Fragments after Alice Birch

Explanations, imperatives, language, love, death, and other short things that can take place in the theater, and did: Revolt. She said. Revolt Again, at the Soho Rep, and me in the audience.

1. I don’t know where to start. So we’ll start at the beginning of the play, which was Alice Birch’s Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, in its American premiere in Soho Rep. Though I could just as well have started fifteen minutes before I arrived in the theater, when I was cancelling a date or getting a date cancelled, with this guy I am fucking. I met Michele, who had bought the tickets, on the step next to the theater. “Kill me,” I said when I peeled out of hugging her, even before I said hello. Smiling.
2. The first scene of the play: girl speaks to boy about the ethics of sexual language (Who fucks whom? Who is doing what to whom?), blows up his spot. The guy, Daniel Abeles, starts out lush on his words, comfortable in his unquestioned desire, how much he wants to fuck her; the girl, Molly Bernard, drawn in sharp lines and Brooklyn bangs, a human wince. It turns backwards. The power of, of not even saying no, of just saying “what you do unto me I will do unto you”, of “what we do we do to each other”, the brinkmanship of consent—but funny, mostly. The language moves fast, exhiliarating, instantly clicking with an off-Broadway audience that’s at least 50% My Generation. A “Sure Thing” in a defiantly 2016, declaratively feminist pen.
3. It’s like that, right, for three scenes—the play is scenes, rather than story, titled with commands: REVOLUTIONIZE X (LIKE SO). So, those three scenes: first, REVOLUTIONIZE THE LANGUAGE (INVERT IT). I’m going to fuck you / I’m going to fuck you right back. Then: REVOLUTIONIZE THE WORLD (DO NOT MARRY). Imagine if one day I waltzed in and was like. Sweet pea. Honey. Nightingale of mine and heart’s desire. I love you. I love you to the edges of this earth and back, I love you body and heart and soul, I love you and I think to express this love we should go and blow up the local Stop & Shop. And then I presented you with a massive bomb upon a vest. On bended knee. Then: REVOLUTIONIZE THE WORK (ENGAGE WITH IT). Woman requests Mondays off from her job from uncomprehending boss. I want to get more sleep.
4. Me, running perpetual overtime at my first-ever office job, recognized. Me, fucked approximately bi-weekly by a distillation of male mediocrity, recognized. Recognized, recognized, and I think: I think, I am so glad to be seeing this, I am so glad to be seeing this now, I am so glad to be seeing this as the me that I am right now, spring ’16 collection, her feelings and thoughts and emotions. Recognized and rendered somewhat universal. It doesn’t make me feel small, in the audience, in an audience of which I am the target.
5. Here is the cast, none of whom hit a single sour note:
   • Jennifer Akeda, compassionately matter-of-fact
   • Molly Bernard, whose face is expressively goofy in motion and profile and terrifyingly attenuated in still focus
   • Eboni Booth, radiating a kind of pure calm, wearing a smile under which anger or sadness are free to seethe without breaking that veneer or the sincerity and integrity of it
   • Daniel Abeles, who looks a little like a young Brad Pitt but mostly like, as Michele leans over and whispers to me at scene-change, “every guy?”, which is the point, so very naturalistic, so at ease being, yes exactly, every guy
6. I can’t speak for directorial intention—I mean I can speak to intentionality, and how clear consistent and deliberate this production felt; I can say with great faith that everything was a product of the director’s intent, from the actors’ cohesive naturalism to the motion of the scenes—I can’t speak in the director’s words, because those we don’t get to hear in the audience. The director is distilled into their work, the chief voice behind the scenes silent to the audience. So I don’t know how Lileana Blain-Cruz spoke to her actors, how she organized them. But what I got was a kind of order of empathy from the women: Molly Bernard as the most capably unlikable, the most distant, the most inaccessible, in her sharpness; Eboni Booth compellingly warm but impossible to get hands on, slippery and ungraspable in a production about how the cultural job of women is to take the world’s fingerprints. Jennifer Akeda holding the mantle of the woman the audience can best understand, the most overtly compassionate, the most articulate, the most accessible. The most interrupted, the most frequent stepper-upon of the line between actor-before-audience and character-in-scene. (Daniel Abeles as every guy.)
7. Three scenes and then the production turns, still funny, but the ratio of funniness to encroaching dread tips, on the fourth: two grocery store employees asking Molly Bernard (in a coat, face sharpened, eyes distant, silent for a very long time) what on earth would bring her to lie down with her skirts over her head in their store, for god’s sake now there’s watermelon all over the floor—
8. Several images pervade this play, its language fully coherent from scene to scene. We learn it as we go; we laugh at the second scene’s invocation of potatoes and wince at nightingale from scene one. A flashing title in the fifth scene: REVOLUTIONIZE THE LANGUAGE (THAT WORD DOESN’T EXIST HERE). All words exist here but within the space of Alice Birch’s text they are reconfigured to fit a language that defies expression, that has been warped beyond its speakers’ tongues. Menial things mean something beyond themselves. You chase after what that thing is. Potatoes, watermelon, bluebells, nightingales, severed fingers, suicide vests—all carrying the same weight, all reminding the audience we are all speaking the same language together for this span of 85 minutes, all chasing the same meaning.
9. But, I’m sorry. Scene four finishes in anxiety and dread, which to be fair all scenes do. It is, I think, the first invocation of rape in the play: This body this land is unattackable, unprotected, unconquerable, unclaimable… You cannot overpower it because I have given it you cannot rape it because I choose it you cannot take it because I give it, says the woman played by Molly Bernard, trembling through her numbness. And we flinch. Rightfully. I choose it I choose it I choose it. Constantly.
10. So, the scene changes and as they reset the stage the audience gets offered watermelon with a wink and a grin. Witty. I eat my slice. It’s good.
11. At the end of the fifth scene, two actors cut off their own tongues.
12. I, in the audience, pull my sweater over my face. It is unbearable. Or anyway I cannot bear it. I think of myself as thick-skinned but somewhere in the last—oh I don’t know how long it is at that point, 30, 45 minutes—I have stopped thinking of myself.
13. The performance is matter-of-fact and awful in its matter-of-factness. This play is not well-behaved, says the stage direction on the very first page of the script, but for all that, it doesn’t seem designed to throw grenades at its audience, to hurt for the sake of hurting. There is a core of empathy, in Blain-Cruz’s direction especially. For the world, and its women, and the figments of women the actors wear, and for the audience included. This absolutely makes the horror worse.
14. See, then the next scene: overlapping dialogues and no characters and very loud messages, Daniel Abeles (as Every Guy) popping a balloon and calling out HYMENS FOR SALE!, Molly Bernard drawing lipstick gashes up and down her arms and laughing manically, Eboni Booth in a blond wig grinding against the floor—this, I understand, as a theatergoer, this doesn’t stop working, but this lets me relax, somehow, for a little bit, because I understand popped balloons and stained wedding dresses and smashed cherry-jam whipped-cream cupcakes and the absence of characters and the overlap and the outcry; this is provocation, overt, if not just for provocation’s sake. Jennifer Akeda opens her mouth, (takes a big breath ready to speak) over and over again, and the loudness moves over her, the messages, the outcry, the ever-changing scenework. No characters. Loud, loud, loud. Until she screams SHUT THE FUCK UP, and she throws her chair, and my god, they do, and her monologue—
15. There is a point at which the thought is not enough. Building building building, the sentences rising and breaking down: the thought the thought the thought hasn’t been enough hasn’t been the thing hasn’t been
16. The stage direction, then:
    Loud noise. It is cold. It is bright. Then it is black.
17. You can get an idea, I think, maybe, of what they did. At least at first. The escalating grind of a synth, droning like a chainsaw, turned up just to the edge of bearability. The bright light (not white but yellow if that makes a difference). The blackout. But the blackout doesn’t go silent. The chainsaw grind builds, builds. For a long time. Too long, longer than I was expecting—a full minute, or maybe more than that. For an hour or a lifetime. I don’t know.
18. There was a point in that deafening darkness, which didn’t end, which wouldn’t end, when I thought with absolute certainty: I will die in this theater. Then, too: I don’t want to die in this theater. I don’t want to die. Not now, not at all.
19. Now, disbelief no longer suspended, I wonder—if I’d been to the British premiere, maybe, if I hadn’t been in an American theater, where people do get shot in the dark—if I would have been so, no, not scared. That’s the wrong word. I mean, terrified, but it’s easy enough to get scared by art. Whether your shell is soft or hard, something will find its way under your skin. Cottage industries are built around the reproduction of terror, the fact that people can and will seek out the opportunity to be scared. Belief is much harder to render. Certainty is much, much rarer.
20. But I was certain. Wrong, of course, but certain.
21. In 2012 I was in a huge tank of a car, in the passenger seat with Michele in the back and Maddi at the wheel, on the road in Montreal, when a car sped along as we were backing out of a gas station and t-boned into us at seventy, eighty miles an hour. Into my side of the car. I didn’t know how fast it was going, of course, not the numbers. I remember the impact, though, the crunch-sound and the sense of the car hitting not just us but me, my side, my door, rattling next to my hip. The certainty was different, then. I thought: Shame for that car. It’s going to bounce off. We are invulnerable in our metal tank. Then the car started to turn.
22. I was wrong, of course, but certain. And Maddi was wrong, too, when she told me what she thought in that moment, which was: I am going to die.
23. None of us died. My own total absence of fear—absence even of the sense of mortality—lives in me to this day, with the crunch of metal at my hip and my own body intact at the end without scratches. I relearned that certainty in the theater of the Soho Rep. I’m going to die, I thought, the room sounding like the inner gear of a chainsaw, the blackness complete. Anything could have happened. Welcome to America, sure, but welcome to mortality, too. Welcome to life. It turns out I’m not done and in that moment I learned what it was like to be not done or maybe undone, how profoundly willing I was to sink into my life with my teeth and my nails. I knew. I knew.
24. The light came back up, fire-yellow. The room full of smoke. The three women of the cast at the back of the stage, inaccessibly far for the first time in 80 minutes of theater. Wearing suicide vests. 20% of me thought: This text is so coherent, so smart. The other 80%, suspended perfectly in her disbelief for maybe the first time in her theatergoing life, thought, Oh, there’s the answer I was looking for in the dark, that’s how we die.
25. This was new. First of all, what a thing it is to experience a brand new feeling. Second, what a thing it is to experience a brand new feeling because of a piece of art. Even before you get around to what the feeling is.
26. But not wholly new, maybe. The idea of theater as a place to die was something to which I grew accustomed as an actor: my other most emotionally affective experience in theaters has always been Arcadia and in part that’s because when I was sixteen I was the sixteen-year-old who died at the end of Arcadia, onstage, and every time I have cried at Arcadia, offstage, which has been every time I’ve seen Arcadia, I’ve been right back there. On the brink of my own character death, waltzing ever closer.
27. Productions are mortal: they’re finite and they breathe. Productions are mortal: they’re only alive as long as they can live in you. And you’re finite. (You breathe.)
28. I remember reading that play for the first time and being kept awake by the sound of my own heartbeat; I remember listening to the panicked exultant race of it and thinking I understand what falling in love is like now. Certain but wrong. But as always, it’s the certainty that matters, the education of it.
29. Good theater can make you fall in love and good theater can kill you and good theater will leave you stronger at the end of the play.
30. All good art has the power to hit you hard and heal you after, but it is I think a revelation that belongs uniquely to the theater to make you believe like this. The perfect three-dimensional darkness and the human beings on the other side of the art and the unpredictability of it. Anything could happen on any night.
31. You will know yourself better after every play.
32. In the theater of the Soho Rep, surrounded by an incongruous audience of money and comfort, I learned: there is no cause on earth for which I am willing to die. There is no horror I will not weather. There is no circumstance in the world that will let me relax my grip on life, mine.
33. “Who knew the world could be so awful,” speaks the last line of the play, and there was a small shuddering ripple of laughter because we all knew we were going to have to live in it. Somehow, it didn’t feel gratuitously cynical. Maybe because in varying degrees everyone in that room had relearned how willing they were to live, no matter the conditions of that life. I can only guess at that—how well a piece of theater worked is case dependent, person dependent—but I can say that the higher message, the greater mission statement, is about action in the face of the responsibility of living in all of this, about reconfiguring this world into one that can be lived in.
34. That we will be strong enough to live in it because. Just because. Because we will be.
35. Certainty in the face of wholly wrong information—I mean, that’s an impossible joy of theater, a higher aim. Suspension of disbelief. But the knowledge that I will cling to my own life like a set of bared claws was real, is real. So I have to make it, not just worth living, able to be lived in. Some days that is easy and some days that is hard. Even the best life seems unbearable some days. Just because the world. The world is. The words fail. Who knew the world could be so awful. Kindness is not enough. Thinking is not enough. But we have to be enough.
36. I’m dramatic, right, and I live on the internet, right, where I write and I talk and I take in the news of the world and the dumb gossip of my dumb life in equal measure in both hands and every day I write for some reason big or small lol lol kill me lol I don’t want to live in this body this world any more lololol
37. Leaving Soho Rep, I felt like I should go to confession. I’m sorry. I do want. Turns out I want so much I will do anything to keep it.
38. A good play will grab you by your feet and make you land twice as hard in the world. Will make you think about the space you take up in it, how to go forward. While this is true of all good art, there is something about theater—about being, physically, in the space where the narrative is made that makes the narrative twice as contagious. You leave speaking the same language as the stage. Alice Birch translated me: potatoes, bluebells, sentence fragments, the will to live whether or not it is worth it. Worth isn’t the question.
39. There was a deranged moment, leaving that theater, where I thought about texting my own mediocre everyman, the one I’d been cancelling. Just to schedule the reassurance of having hands on me, an act that can put a soul back into a body it’s left behind. The anchor of the flesh, of a hand below the throat or an arm around the waist. Outside hands that know the body in question—overwhelming in their knowledge, transfiguring with their invited entitlement.
40. Profane, I thought, immediately, and threw my phone into my purse.
41. Instead I drank a vodka punch with Michele. We ate dinner, despite everything. Then I walked the mile and a half back to Union Square to take the L home. The air is just turning New York summertime sticky-warm, after half a month of rain. I couldn’t hear the catcalls clearly. There were some; there are always some.
42. After we got hit by a car I was the first out of my hospital bed, unscratched, five minutes to spare before I could see my friends. I put my dress back on. I put on lipstick. My hand was very steady. I remember that control, that perfect calm. Anyone watching me would have been, should have been, very impressed.
43. Catcalls, abortion laws, hollow writing, fucktoy ads, every fucking part of your body under legislation and under sale, yes, yes, we know. But it’s not that, it’s the way your body moves the way it’s told, the way that the world’s bad writing and hollow gaze turns into your own. You move through the world and you can’t help fitting, despite yourself, into what someone else’s bad story tells you to do, that all-watching external viewer that barely sees you as a character. The target audience: a man born believing in his inborn right to cut you into your component parts.
44. He doesn’t have to be in the room, though. He doesn’t matter.
45. You matter.
46. Me, my life, everything that brought me to this theater, to the tipping point. That’s in the column of you, in the column of reality, in real things with significance.
47. You can learn something important even if you’re wrong. You can feel something true based on something false. This is the point of art. I didn’t die after all. Of course not.
48. This world can be yes yes so awful and it takes so much of its pound of flesh from its women, carves it from their bodies out in words and in deeds and the thought is not enough to keep the knife from sinking in. Every day kills you a little, which is the point of mortality, and sells you a little, which is the point of being a woman. Per the play, and not wrongly. (Just not all the way complete, as a premise. Every language has its limits.)
49. Yes, but my god, how much I value the life that lives under this slightly sticky skin, and what wouldn’t I do to keep it, to waltz in it. To keep these eyes open for watching theater and injustice alike. To keep this tongue intact in my mouth and tethered to this particular heart.
50. What won’t I do, then, to make the world livable.