Trust Exercise(56)

end

is all that remains.

But Karen, reading that word, could see the end clearly, as Martin, writing that word, must have seen it clearly. Martin was a director as well as a playwright. What might seem missing, from a reading point of view, was actually something bestowed, on director and actors. Karen was once an aspiring actor. She remembers how to fill in those blanks.

In the trance that overtook her while reading, Karen was not sure how much time had passed. She remembered Mr. Kingsley once telling them that if they simply read Shakespeare at the same rate that actors performed it, they’d be able to read entire plays in a couple of hours. This was the sort of putatively encouraging but actually critical and discouraging advice Mr. Kingsley had constantly given them despite his never having, Karen would bet, read an entire Shakespeare play in two hours or even an entire Shakespeare play in his life, yet it was a piece of advice that had stuck in her head ever since. It had given her the obviously flawed idea that reading time and staging time must be similar when most times and certainly this time that wasn’t the case. It seemed to have taken her minutes to read through the play, and yet the play took up one hundred plus pages and was stuffed full of invisible silence, and not just the kind that takes up time onstage. There was copious onstage silence, that might take minutes or hours to enact, but there was also a silence of meaning, a refusal to spell out the facts. This refusal Karen felt as a challenge, although it took her some time, of having feelings and trying to name them, before she hit on the name for the feeling. Challenge. Very personal challenge. This isn’t to say that Karen felt the play was a personal challenge to her in the sense of a message from Martin, that letter he’d promised, belatedly sent. Karen isn’t crazy. She doesn’t hear the lampshade talking, or read messages in her eggs. This is to say that she felt, from herself, to herself, a strong challenge to enter the play’s silences and to utter their meaning.



* * *



MANY WORDS ARE both nouns and verbs. Present/present. Insult/insult. Object/object. Permit/permit. A list of such words, compiled for the business traveler not fluent in English, is pinned to my bulletin board. It’s meant to illustrate not just the words’ versatility but the fact that in each word the emphasis shifts the same way, from the first syllable to the second, with the sense shift from object to action. “I have a PREsent to preSENT to you.” “The stapler is an OBject to which I hope you won’t obJECT.” “This PERmit perMITS me to fire you.” These example sentences are of my composition. I like the list of words because it’s like a monotonous poem and also because the “rule” it represents applies only to those words and is otherwise useless. “Audition” is also a word that is both noun and verb, but it always sounds the same. It’s a word that means, literally, “the power of hearing,” or “a hearing,” as well as “to perform an audition,” a circular definition that is actually the first under “verb” in my dictionary. In the verb form most true to its source (audire: to hear), the action belongs to the listener: David is auditioning actors for roles in the play—he is “hearing them out.” But actors, poorly educated egomaniacs though they may be, understand about power. They’re the reason the circular verb definition—audition: to perform an audition—has become the most popular one: I’m auditioning this weekend, I auditioned for that, I auditioned for him, etc. “Audition” dramatizes the struggle between subject and object, between doing and being done to.

My hatred of actors and my resistance to including myself among them complicated the resolve I had made, after reading the play, that no one else but me would play the Girl. I wanted to act without being an actor, and definitely without having to act like an actor. But no less than I hated actors I also hated people who thought they were so good they just asked to be given a role. And so in the days leading up to auditions I never told David I was coming nor simply asked him to give me the part, never chose a piece, never rehearsed it, never reconciled myself to being auditioned—and never reconciled myself to not auditioning.

The morning of the auditions I printed out a monologue but I didn’t learn it. I didn’t even look at it. I drove to the club David used as a theatre, and sat outside in my car until I knew they were just about done—because I’d helped with the schedule, as usual making myself indispensable about these auditions that David had never suggested I come to, having almost certainly forgotten our long-ago conversation about my great talent because he’d been drunk at the time. Sitting in the car I was surprised to have no idea what I would do. I tried to audition myself. I listened hard and heard nothing. Then as if she’d been given a cue, around the time Karen sensed they were finished she got out of the car and walked quickly inside where a very young, petite, pretty actress was in conversation with David who’d clearly just auditioned her or perhaps relinquished subjectivity and allowed her to do the auditioning, from the looks of his slightly flushed face. Karen knew auditions made David anxious as if he were the one who had something to prove. Maybe that knowledge emboldened her. Grabbing a chair she sat down just across from him, shoehorning in on his conversation with the actress, who faltered and smiled and finally went for her bag while David’s assistant director picked up his clipboard and flipped pompously through sign-up sheets that Karen had printed herself. “David’s just about done if you’d give us a second,” said the assistant director but Karen disregarded him and only focused on David. “You don’t think I can do this,” she said.