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.

 

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 gradually removing articles of clothing in the round?

 

Lord Almighty.

 

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 several 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 staggered me.

There is grief in that realization.

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 somehow misplaced or never been gifted. The actress perpetually trying to squeeze herself into categories that never quiiiiiite fit.

Because if I'm honest, I always had to really make ingenues work. As in: I worked at it. 

I was never the princess or the porcelain doll. Never the girl who floated effortlessly through a story while everyone else projected fantasies onto her. Whatever "ingenue" roles I played, I played them by smuggling my own strangeness inside them. By bending the material around the oddly-shaped corners.

 

The women, though?

Ooooo the women are different.

Complicated. Funny. Wounded. Wise. Messy. Sexy. Flawed. ones. The women who know things. The women who have lived badly and brilliantly who who carry history in their bodies and alter the temperature when entering a room.

 

I've been waiting my whole life for these roles.

And now they are 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 others.

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

Maybe it means I can simply be here.

 

 

A realization occurred to me years ago while in the trenches of recovering from an eating disorder.

For most of my teens and twenties, whenever an invitation involved swimming, I quietly 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 imperfect 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. Yet I abandoned it over and over again because I had become convinced that cellulite was a moral failure.

 

As recovery slowly arrived—and later, as illness arrived—I began to see the betrayal. I had sold myself out thousands of times and missed irreplaceable experiences because I was busy auditioning for a standard that did not exist with the intensity of a woman trying to secure the last helicopter out of Saigon. 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. 

 

What nonsense. 

 

When my body got 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 extraordinary 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 some of me is extremely hot.

 

This, strangely enough, feels related to Désirée, and to "Send in the Clowns."

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. 

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 an 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."

 

Real is where Désirée lives.

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. 

 

I think I'm learning to applaud it. And if I don't fully succeed this time? 

"Well. maybe next year." 

  

© Joe Mazza for BraveLux (of course)