I think T. S. Eliot's notion that the “experience of a poem is […] both of a moment and of a lifetime,” from our first encounter, which “is never repeated integrally” to the poem's survival “in a larger whole of experience,” bears a special parallel to the way an actor prepares for a role, progressing from the read-through, to rehearsals, to performance.

For me, Richard's monologue has an immediacy, an exhilarating appeal at the moment of delivery, for both the character in greeting the audience at the start of the play and the actor charged with giving life to an illusion. Theatre is, after all, a medium of the moment, the presence of the actors and their audiences inhabiting the same space and time. Or as one of my actors once observed, “If Godot doesn't show up for the characters onstage, he doesn't show up for us in house either. The joke is on both of us.” But what Robbe-Grillet has called “presence” in the theatre coexists with something not there, or not physically there or of the moment. Harold Pinter speaks of the latter as “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” We go to take out a bottle, a purely mechanical act, but as we approach the cabinet, we know that a weasel is living underneath, unseen but there. I tell my theatre majors this is a good way to imagine subtext, the deep and personal inner dialogue an actor devises to complement, sometimes even enhance the words there in the script. That subtext expands the present moment, the dialogue heard by the audience, the character seen by them, into the character's past, the sources, and the backstory that, while unseen, are there before the character even speaks. “The ‘why’ he says what he says,” as an actor friend calls it. And if the actor builds the character from real-life experiences, consciously, and sometimes not, this visionary moment of the playwright's art coexists with a real-life story.