One of the annoying things about doing community theater, and there are lots of wonderful things, is when people who do not do theater ask how we remember all those lines. We work like hell at it, that’s how.
(The other annoying aspect to the question is that it assumes that memorizing lines is the hard part. Well, in some ways it is, but it’s like seeing a beautifully hand-carved wooden stair rail, all vines and leaves and curlicues and whatnot, and asking the carver how he manages to make it support the weight of the person coming downstairs. It takes training and hard work, and it’s important, but he was kinda hoping you would notice that bunch of grapes on the sixth newel post.)
Anyway, here’s a little moment in the line-learning process. I had been having trouble remembering Rich Alfie’s line “What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age?” I could get it more or less right, but I couldn’t make the clauses come out in order. What is there for me in my old age if I chuck it but the workhouse? What is there but the workhouse for me in my old age if I chuck it? What is there for me in my old age if I chuck it but the workhouse?
You may notice that none of the wrong sentences sound right at all. I certainly noticed, as I was saying them, and be unable to finish them or the speech. So I would stumble and stammer, and ask for the line.
Today, while running the lines, I wound up saying it a different way, and I’m hoping that it will help. I had been saying (and you’ll have to pardon the notation; I’ll try to record it for listening, but I haven’t a mic with me) something like “What is there for me, if I chuck it, but the workhouse in my old age?” Today I tried “What is there for ME, if I chuck it, but the workhouse in my old age?”
The change of inflections is sensible, I think, as it (a) leads eventually in to a consideration of what the deserving people would have if they chucked a bequest, and (2) plays in to Alfred Doolittle’s moral philosophy, which determines the ethical nature of questions by what he gets out of them. The other way, I think, conveys the, um, pathos? The emphasis on there being nothing for him, rather than on there being nothing for him, if you see. So for meaning, either could work.
But for some reason, What is there for ME… leads more naturally and rhythmically into if I chuck it and less into but the workhouse or in my old age. Is it the repeated pronoun? I know I’m saying the rhythm has something to do with it, but aren’t all three phrases two weaks a strong and a weak? No, I don’t really know why it works, but with luck, I now know my line.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.