Chances are if you’re writing in verse, you’re writing about an epic world that’s not quite our own.
Sort out how to kill your vampires.
And then don’t be afraid to just tell us how you do it.
We’re with you for the ride.
Even if it means that your vampires…(sigh)…sparkle.
I Do Not Lie
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It’s rather curious.
I wrote this little speech without thinking much about it. I guess I was just feeling giddy with homophones, and The Cleverness of Me.
Then, in our first iteration of the show, we had a truly fantastic actor playing Brontes, a fella who’d had the advantage of not only playing Hamlet and a handful of other great Shakespearean characters for me, but had also originated several roles of mine. So, when he came to this speech, he just jumped in, and it was amusing, and I thought no more about it.
Or, if I thought anything about it, it was: “O, the Cleverness of Me.”
However, this little speech has proved a strange stumbling block for several of our subsequent Bronti.
“Do I like her? Don’t I? Am I lying? Aren’t I?”
My answer is, frustratingly: Yes.
My advice, for here and elsewhere, is a touch more concrete: play each line as if it’s absolutely true for that moment. Even if the next line contradicts it. For man is, himself, a contradiction.
As my dearest Chesterton put it:
The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait. I give one coarse instance of what I mean. Suppose some mathematical creature from the moon were to reckon up the human body; he would at once see that the essential thing about it was that it was duplicate. A man is two men, he on the right exactly resembling him on the left. Having noted that there was an arm on the right and one on the left, a leg on the right and one on the left, he might go further and still find on each side the same number of fingers, the same number of toes, twin eyes, twin ears, twin nostrils, and even twin lobes of the brain. At last he would take it as a law; and then, where he found a heart on one side, would deduce that there was another heart on the other. And just then, where he most felt he was right, he would be wrong. (Orthodoxy, Chapter VI.)
That said, you can also make a case for subtext in this scene. But only, of course, because man’s a contradiction.
If You Wanted Mary Poppins…
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Of all the script, this is probably the one stage direction that’s undergone the most iterations. At first, it was:
CUPID.
Then I will make thee mine.
(He takes her. PSYCHE screams.)
Which was just so out-of-the-blue rapey that at the first read-through, everyone blew breath out of their cheeks, sat back in their chairs, and said, “Oh. Well.” In the second revision, I changed it to:
CUPID.
Then I will make thee mine.
(PSYCHE gives herself to him. She screams.)
Which at least gives Psyche some power, but not much. A passive power. Which she’s not. So finally, the current stage direction, which is:
(They take each other. PSYCHE screams.)
The most important thing to keep in mind if you’re about to produce this play is that, no matter how the stage direction is written, there is simply no room in the blocking to be polite.
If Cupid and Psyche are in the least bit apologetic, the audience will be uncomfortable.
If one party is engaged physically in the scene and the other isn’t, the rest of the show won’t play.
What that means for directors, is that you need to be willing to go deep within yourself as well, to find what is true, appropriate, raw, and—as Peter Brook might say—Immediate, Holy, and Rough in order to avoid that which is Deadly.
I’ll give you an example:
Although I’ve been directing since I was in second grade (no joke; I thought all kids played pretend that way), when I was in college at Franciscan University of Steubenville I was aware that I was directing when I worked on my senior thesis, Salomé by Oscar Wilde.
(If you need a refresher, Salomé is about Biblical woman who danced for her uncle, King Herod and then asked for the head of John the Baptist. So, you know, a play full of happy things like incest, adultery, and the beheading of a major saint. Light stuff.)
My mentor, Mr. Shawn Dougherty, who’s not only a fantastic teacher, a ruthless grader, a powerful performer, father to a passel of kids, smitten husband, and owner (I swear to God) of a working farm complete with a goat, would occasionally drop in to rehearsal and sit in the back of the house, one leg crossed over the other, stroking his beard and furrowing his brow.
At the end of rehearsal, I’d shuffle into Mr. D’s office, trying to hide behind my shoulders, and await his verdict. He always said the same thing:
“It needs to be darker, Emily.”
“But—!” I’d protest helplessly, meaning: “But—we’re on a Catholic campus! And I’m in the middle of a religious conversion, or rather CONVICTION, and I’m trying really hard to avoid the very things this play is about, and besides you were the one who changed ‘Out, out, you slut!’ last year in Tartuffe—which was my only character development as Flipote—because you thought it might offend our very Catholic audience…so who are you to tell me that I ought to go ‘darker’ with this play—even if I should?”
Knowing all this, like any good Obi-Wan, Mr. D would crinkle his face into something like a smile and say: “You’re not doing Mary Poppins, Emily. If you wanted to do Mary Poppins, you should have done Mary Poppins. But you chose to take on Salomé. So, either you’re honest with the work or not.”
So I started letting this play—and all my subsequent plays—play.
It wasn’t easy. I remember one day when I was beating lines into Herod’s head (long story; great actor, terrible memory, heap ton speeches), and we were working out the last emotional bits, I found I had to give the direction: “Um…can you, can you say that a bit more, I mean, d’you mind, but, well, can we have just a touch more orgasm in the line?”
The job, I feel, of a director is not only to be an audience of one, to be the reflective eyes for the actors, but also to be the person to give permission to go to those dark places—the person to shine the light even in the dark, if you will.
Practically, though, I’ll pass on great trick to any squeamish directors out there: find something utterly stupid to laugh at during rehearsals.
For example, during Romeo and Juliet we would recite lines like Shawn Connery. (Try the “But soft” speech. It’s a hoot.) And just the other day in rehearsal for the “Psyche screams” scene as we were sorting out how to safely slam Cupid on his back, my actors got the biggest kick out of shouting: “I LOVE YOUR LIGAMENTS!” (It’s funnier in context.)
You can, of course, leave all the decisions up to the actors, but I’ve found that directors who leave their actors floundering—particularly in intimate scenes—have done their actors a great disservice. Just like fights need choreographing to keep everyone physically safe, so intimacy requires choreography to keep everyone emotionally safe. And by creating that safe space for the actors, by being the point of origin for movement rather than putting the onus on the actors, the actors are thereby liberated to colour vibrantly within the lines, rather than hesitantly doodling on the center of the paper without knowing where the limits are.
As Wilde himself said, “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
Or in the words of Mr. Dougherty, this isn’t Mary Poppins.
The Intrusion of Grace
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Of all the scenes in this play,
I wrestled and fought and wept and beat my head and rested and tried again with what is now Act IV, Scene 2.
Coming off the previous scene, I originally thought that, naturally, Cupid and Psyche would fall out from one another. Trouble was: the scene worked. More trouble was: My first Cupid fell in love with his long speech: “All you who witness, silent, at this act” and told me so, and I, being flattered (and thinking the speech pretty damn fine myself) hadn’t the heart to kill my darling. (You can see that actor’s interpretation here.)
Yet something was off, something was missing. Cupid and Psyche falling out after the violence of Act III made logical, human sense. But it didn’t make supernatural sense.
I tried another iteration: one where Cupid was flung all over the room by forces greater than himself and Psyche took pity on him. I had a few actors read it. Their gentle response was: “Well, that was weird.”
I tried a few more stabs: intercutting Adonis and Persephone in Hell with Cupid in Heaven.
I didn’t bother showing that scene to anyone.
Then it was Christmas and I went home to New England, and old friends, and family—a place where I could play out my irritation on the piano, rather than moving restlessly from Starbucks to McDonald’s to home to Starbucks again, weighed down by my laptop like the proverbial albatross.
During that time, I ran across a short article meditating about novelist Flannery O’Connor, who wrote:
Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for the nature of the violences which precede and follow them…
There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence. (Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose)
The essayist (whose name I have sadly misplaced) then went on to affirm that he believed in “unearned grace,” a phrase which immediately sent my mind racing to a thousand other quotes about the nature of mercy—from the central thesis of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables to J. R. R. Tolkien through the mouthpiece of Gandalf:
Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many—yours not least. (The Fellowship of the Ring)
With these and other thoughts rattling around in my mind, I sat down with my dear friend and sometime actress, Jillian—a woman with a great clarity of vision. We only get to see each other rarely these days, and when we do it’s usually over a café brunch that morphs past dinner. We’re the queens of missing time and milking tea. And Jill is, in particular, the Empress of Story Vortices. She’s solved several of my script problems…and the scenes that come out of those sessions always, always become my favourite thing about the script.
So, round about that nebulous time when it’s too late to order entrées, but you’ve definitely concluded lunch, I brought up this scene to my dear friend.
“I just don’t know what to do,” I wailed to her after explaining my difficulty. “I mean, Cupid should be punished, right? He can’t be allowed to…I mean…grace. And yet—reconciliation? He doesn’t deserve reconciliation, and yet—the whole point of grace is that it isn’t yours to give…”
My dearest friend beamed at me seraphically (we had been going over this point for the better part of an hour), and reached forward to cover my hands with hers.
“It’s simple, Emily,” she said. “You have to write sublimely. Everything good, everything beautiful, everything everybody aches for: that’s your task. None of us deserve it. Write sublimely anyway.”
I tried my best.
I railed at the idea.
Write sublimely.
Oh, yeah. As easy as that.
Just write the end of Les Misérables, Emily. It’s as easy as that.
Just write the “I pardon you” sequence from Schindler’s List.
Yeah, sure. As easy as that.
Be honest, Emily.
As painful as that.
I began by throwing everything out. Everything. And starting everything I had done from the complete opposite end.
I put Mumford and Sons on repeat.
I thought about not writing the play at all and just selling a bunch of Mumford and Sons CD’s.
I realized that was a cop-out.
I got down to writing.
Psyche spoke first. I wrote “There was—one moment—wordless” over about two weeks, jotting down bits and pieces on my iPod as I rode the train and (rather more perilously) as I walked from the train back to my house over major intersections. (I can only conclude from the fact that I was neither accosted nor hit by a car either to a terribly vigilant guardian angel or to the fact that I’m secretly Belle from Beauty and the Beast.)
Allowing Psyche to explore her newfound sexuality, and yet still struggle with her desire for individuality yielded more dialogue. And when Cupid suddenly revealed: “Nor are you blind! You’re husband’s here—then look!” it struck me: Of course. She’s in Heaven, where nothing’s hidden anymore. Yet, I wasn’t accosted or hit by a car, and my conclusion wasn’t immediately guardian angels, but Disney cartoons. How much do I not see?
I finished about half the scene in an über-long marathon writing session one Friday afternoon wherein I overstayed my welcome at several different establishments. A few days later, I saw a posting on Facebook about a new theatre group for Directors, Actors, and wRiters (DARE Lab, of course).
Being only a few months in the city, I signed up and was told to bring something to work on.
The following Thursday evening arrived, and I nervously made my way into West Harlem with three copies of the scene in hand. I was greeted by Reesa, a fantastic director who runs the equally fabulous Manhattan Shakespeare Project, and whom I had met through the warm and welcoming Shakespeare Forum.
She explained that we’d be splitting into groups and working on different projects for about an hour, and then switching things around for the second hour. I answered that I wanted to workshop a new scene that needed one man, one woman—and looked nervously around the room.
That evening, like most evenings, there were plenty of woman there…and only two gentlemen. One was a fellow writer but hadn’t brought anything to look at. The other was a young gentleman who was lounging intently in a low seat, as though at any moment he could spring up or remain a monument to casual indifference.
“Alright,” Reesa said, “James, why don’t you work with that group, and I’ll be your actress, Emily and [Playwright] why don’t you join our group? What did you bring?”
I showed her the script, mumbling that I needed a Cupid and she’d be Psyche.
Reesa paused, script still in mid-air. “Oh,” she said, and hummed for a moment. Then, briskly: “Nope. My mistake. James, you come here and play Cupid. [Playwright], do you mind working there?”
[Playwright] didn’t mind.
And that’s how I met Cupid.
I often feel, when acting as playwright-director, that I can only enter a scene so far. It’s as though as the playwright I inhabit all the characters sporadically, quantum-leaping my way from one set of emotions to another, never settling in any one thought-pattern for too long. I see what characters do and I hear what they say and I those things ripple through me, but never so much that I’
m transformed myself.
As the director, I can step back and see the entirety of the map that the playwright in her fit of clairvoyance sketched out. When I assemble the actors, then, it’s as though we’ve been given a map to Narnia and we’re all going to make our way through the wardrobe and back out again. Only—only the actors can really go through the wardrobe. I’m back in the spare room shouting out directions, such as: “If you go left, you’ll avoid the White Witch’s castle!” Or “I’m pretty sure there’s a waterfall ahead!” While the actors are shouting back in return, “Yeah, I see the castle, but did you know there’s an ice cream store ahead of it?” To which we all turn to the designers and producers and say: “Can we go to the ice cream store, pretty please?”
So with this scene, I needed someone who could travel through the wardrobe.
We began with ye olde typical read-through, seated. And then—this being DARE and a place to experiment—I asked Reesa and James to try the scene out physically. They were game, grabbed a bunch of blankets and threw them on the floor and themselves on top of it. Reesa began. And when it was time, I saw James’ hand reach up to encircle her.
The wardrobe had let us in.
We played a bit more—sometimes on text, sometimes improvising, sometimes talking through questions—all while I jotted notes like an archaeologist.
Cupid and Psyche Page 15
