Theatre Thursdays

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays. This week we chalk another one up to Feminism in the 20th Century.

I was in this play in college. I played Clovis, the mentally disturbed wife. I was hilariously anorexic at the time (it was riotous!) so I definitely pulled off the sick look. What I didn't pull off, and why I think that no one under, say, 25 should be allowed to act? Emotional intelligence. First of all, being anorexic or bulimic for any length of time (clinical diagnosis only begins after 3 months of sustained symptoms) is the equivalent of shooting Novocaine into your emotional center. Second of all, to play a wife and mother? I don't think you necessarily have to be a wife or a mother, but you sure as hell have to understand the world more thoroughly than a pampered 21-year-old does.

Don't get me wrong: This is a play that intends to be something more original that what it is, inspired by a groundbreaking work of poetry (Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich), and about characters based on Impressionists including Édouard Manet. But the ideas are there, and I wish I had appreciated them at the time. It's about women with men, and women with women, and husbands and wives, and complacency and frustration and devotion. It's about girls with their fathers, and boys with the women who raise them. It's a play on how differences between us and our beloveds make and break our lives.



DOLORES. When I was young, I went with any man who wanted me and I stayed with them until they didn't want me anymore. I kept thinking that if I had someone, someone of my very own, it would be more than happiness. It would be like discovering the reason for my existence, the very reason for being the person I am.
Then I came here. Because of a woman. The first place I'd ever come not because of a man. I'd worked at the hospital eight years when your mother was carried in bald and screaming. When I met her, she asked me who I was, and I said, all I know of myself, where I come from, who I am, is that my name is Dolores, which means sorrow. (SHE laughs.) Well, it is funny because I've always thought of myself as a rather contented person. Clovis said, I like your name. So I came here.

*These two monologues essentially open the play, and are interspersed with a scene between Dolores (Clovis' nurse), Clovis, and Clovis' nine-year-old son Mylo.


(LIGHTS fade on Dolores and Mylo and come up slowly, illuminating CLOVIS in the graveyard. CLOVIS kneels at the altar she has built around one of the grave markers. [Her creation is something similar to altar boxes or to Joseph Cornell's shadow boxes and assemblages.] CLOVIS faces a small headstone. Glued to the surface of the headstone are shards of colored broken glass. The altar piece is filled with shiny things that catch and refract light. Colored glass jars, a string of glass beads, a ladies' hand mirror, half-filled bottles of perfume, silver earrings, shiny stones, a ruby ring, a piece of Venetian carnival glass, glittering pieces, reflective surfaces. This place is Clovis' sanctuary.
SHE holds out the shiny stone. SHE fixes the bottles working on her sanctuary. SHE talks to someone she senses is there. We glimpse a vision of a LITTLE GIRL. A mirage. A flutter of a skirt, a wisp of hair, a whisper.)

CLOVIS. I like this place at dawn. I breathe easier out here away from the house.
The party is tonight. I hope I'll be fine. Victor says it's time. A year and a half. I should be able to manage a dinner.
I keep having this dream where I'm eleven and my father and I run through a field up a hill. We're out of breath and laughing. It's a beautiful sunny day and we're surrounded by light. I lean back my head, close my eyes, and smell the most extraordinary fragrance. Cinnamon. My father says to me, you can take this moment with you for the rest of your life.
That day with my father I felt I could run and laugh forever and would always be surrounded by the most extraordinary smell. (CLOVIS looks around her sanctuary.) This is now my field of cinnamon.

Dream of a Common Language, Act 1, scene 1
by Heather McDonald

Theatre Thursdays

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays. Today we're delving into postmodern theatre. Fun!

Heiner Müller is often considered one of the most groundbreaker 20th century playwrights, but I won't pretend to know a jot about him other than his seminal work: Hamletmachine. The book of the play, depending on translation and text size, is only about 6 pages long. Usually the play itself is about 2 1/2 hours long. Yes, that's correct: 2 1/2 hours. Müller was East German and he wrote this baby in 1977 or so, at the height (or depth) of East German oppression, politics, angst, etc. The characters are Hamlet and Ophelia, with a chorus including Gertrude, Claudius, etc. and so forth, though how many actors, who speaks which lines, etc., are all arguably up to the director. (I'm sure Müller would disagree with that statement, though.) The original German text contains, where in all caps, the ORIGINAL original lines in English. (Do you see what I mean? Even if you're seeing Hamletmachine in, say, Berlin or Paris, the lines in ALL CAPS are said in English, for they are from the canon of the Western dramatic world, Hamlet.)

I do wish you'd read the whole thing, because yanking out Ophelia's monologues loses something in translation... not to mention the entirety of what little narrative there is. Herewith, Ophelia's monologues, from Carl Weber's translation, my personal favorite:


2: The Europe of the Women

Enormous room. Ophelia. Her heart is a clock.

OPHELIA (CHORUS / HAMLET):

I am Ophelia. The one the river didn't keep. The woman dangling from the rope. The woman with her arteries cut open. The woman with the overdose. SHOW ON HER LIPS. The woman with her head in the gas stove. Yesterday I stopped killing myself. I'm alone with my breasts my thighs my womb. I smash the tools of my captivity, the chair the table the bed. I destroy the battlefield that was my home. I fling open the doors so the wind gets in and the scream of the world. I smash the window. With my bleeding hands I tear the photos of the men I loved and who used me on the bed on the table on the chair on the ground. I set fire to my prison. I throw my clothes into the fire. I wrench the clock that was my heart out of my breast. I walk into the street clothed in my blood.


5: Fiercely Enduring/Millenniums/In Fearful Armour

The deep sea. Ophelia in a wheelchair. Fish, debris, dead bodies, and limbs drift by.

OPHELIA:

While two men in white smocks wrap gauze around her and the wheelchair, from bottom to top.

This is Electra speaking. In the heart of darkness. Under the sun of torture. To the capitals of the world. In the name of the victims. I eject all the sperm I have received. I turn the milk of my breasts into lethal poison. I take back the world I gave birth to. I choke between my thighs the world I gave birth to. I bury it in my womb. Down with the happiness of submission. Long live hate and contempt, rebellion and death. When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives you'll know the truth.

The men exit. Ophelia remains on stage, motionless in her white wrappings.

Hamletmachine
Acts 2 and 5

Just Like That Episode Of Full House Where DJ Skips Meals

Over Thanksgiving week in Atlanta, I took a few spare minutes to be very sad for myself as I used to be. It was a good exercise, and not as self-indulgent as it sounds (not quite, anyway). My mom swears up and down that she is finally going to "do something" to my old bedroom, so I was tasked with setting aside whatever I didn't want chucked out or sent the way of the Goodwill. I didn't find much: a coin collection from my paternal grandparents' many travels and international homes; a Renaissance fair dress that cost me the entirety of my second-to-tenth-grades savings; an old book of Scandinavian fairy tales; plays; an astrology chart set; some old spell books (yes, you read that right: spell books).

During this excavation I came across high school pictures, which turned out to be a punch in the gut. What I couldn't get over was how fat I felt at that time. Here I was, looking at these images of my 14- to 18-year-old self, probably 105-115 lbs. and 5'1"-5'3", and I remember feeling fat when each of those pictures was taken. I thought I needed to lose weight for essentially my entire high school experience. Ridiculous. How sad to have wasted so much mental and emotional energy stressing over something that wasn't even true, and that I equated erroneously with "fixing" myself. Sad, sad, sad.

My eating disorder grew from a conviction that something was wrong with me. Plenty of girls (too many) go on diets and/or obsess about every new curve or dimple. Not all of those girls go on to develop disordered eating habits, let alone full-blown anorexia or bulimia (or both). Whatever invisible and silent divide there is between girls like I was (and am, to a certain extent) and girls who go on to say, "Eff you, buddy," to their sicker impulses: that's the Rubik's Cube of adolescent (and increasingly adult) psychology. And I'm sorry (I'm not), but I don't believe that divide has anything to do with "will power" or "choice" - regardless of which side a person inhabits. The puzzle is one of those "nature vs. nurture" or "nature, nurture et al." jumbles that shrinks may never suss out.

So while that whole mess remains a mystery, and since I've already expended so much time and energy in unraveling said mystery, I will go ahead and concentrate on enjoying what I have now. On not berating myself. On mentally giving the finger to everyone who won't STFU about diet, weight, blah blah blah. On immersing myself in reality and owning my weight and shape and health and curves the way they are now, or whenever. *cue maudlin sitcom music* And on forgiving myself allllllll the years of abuse I put myself through, both mentally and physically. *end maudlin sitcom music*

Aren't you glad that all of life's problems can be solved in a half hour or a blog post? Yeah, me too.

Just Keep Swimming

If it seems that my posts have been paltry lately, or few and far between, it's because they have been. I find I don't have much to say at the moment, and can't really justify posting for the sake of posting, hence Theatre Thursdays and bitching ad infinitum about the inanity of modern American grammar as practiced in the general population.

Part of the reason I haven't been writing much is that I started Cynical Nymph as an eating disorder recovery journal (interspersed with verbal diarrhea that my former therapists would tell me is all related to the e.d. anyway), and I've actually been doing remarkably well for the past three months, symptom-wise. So, I often feel there's not much to say on that front.

Note to self: It only took about 27 years, but I finally learned to spell "diarrhea" without having to think about it. I'm so proud.

Of course, there's still plenty to say. I'm at a point where it feels natural not to think about doing unnatural things (though I do keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it very well might). However, that hardly means that I am all confidence and body appreciation and self-worship over here. I'm doing my damnedest to re-train myself and my thoughts, as I spent 4 weeks in the early autumn practicing with others like myself. (Anyone in the NYC area looking for a great, unconventional e.d. support group, email me. Seriously.)

The holidays are tough. Part of this difficulty is self-fulfilling prophecy: anyone who knows about addictions even tangentially knows to be wary of relapse during the holiday season, so nerves are already on edge going in. Some of the grating-fingernails-on-a-chalkboard characteristic of the holidays is also (I think) due to the fact that they're a memorable time of year. With an eating disorder, you can remember (trust me) exactly what you looked like, felt like, fit into, didn't fit into, ate, drank, and accomplished for the previous holidays of your illness, whatever its length. I, for instance, am trying really, really hard - wading through sludge up to your waist hard - to remind myself that not only am I not anorexic* anymore, I'm also not 18 or 21 anymore, so why on Earth should I be shaped like an 18- or 21-year-old? It bears repeating (and repeating, and repeating) to myself that, "Who cares if I don't fit into blah, or have a waist measurement of blah, or have a different, larger curve to my blah blah?" My head feels like a broken record a lot of the time with the, "I am behaving naturally and healthily," and the, "my body is how it wants to be," and the, "I look great. I'm the chubbiest woman in my husband's family. I look great. I look like a cow. I look great." Very often I feel like a hamster on a wheel. But, you know, without burning the calories. Or maybe like Dory in Finding Nemo. "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming swimming swimming!" Ooh, now I want to watch Finding Nemo. What a kickass movie.

Happy Holidays. Be good to yourself. Just keep swimming. ^_^

*Not sure how to classify myself in terms of bulimia. Having been without symptoms for 3 months, I do believe that I can't be clinically classified at this point in time as having bulimia nervosa. So, ha ha ha, I'm cured! Someone tell BlueCross BlueShield! Oh, wait...

Theatre Thursdays

Welcome back to Theatre Thursdays. I was hoping to make it a few more weeks without using Shakespeare, but who are we kidding? He refuses to be shirked for too long, and three weeks is too long.

Ah, the Percy family. Gotta love 'em. They ended up on utterly the wrong side of history, yet they have the appeal of winners because they're so... zesty. Specifically, you gotta love Lady Percy, who really knows how to play what Tranny Head might call the green beans card. Her asshat husband has been ignoring her for two weeks straight while he gets up to some rebellious antics with her brother (not a euphemism). So not only is this gal not getting laid, which is basically her only power play in Renaissance England, she's also being kept out of all the fun civil war plans just because she has ovaries.

"Nuh-uh," is her take on that, "I'm a Mortimer [another feisty ancient family on the wrong side of the Wars of the Roses], and I won't take your shite. You are gonna tell me what's up, or else." So here, she butters him up but good by using the only weapon she has: green beans... and by surreptitiously calling him a little girly man for having bad dreams.

Oh, and later in the scene she threatens to break his dick off. This betty is pure pep.


LADY PERCY: O my good lord, why are you thus alone?
For what offense have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry's bed?
Tell me, sweet lord, what is't that takes from thee
Thy stomach, pleasure, and thy golden sleep?
Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,
And start so often when thou sit'st alone?
Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks
And given my treasures and my rights of thee
To thick-eyed musing and cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars,
Speak terms of manage to thy bounding steed,
Cry 'Courage! to the field!' And thou hast talked
Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,
Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,
Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,
Of prisoners' ransom, and of soldiers slain,
And all the currents of a heady fight.
Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,
And thus hath so bestirred thee in thy sleep,
That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow
Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream,
And in thy face strange motions have appeared,
Such as we see when men restrain their breath
On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not.

Henry IV, part 1
Act II, scene iv