Do you know what the secret is to all good theater? No, it's repetition. And timing. And repetition. But mostly timing.\n
YHB has an unfortunate tendency to slow pacing. Not terrible, and at least I'm aware of it, but still—I like to create a silence to speak into. A rather effective technique, if it is used very, very sparingly.\n
I should say that I am not generally slow to pick up cues, that's not the issue. It's that once I get into a speech of any length, I tend to find places to pause, to create emphasis with stillness, a kind of creeping Shatnerism, to be honest. As I say, I am aware of this, and I know that it can be easily overused, very very easily, and so I struggle with it.\n
My point is that I have a line, one line in particular in this play, that seems to me to require a pause before I speak. There's my cue line, and then I come to a decision and speak. In order for the audience to follow that I have come to a decision, and that I am coming to a decision right at that moment, there needs to be a pause.\n
But how long a pause?\n
My instincts will tell me to prolong the moment, that the tension is continuing to build. My instinct will continue to tell me that for at least, oh, three or four seconds after the last audience member has dropped off to sleep. My instinct is not to be trusted. So I will not trust my instinct. I'm not sure how I will wind up judging the pause—there's the simple method of counting two, or I could find a way to have Richard (for it is Richard, inevitably, to whom I speak) cue me on his<\/i> instinct by raising an eyebrow or otherwise unobtrusively kicking me. Or something will come up—the one thing I know for sure is that whenever I do speak, it will feel to me rushed.\n
Which means that every night, at the end of that scene, I will leave feeling a twinge of dissatisfaction. And I will feel that twinge of dissatisfaction no matter what. If I don't feel that I rushed the line, I will feel that I dragged it out; if I nail it by any objective measure—including an audible gasp from the audience and a chorus of oooooh<\/i>s—I will still feel rushed.\n
Ah, well. Such is life. As we hear in They Might Be Giants, everybody dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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