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The Sounds of Silence:  The Power of a Well-placed Pause

By Kevin Stone 

Kevin Stone has been writing and directing plays for over 20 years.  He has experience as an actor and as a director of community theatre, church plays, high school productions and touring collegiate groups.  Besides teaching drama classes, Kevin is the pastor of a church and the managing editor of a ministry website.  Kevin’s play After Hours won the Shubert Fendrich Memorial Playwriting Contest. 

Actors communicate on stage in a variety of ways — a gesture, a facial expression, a bit of dialogue.  But we should never overlook the value of silence.  A well-timed pause can communicate just as much as a spoken line — if not more.  Comedian Jack Benny mastered the art of the comic pause, and many of his best punch lines were nothing more than an eloquent silence as he turned to the audience and allowed their understanding of his character fill in the details.

Years ago, I came across a great definition of a “play.”  Part of it said that a play is “told with speeches and actions plus silences and inactions” (Louis Catron, The Elements of Playwriting).  That balance of speech and silence, action and inaction, is vital to making a play work.

Sometimes a lack of pause is needed.  For example, Lucky’s 703-word sentence in Act 1 of Waiting for Godot depends on the actor’s non-stop delivery.  But much more common are the lines that require pauses.

Pauses are the key to phrasing.  When we write, we naturally group related words.  That’s what punctuation is for.  In oral communication, no one sees the punctuation marks, but we show the grouping by inserting slight pauses.  In a play, we divide individual lines into easy-to-grasp packages as we deliver them to the audience, and this aids their comprehension of the lines.

Pauses are necessary for rhythm.  Some playwrights specify pauses in order to establish the rhythm they want in a scene.  Here’s some dialogue from Pinter’s The Caretaker:

Mick:  You still got that leak.
Aston:  Yes.  (Pause.)  It’s coming from the roof.
Mick:  From the roof, eh?
Aston:  Yes.  (Pause.)  I’ll have to tar it over.
Mick:  You’re going to tar it over?
Aston:  Yes.
Mick:  What?
Aston:  The cracks.  (Pause.) 

If the playwright doesn’t specify where to place pauses, that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.  Rather, it is up to the actor and/or director to determine where the pauses are best placed to create the desired meaning. 

Pauses grab attention and highlight certain words.  In Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” we find this description: 

“Someone knocked on the city gate; and the king himself went down to open it.  On the other side of the gate stood a princess.”

Now, insert a pause after the word stood:

“Someone knocked on the city gate; and the king himself went down to open it.  On the other side of the gate stood // a princess.”

There’s a big difference between those two readings.  The addition of a pause draws out the mystery for just a moment and heightens the significance of the personage at the gate.

Pauses provide slight variations of meaning.  Take this line, for example:

“You can have the roses if you want.”

The line can be delivered as is, with no internal pauses.  Or, we can place slight pauses (beats) within the line at different places:

“You can have the roses / if you want.”
“You can have the / roses / if you want.” 
“You can / have the roses / if you want.”

In each case, the level of hesitancy is increased.  What the speaker is hesitant about varies with each change.  It’s good for actors to experiment with various pauses within a line to see how the meaning subtly changes.

A pause before or after a line also communicates a great deal.  If the previous line is an emotional outburst of some kind, and the purpose of the response is to placate hurt feelings, then a well-timed pause between the lines is necessary:

“Just once!  I wish someone would show me a little kindness!  Is it too much to ask for a little consideration now and then?!”
(Pause.) 
“You can have the roses if you want.”

If, however, the response is itself an emotional outburst to match the previous line, then there would probably be no pause between the two lines:

“Just once!  I wish someone would show me a little kindness!  Is it too much to ask for a little consideration now and then?!” 
“You can have the roses if you want!” 

In this case, the roses would probably be thrown in the first speaker’s face.

Pauses are always filled with something.  Hopefully not panic!  Planned pauses are for a reason, and the attentive audience will pick up on that reason.  Some pauses are filled with business.  In the famous dinner scene in The Miracle Worker, there is no dialogue to speak of, but plenty is communicated through the frenetic stage business. 

Pauses are also filled with subtext.  When a character on stage is provided new intelligence, he or she will naturally take some time — even if it’s just a moment — to process a response.  This is especially true in dramatic scenes involving new revelations or turns of the plot.  A well-placed silence will allow the audience to think with the character on stage:

“It’s over between us.”
(Pause.) 
“You can have the roses if you want.”

A good director will work at hearing dialogue naturally, and that includes hearing the pauses that should be there.  A judicious use of silence can powerfully improve an actor’s performance.  As Mark Twain said, “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”