by David Adjmi
Edith was a musicologist before she went into the theatre, and knew everything about Bach and Prokofiev. In my script I indicate that the character listens to one of Chopin’s nocturnes, and she was like a martinet: “Which nocturne?”
“Huh?”
“It says in the stage directions that she plays a nocturne. Which one?”
“Uh,” I said, my pulse pounding, “I’m not sure exactly.”
“So you haven’t made a decision about it?”
“Well, I . . . have to look and see.”
Edith craned her neck. “Chopin composed twenty-one nocturnes. They’re all completely different. Do you mean to say you don’t care which one we use?”
My imprecision with regard to Chopin haunted me for the rest of the rehearsal. Whereas Edith had the Wagnerian tropism toward obsessive detail and order, I was lazy, a dilettante. I made it all up as I went along. I wasn’t serious.
During the break, Jane Asher and I went down to the restaurant in the basement of the Royal Court and split an order of fish and chips. I liked Jane right away, but we didn’t have very much to say to each other. There was a long silence as we nibbled on chips and drank our beers. Then Jane, in her perfect British deadpan, quipped, “Edith is quite scary, isn’t she!” and we both erupted in fits of laughter.
The night of the performance I had a tingle in my spine as the safety curtain came up. Jane was funny and genuinely frightening in the role. People in the audience were asking to buy copies of the script; they seemed to love it. Some other writers I knew were there, and we drank and ate cucumber sandwiches. It was one of the happiest nights of my life.
The next morning Edith picked me up at my hotel to get breakfast in Covent Garden. Edith was the complete obverse of Gloria. They both had intense charisma, they were both staunch, but Edith was smarter and wittier. She was an aesthete, which I loved, and though she could be severe, it was the Nietzschean severity for which I still retained vestigial admiration.
On our way to the restaurant, she asked me how I liked Juilliard. I told her about Gloria, and her flip phone, and her gummy peaches. “Oh, blow it out your ass, Gloria!” Edith said, erupting in an insolent cackle. The way she said Gloria’s name I could still hear a hint of a New York accent. “I showed my professor an early draft of one of my plays when I was an undergraduate at Yale. He said, ‘You are an extremely disturbed person. You need to see a psychiatrist.’ Seven years later they did the play at the National.”
I walked alongside Edith in silence for a while, until I found the courage to say what I’d been thinking. “I think Gloria’s blocking me,” I told her.
“Well, don’t let her do that. Just write what you want to write.”
“But . . . I don’t know what that is anymore,” I said, vaguely ashamed. “I feel like I’m losing my own taste.”
Edith didn’t respond, and we walked in silence the rest of the way. I felt certain she was repelled by my weakness. Edith had a surety I lacked, a kind of gunmetal toughness—the same toughness Gloria had, a toughness one needed to be in the world. Edith was an artist, and all I could do was curate experiences that seemed prestigious. I couldn’t choose a Chopin nocturne and I couldn’t choose what to write. The artist’s job was to choose, and I’d become a suppliant.
Wallace wanted me to use Elective Affinities for my presentation on Playwrights Night—an evening where big-time producers came to suss out new writers. It was the only thing I’d completed all year, but I was still too scared to encroach on Gloria’s gazelles. I’d thumbed through every issue of O magazine, rooting around public libraries for months, searching for the putative article Gloria referenced that day in the elevator, but I couldn’t find it. Maybe O magazine didn’t like it. Maybe Gloria lied to me and there was no article, or it was some hypothetical article she’d been musing about writing someday in the distant backdrop of the future, and she was securing the gazelle image just in case.
I called my friends for advice: should I cut the gazelles? Should I change gazelles to something else? Giraffes? Elk? Everyone felt I was being neurotic and overthinking things. Nobody seemed to feel I was immoral or a thief, so I kept it in.
Marian Seldes was cast as Alice. I wrote the monologue with her in mind, but I never thought she’d actually play the role—she was a theatre legend. She initially told Rob she was hosting some party for Lauren Bacall that night and wouldn’t be able to do the reading, but when she read the play, she said she’d push back the party a couple of hours. I was elated.
The day of the presentation Marian showed up early to rehearsal. I imagined she was early to everything; she was famous for never missing performances or taking sick days. She was sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the room. She wore a violet-colored dress with lilac lozenges and a grape chiffon scarf tied around her neck—demure, a girl at a prom. She was very tall, even sitting, and had the shoulders of a linebacker. When I approached, she stood slightly hunched, as though her towering length caused her to buckle. “Thank you for doing this,” I said. Marian half curtsied, then took my hand with a quiet urgency, as though vouchsafing some impossibly wonderful secret. She whispered when she spoke, so that you had to come close and strike a familiar intimacy whether you wanted to or not. “Oh, darling,” she said, gazing into my eyes, “I love the play.” The filaments in her irises were stellated with dimension, like a cosmos was shining inside her.
My piece was programmed to go first so Marian could make her Lauren Bacall party. I sat down in the audience to watch it, but I wasn’t watching Marian, I was watching Gloria. She sat next to Wally a few rows ahead of me with her perfectly erect posture. When Marian uttered the word gazelle, the muscles in Gloria’s back contracted slightly, her posture seized. It was straight out of a melodrama, like the scene in Rebecca where Joan Fontaine shudders at the mention of Rebecca’s name and we see it from behind—a small dorsal convulsion up near the shoulder blades. Paul was sitting next to me, he saw it too. We tittered nervously, exchanged crabwise looks. Marian finished, and as the audience applauded she stood up and searched for me in the audience. “David?” she said, blocking the glare of the stage lights with her palm, “I hope I did it right!” And then she was whisked away by some regal wind.
The play was well received that night. Afterward there was a party and a bunch of the actors and faculty came up to me and tendered their congratulations. Gloria didn’t even mention the gazelles—in fact she praised me. The tension between us seemed to have evaporated completely. Maybe people liked my play and told her so; maybe they asked “Who’s this David Adjmi? That kid’s got something!” and she preened confidently, realizing I was a potential jewel in her crown. Or maybe it was what Rebecca had said, and that the people she picked on in their first year went on to become her favorites.
After our final class of the year, we all walked over with Wally and Gloria to the bar at the Empire Hotel for a valedictory drink. Everyone was happy and in a good mood. It felt glamorous, having drinks across from Lincoln Center, our first year at Juilliard safely behind us. We talked about our plans for the summer, and what readings we had coming up at which theatres, and how we were going to get agents or switch agents. I felt relaxed, buoyed by the success of Playwrights Night, which eclipsed, at that golden moment, the whole rotten preamble of the first eight months of the program.
After about an hour, Gloria and Wally stood to make their exit. Wally waved, and Gloria went down the line, saying her goodbyes, cordially wishing everyone a happy summer. But when she got to me, instead of saying goodbye, she came very close to my face—it wasn’t cordial; the proximity was jarring. For a brief instant I thought maybe she was going to tell me she was proud of me, that she was sorry for misjudging me, that it was all a test and I passed—but as she got closer, I felt the proximal horror of her nearness, I felt my own position on the earth’s surface. I could smell the makeup on her face. I could hear the soft clank of jewelry against her clavicle. My synapses fired wildly, my heart was beating
like crazy—and before I knew it Gloria’s lips were on mine, kissing me. It wasn’t sexual, but seemed instead to carry fatal import, like a mafia don sending a doomed consigliere to his death. “Goodbye, David,” she said, a combination of sweetness and rue in her expression. She and Wally left the bar, and the playwrights all had a nervous titter. What the hell was that? And as I laughed and tried to make light of it I realized the muscles in my abdomen were clenched tight. I couldn’t stop trembling. And the whole nightmare yawned awake again.
I sprinted out of the bar into the lobby, and Frances rushed after me.
“Are you okay?”
“They’re kicking me out!” I screeched with resurging madness. I was confident I was right—why else would she kiss me? Now all the pieces of the puzzle began to fit: she was nice to me on Playwrights Night because she was tolerating me. She was kind to me because she’d gotten rid of me.
I got my dismissal letter in July, signed by Wally and Gloria, saying that I was talented but not responsive to their teaching style. It wasn’t untrue (if anything, it was an understatement) but it wounded me. I felt I’d failed at some terribly important and determinative test.
I didn’t write a word all that summer, or later that year, or the following year. I saw my classmates go on to great success. They had their plays produced, and won awards, while I floated from one temp job to another. In 2003, Wally nominated me for an award, which came with a $20,000 cash prize. I felt guilty accepting the money. I didn’t know if I was a writer anymore. My mother urged me to invest it, but instead I used the money to move to Berlin, thinking I would overcome my block and write a bunch of plays there, and maybe relocate permanently. I did end up starting a few plays, but I couldn’t finish anything I started. Eventually my money ran out, and I came crawling back to my mother, asking if I could move back home. “You better get your act together,” she told me, and she was right. I had nothing to show for my life—no partner, no savings, no career. I was thirty-one years old, single, and living with my mother. It was the worst-case scenario, and it was my reality.
To pass the time, I’d walk to Ocean Parkway and sit alone on a bench for hours, staring at the rows of familiar brick houses, watching the endless cortège of Mercedes and Jaguars. One afternoon, a bunch of teenage Syrian girls passed by with their laminated hair and Lester’s outfits, their spray tans and gold jewelry. They were speaking SY slang and chewing gum. They sat a few benches away, and I couldn’t help but stare. They were plucked from my memory, unchanged and unretouched. They would be this way for all time, I thought, and so would I—like in mythological Hades, where nothing changes, nothing grows or dies, and all life is preserved in its undying sameness forever.
The Champ
THE APPLAUSE DIED down, the lights went up. As the audience filed out of the theatre, in the wake of ushers collecting used playbills and discarded ticket stubs, there, near the exit doors, I noticed a tiny quorum of young women no older than twenty or twenty-one. They were dressed identically, with identical hair and boots and clothes. Their stances were identical, their hands identically positioned on their hips or brushing invisible strands of hair from their identical faces with the tips of their manicured nails. They could’ve been pulled from the stage; they looked just like the girls in my play. They were huddled and whispering, until one momentarily broke from their unison and, with her eye, scanned the back of the house up the length of the raked stairs to where I sat in the last row. When she spotted me, she jerked her head and whispered something to the others and they all turned to look at me. Their looks seemed to wind together into a trebled stare, like a swarm of insects forming a single opaque black cloud.
“Oh no,” I said under my breath as one of the girls, whom I recognized as Stevie and Debbie’s daughter, Frieda—in fact, my own niece, I hadn’t seen her in years—waved a tiny wave with her tiny hand that was wreathed with rings and jewelry. She began climbing the stairs toward me. As she made her tormented ascent she smiled a wobbly smile, and with each agonized step her gold bangles crashed loudly like high-pitched cymbals. Once she got to the top, she gave me a stiff awkward hug. “Congratuleetions.” I could smell her perfume, the same clove and allspice bomb my mother wore in the eighties.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, aiming for a casual sangfroid, even though our relationship was strained and my play was essentially an indictment of the Syrian Community and her entire way of life. “Hey, how did you even know this was happening? We’re just in our third preview.”
“My mothah.”
“Oh yeah? How’s she doing?”
“Everyone’s good. Giselle’s getting married.”
“I heard. Congrats!”
“You have to come to the wedding,” she said.
“Is your dad doing okay?”
“He’s good,” she said. “He has a new job.”
For some reason, I turned to my assistant, Carmen. “Do you know my niece, Frieda?”
Carmen gave me a weird look. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
Frieda pulled a chunk of her hair and strummed it with her fingers as though playing a string instrument. “So wheh do you live now?”
“Brooklyn Heights. I have a little studio apartment.”
“Very shahp . . . Your play was very different,” said Frieda. “The main girl looks just like my friend Selma. It’s so funny.”
We stood for a moment in tense, smiling silence. Her swarm of friends viewed us from their fixed position near the exit doors like the maudlin chorus in a Greek play.
“Well, thanks for coming,” I said, and we hugged once more like two rigid planks. I watched as she and her friends clanked and clomped their way out of the theatre.
Carmen shut her laptop. “That was so weird,” she said. “That was like the most awkward thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Carmen, my heart is pounding. I didn’t think Syrians would come to this.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t think they went to plays!”
“But they’re gonna come see it if it’s about them. How many plays about Syrian Sephardic Jews are out there?” Carmen laughed. “Dude, you’re the canon!”
I wrote Stunning three years after I was dismissed from Juilliard, thinking it would never get done, and certainly not at Lincoln Center. It was a suicide note—my one last missive to humanity before hurtling myself like Anna Karenina onto the train tracks at McDonald Avenue. The play was about a sixteen-year-old SY girl pressured by her family to marry a controlling older man, who turns out to be a con artist. The main plot was loosely based on A Streetcar Named Desire. Blanche is a gay, semiotics-obsessed, African American housekeeper. She takes a liking to Lily, the SY girl, and tries to expose her to culture, to life outside the bubble of the Syrian Community. The two end up falling in love, but The Community won’t stand for it, and Lily’s family threatens to excommunicate her. (“Don’t you dare come crawling back to me on your hands and knees,” warns Lily’s sister, “because I’ll kick you right in the throat.”)
I had written a play I believed was unproduceable. Not only did it skewer a community no one had ever heard of, but it was crazily stylized: it clashed together genres and tones in a way that was not exactly in vogue. It was bleak, it was harsh, and there was no redemption in it anywhere. One main character kills herself, and the other—like Gloria’s gazelle—submits to her predator and is psychically destroyed. I knew no artistic director in New York would put on this sort of bleak, crazy play. It wasn’t marketable, and American theatre was driven by the desires of subscribers—those people Gloria talked about who wanted to know when they could go home and have their dinner. What use would those people have for me?
But since I knew no one would ever see it, the block around my writing lifted. The writing was intensely cathartic—I sobbed uncontrollably writing the end, the way I sobbed watching Six Degrees of Separation and Streetcar. I cried for my characters and my family and the whole brutal, broken world.
&nb
sp; I gave Stunning to my agent, thinking it would vanish in a stack of unproduceable plays, but he liked it. He sent it to New York Theatre Workshop—and they liked it. They put together an in-house reading. Then Manhattan Theatre Club did a reading. Then the woman who curated that reading was hired to run a new program at Lincoln Center, and, a few months later she offered me a production at Lincoln Center: Where I’d seen Six Degrees of Separation. Where I’d gone to Juilliard and been kicked out—just like I’d been kicked out of the Syrian Community; now, like the prodigal son, I would make my return!
After my niece’s surprise appearance at the preview, though, I began to fear reprisal. I’d only been brave enough to write the play because I thought no one would see it—but they would see it. I started going to the theatre ninety minutes early to avoid SYs. I hid in the greenroom. There was a monitor from which I could watch the audience—and with each performance they started to proliferate: bangle-wearing women with shellacked hair, olive-skinned men dressed in Armani. They hearkened from the red-bricked depths of Midwood to see for themselves my act of dirty laundering. The audience mirrored the actors on stage every night—it was like a crazy dream.
The play was a succès de scandale. Performances began selling out, and we started keeping wait lists. The wait lists got longer and longer. The lobby got so crowded before performances it became a fire hazard. It wasn’t just SYs coming to the show, ordinary theatregoers showed up in droves—and fancy playwrights, and movie stars, and Hollywood producers. Two weeks in, we sold out the run, and the theatre announced an extension. The extension sold out, and they announced another extension—and then that sold out. I had no real experience with success, so I registered it as a kind of pain or anxiety—I was overstimulated. I couldn’t write, I couldn’t sleep. I felt a kind of frantic exhilaration.
