The Actors

September 12, 2013

E. has been announcing her departure from the Milena Theatre Group for years now. It’s a Cher moment we all enjoy, “the last play,” followed by the next “last play,” and now the next one. I think “Noir” might truly be her last performance with the group.  She said, “In every single play you’ve done, I die at the end. Now I’m playing Death. Is this Freudian?”  Twelve years of plays (here). Twelve death sentences. (Why does “A Very Long Engagement” come to mind?) There’s something very strange about last performances. Sometimes their intensity – there’s so much more at stake – affects the entire cast and this has an impact on the relationship between the characters.

I remember a “last performance” that wasn’t exactly that, but had a similar effect: a dying man, a great director, was working on “The Cherry Orchard” with the knowledge that it would be his last play. The cast felt it in every rehearsal and became strangely unified – one body, one voice, chasing that one ideal performance. The last scene (remember it? The orchard is destroyed, the old servant forgotten) is utter and complete desolation. In this production, the director chose to empty the stage of any human presence at that moment. The family has moved on. The house is empty. In the distance, the sound of an ax hitting a tree. And then, a solitary cart rolls downhill and stops, hesitantly, downstage center. The lights fade. The orchard takes its last breath and that lonely, empty cart going nowhere says it all. The man didn’t get to see the opening night. The dress rehearsal was “the last performance.”

This is depressing. E. is not dying. She’s moving on, to graduate school, to another city, another world altogether. I realize that I have a love-hate relationship with “last performances” but also know that, after all that dying, there’s no one better to play the Angel of Death.

The femme fatale presented a problem from the very beginning: first, her type is not easy to come by. You don’t wake up one morning and decide that, from now on, you’re going to be “fatale” and wither any man that crosses you. Physically, I’ve always been partial to the diminutive “fatales” – tiny but deadly porcelain dolls. The girl in “Brick” has that look. The look, the voice, the movements. Second, I wanted a different kind of femme, capable of playing the noir part to perfection (“I’m stupidly in danger but I’m gorgeous. Take away my troubles and I might sleep with you!”), but also becoming immensely human, self-sacrificing even, when we shift from noir to fantasy. That’s when I met C. in my Postmodernism class. She had the look; she almost had the voice; she had the talent (I realized during a cold reading of Stoppard), but was impossibly nice. I wondered if I would succeed in toning down that quality. I asked her to be in the play. I over-explained the time commitment, the grueling two weeks before the show, my need for perfection. She smiled sweetly. I thought, “You don’t believe me, do you?” They never do. And then the two hour repetition of a single movement begins as I inform the cast that a minute on the stage, a well-choreographed, obsessively staged minute takes an eternity in rehearsal. Then they believe me, but by then it’s too late.

There’s a certain aloofness about C., a reserve, a barrier I haven’t been able to break. It’s possible I never will. And if I do, it’s possible that I won’t know it, because she’ll smile at me through her tears. I wonder what’s on the other side of the barrier. I wonder if there’s an enchanted territory there which I can’t access because it is invisible to the naked eye, like the fairyland in “True Blood.” For now, I imagine a land of exemplary, healthy people whose optimism would devastate me. I hesitate to trespass.

S. Night would not exist had I not met the real man, an impossible combination of Steppenwolf and something else: fragility, refined intelligence, an instinct for nobler things arrested by a pathological distaste for prolonged human contact.  In class he spoke in measured sentences punctuated by excruciating silences. Dismissed by some of the faculty as “hesitant, indecisive,” unknown to most of the other graduate students, he survived inside a protective shell – fortress or prison, I couldn’t be sure. The class found his silences uncomfortable. I found them fascinating. Here is a man who thinks before he speaks, I thought. How he takes his time, how he fights the impulse to run and leave us all behind with our judgments, and fears, and preconceived ideas.

I didn’t see K. for a long time after that first class. Oddly, I had a sense of temporary loss, as if I had misplaced something, a favorite volume or an object of nostalgic value. Then, miraculously, he reappeared in my next class and then the next. Always reassuringly quiet, always dressed impeccably, like a mild-mannered Kafka clerk. I began to see him, the other one, the one called Night. Alone in his warehouse, preparing a banquet for one every evening, drinking water out of a wine glass, eating a sandwich he took time preparing as if it were filet mignon. I saw him sitting at his desk waiting for his first client, patiently, lost in one of his interminable silences. They (both Night and his real counterpart) would not be visible from a distance. There are people who become attractive only upon close inspection, with the world in soft focus. In a crowd, they are completely unremarkable. Up close though, one begins to notice a certain way of articulating thoughts, mannerisms that betray a complex internal mechanism, emotions hidden in the slightest hesitation before a word.  I guess the fragility of such a character (for a while I had the distinct impression that Night would break under the pressure of circumstance), comes from the fact that he only externalizes emotions that have already consumed him. Auster calls these guys “internal émigrés,” exiles inside the vast territories of their internal being. K. is all of this, the perfect Night, a Steppenwolf of my own making. His (re)invention has had a strange side-effect: nostalgia, a constant flow of memories and inarticulate obsessions I try to keep in check. It is immensely difficult.

These are the actors.