In a local discussion of actors and accents, the obvious place to turn is a group that lists part of its mission as "actor-centered, text and language-driven theater." That would be Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre, where Shakespeare, Shaw, Synge et al. can put an actor to the test.

	Martin Giles Click photo for larger image.

Artistic director Andrew Paul walks a bit of a tightrope when preparing a work like last season's "The Shaughraun," a 19th-century Irish play in which Paul directed 22 actors.

If the accents don't faze the audience, there is a good chance the authentic language will.

"Idioms are tough," explains Paul. " 'The Shaughraun' is a good example. If you do a play that's written in a very strong sort of colloquial dialect, one of the problems you have is the audiences can find it off-putting. I got a lot of complaints from audiences, at least in the first act [there are three]. Until they got used to it, people were like, 'Wow, they're talking in a foreign language up there.' "

The catch-22 is that many audience members come expecting authenticity, creating a balancing act for the company.

		Related article Some actors have knack for accents, while for others accents a negative Listen In: Hear excerpts from Andrew Paul's conversation with the PG's Sharon Eberson: On finding an actor with an authentic accent to serve as an anchor in an Irish play On how difficult it can be for audiences to understand regional dialects On upcoming plays that required PICT producers to think about casting for dialects

"No matter what you do, there's always going to be someone who says the dialect isn't what it should be. And I'll say we pulled it back a little because otherwise it would be [incoherent] for 80 percent of the audience," Paul said.

"But they do the same thing in Ireland and England when they do American plays," he adds. "To me, when plays and films are done well, you start to forget that stuff. I don't think you sit there judging the dialects on a really good production of Tennessee Williams, even if they're a bunch of English actors and they don't quite sound American Southern."

A good example, he says, is Vanessa Redgrave playing an Italian in the 1989 Broadway revival of Williams' "Orpheus Descending." "She got a lot of criticism for her dialect. But I saw this production, I saw it three times, and I thought she was mesmerizing. I didn't even think about the dialect because the acting was so good."

Several local actors fit that bill for Paul, who says Derdriu Ring is a go-to actor because she's from Ireland, was trained as an actor there, and she's someone others can look to while perfecting their own speech. Another is Martin Giles.

"He can do dialects. Usually all it takes is a couple of tapes and two sessions with a coach, and he's off and rolling. A lot of actors just have a natural ear for that."

	Andrew Paul Click photo for larger image.

Helping him and other PICT players are accent coaches Don Wadsworth and Natalie Baker, who teach voice and speech in the Carnegie Mellon University theater department.

A PICT cast doesn't have the luxury of movie actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, who spent weeks in South Africa listening to locals before he nailed the accent for "Blood Diamond" -- and was Oscar-nominated for the role.

The coaches help actors find their voice, then stick around for run-throughs of a production, so they can watch for glitches while the director concentrates on the rest of the show.

Sometimes, no matter what you do on stage, the audience comes looking for trouble.

"When we toured Ireland twice, with 'Faith Healer' and then 'Major Barbara,' we did get some critics who noted the dialect," he recalled. Particularly, and it's weird, they were critical of Bingo O'Malley playing the faith healer because the guy playing the cockney was actually a Brit, so they couldn't criticize him. ... [O'Malley's] a second-generation Irish American, and of course his parents are the real thing, so he's really not that far off the island."

Paul laughs. "So that's just how it is. You kind of expect it."

Coming up next season is a different type of challenge for Paul & Co.: Audience familiarity.

After a run of "Julius Caesar" comes its modern-day counterpart, "Stuff Happens," about the political lead-up to the Iraq war. "The play's pretty evenly split between the British, Tony Blair's administration, and the American administration, so we'll have some interesting dialects."

A bit of New England-meets-Texas for President Bush?

"That'll be a unique challenge, I think," Paul says. "It's one thing to play characters with dialects, but to play people we see on our television screens is another thing altogether."