When I first started crafting a career for myself as a playwright,
 I believed fervently that theater could be – would be – the great didactic lever to shift people into being better after leaving the theater than they were coming into the space: if not more
humane, at least more knowledgeable and thus, maybe, less willing to accept bilge for truth.

I’m pretty sure that that was not the right path to follow because people – or, I should say, Americans since they are the audience
I know best – usually don’t go to theater or to the arts in general to educate themselves for personal change (a really hard cognitive and emotional task, which is why people generally avoid doing it regularly and perhaps only get to it once or twice in a lifetime).

What do they go to the arts for, then? I think it’s for the sweet nothings (even if no one in 2026 America uses that phrase in their flirting and lovemaking).

“Sweet nothing,” in the singular, first appears in print, according to my trusty Copilot, in 1776 in Belgravia, a poem by Mary Elizabeth Braddon: “As low he bend o’er her he loves so dear, to whisper some sweet nothing in her ear.” (The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1900 diary entry by Fazl-i-Husain, an Indian Muslim politician of the British Raj, using the word “nothing” as an intimacy (“I whispered nothing in her ear”) but states that the entry is just part of the linguistic evolution of “sweet nothings,” which is why they cite it.)

Sweet nothings are small, intimate, whispered offerings of affection or flirtation or interest or notice – the meaning of the particular words is less important – may not even be important at all – than the fact of their being shared by one human to another human in a quiet, immediate way, low-voiced enough to cut through the daily blather.

Sweet nothings are things that crack the social mask (ideology, shoulds, principles, rectitudes) so that an intimacy can slip in and get us to stop, feel, ponder, breathe – and breathe again – and feel better about the human that we are – in fact, feel human at all.

Here are a few of my recent sweet nothings.

Always holding a newborn and smelling the skin.

The weight of our dear Guinness in my arms and the quiet that descends when I hold him and he leans his body against mine.

Two characters, Stevie and Grace, in one of our favored shows, Blue Lights. They are police officers in Belfast dancing around what they feel for each other. Stevie loves to cook, so he is always bringing in his new productions. When he goes to offer something to Grace, he pops open the four latches that hold the lid of the container – 1, 2, 3, 4 – and then makes the offer. Each time the audience hears the sequence – 1, 2, 3, 4 – they know what it signals: a struggle to connect between two struggling people with the aid of glorious food. Those four pops: that’s the sweet nothing.

Or this gem of a song, “What Use is Paper?”, from A History of Paper, with Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson. The sweet nothing is both in the words – the conjuring of the paper slips that annotate a life – and in the interplay of the actors as they deliver to each other these small observations in the softest and gentlest of voices. (Check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gi2CCUvDWrQ)

Shirley Henderson: A History of Paper. A sort of love letter.

Alan Cumming: What use is paper?

Shirley Henderson: A perfect origami rose.

Alan Cumming: What use is paper?

Shirley Henderson: There's tissue paper for blowing your nose.

AC: What use is paper? There's letters, shopping lists, train
tickets, bus tickets, passports, postcards

SH: Hate mail and love letters

AC: Newspapers, bills

SH: And more bills

AC: Last wills and testaments, and posters and pamphlets

SH: Post-it notes

Together: To remind you of the things that you always forget

SH: What use is paper?

AC: We write our dreams on it

SH: What use is paper?

AC: We share our secrets with it

SH: What use is paper?

AC: We express our deepest selves, we stack it high on our shelves - it's you, it's me, and it's us, and it's everywhere.

The time unit of the sweet nothing is the moment, the measurement of it an inbreath and an outbreath, the effect of it is healing, the after-effect of it is a feeling of simple sufficiency.

The physics of the sweet nothing is that catch in the throat, that squeeze in the chest, that sting in the eyes that signals, at the same moment – and it is only momentary – a release from life’s dread, a reprieve from grief, an embrace of safety, a grace of peace, the joy of repair.

The sweet nothing passes quickly – it’s hit-and-run and then gone. But it can help us remember that the world can, indeed, be repaired: If not permanently fixed, then at least kept intact enough for long enough to keep babies safe and food shared and the fleeting thought captured on paper by hand.