100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write (5 page)

Now, as I was writing that sentence in my office, William and Hope ran in.

Hope said, “William, I had a question, did you draw these drawings?”

William said, “Yes.”

Anna walked in. “I’m starved,” she said. “Can I have something to eat?”

William said, “I’m starved too.”

28. Greek masks and Bell’s palsy

I was diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, a usually temporary paralysis of the face, or the cranial nerve, by a lactation consultant. In the hospital, while I was nursing, she said, “Your eye looks a little droopy,” and I said, “Yes, I’m Irish!” She said, “That’s not what I mean. Look in the mirror.” I looked in the mirror, and the left side of my face had fallen down.

That side of my face didn’t move for about a year. I tried to develop odd ways of signaling approval, or friendliness. I vocalized more. I made weird gestures with my hands upon seeing people I liked, as I was unable to smile at them naturally upon recognition. When my babies first smiled at me, I tried to smile back, but I feared the sideways effort looked more like pain.

Eventually, I learned to blink again and I stopped drooling and I could almost whistle and eat spaghetti again (although not at the same time), but I still could not smile.

One day I was watching auditions for my translation of
Three Sisters
and watching all the crying Mashas. Behind these deeply expressive actors was a mirror. I could see myself watching them, expressionless, a mask.

And I wondered, do actors need to experience the sadness in order to express the sadness? Can one experience joy when one cannot express joy on one’s face? Does the smile itself create the happiness? Or does happiness create the smile? There was once a neurological study that measured actors’ physiological condition after acting. There was no physiological difference between an actor who had experienced grief on stage and a regular person who experienced grief. This made me pity actors.

And what of symmetry and beauty? Botox creates a paralysis that is symmetrical and therefore beautiful; Bell’s palsy creates a paralysis that is asymmetrical and therefore unpleasant. A beautiful smile is nothing if not a flash, a revelation, of symmetry. A spontaneous, perhaps slightly aggressive flash of teeth, saying,
I will not eat you. But I like you.
We know that, biologically, symmetry is pleasing; even fruit flies like it.

But where do we put all the asymmetrical people? The asymmetrical stories? Where do we put the crooked people? The people with one leg, lazy eyes, crooked grins? Do we write plays for them? Do we make theaters for them? If symmetry is beauty but life is asymmetrical, then how can art imitate life with an expression of formal beauty that is also true?

I do not know. I do know that an old man walked toward me today and smiled at me. Without thinking, I smiled back. Crooked, but impulsive, and therefore with joy.

29. Greek masks and star casting

When a star is cast in a play, what does the audience see, other than the play? The audience also sees the actor’s persona, underneath the language, or above the language, which is, in a way, like watching a masked actor. We are watching, superimposed, the three-dimensional mask of all the old photographs of the actor we have seen before in a
Playbill
or
People
magazine. The actor’s face has been made into an individual mask by all the pictures taken of it. And I believe the big difference between the mask of celebrity and the Greek mask is that the Greek mask has to do with the universal, whereas the mask of celebrity has to do with the illusion of being able to know an individual from a distance. When the individual we think we know from a distance is put on stage, we think about all the wrong things. We think about individual neuroses rather than the primal universal.

In effect, one might argue that the relationship between nobodies and somebodies has now been reversed in the theater. It used to be in Shakespeare’s time that nobodies, actors, would play royalty, somebodies. Now there is no royalty in our culture but for actor-celebrities themselves. So now the actors are somebodies in real life while on stage they pretend to be nobodies. And we no longer write about royalty on stage; we write about the common man.

What does that do to mimesis or to the sense that we are seeing something important on stage? When a nobody pretends to be a somebody, the transformation is magical. But when a somebody pretends to be a nobody, are we just watching for a glimmer of the somebody inside the nobody? There is no royalty inside the story anymore, only inside the image.

One might argue that in the age of plastic surgery, Botox has become our new version of the Greek mask. But why would we want immobility in the most facially expressive of all art forms? In order to approximate an ancient mask? The Greek mask is placed
on top
of the face, as opposed to the mask
being
the face, as we have in Hollywood. If the mask
is
the face, as opposed to the face being
below
the mask, then subtext rules the day. That is, when Botox renders the forehead a mute sculpture, we are unable to tell what actors are thinking while they are speaking, and subtext has even more primacy. For a celebrity with a deeply Botoxed face, the purpose of the face is to
not
express. The language speaks, and the face hides. The face hides meaning and expresses beauty. For the Greeks, the ritual mask exposed the voice, which was a very large howl. We do not howl in the movies. And I think it has become bad form to howl in the theater. Because howls are the enemy of subtext.

30. Subtext to the left of the work, not underneath the work

If you’re acting in a play of mine, and I say this full of love for you, please, don’t think one thing and then say another thing. Think the thing you are saying. Do not think of the language of the play as a cover or deception for your actual true hidden feelings that you’ve felt compelled to invent for yourself. Don’t create a bridge between you and the impulse for the language; erase the boundary between the two. Think of subtext as to the left of the language and not underneath it. There is no deception or ulterior motive or “cover” about the language. There are, instead, pools of silence and the unsayable to the left or to the right or even above the language. The unsayable in an ideal world hovers above the language rather than below. Think of the word
hover
over and above the word
cover
. Perhaps it is because I am from the Midwest, but I think it is almost ontologically impossible to truly think one thing while saying another thing. It creates an acting muddle in the theater and a sociopath in life.

31. On Maria Irene Fornes

Maria Irene Fornes was once my teacher. She objected to the language of intention in the method school of acting, to the constant refrain: “What does my character want in this scene?” One day she said to us, “Who always wants something from someone else? Only criminals. And Americans.”

I visited her recently at a nursing home in New York. She now has advanced Alzheimer’s. When I saw her, she couldn’t speak, and she had no preferences. My friends and I wheeled her to see the birds, then the fish. I thought she might prefer one to the other, but she didn’t seem to.

I thought about the will and wanting. I had always agreed with Irene that life and theater are not essentially about wanting something from another person. And then I had children. After which, I would add to Fornes’s thesis: Who always wants something from someone else? Only Americans. Criminals. And two-year-olds.

Perhaps what Fornes was advocating was a theater of desire, transformation, and grace over and above simple want. When I visited Irene, she seemed to have no wants. I hoped that the simple act of being together was enough, as it was for so many of her characters, suspended in a state of communion. She once said to us in class, “American actors are taught to have objectives—what does your character want from the other character? That is
business
. When I deal with other people, I don’t
want
something from them; I want a rapport. Some people say that’s an objective—it’s not—it’s a sensation of well-being. Life is not constantly about wanting to get something from somebody else. Life is about pleasure.”

I hope, dear Irene, that you are in a sensation of well-being now, whether you are watching the birds, the fish, or the television. When she started losing her memory, she laughed and told me that she wrote on many scraps of paper “write” and taped them to her walls to remind herself. “I even put them on the bathroom walls!” she said, laughing. “Write.”

32. What do you want what do you want what do you want

Last night I was up most of the night with my three-year-old son, William, who had asthma. This morning I thought it would be a good idea to take William and his twin sister, Hope, to buy new shoes for the summer. They probably hadn’t eaten enough breakfast, and I rushed them to the shoe store anyway. As we were leaving the shoe store, they both started crying.

Hope took off her new shiny shoes and threw them into the street. “Naughty Hope!” I said. They both kept crying. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Are you hungry?” I wheeled them into a bodega and said, “Do you want cheese? Do you want Pirate’s Booty? Do you want apple juice? Do you want chocolate milk?” They kept crying and throwing things out of the carriage and kicking. “No, no, no!” they cried. “
What do you want?
” I said.

“I want M&M’s!” screamed William.

“No, William,” I said. “They don’t sell M&M’s before eleven a.m.”

“I want M&M’s! I want M&M’s!”

Then I said something that I am ashamed of. I believe I said something like, “Fine, I’ll get you M&M’s if you promise to shut your face. Do you promise?”

“Yes,” he said.

I gave him M&M’s and he quieted down. But Hope continued to scream, even when William fed her M&M’s, one by one, tenderly putting them into her mouth. Her screaming was getting the better of me, and I asked her, “Hope, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want?
What do you want?
” I was like an actor’s nightmare of Stanislavsky.

Then she said softly, “I don’t like you.”

I stopped and listened.

“You don’t like me because I yelled?” I asked her.

“Yes!” she said, sobbing.

“Oh, Hope,” I said, “I’m sorry. Will you stop crying if I’m my regular self again?”

“Yes,” she said, and stopped crying.

William promptly fell asleep, and Hope became her matter-of-fact, happy self again. I thought she wanted me to guess a
thing
she wanted and give that thing to her. In fact she wanted me to stop asking her what she wanted.

When we got home, Hope said, “Will you play with me?”

“Yes,” I said. “But how about you eat something first?”

“No,” she said. “Play with me first and then I will eat something.”

“Okay,” I said.

She began to decorate the stage, that is, a small red couch.

She said, “Here is the audience, here is the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s the gigu show.”

“What is the gigu show?”

“I am a gate,” she said. “You open me.”

She gave me a plastic yellow key.

“How do I open you?” I asked.

“Here,” she said, pointing to her heart. “Turn the key.”

I tapped the yellow key on her heart, and she opened her arms, pretending that her arms were a swinging gate.

“Now walk through,” she said.

I walked through the gate.

“Now you,” she said.

I stood erect, a closed gate. She put the yellow key on my heart and turned.

I opened my arms, a gate, and she walked through.

She was very pleased. And we did this over and over again.

I had underestimated the heart of my little daughter when she was crying. I thought she wanted chocolate milk. She wanted something more, something that didn’t cost anything.

She wanted to open my heart; she wanted to walk in.

33. Non-adverbial acting

I admire non-adverbial acting. That is to say, I like the focus to be on nouns rather than being awash in emotional description. It is interesting to me that playwrights don’t often write adverbial parentheticals anymore. For example:

SHE
(
hoarsely
): Hand me the broom.

Or:

SHE
(
jubilantly
): Hand me the broom.

But is acting training still adverbial? And what do I even mean by acting being adverbial? In non-adverbial writing, it’s simple: there is an absence of adverbs. In acting, an adverbial acting style proclaims: I have chosen to do this action
this
way; look at how I have chosen to do it! As opposed to: I’m doing a thing. I’m disappearing into the action, the verb or the noun, rather than illustrating it with a wash of interpretive narcissism. The adverb underlines choices, asks: what is the best “-ly” way to perform an action or to say a line?

There is a wonderful game in the Noël Coward play
Hay Fever
called the adverb game. One person leaves the room, and the group decides in secret on an adverb. When the person comes back, he or she asks the group to do activities “in the manner of the word” and eventually guesses the adverb. An example: someone leaves the room, and the group decides on the word
theatrically
. The person comes back in and says, “Harold, wash the dishes in the manner of the word.” And Harold washes the dishes theatrically.

I played this game when I was little and perhaps more recently. In some ways this game contains the essence of acting: “Do the action in the manner of the word.” But what it leaves out is the practitioner’s ability to simply do the thing, focus on the thing, and not on the manner in which the thing is done.

I think of the scene in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in which Bottom says, “I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar you as
gently
as any sucking dove; I will roar you an ’twere any nightingale … We will meet; and there we may rehearse most
obscenely
and
courageously
. Take pains; be perfect: adieu.” (The italics are mine.) Here, Shakespeare makes fun of adverbial acting. Bottom’s limitless faith in his abilities to roar gently or loudly depending on the theatrical need, to rehearse obscenely and courageously, is that most wonderful and ridiculous of things—the narcissism of the mediocre actor, or the ass.