“Yeah, here.” Marcus dashed to get them from his backpack. “Mr. Dansen had me read them first. I mean, obviously.”
“That’s right. You can’t get the feel for the monologue unless you know the context.”
“You want to start with Hal?”
Marcus nodded. “Yeah, I’m ready.”
“Do the whole speech without stopping, and then we can talk through any suggestions I have.”
Marcus took a breath, looking down at his feet for a moment, clearly focusing before starting.
He was good. In fact, he was better than Jason had expected him to be. He sounded conversational, despite the iambic pentameter challenges. He seemed to understand the pivots in Hal’s speech well—the moment where the soliloquy turned from describing his loser friends to declaring his own secret nobility was done well for someone his age. His vocal elocution was crisp and his tone resonant. He’d clearly been working hard on it. And he was talented. No question there.
When he finished, Marcus returned to being a modern teenager. “How bad is it?” Marcus cringed, as if he were about to be smacked hard in the chest.
“That was solid,” Jason said. “You know what you’re saying, which is half the battle with this stuff. I have a few suggestions, though, to make it even crisper.”
Marcus exhaled. “Great. Give it to me.”
Jason couldn’t help but get excited. This work was his happy place. .
“Tell me what you think about Hal,” Jason began.
Marcus sat across from him at the kitchen table. “I like that Hal kind of knows everybody underestimates him.”
Jason pointed at him. “Exactly. That’s the key to the whole thing.” He leaned back in his chair, studying Marcus for a moment before continuing. “Hal’s not confessing here. He’s revealing strategy. Huge difference.”
Marcus glanced down at the page again.
“He’s basically saying, let them think I’m a screwup,” Jason said. “Let them laugh. Then one day I’ll become exactly who they never expected.”
“That’s kind of cool,” Marcus admitted.
“It’s very cool,” Jason said. “But don’t play the result.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t start sounding noble too early.” Jason got up and crossed toward the counter, thinking as he spoke. “If you play him like a prince from the beginning, the speech dies. The whole point is that, underneath all the joking around, there’s this terrifying level of self-awareness. Which foreshadows what is to come.”
Marcus nodded slowly.
Jason came back to the table and tapped the page lightly. “He’s talking to us. Not the guys he’s out drinking with. Us. The audience. The world.”
Marcus leaned forward. “Right, okay.”
“He’s confiding in us. Saying—don’t worry. I know what you think I am. But wait. Trust me. One day I’ll show you who I really am.” Jason paused. “He’s asking us to keep his secret for a little while.”
Marcus looked back down at the speech. “I didn’t really get that, but yeah, I see it now. That’s actually beyond cool.”
“Agree. And it’s all very vulnerable. Not regal. Not performative. For one second, he stops managing everybody’s perception of him and lets us see who he is. The real version ofhimself, not the persona. Which is really hard to do in real life, by the way. Have you ever felt that the person you show the world isn’t really you? That you’re better than what they think they see?”
“All the time,” Marcus said. “I mean, until Roan and Reese adopted me, I was basically the kid no one thought twice about, let alone believed in.”
“Okay, right there. That’s the thing to tap into. When you connect it to your own experience, it becomes so compelling, no one can look away.”
Marcus nodded slowly. “Okay. That makes sense.”
“You started the speech like you already knew we believe you. You need to win us over. Convince us.”
