In one, as Mr. Brando's inarticulate character tries to make friends with Edie, he picks up her dropped lace glove and unconsciously puts it on his own hand as he struggles to make conversation.

She was writing, she said, about inarticulate characters seen through more sophisticated sensibilities.

As Mr. Neeson demonstrated in the recent stage production of "Anna Christie," he is an actor of remarkable gifts who can find the articulate heart of an inarticulate character.

("A subplot on the soap opera 'Days of Our Lives' might involve some perilous plight of an inarticulate character faced with a crisis in which he or she desperately needs to be more articulate.")

Not since the screen adaptation of Clifford Odets's "Golden Boy" has there been a film about Good and Evil in which an inarticulate character talked so knowingly about principle.

On the other hand, the most inarticulate character in the novel, Jewel, is all motion.

As the play goes on, though, each reveals the gallantry that is the unexpected common bond of their largely inarticulate characters.

It is all the more comic for taking its inarticulate characters as seriously as they take themselves, though not always for the same reasons.

In "Road," previously inarticulate characters speak of how "everything's been made ordinary in our lives" and of how bitterness swells like a "black rose inside."