Audition

by Katie Kitamura

Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.

I remembered what it was like to be so young, and to be seen always in relation to the fulfillment of an older person’s desires.

Because of Tomas. Through him, with him, I had learned to live with greater discipline, to inhabit a certain quietude, so that I no longer fully remembered what it felt like to be so open to the world, to take such pleasure in throwing myself onto the crashing waves of other people’s temperament.

I had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.

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.

It was altogether possible that a woman of forty-nine would fall in love with a young man of twenty-five, and it was even possible that a young man of twenty-five would fall in love with a woman of forty-nine. Perhaps I knew this to be the case, without wanting to acknowledge it, perhaps that was why I was so swift to reject the narrative that even then seemed to occur to both of us. I found myself on guard, and as if aware of this, he appeared to change tack.

I think you might be my mother. I genuinely thought I had misheard him. Then I laughed, in an outburst of astonishment. I’m so sorry, I said, but that’s not possible. Please, he said. And there was a bright intensity to his eyes that briefly silenced me, so that he was able to continue. My parents have told me some things about my birth mother.

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.

In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again. At least for a time.

I saw an elderly couple take note of us as we passed, this time it was clear that what they saw in us was not some unsavory sexual entanglement but rather the contrary, a wholesome outing between a mother and son.

You can be entranced by an idea, I said, and at a certain point you can no longer see the edges of it.

I continued, it’s something that happens every time I prepare for a role. In some ways the part is only working if I lose sight of the shore. But at the same time, it’s important to be able to come out the other side, you have to be able to come up for air. Otherwise, you won’t survive.

For people like me, who looked like me, there were no parts—or rather, there were only parts that were commensurate with erasure, whether through the thinness of stereotype or through simple marginalization, often these characters were quite literally silent, a moving image and nothing else.

At one point, my agent had suggested that I might change my name, he said that there was something racially indeterminate about my appearance, with a different name there would be better parts.

And for a long time, it did not seem likely that my work would achieve that totality, whether I changed my name or not. I had time to wonder what it meant, who the work was made and performed for, whose imagination I was being subjugated to, because I knew it was not my own.

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.

And later still, there were parts that consumed me, so that I could say the life that was performed, on a set or in the theater, could at times feel more real to me than my actual life.

The alchemy was particular, and the truth was that there were many occasions when it went awry, or did not cohere, I had come to see it as something of a crapshoot, you never knew if this would be the one when everything would come together or if it would fall by the wayside, another disposable performance, the detritus of a soon to be forgotten artistic endeavor.

even in a half-empty theater with a cast of unknowns, I knew that she was an extraordinary talent. Tension grew out of every scene, scenes in which nothing took place and people said very little, and yet the pressure grew and grew so that by the end of the play I realized I had been in a sickening state of unease for some time, and when I emerged from the theater I was simultaneously invigorated and physically exhausted, every nerve in my body still standing on end.

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.

I am not where I need to be. I’m waiting for something to happen and time is running out. I moved my head uneasily, I didn’t know why I was telling Xavier this.

It’s not through any fault of Anne’s, I added. The play itself is wonderful. It’s me.

But what if you are actually good? Does it matter how you feel? Of course it matters, I said quickly. But even as I spoke I found myself uncertain.

I didn’t know how to separate the work from its effect.

I wondered if he worried that he would never find his way out, if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone. The confusion and the vulnerability that I had seen on-screen was real enough. And I thought again of the panic in the actor’s eyes, which was entirely authentic, when he stood in the middle of the set, when he looked at the other actors, the director, for his scrap of paper, in that moment everything was terribly, terrifyingly real.

And although the actor was only in his sixties, as soon as I heard the story of the notes on the counter, the forgotten lines—not even forgotten, because they had not been retained and then lost again, they had evaded his mind’s grasp altogether—as soon as I heard this, I was able to envision his death. I was able to imagine the parabolic arc of his decline, I understood that eventually his mind would disintegrate to the point that his memory, of the world and of himself, would be lost, and with it everything that formed his being.

Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

I said to Xavier that it did matter, yes, it did. Without intentionality, there was no agency, no control, the work was happening to you. An impossible inversion. Ah, he said lightly, and he took a sip of coffee. We had arrived at our destination.

I had watched the work emerge with incredible rapidity, until it was only one particular scene, positioned right in the middle of the play, that remained patently unresolved. It sat in the center like a black hole or box, and it was a scene that I played alone. This was the material that we were going to work on today.

Of course, this is the moment when your character achieves a kind of breakthrough, and reaches the opposite shore. The Opposite Shore was the title of the play, but she said it without any irony or self-consciousness, perhaps she always found her own writing eminently quotable.

It is the moment when she locates her emotion, when the play breaks opens, when she steps forward into life, if you see.

I had almost no idea what she was talking about, it was all a way of talking rather than talking itself. The sensation of dread increased.

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.

He said that he had a friend who was no longer in love with his wife, no longer took joy in his children, but who nonetheless did not want to leave his family. He only wanted to feel the way he used to feel. He asked his therapist what to do. She told him to pretend he was in love with his wife. To enact it as fully as possible, and then eventually, he would be in love with her again. Why is this a joke? I asked irritably and checked the time.

Oh, he said. Because he was talking about himself. My mom was the wife he was no longer in love with, and me and my brother and my sister were the children who no longer gave him joy. After he had done what his therapist told him to do and fallen in love with my mom again, we used to joke about it. That’s not funny, I said. I know. But it felt funny at the time.

It’s nice to have someone who can anticipate my needs. There was a softness to her expression, a vagueness, that somehow vexed me further, I saw that she had decided to take Xavier under her wing, that he would be a fixture now, present at all times, privy to Anne’s thoughts about her work and beyond, her assistants were always required to absorb a great deal, both in terms of emotion and in terms of information.

I could already see that Xavier would succeed, not simply because he was exceptionally mutable but because that mutability did not seem to cost him very much. He did not seem any less himself, he did not seem to be troubled or even to feel those shifts in his being.

I felt further irritation, it was unpleasant to imagine them combing over the weaknesses of my interpretation, which were in fact weaknesses in the writing. She hasn’t seized the part at all, they might have said, she hasn’t understood it.

Rivers had been extended three times and still the run was sold out, the tickets gone almost as soon as they were made available. The reviews had been uniform, they had been ecstatic, to the degree that we were even at times tempted to believe they might be true.

Never before had I received such universal approbation, never before had my work been scrutinized and interpreted so thoroughly, or indeed so warmly. It had sent my agents into a frenzy, every other day they seemed to contact me with offers, for film and television and theater, some of which were even interesting, and many of which I would have accepted with excitement only months earlier.

She was without question the best writer I had ever worked with, the part and the play the best material I had ever been given to perform. In Rivers, she had created a role of seemingly endless depth and variation, so that no two performances were the same.

I felt I could play the role a thousand times and still not reach the end, the boundaries of its world, I felt there would always be more to explore. 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.

From that point, for a period of four minutes and thirty-odd seconds, I explored the scene’s terrain. The experience felt wholly private, even though I was onstage. It was not that I forgot about the audience or the parameters and construction of the set. 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.

It was not that I forgot about the audience or the parameters and construction of the set. 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.

Although every beat of the scene was tightly scripted, I felt as if I had an infinite amount of time, I moved at my leisure. And while I hit my marks and cues, never deviating from the script, I was not in control of what took place, there was an alchemical...

And while I hit my marks and cues, never deviating from the script, I was not in control of what took place, there was an alchemical process by which the scene unfolded, mysterious even to me and Max. In those moments, I was in communion with something, some...

In those moments, I was in communion with something, some force that was larger than myself and t...

I’d always known that I would remain with Rivers through to the end of its run.

I knew I had to give Xavier space, to be himself rather than my son, and it was also true that I had every reason to wish for the relationship between Anne and Xavier to flourish. In this sense, in giving him space I was also giving her space, which she was all too eager to claim.