Accent Elimination

Although they have lived in the United States for over forty-five years, my foreign-born parents both have distinctive but hard-to-place accents that I have never been able to imitate correctly. (Childhood attempts merely resulted in cartoonish “Russian spy” voices.) Inspired by posters around New York advertising courses in “accent elimination,” I decided to hire a professional who could teach me to speak in each of my parents’ accents and teach them to speak with a so-called standard American accent. My parents and I took intensive lessons with accent coach Sam Chwat at his office every other day for several weeks and also practiced in my studio between lessons. We worked with two scripts: one written by my mother and the other by my father, both modeled on the typical conversation that each of them has when talking with a stranger who notices an accent and gets curious about its origins. I played the part of the stranger. We first perform the dialogues in our natural accents, and at the end of the piece, after much practice and struggle, we attempt to perform the same scripts—in the best version we can muster—of our new accents.