I was looking over my notes from the staged reading of Bound<\/i>. There was one place where I had made an acting note (never actually transmitted to the actor in question) that the passage was something the character had never said to anyone before. And it occurred to me that, although I didn’t think about it whilst writing the play, there was a good deal in the script having to do with Things You Say a Lot and Things You Have Never Said. That made me wonder how much that idea is threaded through literature generally, or if it’s just me.\n
Gentle Readers may be noting that those two categories of speech are not the only categories there are, and in fact comprise only a small amount of all the stuff people say. That’s true. But I think the stuff that falls into either of those two categories is important, and perhaps paying attention to it is one way to make some key decisions as an actor.\n
Look, here are some specific examples from Enchanted April<\/i>. When I am closing the deal on the castle, I say that It’s a small castle, but of course it has most of the “modern improvements”, as an estate agent would say<\/i>. That pretty obviously falls into the category of Things I Say a Lot. A bit later, addressing one of the women renting the place, out of the blue comes I like your face, Mrs. Arnott<\/i>. Is that a Thing I Say a Lot? If it is, that’s an important thing about my character. Is it, perhaps, a Thing I Have Never Said? Again, that’s important. I suspect it should feel like one or the other, and it’ll be largely up to the director which kind of character I’ll be.\n
Now, I don’t think Matthew Barber (who adapted the play of Enchanted April<\/i>) thought about the lines in those terms. And I certainly didn’t when I was writing Bound<\/i>. But if I went through the script with a highlighter and made notes of things that fell into those categories, I suspect I would find some very interesting things. I think each of my characters has some moment in the play when they say a Thing They Have Never Said. And perhaps just as important, some other moments when they repeat Things They Say a Lot.\n
I should be clear—the category is not for Things You Have Never Had Occasion to Say, such as Cheese sandwiches are tasty, Mr. President<\/i> or This is my first time in Seattle<\/i>. It’s perhaps more accurately Things You Have Never Said Aloud. If I tell you that when I was a kid I wanted to be a doctor, and it’s a Thing I have Never Said Aloud, then it’s probably pretty important, and there’s a story behind it. If it’s a Thing I Say a Lot, then it’s probably pretty important as well, and there’s a story behind that.\n
Just thinking about plays, there’s a lot of stuff about those categories in Death of a Salesman<\/i>, and in all of Beckett, or all of Beckett with words, anyway, and in Streetcar<\/i>… I don’t think that there’s a lot of it in Shakespeare, although I could be persuaded otherwise. I’m not claiming it as the Universal Key to anything, just that it happens to be pretty important in some pretty good plays.\n
And in other things? In movies? In books? I don’t know. It’s obviously a dialogue-based concept, so I wouldn’t necessarily expect it to turn up in less dialogue-based forms. On the other hand, in addition to being part of Drama, it’s part of actual life—my life, anyway, as I certainly have a lot of Things I Say a Lot and a fair number of Things I Have Never Said Aloud, and I remember moments when I said a Thing I Had Never Said Before, and moments when I say some of the Things I Say a Lot, and some of those moments are the most vivid memories I have.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger reveals the fallacy of intention, so there, now what are you going to do about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18670,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11851\/revisions\/18670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}