Around me things collapse and then emerge from their
ashes with a frequency, with an intensity that I couldn’t justify on the stage
even if I tried harder than ever. Everything I knew to be just so a few weeks
ago is no longer there. Everything has changed. I wake up every morning to a world
that has rearranged itself around me with a colossal disregard for my
well-being. But the initial panic has subsided and something else has taken its
place, a kind of lucrative numbness that allows me to feel completely detached
from habits and people I thought were absolutely necessary to me. And inside
this detachment, like inside the eye of a storm, there is a place where the world
of Glissando evolves continuously, in
an exalted and feverish manner.
The idea that there is a “final text” has become an
inside joke. I write the script, it feels final, I save it on my desktop as “Glissando-final”
and in the next moment, or a few hours or days later, an idea surfaces for a
new scene, or a different kind of scene, and I have to accommodate it, I have
to let it emerge and take over the text which is now saved as “Glissando-final1,”
which later becomes “Glissando-Finalized” or “Glissando Final Text…” The truth
is, there is no final text. The text evolves with me, with the cast, as they
come together and fall apart, as they pair and split, as they dance around each
other’s obsessions not realizing that they’re simply part of a performance
which, like Noir, has already begun.
We are working with a text inspired by Chehov after having
studied (to death) his characters and their moods, their unhappiness, their
endless, painful follies. In the end (I’ve always known this), there is one
single aspect of Chehov’s tragedy that everyone in this play must understand:
the fact that it doesn’t kill. It maims, it erodes the soul for a while, but
the characters continue to live as if (on the surface of things) nothing has
happened. This is a fate worse than death. Aware of it or not, Chehov’s characters
continue to live, diminished and unhappy. Less. But they continue to live. No
exit line for them, no satisfaction, just the drudgery of never-ending days that
intensify their need for grand passions and immediate affection. Some of this
fever was bound to affect the cast. This is neither the planets’ fault nor,
entirely, Chehov’s. Perhaps something had to give. Something did.
And so the ever-evolving text of Glissando swallowed everyone’s tragedy –
their doubts and torments, their fears and resolutions, their unapologetic need
for guilt and punishment. Somebody (wise, but I wasn’t listening at the time)
once told me: “Always think: a year from now, will this be equally important?”
I remember the woman in Kieslowski’s Blue
who says “Nothing is important.” Except for death (the death of those we love),
or a permanent dependence on the kindness of strangers for the smallest daily
tasks (I remember the crushing unhappiness of a man in a wheelchair who told
his doctor that his only regret was that he could no longer use his hands to
kill himself), nothing matters.
There is a tremendous advantage to growing old –
this sounds terminal. Let me try again: there is a distinct advantage to not
being twenty or thirty anymore. It feels immensely liberating, age. C. and I
talked about writing this in the play. The oldest sister, Marnie (C. plays
her), is the one who says exactly what she thinks. If she loves a man, she tells
him that. She chooses her words carefully, to do justice to the feeling, but
also to clarify it. She leaves no room for misunderstandings. She is very
precise. She says, “I love the color of your eyes; I love the shape of your
bottom lip.” She is clinical, not at all a romantic like me. But the point is
that her age (in the play, 45) gives her the courage (the right?) to say these
things. Saying them frees her. Instead of festering on the inside, nurturing
some idiotic, unrequited passion, she formulates it, and once it becomes words,
an identifiable text, she is free of the sentiment. Chehov’s women are made of
contradictions: they are impossibly indirect and introverted, and in the next
moment they utter their unhappiness without shame. But that’s the pattern: they
never admit to the love that consumes them; they admit to the unhappiness that
follows. What a sad way to see the days go by…
I’ve put in this play everything (well, maybe not
everything) that I’ve always wanted to say about men and women, about age and
passion, about blindness and insight, sex and sexuality, love and death. (So, a
small play…) Like Marnie, I’ve looked the characters in the eye and told them
everything I saw in there. What I see in the actors is a different story. I
think they only see what I see when they look at photographs -- we did a photo shoot
this past weekend, so I could start introducing the characters, visually, to a
public who might develop a relationship with them months before the play. Naturally, the public is virtual: the readers
of this blog, the network of invisible friends on Facebook, a few other places
as well. Some of these people will end up seeing this play. By then, they’ll be
as familiar with the characters as I am.
But I was talking about blindness and insight. Mostly blindness. I’ve
always been able to look at people (potential future actors in my plays) and
see an image that hadn’t materialized yet. The being-inside-their-being,
something dying to come out. I’ve always sensed the ravenous nature of the
shiest people, for instance, their need to perform certain tasks with abandon.
I say tasks, but I mean actions, gestures. I had people do on the stage things
they wouldn’t do in the privacy of their homes surrounded by their best
friends. I’ve always needed those moments on the stage; they were never there
to shock – they were always justified. Still – I’ve always known whom to ask.
So when I do ask them to let go, or to put on tattered wedding dresses and
climb up trees and look languid or relaxed, or forlorn, or dangerous – they do
it, and then they look at pictures and don’t recognize themselves. I always
say: “Trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know how to look and when I see what I’m
looking for, I know how to capture that image.” This play…there is so much at
stake, emotionally. I tell the cast to use the turbulence they’ve been
experiencing and sublimate it in performance. I tell them that they can leave
if the rehearsals become unbearable. With one exception, I was pretty kind
during “Noir.” I can no longer be kind. I want whatever is buried deep inside
the souls of Chehov’s characters to come out. What is the point of doing a 21st
century Chehov revision if that sentiment doesn’t come out with unspeakable force,
if it doesn’t level everything in its path?
I was thinking the other day about the irony of the
fact that I see all these things about all these people while remaining
completely unseen. But then I tell myself: that is the role of the director, of
the playwright, of the charlatan behind the curtain. To see and not be seen. I
won’t lie, it is lonely. A certain kind of incurable loneliness is the reason I
started writing plays in the first place: to populate a world I wanted to
inhabit. In the process, the real world stopped being enough. In the process, I
became Pygmalion. But the play, the next play – always a little more
fantastical, always a little more honest, colossal and true – is worth the
disappointment. The play thrives as the world (the real world) shrinks. I
wonder if one day, unable to return from the refuge the stage offers, I’ll
decide to live there forever, like the man in Wells’ story, who opens a magical
(invisible to others) door in the wall and crosses over to a better place. This
is the world of Glissando. This is The Art of Cruelty. The only way to
survive it is to feel everything intensely for a while and then, to simply let
it go.
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