HEALING THROUGH THEATER For Rebecca Gibel, the actor who played Sheila marriage and was replaced by a fear that remained Bentley in Trinity Repertory's fall 2019 production of until Cianci's death in 2016. Why did Bentley trust The Prince of Providence, the voice of Buddy Cianci's Gibel with her story now? ex-wife is very grounded. It resonates in her molars Perhaps one answer is that Gibel approached and chest. Bentley the way she approaches all her characters: In a small room nestled above the glass dome with the desire to understand them on their own terms. presiding over the foyer of the Trinity Repertory Over “Sheila-tini” vodka cocktails, the two women Company theater, Gibel, who is 40 years old, explained built a space where Bentley felt comfortable sharing that becoming Bentley required changing her vocal her story. pitch. The College Hill Independent sat down with actors “I use a lot more inflection and pitch and go up and vocalists who knew Gibel at multiple stages of high in my voice and down low,” Gibel said, adjusting her acting career, all of whom described her as kind, her voice accordingly. “My tempo is a little bit erratic, welcoming, and very talented, which allows her to and her tempo is a little slower than mine,” she added, empower character voices that are not always a part of waving her arms as she spoke quickly, and then slowing the mainstream narrative. down and keeping them to her sides. The relationship between Bentley and Gibel is an The Prince of Providence dramatizes the life of example of how art and storytelling can help people Providence ex-Mayor Buddy Cianci, who served heal: While the play is not primarily about Bentley, between 1975 and 1984, and again between 1991 and her story would not have been publicized had the play 2007. Cianci's flirtations with corruption and the time never happened and the cocktails not been shared. he served in prison for racketeering secured his repu- Because Gibel showed Bentley that someone was tation as the mayor Rhode Islanders loved to hate. The listening, Bentley decided to speak up and add her play, which opened in September 2019 and ran for just voice to the story of Providence. over a month, received widespread acclaim and will be revived by Trinity Rep in the summer of 2021. +++ Gibel, a trained actor and singer, tends to locate characters vocally before embodying them physically. When they're not using their voice onstage, Gibel and Giving an onstage voice to Sheila Bentley, however, her husband Charlie make ends meet by recording was particularly challenging—and not just because it audiobooks. In the second-floor study of their home was the first time she was playing a real person who'd in the East Side of Providence, they have installed a be watching her perform from the audience. For mobile recording studio that looks like a soundproof decades, Bentley refused to go on the record about her telephone booth. They can each spend hours in the personal experiences while married to Cianci, and small booth, where the interior is decorated with a Gibel was concerned she knew too little about the inner stuffed elephant, a talisman of a female storyteller, and life of the woman she would be bringing to life onstage. a portrait of Gibel's grandmother from World War II. Bentley was not unknown. As Sheila Cianci, she For each audiobook, Gibel puts two to three hours was a celebrity in the Buddy Cianci story, an iconic of work into every final hour of narration. When faced smiling blonde standing by his side in the pictures of with a new project, she assigns a different color to his first term as mayor. She married Cianci in 1973 and each character and highlights their name in that color changed her name back to Bentley after divorcing him throughout the manuscript. Anything that the author in 1984. says about a character's personality, vocal quality, or But Bentley’s voice had never told the Cianci story, origins is very helpful at this stage. “That helps me and Gibel knew that that this was the voice she needed build a character voice so I know their identity.” to hear in order to do justice to her character. So she For her current project, Gibel is working on develasked Mike Stanton, the journalist who wrote the book oping the voice of an old woman named Nora, whom on which the play is based, to help her set up a meeting the author compares to Carol Channing and Ethel with Bentley. After an initial rejection, Bentley agreed Merman. Sitting inside the recording booth, Gibel to talk. She just started talking and telling stories. And plays a grainy YouTube video of a Carol Channing I didn't realize how little she had spoken about it,” interview, listening carefully. She will use that as a Gibel said. “I realized the gift that she'd just given me.” template to construct Nora's voice. “You hear her voice, In October 2019, Bentley went on the record for the right? I've got to kind of figure out a way to make that first time, telling the Boston Globe that Cianci subjected sustainable.” Holding her trunk in the posture of an her to domestic violence and psychological manipu- older woman, Gibel begins narrating. “Be a darling lation. In a radio interview with Bentley, WGBH host and drive my car down to my designated spot,” she Jim Braude asked her what made her come out with the says before adding, in a pleasant narrator's voice: story now. “The meeting that I had with Becky [Gibel],” “Gold booties clicking across the sidewalk, she reached Bentley answered. out to shove a tip into his hand.” “If you'd never met her, you'd never have told the In 2013, Gibel recorded the memoir of a sex surropublic about what he did to you?" gate named Cheryl Cohen-Greene. Green was alive at “No.” the time the audiobook was published, and it was the Bentley told the Globe that love died early in their first time Gibel had performed the voice of a living
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BY Clara Gutman Argemí ILLUSTRATION Clara Gutman Argemí DESIGN Ella Rosenblatt
person before taking on the role of Sheila Bentley. In constructing Cohen-Greene's voice, “I didn't want to cloud her personhood with my interpretation and my performance,” said Gibel. Her goal was to let the audience hear this woman's voice, while also letting them construct their own interpretation of what Cohen-Greene sounded like, mimicking the experience of reading a book. This was slightly different from what Gibel wrestled with when constructing the fictional portrayal Sheila Bentley. While Cohen-Greene wrote a memoir on her own terms, Sheila Bentley was just one of many supporting characters in The Prince of Providence. Gibel faced two pressures: knowing that Bentley was going to see it, and staying true to the plot and purpose of the play. Bentley's voice would have been different had Gibel been narrating an autobiography: “The play dealt a lot with the confrontations between her and Buddy, so a lot of times we were seeing Sheila in these imagined and heightened confrontational moments.” In daily life, Bentley “doesn't fly off the handle all that much. And so I think I would be able to capture that measuredness and that poise better.” Audio storytelling not only made Gibel think differently about how to construct characters; it also built up stamina and resilience of her voice. At some point after graduating from Brown University's MFA Acting program, she was living in New York and performing in musicals. She’d belt through the night and try to record during the day, and “It was sheer terror whether or not my voice was going to last.” For the past three or four years, however, her voice has become “steel,” which she attributes to hours of narrating and trainings she received from Thom Jones, head of voice and speech at Trinity Rep, and Kurt Robinson, a voice instructor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. When a colleague first directed her to Robinson, it was an epiphanic moment. Over the course of the two lessons they had together, he taught her how to produce a healthy belt by using her voice in an efficient way that “is actually making your voice stronger.” Her meeting with him also carried a surprisingly nostalgic discovery—the two of them had gone to middle school together but had fallen out of touch over the years. As middle schoolers in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Robinson remembers Gibel as being talented and also kind. “She’s always had this bubbly personality that she still has as an adult,” he said. “It's like she's constantly on caffeine. She channeled that bubbly energy into her art.” Gibel continues to combine talent with kindness in her work today. Not only does her acting and singing voice have brilliance, power, projection, and resonance, “She's also able to sing with dynamics, and that's almost more important than anything else.” The ability to do this stems from her intelligence and empathy, through which she's “able to make different colors and different dynamics in her voice that help her be communicative and tell a story.”
06 MARCH 2020
