The last dozen drawings simply represent their dialogue, tender, wry, gently reproachful, as Beatrice takes him up through the planets to explain the mysteries of God's universe.
Her memories of her lost girl are wonderfully tender, and in the dialogue she gives to both Laura's children Doughty doesn't once hit a duff note.
When we got to competitive dialogue [the tendering process], it took me out of school a lot more," says Smith.
The contrast between the plain sets and the richness of Baker's dialogue is striking, tender.
Wilson's dialogue ranges from tender (Troy about Rose: "I love her so much, I done run out of ways of loving her") to baldly carnal (Troy: "We go upstairs in that room at night, and I fall down on you and try to blast a hole into forever").
Robert Duvall, who made his film-acting début as Boo Radley, the subnormal next-door neighbor who saves the lives of Finch's children, and who appeared in six other Foote projects, including an Academy Award-winning performance as the fallen country singer Mac Sledge, in "Tender Mercies," compared Foote's dialogue to "sandpiper prints".
Ms. Cooke's portrayal of Kitty Oppenheimer in John Adams's "Doctor Atomic" was widely praised, and Mr. Appleby, a winner of the Met's National Council Auditions in 2009, gave superb performances in Juilliard productions of Copland's "Tender Land" and Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites" last season.
Tolstoy then reproduces a page of this kind of illogical dialogue, one of the tenderest things he ever wrote: "No, what were you saying?
NEW HAVEN — Intimations of mortality hover in the pauses punctuating the dialogue in "The Realistic Joneses," the tender, funny, terrific new play by Will Eno at the Yale Repertory Theater here.
When we attempt to articulate our tender feelings in writing, we enter an inner dialogue of self-exploration: we forage for the more precise word, the more resonant phrasing.
