I don’t know why, but I’m having trouble buckling down and learning lines. Not having trouble remembering the lines, as such, just having trouble making myself sit down and work on them.
It’s possible that it’s just the long gap between stage shows. Although I did learn lines for a couple of recorded things over the year—it’s not that I haven’t sat down to learn lines in two years. And it’s not that I have a lot of exciting or urgent things to do, such that I haven’t carved out the time to work on the lines. I have, in fact, lots of time to kill, it being summer and so forth. No, it’s just that every time I get the script out, I set it aside and start doing something else, whether that’s playing more silly video games or just starting into space.
I suspect that part of it is that Godot, more than in many shows, is about the action rather than the words. Absent the props and the blocking, the words aren’t terribly interesting in themselves. It’s worse for our Didi and Gogo, of course. Pozzo at least likes to talk (and be listened to), although he really does not listen to anyone else. Even himself.
Part of it also might be that Pozzo is such an awful person. When I told one of my Gentle Readers that I got the part, she asked what it would be like to be so terrible. I off-handedly replied that I generally played terrible people, whether that was Barrymore’s ghost or Buckingham. But it’s true that Pozzo is brutal and vicious in a way that is different than many of the others. And of course his primary relationship is with Lucky, who doesn’t speak (for the most part). And whatever the nuances of that relationship, it’s certainly far from healthy.
Well, whatever the reason is, the practical outcome is that I need to stop blogging and get back to memorizing.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.