First rehearsal today. This is a very short play so I had the luxury of telling the actors to take their time and think before they spoke their lines.
This is the first I've done that in over two years. I've been trying to avoid what happened in a full-length play I directed over two years ago.
For that production I told the actors to take their time, and one of the actors went completely overboard. He took forever to say his lines, so much so that a friend who came to see the show always referred to him after not by character name or real name, but as "the one who took so long to say his lines."
After the first performance I begged the actor to speed it up but he refused. And to this day I'm sure he thinks he did the right thing - no matter what the audience thought.