by BRIAN HALL
She finishes her coffee, buys bread and a banana, walks home. She has nothing on her schedule until a recording session Tuesday, so if she can just keep not thinking about Mette, she can get in some hours revising her play.
For a while after she moved to the city in 2002, it looked like she might have a semi-viable stage career. First off—what made everything else possible—she lucked out and found a woman who could stay with Mette when necessary in the evenings. Elaine was a retired accountant, never married, who took a shine to Mette because she reminded her of her much younger sister, who when little had been “strange in exactly the same way and no one understood her except me.” Saskia weed-whacked her sense of affront, watered her gratitude. She took a waitressing job and fit in another acting workshop during Mette’s school hours. She gained experience, made connections, got an agent, went to a zillion auditions of which a zillion minus five were fiascos, the remainder being minorish roles in off-off-Broadway productions that limped along for a few weeks, steadily deflating. Finally she landed a part she liked to think of as minor-major, though everyone else probably saw it as major-minor, in a play that got generally good reviews and had an extended run of six months. The Times idiot liked the production but declined to devote a word to her, whereas the Daily News genius, in the midst of pooh-poohing everything else, said that she “tapped unexpected depths in an underwritten role.” Meanwhile—fortunately—it turned out she enjoyed waitressing: enjoyed the insane bustle, her volatile fellow waitresses, the backbiting, the shouted resignations in the midst of slammed lunch hours, the busy holiday weekend revenge no-shows, the heat-crazed irascible cooks, the fluttery zoetropic interaction with almost-real-seeming customers, among whom she especially loved the assholes, who in their baroque assholery were fecund sources of acting ideas. At the same time she was doing occasional small roles in TV shows filming in the NYC area: a single mother and waitress (nailed it!) who’d witnessed a crime, a school guidance counselor, a nurse, another nurse, another nurse (what the fuck? male directors’ little buxom nurse fantasies?), one of six bank hostages, a few other spear carriers that have blurred together, with lines like, “He went that way!” and “Are you sure you’re all right?” and “It was too dark to see his face.”
After four or five years of this she got a film role she fantasized might be her big break. She preferred the stage—the protean communication with the audience, the emotional through line, the danger—but of course was aware that if she ever wanted to give up her first love (waitressing!), then film was more likely to be her white-clad Richard Gere. The writer and director was the same guy who directed the play in which Saskia tapped unexpected depths in an underwritten role. (May she pause for a moment to note that fifty fucking years downwind from the founding of NOW, only 8 percent of film and television directors are women? Back to our regularly scheduled program—) She and this guy—Dexter, DGA, WGA, XY—had gotten along well during the stage production, including a couple of times when he seemed genuinely to consider a suggestion of hers before rejecting it, so when he asked her to audition for his pet project she fell on that grenade like a ton of bricks. Of course it was a low-budget indie, a post-apocalypse chamber piece wherein 95 percent of the screen time was handled by two actors, a man and a woman (Saskia!), in a jury-rigged shelter-cum-science-lab plus a withy-and-polyethylene greenhouse in a clearing in the woods. The script was spare and enigmatic, going for Mythic or maybe Folkloric, Adam and Evey, Death and Rebirthy. On the page it didn’t look like much, but the words were speakable, occasionally even beautiful, and Saskia and the other actor (Fawad) built up a rapport. They shot for three weeks in the Finger Lakes National Forest—Mette, now twelve, showing a feline indifference to whether it was Saskia or Elaine who occasionally tapped fruitlessly on her bedroom door back in New York City—and Saskia had good feelings about what they had accomplished. But in film, actors don’t know squat until they see the finished product. When she did, she was excited. Dexter had caught something fresh and nuanced in the way Saskia and Fawad played off each other. Plus, the editing and the cinematography were good, the score was moody and perfect. She started fantasizing about festivals, acceptance speeches, what she’d wear on the red carpet, etc.
The critics hated it. The first one, a prominent male reviewer, approached it as though it were trying to be realistic sci-fi and pompously mansplained the scientific “errors,” which, since these would have been obvious to an innumerate ten-year-old, might in a better world have clued in Mr. Swinging-Dick to the fact that the film wasn’t trying to be realistic sci-fi. Then three or four reviews followed in which the words “boring” and “static” and “pretentious” kept recurring. After that, some herd-instinct tipping point was passed and everyone piled on with cathartic glee: self-indulgent, politically correct, mind-numbing, dead-horse-flogging, slow-motion-train-wrecking, jaws-on-the-flooring, can’t-look-awaying. This was in 2007, so social media was building steam but still kind of new and startling to a person born in 1971, and she was thunderstruck at the torrent of cruel comments about her (ugly, slutty, shrewish, whiny, unfuckable), Fawad (ugly, smarmy, stalkery, towelheady), and Dexter (narcissistic, privileged, French-influenced, shit-for-brainsy). Having unwisely just now googled the movie, she sees that on Metacritic it boasts a score of 38, indicating “generally unfavorable reviews,” while over on the Tomatometer there’s that green asterisk-blob of a thrown-at-the-actor rotting love apple and a rating of 31 percent. The only chance left for the film would be a festival of mockery on Mystery Science Theater 3000 so vicious it goes viral. (A slut can hope.) Netflix picked it up for pennies a while ago and Saskia streamed it out of wary curiosity, the first time she’d seen it since it bombed. And is she crazy? It still seems like a decent movie to her. Okay, maybe a tad self-serious, but with, come on, folks, a lot of heart and hard work on display.
Anyway, a turbocharged rocket boost to her career it proved not to be, and some more years went by during which she had a few stage roles and a few minor film roles, and once she was nominated for an award, but as she spelunked deeper into her forties and her face began to look fortyish and she failed to get any taller and her large boobs stopped being certified fresh on the Tomatometer, the gigs thinned out. Hey, it’s what happens to 95 percent of working actors, she’s not complaining.
(Beat.)
Of course she’s complaining!
She makes herself tea. Thank god for voice work. Thank god for honey and lemon.
Life choices. What does Mette mean by that? Did she intend it to sound ominous? If Saskia had a partner at the moment, she’d distract herself with him or her, send a text, hop in the sack, have an argument. But the thing with Maggie became such a nightmare, she’s been wary lately. Or maybe weary. Or both.
One guy she dated during her Ithaca acting years was younger, twenty-four to her twenty-eight, a graduate student in English literature, cumulo masses of dark hair, sunken cheeks and sexily alive eyebrows—eyebrows seem to be a theme today—and he told her in a post-coitum tristesse that he dreamed about quitting the program, ghosting his family and friends, and going to live in a stone hut with a peat fire at the top of a wave-shattered cliff in the Orkney Islands, there to do naught but read classics and play ancient airs on his wooden flute. Yes, he was full of shit in all three directions, and she dumped him after a short and lusty while, but his adolescent fantasy stuck with her, probably because it was so much like the reveries of travel she’d lost herself in before getting to know her father, and maybe she missed the . . . she doesn’t want to call it innocence . . . the wide-horizoned immaturity, which meeting her father despoiled early. Anyway, now, years later, when her life seems in some ways inadequate or emptyish or whatever, there are times when that lonely hut at the top of the cliff beckons, and she stands out at the lip where the mist from the waves rejuvenates her, then goes in to the fire where the peaty smoke toughens and preserves her. Witchlike, she listens to the wind talk in the chimney. Over
on the next promontory Mette dwells in her own hut—Saskia can see her light burning at night—with high-speed internet yet no earthly way to receive communications, happy as a clam.
Okay, speaking of her love life, here’s the problem in a nutshell. When she dates a man, she longs for a relationship with a woman, and vice versa. She hates to generalize (honest, she really does) but it is simply true that women (in general! not every individual!) communicate better, are more attuned to social and emotional cues, play the game at a higher level. As the rhyme says, when a relationship with a woman is good, it is very, very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid. Men may be boring, but they won’t try to eat your brains. (We’re talking about the subset of men who won’t kill you, which Saskia likes to believe she can recognize by the third date.) Maybe she’s just feeling discouraged right now because her last male partner turned out to be a classic withholding monosyllabic stone-faced narcissistic manchild, and her last female partner was Maggie, who was wonderful and exciting and intuitive and passionate and giving and delightfully unpredictable and then watchful and manipulative and groundlessly jealous and crazily accusatory and creepily stalkerish, not only in the cyber sense but actually physically creeping behind Saskia on sidewalks and up stairwells, and Saskia at this point would reference Glenn Close except she fucking detests that movie.
Life choices, as the mystery girl said.
Yes, and regardless of whether Saskia’s lover was an innie or an outie, their relationship with Mette was never good, which became for Saskia a source of mounting frustration. The men tended to offer unsolicited and clue-free advice about getting her out of her room more, or not giving in to her whims, whereas the women often got jealous and competitive, which could be worse. It didn’t help that Mette hated having anyone sleep over in the apartment other than herself and her mother. Routine is important for people like Mette, everyone knows this, but maybe they choose not to remember when it’s midnight on a rainy night. Once Mette was old enough that Saskia could spend evenings and the occasional night at her partner’s place, there seemed to her (Saskia) to be no conceivable grounds of complaint, but it’s simply astonishing how many people want to feel thwarted by other people’s children. What, I get a new girlfriend, but I don’t get a second TV, a second bed, a second coffee machine, a second local bagel joint?
Another factor, which Saskia will acknowledge for the sake of strict fairness, is that Mette took a strong dislike to all of her partners, acting out (okay, sometimes outrageously) when she was young, and then when she was older, stoically enduring with displays of dieback and root blight, then time-lapse blooming when a relationship ended. The worst thing about this latter was that Saskia was pretty sure Mette wasn’t being passive-aggressive, she simply was honestly happier to be alone with her mother again, just two gals sharing a spotless and never-varying kitchen and bathroom. Which eloquent testimonial from Ms. Undemonstrative touched Saskia rather deeply, so maybe it wasn’t the worst thing, but the best thing.
She composes a text message. I’m trying not to be hurt that you communicated with your father but not with me. Speaking of not being passive-aggressive, that is not passive-aggressive, it is merely the truest thing she can say about her feelings right at the moment. But it certainly sounds passive-aggressive, doesn’t it? She deletes it.
Can’t you just tell me where you are?
Deletes.
Can’t you just tell me what happened?
Deletes.
I love you.
Man, that really sounds passive-aggressive. Deletes.
Thank you for communicating with your father. I appreciate it.
Sends.
She cleans the kitchen, vacuums the apartment, does a load of laundry, alphabetizes her spices—well, not the last, but otherwise putters around, not merely to distract herself from worrying about Mette but also to delay working on her Joan play. Eventually the rising tide of self-disgust crests the grand dike of avoidance and she turns toward her desk—but first she has to brew another cup of tea, honey, lemon, remember that woman in the deli, imitate her grimace, etc—she advances on her desk—but now she needs to take a dump, hot liquids do this to her—she marches to her desk, boots up, booties down, opens the file containing her latest batch of notes, reminders, admonitions, half-baked ideas.
Saskia wants to become a director. Go, 8 percent!
Okay, complaining is fun, but that figure applies only to television and film. Saskia wants to direct her own play, off- or off-off-Broadway, or really, anywhere short of the horizon in that famous New Yorker cover. Among off-Broadway plays during the last five years, 33 percent have been directed by women and 30 percent have been written by women. As for plays written and directed by the same woman, who knows? Saskia would bet it’s rare, because directing your own play is sort of a big-swinging-dick thing to do. But why should she even think that? What socially conditioned, shrinking-violet, who-me instinct overcomes her at moments like this? Of course she wants to direct her own play! Take your stinking paws off it, you damned dirty ape! She’s rewriting the latest draft and there’s a woman who’s directed her twice in the past who’s just become Artistic Director of an off-off theater in SoHo, and this woman has expressed interest, and has not immediately nixed the idea of Saskia directing, so . . .
Anyway, she’s had an interest in Joan of Arc ever since she was a lonely and strange thirteen-year-old. Maybe because Joan was a lonely and strange thirteen-year-old when the Archangel Michael first assured her, against all the available evidence, that she was an important person. Or maybe because Joan idolized a distant father figure, otherwise known as the Dauphin of France, who eventually betrayed her. So here’s the thing, don’t laugh—Saskia is writing it as a mystery play. Not as in The Real Inspector Hound, but as in the kind of play performed by English craft guilds on decorated wagons during religious festivals in the fifteenth century, the older actors doing Herod and the Almighty, the younger ones Jesus and Lazarus, boys cross-dressing for Mary, both Madonna and whore, Eve, etc. Saskia first tried writing her play in the same mix of clunky, homespun stanza styles that the original mysteries used, for example the Chester stanza, which might be her favorite for sheer galumphing balladry:
All peace to you that be present,
And hearken now with good intent,
How Joan away from home is went
With all her company.
Attendants few, of small renown,
Avoiding hostile field and town,
Asleep in woods, with stars their crown,
The Dauphin gone to see.
But no matter how much she tinkered, it came off sounding hokey, like one of those coastal-city Christmas revels with mummers and wassail and figgy pudding. She’s currently rewriting the whole play in irregular four-beat couplets, the simplest of the medieval forms, with abundant use of half rhymes:
Jean de Metz:
Eleven nights on horse we rode
Through Lenten fields not yet plowed.
The frozen stubble made weary bed
For men and girl alike, but the Maid
Tired not, nor feared anything, not even
The soldiers with her who might be forgiven
For thoughts impure while lying by her,
But the wonder was, none sought to try her,
Nor ever felt a natural lust
Which alone seemed miraculous.
She first conceived the idea of a mystery play six or seven years ago when she briefly dated an older woman who’d been flatteringly pursuing her for months, an NYU professor and poet born and raised in Budapest. This woman took her one evening to the Hungarian House on the Upper East Side to see a Genesis mystery play that had been discovered a few years previously in some Transylvanian castle’s closet, and had already been staged in Budapest to great acclaim (probably 98 percent on the paradicsom-meter). The thing was in Hungar
ian, mind you, so Saskia didn’t understand a word, but it was the best night at the theater she’d had in ages. Much of the story could be followed from emblematic action and props: Adam and Eve wore fig leaves, God the Father looked like Dumbledore (or vice versa), the snake spoke with a hiss, the luscious apple was straight out of Snow White (or vice versa), and so on. The actors stood hieratically, facing the audience wide-eyed and without expression, sometimes raising one hand when they spoke, as if to say “Hear me,” or adopting a strange pose and freezing, as if to signal, “This is my intention,” or “This is my inner nature.” It was charming in its simplicity, but also powerful. Can she say mythic? She can definitely say Adam and Evey. It was theater as incantation, as magic, theater the way it was for a thousand years, when it brought rain and induced frenzy. It reminded Saskia of the two bird plays performed in masks years ago in Ithaca, and her realization back then that stylization could be more expressive than realism because it forced the audience to use its own imagination. In other words, fuck Ibsen. Give this middle-aged maenad the Eleusinian mysteries any day of the week.
She’d already been struggling to find a way to represent Joan. She hates the Shaw play. His Joan, like most of his major characters, is largely a mouthpiece for his own smug opinions. And Brecht’s version is even worse. Is it a coincidence that the two most egregious mansplainers in modern theatrical history both decided to appropriate Joan’s story? Or does the unruly bitch make such men nervous? The problem with any realistic portrayal of Joan is that she was a lunatic in an age when lunatics were seen as vessels of God. To a modern audience, any accurate depiction of Joan makes her too strangely medieval to empathize with, so maybe the solution is to make the whole play strangely medieval. When you think about it, what could be more “realistic” than telling Joan’s story in the form that stories were told in her own lifetime, stories that maybe shaped the way she thought?
