Playwrighting with an earworm

I love writing plays.  Let's just say that up front.  The reason I love writing plays is that I have a passion for creating voices that sound authentic without being an accurate recording of the way people actually talk.  What I mean by that is, when a normal person is talking they add in a ton of stuff to what they're saying.  This stuff is like white noise that we start blocking after a while, like the guy who lives next to the train tracks and doesn't notice when the train goes by any more.  On stage, if you were to recreate a regular person's speech with all the "um" and "like" and pauses and circling back to restate an idea and jumping in time and referring to shared moments that might be summarized by a single word or a facial expression, it would be maddening for an audience.  Authenticity, for me, is about finding the right balance of that stuff for each character.  In a way, all that stuff becomes part of the symbol of a character that I, as the writer, am presenting.  There has to be enough of it to make that character unique, but not so much that it becomes the focus of the audience.  It's like good make-up - it's best when an observer only takes note of the things you want them to notice.  So there's all this make-up that you don't want anyone to notice, and there's just a couple things you do want them to notice, like your perfect cat-eye or whatever.  I have a teenage daughter and we watch Project Runway and so I think about things like this just as a matter of course now.

Too many nuances overburdens a character.  Not enough nuance leaves them plain and uninteresting.  The right balance of nuance draws the audience in, makes them interested in discovering more about the character, trying to guess what the character might do or say in different situations and then being surprised sometimes when the character does something new but still in character, and gratified other times when the character fulfills their expectations.

Also, I have had the same song running through my head for days.  Actually just part of a song.  I know it's from the Yes album Fragile, but I couldn't remember which song, and some of the songs have a bunch of different movements or sections and so finding that moment has become a major focus of my morning.  I think it's from the very short "We Have Heaven," but it's also kind of a mash-up with the final moments of "Heart of the Sunrise" when he says "I feel lost in the city."