Ain't it the truth, DR ELMORE. Why do some people think they don't have to say the lines as written? WHY? WHY?
Of course they say what they want, but if you try to say something that's not in the script to cover their asses, they look at you like you're crazy. 
A few years ago, I played Tobias (the lead) in a college production of "
The Perfectionist" by Joyce Carol Oates. I wasn't going to the college, but Alice, a friend of mine, directed it and she had several non-student participants. We performed it as if we were doing a radio broadcast (even though no one asked permission to do it this way
). We had scripts in hand and a sound effects person and the guy playing my son was a quadriplegic (hence the radio broadcast format). Anyway, the characters of Tobias and Willy Rebb (his co-worker) had this one interchange (it's the only specific one that I can remember) within a scene that was something like:
Tobias: So you wrote a letter.
Willy: A letter (
pausing to consider his words carefully) ...came to be written.
But Dan, the guy playing Willy said, "A letter just appeared" (with no pause to consider what he, the character, was saying). Now, that may seem like a small change, but Dan did things like that all the way through the script just because he wanted to! And the director let him! AARRGGHH!! And because he got to make any changes he wanted, a couple of the other actors decided that they wanted to make a few changes. Overall, there weren't any really big changes, just things all over the place. It was quite frustrating.
