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.

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.

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.

And the scene that had troubled me so deeply, it had become the scene I looked forward to the most, the transition from the first half of the play into the second, the instant of transformation—the play’s hinge. As soon as I arrived at the theater I could not wait to be inside the scene, I anticipated the music cue, the pool of light emerging on the near darkness of the stage. I longed for it in a way that was almost carnal. 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.

Can things be unsaid and undone, can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in both directions?

What kind of play? I asked at last and Xavier looked at me. His gaze was steady and clear, and for the first time I had a sense of the consistency of his ego, and I knew that he was someone who could make a piece of work, many of them perhaps. No, I had not understood him correctly at all. He replied, A monologue. And the next question rushed out of me before I could stop it. What kind of part? He nodded as if he had expected the question, and I knew he had heard the greed in my voice, just as I myself had heard it. A woman of your age and general disposition, he said. A woman who can no longer distinguish between what is real and what is not real.

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.