The Fall

The skeleton text of Glissando is finished. At 46 pages, it’s not terribly skeletal, but there isn’t much to add, a few connective moments (I’m thinking of these transitions – see the term “glissando” – as connective tissue) so that the organism (the play, the beast) can come to life. 

I also have to add the only monolog Chehov will have in the play, the most defining moment of his character. I wrote him as a neurotic, slightly detached, often unkind and tortured man. Everyone wants something from him: his wife, the actresses rehearsing his play, his public, his fans. They want what we all want – affection, understanding, patience –  but they want it constantly, feverishly, in a way that both sustains and suffocates his character.

Ok, so I’m doing it again: the image at the heart of the play is that of a solitary man, but this man, my Chehov, reminds me of a tree whose roots run deep and whose branches are always in reach, sometimes for other people (other bodies), sometimes for pure feelings (in which he doesn’t believe). At the end of the play Emma tells him, “Tony, you’re a great man but you’re a small man as well; that is the disappointment,” after which she leaves him. Writing him, I remembered something another Tony (Hopkins) said about playing a particularly despicable character: that the actor must always find the vulnerability, the humanity (even if that means all the flaws) of a character and not judge him, but understand him; that the actor cannot play a character he judges.

I’m not judging Chehov (my Chehov), I leave that to the public who is presented with all the facts, with all the torture, all the drudgery, of everyday living. At the end, they can choose where their sympathies lie, or they can remain conflicted. What happens at the end? A little pact with the devil (see Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus): the man loses everything in love but gains a spectacular career. Isn’t this always the case?

So the play ends on applause (the applause for Chehov’s play which has just ended – stage left), as Emma, and every woman who’s ever wanted anything from him (love, intimacy, sex, a better part in the play, etc.) leaves him. Perhaps this is always the case with the writer, the exceptional writer who sacrifices people for characters, life for the world he creates on the stage. I remember the words the devil utters in Mann’s book: “Thou maist not love.” “Love is forbidden you insofar as it warms.”

I keep thinking that a better title for this play would have been The Fall. A fall from grace, from the proximity of love; a fall from happiness – a painful, endless tumble down a mountain that reminds me of Sisyphus’ eternal punishment. 

Though very humorous in parts, the play got dark. I’m not sure when it happened – it just did, over time, as I kept writing disparate scenes, in no chronology whatsoever, until one day everything fell into place. Until one day everything fell. (“She fell and broke her heart,” the soundtrack claims).

In the meantime, relationships between the characters have changed; relationships between members of the Milena Group have evolved; my interaction with everyone, with the living organism that is the play, shifts slightly every day. Out of the bluest blue, Thoreau comes to mind: “There is more day to dawn; the sun is but a morning star.” And “Things do not change; we change,” and “If you built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” 

I’ve built castles in the air ever since I can remember. I’ve looked at people and seen things no one else has; I put them on the stage and they embodied those fantastical images; the foundations under my castles are always the plays, the best part of me, the spaces that belong to me completely, where – uninhibited – characters connect to one another without fear of consequences. So perhaps people are not extraordinary. Perhaps I sense the extraordinary potential in them and they rise to the occasion. I ask you: what’s wrong with that? I ask you: shouldn’t “the occasion” become the measure of their lives? 

Intensity. Chehov is intense. My relationship with him is intense. I love, not the physical man but the possibility of him, mostly the tender darkness waiting for release.

“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star” (Henry David, Walden)