the computer and after compulsively checking my email 3 times and getting into an argument with a friend from home over instant messenger about whether cheese balls or doodles were superior, I finally began to write. The going was slow. I would write a sentence, read it, re-read it, hate it, and then delete it. I had a vague idea of a plot but I couldn’t find the right characterizations to make it happen.
"When the character in the chair has been observed completely, the actor assumes the skin, contour, and personality of the character in the chair, as if stepping into the model’s space, or sliding in an invisible envelope."
Eugene and Darla. I just typed those names up there to see how they looked and suddenly everything clicked. Instantly. It was this amazing moment when I suddenly knew exactly what my play was about and I began to type faster and faster, excited and a little afraid that the idea would escape before I had time to get it all down. I needn’t have worried. I couldn’t have shaken this story from my head if I had tried. From the moment the idea found me, it was as if a drop of something (maybe acid) had fallen onto my brain and was gradually fizzing and green-bubbling its way over my subconscious with a cool hiss.
Even after it was written and simply lay dormant on my computer, waiting to be printed out and handed in, I felt strangely guilty. Guilty for intentionally manipulating reality through academic necessity. There I go again. Being all lofty and foreshadowing. Maybe that’s just how I should have felt. Maybe then I just felt powerful with the sweet high of creation. The present has colored the past and I don’t remember what is my own fiction.
Since I have this reputation as being a real goody-goody, it is a little bit funny that every piece of creative work I produce seems to be really sick and violent. My play was called Intervention and had a minimalist set. The only things on the stage were the two actors, a chair, and a noose hanging down over the chair.
When the play opens, Darla, this sort of hyperactive waif type, is about to hang herself. She is standing on the chair, with the noose around her neck and begins to explain the previous action to the audience. Darla has been sleeping around her husband, Eugene’s, office and everyone knows. Eugene has always just ignored it and carried on as people do with the bitter realization that they are perpetually being laughed at behind their backs. That morning, however, he had walked in on his boss and Darla in the midst of a passionate kiss. Darla, astounded by the sheer embarrassment and guilt of it all, began a nervous giggle that triggered more laughter until the entire office was laughing cruelly at Eugene. He left, red faced, attempting to play it off, but not before he cast a final betrayed look at his wife. Darla has decided to hang herself to avoid facing the pain that she has caused him.
When Eugene walks in on her attempted suicide, he is perfectly calm and gradually talks her out of killing herself. He is quiet but genuine and soon renews her zest for life. Darla smiles sweetly at him, expresses her desire to live life yet again and asks him to help her down. But before she can remove the noose from her neck, Eugene grabs the chair out from under her and she strangles unwillingly, making her death all the sweeter for him.
The audience only sees Eugene reach for the chair, since I could not show the actress being strangled on stage. As the lights go out, in the darkness of the stage, they hear only a scream and the twang of the rope, all punctuated by the sharp neat crack of her neck.
None of that was the problem. I actually through my play was rather good. The problem was with Eugene. Upon Eugene’s first entrance I describe him as such: Eugene is a tall, pale, quiet man, with light hair and a very skinny frame. Do you see what I did? I wrote him for Leslie. It felt like I was giving him his revenge, allowing him, if only on stage, to grab vengeance for all the embarrassment that he had ever stifled or played off. Retribution without repercussion. It was the greatest gift I could give to him. The chance to taste the blood of your own bitterness as you no longer sit idly by but all under the guise of playing a character whose name you simply slip on as easily as slipping a letter into an envelope.
"The one thing that is perpetual and constant in Leslie’s consciousness is that he is always wanting something . . .His entire life has been composed of a series of wants."
“I-it’s pretty good.” If he had prefaced that statement with any sort of greeting, I never heard it. I looked up from the reading I was desperately trying to finish at lunch before class to see Leslie standing awkwardly next to my table. He looked terrified, the instinct to flee setting it.
“What?” I blurted to delay his escape.
“I just read it.” He spoke as if he was out of breath and scared but I imagine he was just nervous. This was probably more words than he’d said to a girl in his entire life. “Tonight. We are practicing tonight.”
There was an awkward pause. Finally, realizing that he meant my play, the curiosity to see how my creation was coming along began to nag and I was about to ask something when much to my surprise he sat down quickly in the chair across from me. His eyes darted from left to right like a panicked rabbit. After a moment, he leaned across the table to whisper desperately, “Why me?”
There was something in his voice, a tone of plea that one would reserve for anxious near-death prayers, which took me aback and made my face grow hot with inexplicable guilt. “You looked the part,” I said weakly, which was a perfectly ridiculous thing to say since I wrote the damn thing.
“I-I can’t. I mean . . . I’m not. .” He trailed off and then finally composed himself with a big breath. He smiled and laughed a little at his own panic and I smiled too, mostly to try to break up the tension I felt for whatever he would say next. “I’m no actor,” he said suddenly, with more confidence than I had ever heard him speak.
I tried to not let my sigh of relief be audible, since there was really no reason for me to be this jumpy concerning my work, and laughed a little. “It’s not that hard, really. You just go with what you already have. We’ve all felt like we’ve wanted to kill or hurt other people. It’s just a matter of letting the forbidden thought play out. Eugene kills her, not you.”
I cannot truly tell you which was more disconcerting: the fact that I felt the need to add that last sentence or the fact that he smiled with genuine relief at it and stood up as if that was exactly what he needed to hear.
“Thanks.” He put his arm on mine for about the time that it took him to say the word and then abruptly removed it and walked away. I watched him and for some reason I felt very warm, knowing a simple gesture like that from him, meant more than a kiss from anyone else.
"There’s no part of Leslie that is not going to be known to me . . . His life will be mine. I am going to borrow, for a prolonged period of time, his thoughts, his fears, his loves, and his desires. I am going to borrow the hair that grows out of his nostrils. I am going to borrow his central nervous system. I am going to borrow the history of his experience. I am going to borrow his mentality, his awareness, his pleasure . . . Gradually, systematically, relentlessly, courageously I persuade him to yield up his truth to me; his heart, his being."
My play was going up in about 45 minutes and I was really nervous and excited all at once. I felt like I had been kept in solitary confinement for this entire week because I had seen nothing of the my creation while it was in production and I felt utterly helpless to do anything now that it was matured.
I was especially excited because there had been rumors that Leslie, who had been only getting flashes of his character up until this point, had been amazing at the dress rehearsal last night. He had seemed nervous (even terrified) before, but now he played the character with an amazing desperation and realism that was the topic of every theatre gossip circle. There was even talk of him getting the lead in the next mainstage. I was so proud. Acceptance. That is all that I wanted for him. I just wish I could have been there for the transformation.
I bobbed around uselessly backstage, getting in everyone’s way and being wished good luck from all sides. Libby, who played Darla, came
bouncing up to me and gave me a huge hug and assured me that the performance would be “awesome.”
Moments later, Professor Constantine came back through the wings and said that anyone not involved with the play needed to get out into the audience because it was far too crowded in the dressing room. Justifying to myself that I was “involved” with the play since there would be no play without me, I ducked out of his sight until a careful peek around the curtain saw him safely back in the audience. It felt safer to watch the play from the wings. Then I was still somehow a part of it.
I looked out onto the stage where the closed curtain and lack of lights made my set, the noose and chair, look all the more ominous and claustrophobic. I was almost afraid to see the violence that I was the mother of, yet at the same time I was excited by the possibility of having produced such a gruesome offspring. I had felt terror at my words on paper. I could hardly imagine what they would be like when given life.
I began to visualize the final scene in my head, the one that the audience never sees. I saw her struggling, kicking pre-corpse and heard her pitiful dying whimper as she took her last breaths as Leslie ripped the chair out from under her.
I meant Eugene. I saw Leslie, but I meant Eugene. And suddenly I was terrified. For those dying gasps, those last breaths of terror that I had just imagined on stage were suddenly behind me.
I turned and there against the stage door was Leslie. His breath came out in short gasps and he clutched his heaving chest with white knuckles. He looked ill. His eyes screamed for help and he seemed weak, as if he had just been in a struggle. He looked up at me and there was terror and betrayal in his eyes. Unable to rip my eyes from his, I saw them begin to melt from fear and remorse to cold, hard blame and the heartless glare of a murderer. He stood up straight and his breathing shifted from panicked to the steady pant of anticipation. I thought he was going to attack but he smiled. Not yet. Not you.
He closed his eyes slowly and when they opened again, they were quiet sadness. He smiled a weak and broken smile as if he had just entered and saw me for the first time. There was a kinship between us at that moment that had never been there before. I felt as if we were both survivors of some assault, though he had received fatal wounds.
Yet I can never be sure if any of what I saw was true. I write this with the stain of experience heavy on my pen and I don't know if the facts, substantiated by no one but myself, have adjusted themselves to fit my perception. I know only that at that moment my actions were in denial from what my memory has claimed I saw.
“Hey! It’s the big day. Know all your lines?” I smiled and play-punched him in the shoulder like we were good chums.
“He’s in here,” Leslie said with light smile and a touch to his head, as if answering my question about knowing his lines. But then he grabbed my shirt and, with eyes darting from side to side, released a desperate whisper, and touched his heart. “And here.”
He then let go of my shirt just as suddenly as he had grabbed it. It reminded me of the moment in the cafeteria, like he was still too shy to touch. He stepped back and closed his eyes as if trying to compose himself. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He looked at me, leaned over and said in a grave whisper, “I’m scared.”
“What?” I asked, a little too loud and cheery, especially since I had heard what he said just fine the first time. He stood up straight again and smiled sadly at me. Like I couldn’t help him. Because I didn’t know what was going on. He closed his eyes and sighed resignedly. And when he re-opened them suddenly he was more confident then I had ever seen him before.
“Nervous,” he explained, spinning quickly and suavely on his heels and heading towards the dressing room. “I felt nervous.”
The occasional laughter and sporadic shouts from the few students in the audience sounded so safe. I wanted to run out there and wrap myself in that safety of humanity and leave this quicksand I had created for myself. Where creation was still the words on the paper. Backstage it was getting muddled with humanity. But now I felt more than ever that I needed to stay in the wings. Only I could be the witness.
The play began too soon and too ordinarily. I watched as one replays a tragic event in one’s head, desperately trying to look away and yet my mind kept returning to it. Yet, Libby’s reading of some of the lines was wrong, distracted even (the little ditz was probably thinking about doing her laundry or something) and she forgot a few of the words, and I began to feel as if maybe I was working myself up like I sometimes do. There was nothing out of the ordinary. It was theatre. Recreating a slice of life. Leslie was just weird. Everybody knew that. People are usually unpopular for a reason. I had just been looking too far into all of this. Nervous hallucinations. That had to be it.
I sat back and relaxed, watching Darla’s monologue and for the first time enjoying my role as parent to this drama. When Leslie entered, I was amazed at the effect the costume made. He had traded his usual blue polo shirt and khakis for a tight gray long sleeve T-shirt and tight white washed jeans that made his grotesque thinness eerily evident.
He must have put make-up or something on his face because his eyes looked worn, while his face looked as if the skin didn’t quite fit the person. He was amazing. Every rumor had been true. Everyone in the audience was mesmerized by the novelty of his voice, something few had heard often, but also the reality in his performance. Eugene had been hurt and that pain was clear to see. There was this hallowed hush over the tiny audience. As the final moments of the drama began to play out, I finally felt the fear and guilt for my creation melt away into pride. This was mine. Made by my hands. It had never been out of my control. Its limits were that which I had set down to paper and that power felt good.
I saw Darla’s decision to live from my side profile view and stood to bask in my most brilliant part. The house lights began to dim and Darla, unaware of what was about to happen begins the attempt to take the noose off. As the light went dark, Eugene began to reach down.
I don’t know how my eyes adjusted to the dark so quickly. Perhaps because it was my dark, my own creation, taken directly from my page. I don’t really know why I could see his hands go, not for the chair, but for her feet. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the faces of the audience when, instead of the comfortable and usual shuffle of actors clearing the stage for the curtain call, instead they heard the chair fall as he knocked it over with a foot and the broken screams of Libby as he pulled hard upon her dangling feet, speeding her towards my death sentence.
Silence. Panic would come. But for the moment there was only silence and then the ironic patter of applause for my “fiction.” Leslie let go of the now lifeless feet and began to walk towards me. He had hardly any time. Soon my classmates would realize that what was intriguing as fantasy was ghastly as fact and then he would have nowhere to go. But he hardly seemed rushed. He stopped when he was so close that I could smell his adrenaline. He grabbed my shirt, just as he had done before, but this time he did not let go. The crush induced twitter smashed into the raw terror of screaming from 0 to 60 mph in seconds and he lifted me off the ground enough to reach my lips and kissed me, hard. He held it for a moment and then dropped me back to the ground and said with a cruel smile, “Thank you, MOM.”
The words came out on the backdrop of Professor Constantine running up behind him and grabbing his hands behind his back. He didn’t struggle and just stared back at me until the police took him away. I say “he” now because I don’t know which name to call him.
There was a memorial service for Libby a few days later but I didn’t go. I walked quietly across the campus, nearly empty with much of the death-well-wishers at the service. The theatre was still barricaded with the flimsy defense of police tape, but I simply slipped underneath, ready to see. I don’t know what I expected. Everything was the same. There was no real evidence of tragedy. A solitary chair overturned. How could I have expected the stage to understand? It had seen a million character’s deaths through
out the ages. What was one more to add to its repertoire?
I slipped into the dressing room because I needed to sit and I was still unable to stomach the prospect of sitting in the audience at this scaffold where I was the executioner. Alarm, as I looked into the dressing room and saw a pile of clothes that at first looked like a body. I walked over. A blue polo shirt and khaki pants. Leslie’s. Thrown on the ground. There had been a struggle. Perhaps it was internal, but he did not go passively. Good for him. I held the shirt up to my face, a tiny remembrance of a man that was no more. I began to wish that I could identify the smell of it as his, but there was very little reality between us. I felt the shirt and then put it down, disappointed. What had I hoped to find? Stage blood?
William. William Ball. I looked it up online. Sense of Direction: Some Observations on the Art of Directing. So, I suppose I cannot blame him for Eugene. That is a terrifying fact, though, for that means that he must have come from me. Did I really write him? I lost control of him, let my mind wander to too dark a recess and he ran with it. I’m sorry, Leslie. For I allowed him to destroy you.