Better Left Unsaid – Some Secrets Shouldn’t Be Revealed
by Karen Tortora-Lee on February 2, 2011
Can I tell you a secret? Okay, well – what if I can’t? It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just, well, what if I have a secret that’s so damaging I could lose your friendship? Or your respect? Or risk having you take matters into your own hands and tell my secret to the very person I’m keeping it from? You could change my life. You could change theirs. You could change everything. Now you know why I’m keeping it a secret. Even from you. Some things are just better left unsaid.
Better Left Unsaid (written and directed by Joey Brenneman) juggles not one, not two, but over half a dozen secrets ranging from “deep dark” to simply “uncomfortable”. The rule here is: if a character has a line of dialogue, they have a secret. Some are enormous, life changing and devastating, some are simple, quiet, and more of the yearning variety, but all of them are harmful in their own way and once they’re put into words it changes the course of each character’s life irrevocably. As the old saying goes: you can’t unring a bell.
