"Don't Bother, They're Here..."

 Tonight after opening, and a week of tech plus 2 show days, I was doing the show feeling as “lost” and “at sea” and “clueless” as I ever have been (perhaps, save, Kiss me Kate for the BBC where I was just operating on adrenaline and... cortisol and... panic? Unclear. I still can't watch it...) 

 

Bluntly: I have been waiting around for the Désirée “aha” moment to arrive much like the (totally fake) Handbook for Adults whose delivery I am still anticipating. But tonight, during the crushingly iconic “Send in the Clowns” I began to have a catharsis so huge I was rendered inarticulate. I felt like I was bombasted with a shattering realization: that silly ol' Désirée is meant to teach me/show me/force me to:

confront my life choices

confront the health and traumatic history realities that had nothing to do with my “choices” 

including the loss of the full spectrum and potential of my singing voice

and above all my unavoidable relationship with self loathing and my compulsive search to find attunement and safety in the gaze of others. 

 

Whoa boy. It was overwhelming. And excruciating. 

 

The mistake? I was waiting for the intellectual breakthrough—for the moment when I'd finally understand Désirée.  Instead, my body understood her first.

 

It strokes me that most people regard "Send in the Clowns"  as a love song, or a ballad of regret. But psychologically, I think it is something much more terrifying: 
It is the moment when a woman realizes that she has spent a lifetime arranging herself around other people's desires. In my experience thus far, it is filled with almost every emotion there is— including if not especially rage and shame. 

Désirée has always known how to be admired.
She knows how to be wanted.
She knows how to enter a room and make everyone turn.

She even knows how to piss of her own mother. 

But the week we meet her, what she discovers, far too late, is that admiration and attunement are not at all the same thing.

And something about that distinction feels uncannily close to a pattern I have come to recognize in my own life.
From childhood onward, I learned to scan faces.
Dad's long illness.
 An emotionally unsafe extended family.
Years of illness. 
Multiple surgeries.
Throughout those experiences, my silly ol' nervous system seemed to have created a painful equation:

If I can just become the right person... the exceptional person... the indispensable person... perhaps then I will finally be safe.

Not consciously, of course (nervous systems don't speak in sentences—at least I don't think they do...) They speak in actionable strategies.

I have always wondered why, with so much external "evidence" of worth, and with a great loving support system, partner in Alec, and such loyal friends, I have such a ravenous need to feel "deeply seen." 

I now realize that every time I moved to a new environment (which, as a freelancing artist happens every couple of months or sometimes weeks!) a new relationship or singular artistic environment would end up carrying the weight of my need to feel deeply seen. 

 

That's too much pressure for a scene partner. Or a group of strangers. All of whom have their own lives and boundaries and needs and neuroses. 

 

Tonight I think I experienced a revelation: I haven't actually been seeking any kind of admiration or even platonic intimacy.

I have been chasing safety. 

The experience of finally relaxing.
Of no longer having to earn belonging.

Those are different things.
One requires performance.
The other requires surrender.

Then there is another irony.
I've spent much of your career trying to convince audiences that I am "worthy."
But what if the mature roles ask something entirely different?
What if they ask:

Can you stand in front of people without asking them to heal your self-loathing?

 

Not because I no longer have self-loathing (I'm a woman on earth, after all...)

But because it no longer gets the starring role.
That is Désirée to me.
She isn't trying to be adored anymore.
She is trying, perhaps for the first time, to tell the truth.

 

I've been... surviving.
And the agony is that the strategies I constructed for that survival kept operating long after the danger had passed. 

I dunno. Perhaps that is why "Send in the Clowns" undid me. It is exposing the exhausting performance you've been giving for decades.

And somewhere beneath that performance is the woman I've been thinking about all year: the one with the surgical scars, the cellulite, the altered voice, the intelligence and strange humor, the immense capacity to love, and the courage to stand in the center of a theatre without pretending to be immaculate.

 

"Hello, Désirée..."

     "Hm... I wonder if someone has made a clerical error."

 

This is how I feel about playing Désirée Armfeldt in Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. Somebody is allowing me to do this in front of paying, living, customers, and I remain unconvinced that all relevant parties have been meaningfully consulted. I can only assume everyone involved is operating from incomplete information because letting me do this feels like the sort of decision that would normally require several permits and a psych evaluation. 

 

To stand in the middle of a theater, in one of my favorite theatre communities in America—Chicago—and sing one of the most iconic songs ever written for the musical theatre canon while removing articles of clothing in. the. round? 

 

Lord Almighty. 

 

Every day I arrive at work expecting to see an letter on official letterhead that begins, "After further review..." The entire thing feels like the sort of idea that should have been stopped by at least three responsible adults before reaching production.

 

And yet here we are.

 

 

Ah, time. You sneaky little bitch. One day you're Anne Egerman. Then you blink. You answer a few emails. You survive a global pandemic. You have a coupla life-saving surgeries. You discover that your knees now occasionally send weather reports. And suddenly you're standing on the cusp of forty-three, learning Désirée Armfeldt. 

 

The sunrise-sunset of it all has me staggered.

There is some grief in this reality.

Where did it go?

Where did she go?

 

The young woman who believed forty was impossibly distant. The girl who thought grown women possessed some secret map she had never been gifted. The actress perpetually trying to squeeze herself into categories that never quiiiiiite fit. For honestly, just like I did with "being young," I also always had to make ingenues work. Whatever ingenues I did play, I portrayed by smuggling my own strangeness inside them, bending the material around my oddly-shaped corners.

 

The women, though?

Ooooo the women are different.

Complicated. Funny. Wounded. Wise. Messy. Sexy. Flawed. The women know things. The 'women of the theatre' have lived badly and brilliantly—they carry history in their bodies and alter the temperature of a room. Suddenly I feel...equipped. Unapologetic. Ready. 

 

I've been waiting my whole life to portray the women that are now arriving.

Admittedly, perhaps slightly ahead of schedule? (Glynnis Johns was fifty when she originated Désirée) but maybe that doesn't mean I'm early. 

Maybe it means this is merely my first turn.

Maybe it means there will be more.

Maybe it means I can stop treating every new opportunity as if it is the last lifeboat leaving the dock.

Maybe it means I can simply be here.

 

*

 

Speaking of the nudity and sensuality of Désirée and and and—I've recently been recalling a realization I had several years ago while in the trenches of "eating disorder school" (which is to say: the first time Mount Sinai saved my life in the form of a rather strict in-patient treatment). For most of my teens and twenties, whenever an invitation involved swimming, I declined. Anything involving a bathing suit. The logic seemed airtight at the time: I genuinely believed I was protecting innocent bystanders from the burden of witnessing my body. And because this was the 1990s and early 2000s (a cultural era that looked women directly in the eye and cheerfully informed us that the less space we occupied, the better) we were all marinating in some fairly toxic nonsense.

 

The tragedy is that water is my favorite thing in the world. And I abandoned that water over and over again because I had become convinced that cellulite was a moral failure.

 

Recovery slowly arrived—and too-soon after, illness arrived. And I began to feel the betrayal. I had sold myself out thousands of times and missed irreplaceable experiences of swimming in the sea, of lakes on my skin, of canon balls and waterfalls and fjords—all because I was busy auditioning for a standard that did not exist. Convinced that if I just worked a little harder, sacrificed a little more, and occupied slightly less physical space, someone, somewhere, would finally hand me a certificate declaring me: Acceptable. And I did all of this with the intensity of a woman trying to secure the last helicopter out of Saigon.

 

What nonsense. 

 

When my body got mortally sick I realized I wasn't negotiating with perfection anymore, but with survival. Survival means the hierarchy of needs reveals itself with breathtaking efficiency. (I say this with truly PhD levels of expertise: survival is exactly like colonoscopy prep: there are no shades of grey, nuance or dilly-dallying. There is only what must go and what cannot stay.)

 

When you've spent years wondering whether you'll ever be healthy again, whether you'll ever feel strong again, whether you'll ever get another chance at an ordinary day, you start looking at your body differently.

At forty-two, do I love every inch of it? Absoluuutely not.

I remain a human woman.

But I am... alive. Astonishingly grateful to be alive.

And after 42 years on the fence, I've also arrived at the radical conclusion that at least some of me is extremely hot.

 

This, strangely enough, feels very Désirée. 

 

Désirée is a woman who has finally become more interested in truth than performance. Which may be why she feels less like a role I am playing, and more like a role I've been walking toward for decades. I have no idea the exact moment it occurred, but somewhere along the way, I stopped striving for perfection and perhaps more importantly, I stopped performing perfection. I stopped apologizing for being human before anyone had even accused me of it.

When I went to my callback, our director asked me: 

"Aside from the obvious glamorous reasons, why do you want to play this role right now?"

 I paused and really thought about it before answering: 

"Because... once, what feels like both yesterday and very long ago, I took final bows on very fancy stages. And then I got very, very sick. And lost so much. And gained so much. And now I just... want to be happy."

That's the real answer anyway. Perfection doesn't survive four surgeries and come back with scars. Or stand in the center of a theatre in Chicago, remove her makeup, her clothing, sing Sondheim's greatest hymn, and laugh at the absurdity of (please pardon the mixed Sondheim metaphor) being alive.

Breathing, living, human beings do.

 

And perhaps 

Cellulite.

Traumatic pasts.

Scars—literal and metaphorical.

The whole glorious mess.

is more than enough. 

 

And even though I spend almost every rehearsal waiting for the administrative team to dramatically burst through the theatre doors and yell, "WAIT! We meant the other Alexandra!"

 

I think I'm learning to applaud the vast, real, mess of it all. And if I don't fully succeed this time? 

"Well. maybe next year." 

  

© Joe Mazza for BraveLux (of course)