ken Tucker shares a remembrance of the leader of Pere Ubu, David Thomas.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Chapter 1: Who is Sarah Snook and what are her latest achievements?
read one of the characters or one of the poems and when I met her I didn't realize this until I'd until I was thinking about the Roald Dahl's uh element of it all and went back I was like oh man I should have told her that she was such an inspiration to me as a kid through her voice through the the ability like how her storytelling and characters really spoke to me when I was a kid
Through the help of cameras and recordings of you doing the other parts, you're actually acting opposite yourself. Is it odd to be acting with yourself as a scene partner? And this is like a version of yourself that was recorded a few years ago.
Yeah, it's really, it's really strange. It's really strange because, well... What it does, particularly because I can't see myself ever, really. There's only once that I can see myself, which is the character of Alan Campbell. But otherwise I just have to listen to the audio recording aspect of it because I'm either back of stage or I'm in front of the screen or I'm behind the screen.
I can't interact with it in that way. It really forces you to listen to what... the person is saying, what I'm saying, and forces you to be really imaginative, really engage with your imagination and how that makes you feel and what words are springing out to you tonight and what parts of the tone or how it's been delivered are springing out.
And maybe that's come from listening to audiobooks when I was a kid a lot and having that imagination sustained in that way.
Well, the performance is highly choreographed. You have to be very precise. You have to get to a mark or where you're supposed to be in time for you to interact with a recording of that you performed as another character. You say there are sequences where you have like seconds to get lines out. Otherwise, the scene cues will be off.
Yeah, they'll just keep going. They're the worst kind of actors that I'm working with.
They don't wait for you.
They don't wait for me at all. They'll just barrel on. And if I don't keep up, it's my fault. Yeah, I mean, the hardest one of that is the Lord Henry. sequence in the dinner party scene where there's seven... And you're playing all those seven other guests. Yeah. How many is it? Dorian, two, three, four, five, six, I think. Yeah, I'm all of the... Yeah, it's all me.
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Chapter 2: How did Sarah Snook prepare for her role in 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'?
The band's personnel would change regularly over the decades. The one pair ubu constant was David Thomas. His singing, his songwriting, and his immense physical presence on stage. Not for Nothing was one of his pre-ubu stage names, Crocus Behemoth.
Crocus Behemoth
It's a lovely day by the sea Mr. Potato Head is strumming a guitar The beggar on the bench is acting lewd and crude
Weekend fathers got his kid up for a stroll Winter bound offshore is shredding the seagulls once more So that's good And it is as it should be On a lovely day by the sea
Thomas's death at age 71 brings to a close one of the most significant avant-garde experiments ever conducted within the confines of pop music. Emerging from Cleveland, the band was as inspired by the clanking sounds of the city's industrial factories as it was by the blues that David Thomas loved. As he said more than once, we don't promote chaos, we preserve it.
a better voice thanks to dreamboat They got something they're gonna wanna say to you. Shut up.
Shut up. Take a look at me. You got delusions. You have intentions. You think that this is real.
Over the years, certain themes recurred in Thomas' songwriting. He wrote lyrics that revealed a deep knowledge of 20th century hard-boiled fiction.
Novelists like Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, and James Crumley would have covered their ears at Pere Hubu's noise, but they'd recognize a kindred spirit in the man who wrote repeatedly about desperate getaways in the ink-black night, about cynical men and tough women trying to make emotional connections.
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