Laying out a play: Need quick hair space function

Question

I am helping a friend (an 83 year old Benedictine monk, in fact, but that is another story) lay out a 300+ page play, and I am finding it very time consuming. I am using Indesign CS3 (5.0.1) on a PC with XP SP2.
Short version: I need a way of placing a cursor exactly where I want it, to a hair space, on a line, with one click, and have hair spaces generated to the left of that space on that line.
Long version:
My problem is this: the play is rather avante-garde and has chorus parts where characters talk over one another and precise times and they must be perfectly aligned vertically at different places. So, for example, if two lines look like:
(all read together:)
Alto: Where are the.....that used to swim?
Tenor 2: ....................................what fish?
Bass: Where.....the.................................fish!
Soprano: ..............fish.........................the....
I have no problem making the Alto's "W" line up precisely with the "W" in the bass line, as thy are the first letters of the line. But I also need the "t" in "the" in the Alto and bass lines to line up precisely, and the "f" in "fish" to start immediately after the "e" in "the" and for there to be no horizontal space between "h" in fish and "h" in "he"! I also need the two farther right "thes" to line up. And the example above is simple compared to what is actually in the play.
Im currently achieving this through painstaking use of hair spaces, half spaces, etc. Im really can't use a font that takes up the same horizontal space per character (Im using times new roman 10 point). The play is over 300 pages long, however, and so this will take me hundreds of hours if I continue this way.
I have thought of a few potential solutions. One would be a tool that allows me to click on any place on the line, and it creates hair spaces UP TO THAT POINT, so that I can just start typing. As it stands, the best I can do is tab or space over and key in the precise hair spaces, which, as I say, is prohibitively time consuming. Does anyone know of such a tool?
Another useful tool would be one that allows me to click on any place in an existing line and then click in a line below and immediately start typing, with spaces or hair spaces automatically inserted to that point on the new line, where Id like to start typing.
Another person tried to do this whole project in MS Word (!) a few years ago with tabs, but Word is simply not functional enough for publishing.
Any thoughts on this or potential solutions would be very appreciated. The monk who wrote this a dear man and an outstanding visual artist would like to see it laid out in the next year or so.

Answer 1

Why not use tabs instead of spaces as you tried in Word originally? It would be easier in ID. Would the following do what you want?
Set your paragraph style to have a default of a left tab with a leader. (I assume you require the leader to express pauses in the phrasing, otherwise just use a tab.) But don't set up any tabs in the style sheet.
In each line, tab where the pause begins, and then click on the Tab palette anywhere near that position and drag the newly made tab to the exact position required. ID will even give you a temporary guideline to allow you to line up the tab with words in other lines as accurately as you like.
Yes, each tab would have to be positioned manually, but I've tried it and its pretty fast. Just leave the tab palette open all the time.
This assumes I understand what you're trying to achieve and that there are no regular vertical alignments. The others seem to have different takes on that. I don't know what Dave was thinking; I don't see how there would be any consistent rules by which to script this. Every single flex space would have to be a slightly different size. Peter's suggestion of repeated tabs doesn't work because equally spaced tabs won't ever be accurate enough and having multiple tabs interferes with being able to drag any specific tab to where it's needed. As for converting all text to tables, it seems to me that that would be a nightmare of constantly sizing cells and cutting and pasting text between cells.