This Mad Affair

I woke up this morning obsessed with this poem – to be completely honest, obsessed with this stanza only, not the whole thing - and knew immediately that it was going to make its way into The Loneliness Pill.

The stream will cease to flow;

            The wind will cease to blow;

            The clouds will cease to fleet;

            The heart will cease to beat;

            For all things must die.

My second realization was that next time I’m scheduled to teach a graduate playwriting workshop, I must describe the method (the madness?) that has been the organizing principle of my most recent plays: a combination of autobiography and ideas that interest me at the time, against the background of what the naturalists would have called “a slice of life,” a snapshot of my interactions with the psychopathology of everyday life at the moment I realize that everyday life is nothing but psychopathology.

In other words: I’m writing The Loneliness Pill incorporating all the research I’ve done on the subject (a kind of “follow the white rabbit” approach to loneliness, psychiatry, and aging studies), but I’m creating characters based on the people in my life, placed in circumstances I have, or wished I could have, experienced.

After not getting a dime in grant money for Fugue, I doubt it’s worth applying for a grant to do The Loneliness Pill. Its meandering, purposefully chaotic, simultaneous plot would not make much sense squeezed inside the tidy rubric of any grant. Would the community benefit from knowing that almost half of the world’s population under 25 considers itself lonely? Probably not. It’s not an uplifting project (prospect), and I’m not proposing joyful or hopeful solutions. What The Loneliness Pill does is present a state of affairs and ask questions most of us would be reluctant to answer. Behind the collective mask of well-being lies a dormant state of despair.

What’s truly maddening about this play is the way I have to work on it. Consider this: the cast consists of six people living in four different cities unable to get together for rehearsals until the week of the play. I’m rehearsing weekly with the three cast members who live in town. I’m using FaceTime to “rehearse” with one of the silent characters responsible for all the choreography and the movement scenes throughout the play. Her character is based on Sophia, the social humanoid robot activated on Valentine’s day 2016. I’m having phone conversations with the other silent character, the Big Pharma representative, whose background phone calls and tweets affect the outcome of the loneliness pill’s trials; and I’m using the occasional Saturday to rehearse with The Revolutionary, whenever she can drive down from Houston to spend the day with me.

Madness, right? For previous productions, in addition to the weekly rehearsals, we’d have two weeks of daily dress/tech rehearsals before the show. I have no tech elements for The Loneliness Pill (lack of money or a theatre venue), and everyone will be able to rehearse together for only three days before the show. So: why am I doing this to myself…? Because I want to work with these people, most of them past members of the Milena Group, who’ve been away for 10, 15 years; because I want to see if I can do a play like this; because I see no point in doing the same plays the same way for decades and calling it theatre. The event, the immediate and continuous present the stage experience involves us in, the communal, the extraordinary nature of theatre makes me think that I can pull this off. We’ll see…

Since The Loneliness Pill took a sci-fi turn with the introduction of Sophia and Asimov’s plot in The Naked Sun, I’ve decided, as an homage to Blade Runner, to have Sophia kill herself when she realizes that she cannot experience the loneliness she is supposed to cure. Sophia comes with the pill as the social element meant to enhance each test subject’s experience. She is responsible for designing the best type of interaction for each type of loneliness she encounters. I haven’t yet figured out how she’ll get disillusioned, but what I do know is that she’ll realize that in not being able to experience loneliness, she is alone. That’s when she decides to pull the plug and shut herself down forever. And then…

The stream will cease to flow;

            The wind will cease to blow;

            The clouds will cease to fleet;

            The heart will cease to beat;

            For all things must die…

In isolation, in installments, fragmented and hesitant, work on The Loneliness Pill has begun.

The Loneliness Pill: A Confession

On April 12 I was standing before the audience of Fugue saying “I fear going blind.” It was one of the many fears my character confessed to: months of writing paralysis, sadnesses, blindness. A few days before the opening of Fugue I had reached a breaking point, the result of utter and somehow final exhaustion triggered by bitter disappointments, other people’s traumas, and a general sense of nightmarish dysfunction I didn’t have the training to cure or the strength to absorb any longer. 

A week after Fugue I experienced a strange episode that began with an ocular migraine which distorted reality in frightening ways, and ended with a detachment inside my eye. For hours I thought I was going blind. I remembered the lines in Fugue, my monologue about blind writers, about Borges going blind the year he became the director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, and took over 900,000 books he could no longer read. I thought, “I did this to myself by writing it.” Self-fulfilling prophecies and all that. Every time I opened my eyes a storm took over the world with gray clouds and flashes of lighting that made me doubt my perception. 2019, my “best year yet” if I was to believe horoscope predictions, had finally defeated me.

And although I loved Fugue with a passion, outside the protective space of the stage, reality crumbled. An artist I had trusted instantly and completely disappeared in the middle of a collaboration I had poured my life into. His departure felt like a terminal betrayal. The present stagnated. The future felt dark. I could no longer read for hours, stare at the computer screen, do my job. A sadness I could not describe covered everything, like a giant, suffocating blanket. I felt ashamed and diminished by it and, for the first time in years, completely alone.

And then one day I learned of an experiment, a research project whose premise was this: modern life has led to isolation which, in turn, has fueled a vast range of disorders; if there’s a pill for depression and anxiety, why not loneliness?

I kept reading. I discovered a book called Our Psychiatric Future and felt both curiosity and horror. I kept thinking about this extraordinary scenario: a pill for (against?) loneliness. The Matrix. The Blue Pill. Our fear of emotion. The monologue in Fugue that talked about it. “And then the panic sets in. The nausea, the numbness, the erratic heartbeat, the overwhelming sense of terror. A total loss of control. A fall – a falling. You tell no one. It’s not what real men do. The Master Builder hangs the largest wreath on the highest tower. Panic doesn’t come into it.” Except that now it does – panic, loneliness, a fear of old age, of mortality, of banality, of putting one foot in front of the other in the desert of the real whose sole inhabitant you are – forever.

I thought: to eradicate loneliness we must find and annihilate its cause, numb the soul to it, kill emotion altogether. How would one isolate that particular emotion, the one leading to loneliness? In other words, would the pill “cure” all emotion until, zombified but tranquil, we’d wait patiently for the day when we feel…nothing?

Research on loneliness led me to Aging and Immortality Studies (although the immortal vampire is the loneliest creature I know – remember that), which led to the Journal of Happiness Studies, Emotion Theory, and then movies like Her, then Sophia, the humanoid robot activated on Valentine’s Day 2016, ready to punctuate the monotony of our comfortable but deadly isolation.

Slowly, a few characters emerged: a psychiatrist, a Big Pharma representative, a few test subjects, an AI robot, and a revolutionary, a member of the resistance who warns that the suppression of negative emotion may feel like happiness but will lead to the end of life as we know it.

And so, out of fear, disappointment, and exhaustion, having finally left Fugue behind, a new play has emerged – is emerging – like a cure.

"I Leave This Manuscript, I Do Not Know for Whom; I No Longer Know What It Is About"

FUGUE opens (and closes) in two weeks in a small art gallery with questionable acoustics and limited seating, an almost anti-theatre space that I love precisely because it’s not equipped for performance. 

All my life, various theatre people have gone out of their way to tell me that what I do is not theatre. One doesn’t rehearse the way I do; doesn’t treat actors the way I do; doesn’t incorporate cinematic techniques in a play; doesn’t use sound the way I do. The list is endless and it always reminds me of the end of Hedda Gabler when, after Hedda’s suicide, one of her guests says, “Good god - one doesn’t do such things” implying that it’s quite a faux pas to shoot yourself in the head while your guests are still having dinner. That’s not how one exits this world…So, I thought, if what I do is not theatre then maybe I shouldn’t do plays in a performance space. I did REVISION in a large lecture hall at school, and FACE (a long, long time ago) in a classroom.  

FUGUE started as a ten minute scene I wrote for a reading event at a moment when I was convinced that my writing days were over. I’d been incapable of putting anything down on paper for about a year. My mind was like a desert. There was no one and nothing that inspired me. Those months felt like living inside an eternal blackout, in complete silence. An absence of sound and light on a barren stage. It was November, and I was miserable because I wasn’t doing a play, because I didn’t want to do a play anyway, because I was in the middle of all sorts of renovations so I was coming home to a construction zone every day. I remember standing in the middle of my not-kitchen (it was basically a shell at that point) and thinking how nice it would be to experience a fugue state and be someone else somewhere else, and not even remember it afterwards. That’s when I sat down and wrote about the impossibility of writing, about the characters I think of and then discard when their stories don’t make sense, about everything else that happens in my head when I’m trying to write a play: the chaos, the constant return to a theme that refuses to take shape, the tangents on which I go off in an attempt to distract myself from the failure to write. Curiously, the ten minute scene worked. I said, “Let’s finish it. Let’s do a play.”

I wonder what people will make of it, I wonder if the subject will truly interest anyone because – let’s face it – why should anyone care about somebody else’s mental chaos? I’ve also completely abandoned plot (what plot? The plot of not being able to write a play?) in favor of chasing a few themes and images I can’t get rid of, which, like in a musical fugue, keep coming back to haunt me and my characters, the ones I keep rewriting and discarding until they rebel.

I wanted FUGUE to be tentative and a little unfocused, almost like a rehearsal, and I think I’ve managed that, but in the absence of lights or a sound system the props are out of control, we’re drowning in props because when you do a play about dozens of potential scenarios you have to create dozens of worlds capable of accommodating them. Plus often, during the play, the characters are bored with my existentialist angst and amuse themselves throwing parties or finding a million little things in an abandoned theatre trunk that just happens to be on stage, and that’s also a great image for the inside of my head.

I should just stand by the door and say, like Anthony Hopkins in Freejack, “Welcome to my mind.” (Did you know that Anthony Hopkins and Mick Jagger were in a film together? I bet you didn’t…See? Tangent).

And so, in two weeks, FUGUE will come and go and, as always, I’ll miss the people, because I couldn’t have asked for better people to work with. It’s amazing to see how much the girls have become these characters, how much they’ve added to the characters’ inner lives, how easily they move from tragedy to laughter to boredom to mourning…The Stage Manager (who also plays the Stage Manager of the production in my head – trust me, this will all make sense on April 12), looks and sounds as if she’s been stage managing plays all her life. She checks the props and keeps track of the maddening changes I make in every rehearsal, and switches between imaginary Stage Manager and actual Stage Manager with a confidence I admire. (I don’t do well being in the play and directing it at the same time, but that’s a story for another day).

The Sound Guy is amazing. He’s actually built an instrument capable of producing a variety of sounds I need during the production. All I said before the pact with the devil scene was “You know, it would be nice if we could have some devil sounds here…like when the devil enters…oh and some serial killer sounds when the devil talks about serial killer movies.” So he went home and built an instrument. That actually makes those sounds. Unbelievable.

At the end of each rehearsal I fear that the public won’t like FUGUE as much as THE REGISTRY or REVISION because those were plays with a story line and characters to whom one could relate. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, they’ll experience a fugue state and forget all about it afterwards. But during the performance they’ll be captives in a world haunted by two images: that of an actress falling silent during a performance of Electra, and that of a Master Builder falling from the top of the highest tower. In the background, worlds will emerge and dissolve.  

I no longer know what FUGUE is about.

The Three-Faced Mask

I sit at the kitchen table cutting out thin cardboard pieces along their solid outlines. I do not cut the dashed lines – those are for folding. This will be a three hour operation (“operation?” why not) whose final result will be a three-face theatre mask inspired by (but nothing like) the Venetian three-face masks I lust after but can’t afford. I wonder what it would be like to do a play with serious money, without cutting corners, without saying “this is Poor Theatre, people!” during each rehearsal, without making do. “Mend and make do” like it's World War II forever on my stage. Theatre on the barricades and all that.

The idea of the masks was there from the beginning, not just because Fugue quotes passages (or images) from many of my previous plays, but because it is a play about writing plays, about theatre as I know it, the end-all of all things. Somebody did ask me once if I'm capable of doing plays that aren’t meta-theatre and I got upset, and then I did a few just to prove that I could, and then I thought, why am I trying to prove something to someone other than me? I do theatre because I love it, so why not do it the way it makes sense to me? Fugue is very self-indulgent. It reminds me of that Anatole France quote, "Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe—subjects that offer me a beautiful opportunity."

So: masks. How could I not have them in a play about theatre, in a play that talks about the “naked masks” I wear every day. There are gas masks in Fugue, and a White Rabbit mask (because the Master Builder calls the girl who’ll be the death of him “Little Alice”), and some weird steampunk Doctor of the Plague-like masks, and others. I chose the gas masks because they seem to me the best representation of an introvert forced into society. I think of my horror of idle conversation, of small talk and the boredom and the exhaustion that comes with it; I think of me during endless social events having to interact, to smile, to talk about the goddamn weather – in other words, to hide behind a mask. The girls have cakes and sandwiches in Fugue and, at some point, put on black gas masks and pick up delicate tea cups, and wait for the ordeal to be over. They are my characters (in the play and in reality), so they’re trapped inside my indecision, waiting. “The waiting is the worst,” says Liz.

I’m always in a state of waiting. It’s like a mode of being only in slow motion. Right now, I’m waiting for the original music for Fugue. It was supposed to happen at some point at the end of December. Then in January. Then later. The fragments I’ve heard, the ones composed in my presence, are exactly what I’ve imagined, and also a little surprising, which is always good. But the final recording never came, and there are only so many rehearsals I can do without sound. As I wait, I wonder how someone who knows me rather well can do this, knowing that to hurt a play is to hurt the most alive part of me.

I pick up a book by a Romanian director I’ve always admired, a book of memories, and anecdotes, and meditations on the nature of theatre. The first chapter called “Scene,” tells of the director’s production of Gogol’s The Government Inspector that was closed (by the government) after three performances, and resulted in the expulsion from the country of both the play’s director and the director of the Bucharest theatre that allowed the show to be performed.

I read: “Because it is ephemeral, and because we carry it inside us, theatre cannot be truly understood if it is not considered life’s double. This is why telling stories about theatre is, in a way, telling our story. Only inside us does theatre continue to live because, ultimately, memory is the best critic, and if disappointments leave behind the intimation of deception, we always carry with us, inside us, the exemplary shows we have witnessed. We live with them.”

Fugue is my story. Not an autobiography –  the story of immigration, career, or love – but the story of my love affair with theatre, our on-again off-again relationship, probably the longest relationship I’ve ever sustained with a living, breathing organism. I cannot stage it without sound, without rhythm – without a pulse. So I am waiting.

I’m waiting, and cutting along solid outlines, and assembling a three-face mask meant to capture deception, ambiguity, and indecision, wondering if, maybe, I’ve been wrong this time. But one side of the mask is smiling, and I think that tomorrow I’ll be ready to believe six impossible things before breakfast, and everything will be all right.

The waiting is the worst.