Kathy Maes prepped a group of more than 10 actors for battle.
She wasn’t bracing the cast of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of “When We Were Married” for a fight against a physical foe, and she wasn’t about to lead a storm of enemy territory. It was early October, and Maes, the voice and dialect coach for the DCTC, was about to train the actors to speak like natives of Yorkshire, the largest county in the United Kingdom. The accent and dialect work would have to be done in about a month, in time for the comedy’s premiere right after Thanksgiving.
It would be an academic exercise in learning the correct use of consonants and aspirations, but Maes spoke to her pupils as if she were a general leading a force into a firefight.
“They were like deers in the headlights when we first walked in to this,” Maes said. “But I told them, ‘Look, I’ve never lost an actor yet. I’m not going to start now.’”
Maes’ most recent work on “When We Were Married,” a comedy by J.B. Priestley that takes place in England in 1907, is the latest in a career at the Denver Center that’s spanned dozens of productions and just as many accents. A former dean at Regis University and the University of Colorado Denver, Maes has given up retirement several times for her first love: the theater.
She can riff about the differences and similarities between an Irish brogue, a Cockney lilt and a Scottish drawl. She talks about going through worksheets and lesson plans for nearly 50 different dialects. It’s all a matter of learning sounds and rhythms, she explains, little stresses and simple intonations that make up an identity.
“I love the role that I have … All you’re doing is substituting one sound for another … all dialects have their challenges,” Maes said. “Some actors get it a little bit quicker than others. They just have a natural bent for it.”
But as Maes told the cast of “Married,” she’s not satisfied in letting any actor shirk their dialect duty. She draws from nearly three decades of teaching at the college level in Colorado to help students master obscure accents. Maes first came to the metro area to teach at the Denver Center’s National Theatre Conservatory. She was an interim dean at CU Denver’s College of Arts and Media when the School of Medicine made its move to Aurora in the late 1990s, and she taught at Regis University for three years.
But even after decades in the classroom, the lure of retirement was never strong enough to keep her away from students, no matter what age or background. With the closure of the Conservatory last year, much of Maes’ recent work has been focused on the company members and visiting actors at the DCTC.
“I finally retired officially, but that was the time that the company was ending the conservatory, so I started doing much more work here,” Maes said. “I’m retired, but I’m still working. Somebody warned me, ‘When you retire, if you think you’re going to do nothing, you’re wrong.’ It’s just an ideal situation. I love what I do.”
It’s work that’s tied to Maes’ dual specialties, areas of expertise that don’t seem like a natural fit. Maes started her studies in nursing, and soon returned to a field that had caught her interest from a young age.
“I can’t remember a time that I wasn’t interested in theater,” said Maes, who received a master’s in theater from West Virginia University and a Ph.D in theater arts from the University of Pittsburgh. She did her dissertation on dialects. “That’s how I gravitated into becoming a voice coach. (The field) used biology in speech and it used the theater training.”
That combination served her in locales far removed from Denver. The Royal Shakespeare Company brought to England to help native actors learn American accents for works by Arthur Miller and George Kaufman. That brand of work abroad has helped her on Colorado stages, as she’s helped guide actors through frenetic comedies that include a wealth of British accents.
“One of the most difficult shows that we did was ‘The 39 Steps,’” Maes recalled, detailing the 2010 comedy based on an Alfred Hitchcock film. “There were two clowns … they played more than 30 roles. They had to go from Scots to Cockney to London to standard British, sometimes line-by-line. I told the director, ‘Make sure those two guys are really facile with accents or it’s going to be a long ride.’”
The training paid off, as it did with the cast of “When We Were Married” in their mastery of the Yorkshire accent and dialect, a way of speaking that includes components of Irish, Cockney and standard English accents.
Maes, who speaks in a straightforward American accent, doesn’t seem tripped up by the wealth of sounds and stresses that live in her brain. The training she offers actors is a way of keeping up her connection to the theater, she said, and the only temptation to break into a different pattern of speech is purely hypothetical.
“I always said that if I were in trouble, if there was a terrorist hunting for Americans, I’d start flipping,” she said with a laugh.