In act 3 the man has his longest speech in the play. He recounts the events that surround his failure to attend the meeting he was due to go to at the start of the play. In his account, he describes the phone conversations that have taken place, between himself, his boss and the man he was supposed to meet. So far so simple. But the more you work on the speech, the more complex it becomes. There's calls within calls. Calls about calls. Missed calls. And lies about calls. And lies within calls. It's a beautiful piece of writing, but it sums up the twisted nature of the writer's mind. Twisted in the sense of convoluted, complex, opaque. It's almost beyond the realm of auditory understanding. I also suspect I have let it slip through my fingers a little: one of the problems of directing in a second language is that you possess a less immediate relationship to the words and there is a risk you let them wash over you as you focus on the relationships which occur above and beyond text (the true heart of drama, I might argue.) The other aspect of this complexity is that it highlights the beauty/ brilliance of Fosse's text: the dialectic between the exceedingly complex and the moments that cut through this complexity with the simplicity of dawn.
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