NO SMALL ACTOR

Imagine On the Waterfront without Karl Malden, Rocky without Burgess Meredith, or Goodfellas without Joe Pesci. Character actors--you really can't tell a story without them. It's the same on stage. As the adage goes, "there are no small parts, only small actors." Ed Bernard of The Concord Players has never been a small actor. Not even when he split the part of Dr. Doolittle with Joe Dworetsky in the third grade. Only half a part, but a big performance. He didn't find himself on the boards again until well after college, but this time it was for a whole part, the Narrator in the stage adaptation of A Christmas Story. The script was so long it took him 90 minutes just to recite his lines after he memorized them. The performance bug bit him, and since then he's been bringing character to a number of shows in Concord and throughout the region. Ed played four, count 'em, four roles in The Concord Players production of The Man Who Came to Dinner a few years back, including a hyperactive, overwrought radio producer; definitely playing against type for the affable, laid-back Ed. He brings the necessary flexibility to playing character parts, too. "Can you dance, Ed"? No. "Ok, then, here's what you do, move from one foot to the other and rock back and forth while holding your hand in the air." Of course it wasn't that easy, but by the time the lessons were done, Ed was waltzing gracefully on the set of Little Women, along with all the other wedding guests. When he wasn't playing Papa that is.

He toggled seamlessly from Joe the barber to Rudolph the waiter in the recent Players production of The Matchmaker, slipping from a convincing Yonkers New York accent in Act I to an indignant German in Act III. And, as the bumbling detective in Cannon Theater's Murdered to Death, he was playing against type once more. Ed doesn't bumble.
Not only is he gifted at acting, as a writer by trade he has recently taken a turn at writing. His one-act called A Matter of Death and Life is "a serious play with some comedic elements that asks questions about how and why we choose to live our lives," he says. "It showed me how challenging it can be to tell a story with only dialogue--when you can use prose to tell a story (as in a novel or short story), you can use a narrator's voice, but that's not practical in most plays. So you have to use dialogue to get at the whole story. Of course, you also get a great and powerful tool--actors!
As a writer, Ed can be very critical of the scripts from other playwrights, even the best. He's been in some classics: Arsenic and Old Lace, Blithe Spirit, The Matchmaker. Does it feel presumptuous to criticize the likes of George Kaufman, Noel Coward and Thornton Wilder? "Sometimes they seem to have lines that make little sense, are difficult to speak or could be easily improved upon," he explains. In his own play, words matter. "I futz around with word selection a lot, to make it economical but also natural. If I have to choose between sounding like a real person or turning a particularly wonderful phrase, I generally choose the former."