PSYCHE.
I hardly know. He is most changeable.
He wears white wings upon his heart—one breath
And he is gone! I fear he’s fled…
CUPID.
He’ll stay.
PSYCHE.
I hope so.
CUPID.
I’ll vouch for him. What was his name?
PSYCHE.
He was called Passion once, and Cupid, too.
But I have called him Husband, and Father of my child.
CUPID.
A Father!
PSYCHE.
Aye, and Fatherless! Pray, pardon me, farewell.
My candle’s nearly spent, and all the stars are out.
CUPID.
One moment more.
PSYCHE.
I cannot stay.
CUPID.
I beg you—
Dream! O, do not leave me here!
PSYCHE.
Then I’ll obey.
One minute, Soul. What shall we talk of, you and I?
CUPID.
Who is…she?
PSYCHE.
She. I’ve named her Charity.
CUPID.
A pretty name. What was your Husband, Soul?
PSYCHE.
Most perfect Imperfection! Not “what,” but who;
A broken man and beautiful.
CUPID.
O, Dream—
(PSYCHE kisses him.)
CUPID.
Then, Psyche, do you know me?
PSYCHE.
In darkness and in light: Thou art my Husband,
Cupid. And I will have no other. And still—
I will not take thee!
CUPID.
Why?
PSYCHE.
For I’m already thine.
(They kiss, and—sliver by sliver—the world begins to wake. They squint into the dawn.)
PSYCHE.
What world is that?
CUPID.
Where worlds begin. A Garden I know well.
PSYCHE.
I see my Father’s there! And Dareia is going. They call us on.
CUPID.
Then let us fly.
PSYCHE.
So you will catch me.
CUPID.
Always.
PSYCHE.
O, I’ll stop thy mouth with prayers.
(The world’s revealed in splendour, as they ascend into the light.)
FIN
PART THREE: ENDNOTES
SECTION 1: MISCELLANEA
Two Noble Kinsmen
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Shakespeare famously (or infamously) began several of his plays with the trope: “Enter two noblemen,” whose sole purpose was to get the attention of the groundlings while behaving like a “Previously on”-type prologue. Their dialogue therefore often went something like this:
NOBLEMAN 1.
I say! I’ve just conveniently returned from travel,
And find that I am speaking now in verse!
Do tell me, fellow nobleman: What’s up?
NOBLEMAN 2.
I shall! The Duke is with the Duchess—
NOBLEMAN 1.
Yes?
NOBLEMAN 2.
(I mean the Earl of Kent,) who went—
NOBLEMAN 1.
One moment, Sir!
I can’t keep up! The Duchess is a man?
And so on.
Now, this sort of unrepentant info-dump actually isn’t that bad an idea. The thing you want to establish first in a play is Who The Hell These People Are. I say this as someone who once saw Richard II—which, if you don’t know, is about a civil war—where everyone, no matter what side they were on, were all dressed in black. All the time. Always.
Without a bloody helpful info-driven nobleman in sight.
As the Great Muppet Caper put it succinctly, “It’s exposition. It has to go somewhere.”
Alas, Poor Irina!
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While we were rehearsing in 2009 for the first workshop in Boston, the director mentioned that it might be helpful to give a name to the woman whom the sisters see die in Act III.
Eager to please, I created the never-seen character of “Irina”—probably with some thought that companies looking to shoe-horn in a few supernumeraries in future productions could use this as an salve to Actress #6 who just fell short of any of the other female roles in the play, in much the same way that some productions of Romeo and Juliet cast a “Rosalind” to walk across the stage in Act I.
(As a side note, for those in the happy position of adding supernumeraries, you’re more than welcome to add in wedding guests in Act I, men clamouring for Psyche’s attention in Act II, women being killed in Act III, and the ghosts of Hades in Act V.)
In subsequent seated readings of the play, however, the response has been: “Who’s Irina? Did we miss an actor? We’re terribly confused.” (See this rule.)
Time will tell whether poor Irina remains in the official text of the play. But she lived once in the Bad Quarto.
Belovèd-èd-èd-èd-èd
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Fancy Shakespeare Scholars will tell you, quite rightly, the way to discern whether one should pronounce the “-ed” part of some particularly tricky words (such as “beloved” which can be “be-LOVED” or “be-LOV-ed”).
The trick is to scan the verse for five strong stresses, and thus discern whether the line requires an extra syllable or not.
You’re certainly welcome to scan the verse of this play. However, if I intended you to pronounce the “-ed” part of a word, I’ve simply put an accent grave over the è.
You’re welcomè.
“What Should I Say?”
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In my opinion, Hamlet has one of the best entrance lines of any character. His muttered (or exclaimed, or whistled—this is theatre; the possibilities are endless): “A little more than kin and less than kind” is simply genius.
Psyche’s “What should I say?” on the other hand, was born out of about two nights of desperation.
You can sense, in a play, when it’s time to introduce a main character.
You want to give the audience a few moments of readjusting from their world to your own, and then another beat to ease them into the inciting incident, and then wham: Main Characters, please and thank you.
Psyche, however, is curious. She was present from the get-go, but refused to speak. And indeed, I felt most like Aphrodite begging and commanding, cursing and cajoling as she just sat there, ignoring me, or blinking once or twice.
I tried to slip into her skin.
(I don’t know how other playwrights work, but I tend to act out the play over and over as I reread the piece aloud. Again, my time spent in Starbucks can be…special.)
She remained silent.
I spent a day fretting. Taught my classes (I was wrangling teenagers at the time), directed whatever play I was directing (this must have been somewhere between the reign of Romeo and Juliet and Our Town), and tried to crack the nut again.
“What should she say? What terribly clever thing could Psyche say? She’s wicked smaht; what in the world do you say to a god?”
And then, somewhere around one in the morning, I just wrote the question she refused to answer:
“What should I say?”
The wretched woman grinned at me.
Characters are nasty.
Adonis and Cupid Sitting in a Tree
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The role of Adonis—or rather, my ever-expanding understanding of him—is the result of listening to scholars and actors and artists far wiser than myself.
When I was first making my cast list, before I wrote a single word, the character of Adonis presented himself as part of the roster.
I shrugged and added him, thinking that he was a nice doppelgänger for Psyche, since he’s the mortal lover of Aphrodite.
While doing my due diligence on his backstory, though (aka, that ever-re
liable bastion of knowledge, Wikipedia, since I couldn’t find my trusty copy of Hamilton’s Mythology), I was delighted to discover that Adonis was also the lover of Persephone.
Since history has proved time and again that Polygamy is its own Punishment (I refer you to that great show of one-upmanship between Rachel and Leah and their handmaids), and since my main conception of Adonis was originally as a jock-type moron (all apologies to truly cultured jocks with discriminating tastes who have chosen to read this exquisite work of fiction), I honestly didn’t think much about the fella, but stuck him in as a human ping-pong for the gods.
How little did I know.
The first time he really “spoke” to me during the writing process was in his brief parting scene with Persephone in Act II. All of a sudden, this mortal was in charge of the scene, in charge of the goddess, her equal.
Naturally, I killed him.
(I should also point out that Adonis had to die at the hands of a boar. I just planned to spell it differently.)
After the first workshop in 2009, my dear friend Kate spent some time with me going over the tape (should you really want to see the first iteration, go ahead).
“Did you mean for Adonis and Brontes to be doubled?” she asked.
I explained to her the oh-so-fun lack of men.
“So, if you had your druthers,” she pressed, “they’d be two separate actors?”
“Absolutely!” I replied.
“Good. Then Persephone and Adonis could just be present on stage. A shadow over the horror of Act III and beyond. You should think more about Adonis. He’s interesting.”
She wasn’t wrong. I thought more about Adonis.
A year later in Boston, I had the great good fortune to have a really terrific fella read him in my revision of the end of Act II. He had this laid-back air that was brimming with coiled tension, and heavy-lidded eyes that missed nothing even as they stared from shadows. Before he read the piece, he came up to me to clarify a word or two, and then said:
“I’m so excited about one line.”
“Oh? Which one?” I asked eagerly.
(Playwrights love to know what lines you love. Seriously, if you’re working with a new playwright, mention that you love something and it’ll stay in the script forever. More about the joys and dangers of that later.)
He grinned—a tight-lipped, lopsided, thin-slit preen—and pointed to:
“I do.”
Every Adonis I’ve had the great good fortune to work with since has found something new in those words. And there was something in that particular actors’ secret smile that told me that there were secrets that Adonis had been keeping.
In 2012 when I had a reading of Acts I and II at the now-defunct Space on White in Tribeca, I was gifted with another brilliant Adonis—a delicate-featured man whose always looked as though his whole body were straining towards Heaven, while his feet were buried deep on the other side of the earth. Beyond being a sensitive and powerful actor in his own right, this Adonis was also a sensitive and powerful playwright.
“Adonis loves Cupid,” he said to me immediately after we had concluded the reading and all the niceties of moving towards the door.
I blinked at him and asked him to go on.
He was nearly quivering as he spoke, his lashes fluttering, his fingers dancing as though they could catch the words the character had whispered into him. “Adonis loves Love. Yearns for him. Longs for him. And when at last Cupid touches him—when at last Love puts his hands on him—and God, Adonis has been yearning for Love to touch him even once!—When at last his Love lays hands on him, it’s to wring his soul from him. Emily, you have to go there. You can’t keep prancing about Adonis’ point of view. Adonis loves him, Emily. He loves him.”
And it was as simple and as complicated as that.
The next day, I inserted the brief scene between Cupid and Adonis in Act I. It nearly wrote itself.
Soon after this, I began revising Acts IV and V significantly. I had never been pleased with them, and now that I had the character of Adonis finally speaking to me, he had a lot to say.
Act IV, Scene 1 was inserted.
He wrested away the scene originally between Persephone and Aphrodite at Hades Gate for himself.
It was as if, in death, Adonis at last showed his true face. Having literally nothing left to lose, he did whatever he liked.
I was sitting on the very couch I’m sitting on now when Adonis literally made me gasp with what he did in Act IV, Scene 5, and if I could have hid under my own covers rather than have to write, I should have when he started doing what he does in Act V, Scene 1.
No brainless jock. No wilting flower of impossible verse. No plaything of the gods.
Fortunately, I still have one whole play left to explore who this fascinating character is. But more on that later.
Cupid’s Wings
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Have you ever seen an actor wearing “angel wings”?
On a grown man?
On a stage?
Who’s supposed to be taken seriously?
Such a thing might be possible with the budget for Angels in America, but not every theatre company can afford safety rigging and mechanical wings…for an entire show.
Which would leave most companies scrambling for dinky “angel wings” from some Halloween outlet store, which would almost definitely become a nuisance for blocking and sightlines—and actors being actors, said wings would absolutely be destroyed a few times over during rehearsals and/or performance, requiring the purchase of back-up “angel wings”…
Not to mention the possible psychological damage to the ego and therefore the acting quality of the gentleman playing Cupid, since I’ve seen my seasoned lead actors go to pieces when they’re introduced to their costume and it’s nothing but a pair of tights and a teensy tunic (No joke. Also, this is a common work hazard for actors who specialize in the classics. Conservatory bound students, sway)…
Not to mention a thousand thousand other headaches that come from the practical considerations of shoving wings onto a grown man’s back.
I cut the wings.
I don’t regret it.
The Obligatory Meet-Cute
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Throughout this play, there are overt and covert references to Shakespeare’s canon—how could there not? I’ve had the great good fortune to play as his characters and to play with his characters, and as my experience of verse drama is steeped in his work, so he is steeped in mine.
I won’t point out every reference—I leave that game of bingo to the Scholars—but it’s fair to say that there’s at least one reference that’s unabashedly out there. I had thought for one brief second of referencing the far more popular Balcony Scene, and in fact half-wondered if people would recognize the shared sonnet. But I have been delighted to learn that audiences thus far have laughed heartily at Cupid quoting Romeo.
That said, I had no interest in quoting my dearest Bill wholesale, and so was obliged to discover just how Cupid would woo.
Fortunately, Cupid—at least in his smirky, cocky, swaggery state—is considerably more forthcoming than either Psyche or Adonis, and he kept speaking until he suddenly shifted into a form of verse that’s utterly different from anything else in the play.
I remember, I was downstairs in my apartment writing. I was on a roll, since Psyche in the presence of her father tended to open up a bit. It was about two in the morning.
(If you can’t tell, my time of day is the night time.)
Cupid began his first line:
“If thou couldst see with eyes like mine.”
I tried to find two more syllables to fit the line.
He persisted.
“If thou could see with eyes like mine.
If I could be thy glass.”
I tried pentameterizing it.
“If thou couldst see with eyes like mine. If I
Could be thy glass. If thou wouldst wander through
My mind…”
I stopped typing. Looked at the words. Considered.
Then taking up pen and paper, and realizing that this was something different, I wrote out the poem.
To be honest, I really don’t know what it means. I often think of this piece as Cupid’s aria. Something’s so changed in the world that it shatters everything else.
I wanted to return to it elsewhere, and I found a little shoehorn in later, but these are the gifts that verse drama gives you if you’re open to allowing the characters more than strict iambic pentameter.
My first actor playing Cupid put it something like this: that he sets about seducing her, and winds up seducing himself. My current Cupid recently remarked that he thinks the change literally starts rumbling in the middle verse when the rhyme scheme goes staccato.
As a director and dramaturg, I can tell you that this particular poem seems to play best (as most rhyming does) if you actually lean in to the rhyme, rather than trying to hide it through enjambment. Similarly, press into any repetitions: “If thou’s” and so on. While most of the verse in this play is best served by speed, this poem seems to want to begin languorously, and then pick up steam in the second stanza, finally coming to a standstill by the last few lines. Think of the progress of a rainstorm.
Finally, I’ve no idea who kisses whom first.
Cupid and Psyche Page 13
