Well, that’s debatable
Nancy Houfek, vocal coach at the American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), is an expert on how to speak, move, and act onstage. She had the same reaction to the first presidential debate that most viewers did: Mitt Romney flew, and Barack Obama flopped. “Everything is performance now,” said Houfek, who teaches aspiring actors how to project their voices and deploy their bodies. Before there was television and the Internet, politicians were also actors of a sort, she said, but were more dependent on text and physical image. “I don’t think the Lincoln-Douglas debates were performance,” said Houfek. “They were content.” These days, much of the content in a presidential debate is visual and kinetic. Houfek and three other Harvard experts on human behavior and performing offered their perspective on the first presidential debate and the two to come, including the one tomorrow night: The public speaking guru For more than two decades, Marie Danziger has...