Clarity

When I work on a show I usually have a moment in the first week when a piece of the text reaches out and grabs me, snags a part of me, and the play begins to burrow itself into me. It commonly happens during the first read - the first time I hear the text aloud. My current show hasn't had our first read yet, because the director is trying out a new technique. But the snag happened to me nonetheless, last night.

I am working on The Taming of a Shrew and we were doing table work on the scene before the wedding. Petruchio is drunk and dressed horribly and Kate's father is berating him for his lack of respect. 

TRANIO: See not your bride in these unreverent robes

Go to my chamber; put on clothes of mine.

PETRUCHIO: Not I, believe me; thus I'll visit her.

BAPTISTA: But thus, I trust, you will not marry her.

PETRUCHIO: Good sooth, even thus; therefore ha' done with words.

To me she's married, no unto my clothes.

Could I repair what she will wear in me

As I can change these poor accoutrements,

Twere well for Kate and better for myself.

James read those lines aloud after a scene of yelling and drunken staggering. In his first go at it he lowered his voice a little and seemed to look inward. He spoke them to himself and I could see all the fear of letting someone in play across his face.

It reminded me of the moment when Leonard Whiting stops outside the Capulet ball and has the premonition of his death. You can also see him look inward as he says: 

I fear too early: for my mind misgives 

Some consequence yet hanging in the stars

Shall bitterly begin his fearful date 

With this night's revels...

But he that hath the steerage of my course,

Direct my sail.
 

Watching James do that, have that moment of painful realization, and to be sitting across the table from him while he did it, broke a little bit of me inside. Because we've all felt that, haven't we? The fear and then, sometimes, the grief that comes with letting someone in and being unable to "repair what [they] wear in [you]."