Casting Call
Fanni Green
Associate Professor, College of The Arts
School of Theatre & Dance
Fanni Green’s introductory voice class, Voice Preparation for the Actor, is a bare bones course – literally.
Joining Green at the front of the room is a “visitor” more likely to appear in the College of Medicine than the College of The Arts – a full-size model of a human skeleton. Students initially assume it’s a joke, but quickly learn that Green is quite serious.
“The voice is part of the body,” says Green. And, as she explains, that means voice involves a whole lot more than the mouth. “The mouth is only a conduit.” Her skeletal companion, therefore, enables her to show students the connections between the neck, jaw, facial bones, rib cage, backbone, pelvis, and so on, and the production of human sound.
It’s a basic lesson for an aspiring actor, she says, and an essential foundation on which to begin developing one’s craft – a difficult but ultimately rewarding journey of self-discovery that Green knows well, herself.
A USF alumna, Green earned a master’s degree in fine arts from New York University and then remained in New York to develop her acting career. Her professional accomplishments, which include work on and off Broadway with legends such as Vanessa Redgrave, on popular television series including Law & Order, as well as in film – Jennifer Aniston’s The Object of My Affection, for one – provide her with a rich repertoire of stories and life lessons she now shares with USF students.
Green has been part of the USF faculty for 12 years. For nine of those, she taught one semester a year in Tampa, returning to New York to audition and perform. Three years ago, she returned to her native St. Petersburg year-round, and her alma mater full time, to the School of Theater & Dance. Today, she teaches voice, basic and advanced acting, playwriting and an audition workshop, in addition to directing on the main stage.
While Green’s years in New York developed her into an accomplished actress with an extensive resume, surprisingly, she says, “Writing is what I believe I do best. It’s the best craft for me.” Her plays, Tillers and The Gilded Sixpence, have been produced at the New York Theatre Workshop and the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York. She writes poetry “all the time,” and is currently developing a script for a collaborative theatre and dance project with Dance Professor Jeanne Travers, called the CoTA Project: The Women and Children of Dafur.
As an actor or writer, Green credits her upbringing with the opportunity to begin nurturing her imagination and creativity at a young age.
“I grew up in a large family of people who talked a lot,” she says with a laugh, “a family of ministers. And since I was taught that children are to be seen and not heard, I did a lot of listening and that fed my imagination. I learned early on how to create stories.” Consequently, as a USF student, she studied communications with her eye on becoming a broadcast journalist. It was not until she was a senior that she auditioned for her first play.
“It was Romeo and Juliet,” she says. “I did the audition and thought that was the end of it. I didn’t even know I was supposed to check the call-back list.” Not only did Green receive a role in the play, but the experience made her admit that acting was something she had secretly always wanted to do, but didn’t know she could. “That experience, and USF professor Paul Massie, showed me that I could act, and, in a sense, gave me the ‘permission’ I needed to do so.”
Today, Green does the same for USF students – helping them to develop the skills needed to become actors, while emphasizing that success requires more than technique. “It takes discipline to master the craft,” she says, “and it requires imagination. But it also requires something that can’t be taught and that’s presence. Off stage, presence is that innate sense of being as a person. On stage, it’s the ability to transform oneself.”
And, as is necessary for success in any walk of life, Green tells her students that success as an actor requires integrity.
“It’s important that they understand that what makes one the best at what one does is who one is as a person.”
-- Mary Beth Erskine, University Communications & Marketing