Schizo-Split

The other day R. (credited in the program as “crisis management”) reminded me that all my plays go through cycles. In fact (she said) it’s the same cycle of happiness and despair. (You were wondering where the dramatic opening line for this entry was, right?)

Come to think of it, The Happiness Machine and The Silentio Project exemplified these exact emotions, which is probably why I could never jump up and down with joy (as I’m often known to do when things go swimmingly) at the end of any of Silentio’s rehearsals. There was too much darkness there, and I didn’t exactly know where it came from. But I had to do that play as I’ve had to do all these plays whose images haunt me until I manage to put them into words and silences, until I shape them into (always) unfinished love affairs – demented fairy tales, the lot of them, with their monsters, and their lost boy-heroes, and all that fucking, unapologetic sentimentality (yes, I said “fucking” in a blog. Grow up, children).

Happiness and despair. About three weeks before the show everything disintegrates, everything that we’ve worked on collapses, and I have to start again, from the beginning, not quite the same beginning though, but a new point of entry which gives everything a new shape. It’s some sort of phoenix moment I love and mostly hate (up in flames, then alive again), a necessary punishment, a revision, a reconstruction that helps me see things clearly once again. I am not alone in this. Everybody involved in the process feels it, everyone acts and thinks differently after that. I can’t explain it. It always happens, and I always forget until R. reminds me…

Four hour rehearsal this past Saturday – more like three hour rehearsal and 40 minutes of coffee and croissants and reciprocal congratulations – during which miraculous things happened.

You know I love lists. Here’s a list of…

Miraculous things:

-C.

I should stop here, just having said “C.” It should be enough, but it’s not. I need to go into details. C. with the little girl-fatale look, and the expressive, imploring, sad eyes that get somehow bigger, ready to capture all the sadness in the world when Night delivers the fatal line (this is, actually, just one of many: the man is a death-sentence machine): “I don’t think I can help you. Please leave.” Night, kicking happiness out like a fool, as if chances like these materialize every other day, as if people ready to love him unconditionally, blindly, spectacularly, endlessly, are waiting just around the corner for a chance to get in. I don’t understand this man and I wrote him. What does that say about me?

C…There was splendor there on Saturday. How, I don’t know, because the paneled, evil, fluorescent room we rehearse in is the opposite of all that is decent, beautiful, and emotional in a human being (is that why it’s called the faculty lounge? As a punishment?) I watched C. understand the moment of her death (Death comes calling); I watched her take Night’s hand, in a last, desperate attempt at connection (Night, you fool!); I watched her dance her way out, into oblivion, at a moment when I thought there was nothing on the other side. I thought: what an extraordinary girl. I thought: why is she hiding so? I felt gratitude, and affection (affinity?), and a certain need to advertise her extraordinariness, and a certain feeling of impossibility. (Can one feel impossibility? It feels like uselessness. It feels like desolation)

C.: glamorous, secure in her convictions, a movie star, moved to tears by a little man whose need for love is so immense it shatters everything. Is this Night’s tragedy? Is it a kind of blindness? Is he incapable of dealing with these extraordinary women – Chlotilde, The Angel of Death, perhaps others –  loving him completely for what he is (no “I love you, now change” moment here), seeing him for the first time? Was he hiding behind his mediocre relationships before? Was it easier to be with mediocre, normal women because they did not see, and did not question, and because their love didn’t burn at the stake, “signaling through the flames?” Ok, so I went a bit Artaud there, at the end, but, really. Why resist C.? Why not try harder with the Angel of Death who proclaims her attraction to him? At which point does reserve become a shroud instead of a protective membrane? (Night, you fool…)

- Death. Angelica. The Angel of Death. We made a collective decision to let sentiment back in (Yeah: that fucking sentiment. Grow up) and, suddenly, Death was there, magnificent, important, deadly. E. found the character's rhythm, finally, and it makes me think that it was my fault, all along, telling her to sound and behave as if words, sentiments were alien to her…but I thought I was right. I thought the Angel of Death wouldn’t feel, wouldn’t know how. What a colossal mistake. Isn’t it so much more tragic that a creature who understands sentiment, who sees people for what they are and loves them, also has to end their days? Wouldn’t that create, eventually, a crisis of sorts? Is that why Death takes refuge in amnesia – as if it were an oasis in the desert? I understand her so much more now. E. was magnificent on Saturday.

-K…K. having fun with his lines, internalizing the character, having the courage of his inflections, inhabiting that sordid space like it was his birth right, holding C. close during his 25.3 seconds of affection during the waltz…K. becoming Night, meeting the Angel of Death terrified, yet somehow heroic, intense. Vulnerable. Human...K. being human.

And now a list of despairing things which only contains one item (can a list consist of one item only? Why not? It is my list)

I never thought it would happen again and yet it did.  We were taking photographs before rehearsal and, in an attempt to capture the perfect image, I tried to rearrange K’s hair and his face registered a new kind of horror, something very close to suffering. (This happened once before, at the end of a difficult rehearsal when I tried to hug him, to make him forgive me for all the physical abuse I had subjected him to). There was a moment there, on Saturday, that I didn’t want to linger over not to spoil an otherwise perfect rehearsal. Afterward, though, at home, alone, I kept thinking about it, trying to find a logical explanation for it. How to explain this concisely? I handle actors. I manipulate them, I touch their faces, their arms, their torsos, to correct a movement, a posture, a hesitation. I do it all the time. I talk about this in the beginning. I always warn them that I’m going to “handle” them. I also warn them that I’m going to hug them when things go my way. It’s how I signal happiness…I love Gordon Craig and his Ubermarionette, and the possibilities he sees in its silhouette extending somewhere beyond the possibilities of the human body. I don’t have marionettes, but I have actors, and I touch their bodies in rehearsals, and I tell them how I want them to move. With K. things come to a standstill, always. I approach him, I extend a hand, and his face contorts into a rictus – I’m not sure if it’s an expression of horror of disgust, I’m not sure if it’s directed at me or the world in general, I’m not sure if K. is under a general warning of “noli me tangere…” Whatever it is, it alienates me inside a second, it’s detrimental to rehearsals because I hesitate to “correct” him, it also makes me wonder why someone who finds contact (with me? with the world?) so distasteful would spend hours talking (to me) about the world.

So there’s the despairing thing: my failure to connect with my main character because the actor is in the way, because he finds my proximity suspicious, because he knows nothing of Grotowski’s experiments (one of those great 20^th century events that changed the way we think about theatre), because he wants nothing to do with human contact while (I imagine) wishing for a colossal love story, like his doppelganger, one S. Night…

What is to be done? And where are we to go from here?

After rehearsal, K. becomes himself again and sends me a friendly message I cannot respond to, because I never know who I’m talking to: the witty compatriot (I often feel K. and I share a history, a geography) whose collaboration I’ve come to value so, or the distant spectator whose face always shows the horror of proximity?

I don’t know. There’s a bit of a shizo-split at work here I haven’t figured out yet. For now, the formidable promise of our last rehearsal, C.’s extraordinary grace, K's victory over reserve, and E’s tremendous progress will have to keep me company.