Audition

by Katie Kitamura

But the truth is that almost nothing about the way people live in New York makes any sense, least of all when it comes to money.

More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.

Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void—as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give.

There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance. The air becomes thin, the senses keener, there is too much reverberation.

The most obvious explanation was that he was a con artist. For the first time, I understood the presence of the word artist in that moniker. If this was a con, there was a remarkable level of artistry to it, more than was strictly necessary, it was artistry for the sake of artistry alone.

People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

As a consequence, for many years I did my work without fully committing myself to it. Even as the parts improved, I never confused the experience depicted onstage or on-screen with the experience of my actual life, the material simply did not have the requisite dimensionality, there was nothing in these parts that had the stab, the throb, the unruliness of the real.

I began to see in the not too distant future the point at which the emergence would cease and the structure of the work begin to ossify, so that although some movement would remain possible, its essential parameters would be set—even then, I had the sense that I was still too much clinging to the shore. The part, the world of it, continued to elude me, and I knew that the window of opportunity was closing, that I had to make some shift within myself or the role would slip away.

Max was looking at me but when I stared back her face closed down a little, as if she had been confronted, and I knew then that she had no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play, how it would bridge the two versions of the character, the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder. She had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing, I realized, and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether. I could see it now, I could see it all over the writing.

When I breathed in and stepped forward into the light, countless paths seemed to unfurl before me, forking and then forking again, so that I was dazzled each time by the scene’s infinite contingency, the range of possibility laid out in front of me.

It was that here, the gap between my private and performed selves collapsed, and for the briefest of moments there was only a single, unified self. Did this happen only in those few minutes on that stage and nowhere else? It felt that way.

For so many years there had been the tacit understanding that I contained the threat to the marriage, that it was housed inside me. And for all those years I had tamped down every impulse to stray, I had lived inside a straitjacket of my own devising, and I had remained true. But in the end, he was the first to tire of the marriage, he was the first to look outside, to open the door and taste the fresh and free air. He was the first, and he was always bound to be the first, because of course I needed him, I needed Tomas, much more than he needed me, and this had always been the case, whether I was able to admit it or not. It was him, and it was always going to be him.

It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom.