Today I saw a matinee performance on Broadway of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At one point in the play the main character, Christopher, a 15 year old boy who is autistic, calms himself down by reciting successive powers of two.<\/p>\n
It was a very nice moment, and it made perfect sense. Except that the actor, Alex Sharp (who, by the way, was excellent in the role), got it wrong.<\/p>\n
What he actually said was “1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 125, 256, 512, 1024”. That eighth number, so out of place, leapt out at me, and I was instantly yanked out of the story, acutely aware that I wasn’t in the presence of Christopher at all, just somebody playing Christopher.<\/p>\n
The real Christopher, the one in Mark Haddon\u2019s novel, would have been utterly incapable of inserting such a jarringly wrong note into such a beautiful sequence.<\/p>\n
I know this because earlier in the afternoon, taking the R train to see that very play, I had spent much of the ride mentally tuning out the cares of the day — by reciting successive powers of two in my head. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I saw a matinee performance on Broadway of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. At one point in the play the main character, Christopher, a 15 year old boy who is autistic, calms himself down by reciting successive powers of two. It was a very nice … Continue reading “The curious incident”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15681"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15681"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15681\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15684,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15681\/revisions\/15684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}