Leth

A character in a stage play or musical comedy. Leth is the character's name if male, Letha if female. Leth rhymes with Seth and Letha sounds like Lisa with a lisp. Actually, the names are not so important, but are at least plausible as male and female names. I'll entertain suggestions for better names.

The play could be nominally about anything, and should have a title relevant to this nominal subject. Perhaps "The Lazy River," nominally about life on the Mississippi.

But as the audience discovers more and more conclusively as the show continues, the real subject of the play is the actor "playing" the part of Leth or Letha, who has utterly and completely "forgotten" his or her lines. Comedy ensues as the actor comes up with increasingly ingenious and outrageous ways to compensate for the sudden loss of memory, and by the time the audience has figured out that the forgetfulness is actually written into the script, the comedy comes from the increasingly impossible situations with which the character is faced.

For instance:

For Leth's first spoken lines, he starts by pausing long enough for the audience to begin to think he's forgotten his lines, but then, being a consummate professional, he saves the scene by "improvising:"

>Leth: Why Louise, I simply don't know how to respond to you. In fact, I feel almost like that time when we were in that school play together, and I totally forgot my lines. How embarrassing that was. I thought...
>Louise: But you did finally remember, and told me you were glad to see me.
>Leth: ("remembering" his lines) And that's just what I should say to you now. I *am* glad to see you...

The play continues with Leth finding increasingly innovative ways to sneek peeks at his lines that he has written on his hand, inside his costume, on the upstage side of props. He also finds clever ways to improvise dialogue that gives him the opportunity to shout the word "Line!" and he makes up action that gives him excuses to disappear offstage momentarily, and to stand near the wings so his lines can be fed to him from off-stage.

Late in the show, as the audience has figured out the score, Leth is involved in a duet with Louise. Of course, when Louise "hands off" the song to Leth, he has no clue what the script predicts he'll sing, but by now he's confident of his ability to improvise. And the first time, he barely makes it in time rhyming brilliantly with Louise's verse. But the second time he's called on to improvise in rhyme, Louise's leading verse ends with "orange."

The show ends before the nominal plot is resolved, in a situation from which it is utterly impossible for Leth to recover, when he throws in the towel , walks to center stage, faces the audience, and declares, "And they all lived happily ever after. The end!"

The character may become part of theater jargon, with future actors referring to real recoveries from memory lapses by saying, "Man, what a leth that was!"

(Lethe is the river of oblivion)