The Man Stripped Bare by His Boy
Unfortunately, the intellectual satisfaction of creating a piece whose form expresses its meaning so well isn’t sufficient to compensate for that form’s weaknesses. Serial soliloquies inevitably raise the question, Why don’t these people talk to one another? Even when that’s the dramatic point, it’s a question that distances the audience from the work. Only rarely does a monologue provide the emotional punch, the engagement with character, that is dialogue’s stock-in-trade. (Maybe that’s because we doubt the veracity of speech makers: what are they trying to put over by presenting themselves in this controlled way? By contrast conversation seems casual, a context in which truth might slip out.) Without our engagement, the character’s thoughts seem the incidental musings of a stranger: possibly interesting but easy to dismiss.
