ON ACTING: "More on Dialogue"

Since words are so central to an actor's performance--especially in theater where the spoken word almost invariably serves as the primary vehicle of the actor's/character's emotional life--the actor needs to have a highly developed and subtle responsive verbal mechanism (including a swell-developed brain...Words = logic!) to carry the full complexity of the actor's/character's emotional experience. Without that developed verbal mechanism (strengthened through speech classes, breathing classes, practicing Shakespeare's and Cicero's rhetoric and the like), feeling actors are like thinkers with a million ideas but only a hundred word vocabulary, destined to live lives of limited and frustrated discourse. Only a freed-up and subtle developed vocal (and body) instrument can freely express and reveal, with precision and power, the deepest and most complex human truths in performance.