Audition Quotes

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I knew that what Tomas—what the waiter, and the middle-aged couple sitting at the nearby table, what they had all been misled by was the current of intensity running between Xavier and me. 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. More than that—he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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--...”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I looked across at Tomas and I knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy, I could see the thought moving through his head and nearly settling, what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“You’re not cheating on me again, are you? No, I whispered at once, and I was a little frightened as I said it. He nodded and said, Forget I mentioned it, and opened the door for me and we stepped out.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“It had been a heedless moment. 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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“at one point Clarice had pulled me aside and told me that the play was not about what she had thought it was about, that it was better, subtle and more mysterious.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“But then I also thought that if ever an actor had lost sight of the shore then it was this one, he had stumbled deep into the interior, and 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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“But it did, first for a week, and then for a month, and then for so long that it became habit and routine, and in that small act of domesticity, I recommitted myself to the marriage. It was banal, indisputably bourgeois, the coffee cups and the stupid pastries—but that was almost the point. To return to that ordinary life, with its coziness and safety, all those things that are so easy to despise and dismiss. In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again. At least for a time.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“This was undoubtedly because, for the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“It doesn’t need to be true to my vision. But it needs to be true.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“what was a family if not a shared delusion,”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“It is no small thing to realize that you are the one who is waited for, and it is also the perpetual condition of motherhood, the waiting never stops.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“And I wondered also if that wasn't the point of a performance, that it preserved our innocence, that it allowed us to live with the hypocrisies of our desire. 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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I had given in to his story, his narrative, because it had been easier, and because of his persuasiveness—persuasion, which is only one step removed from coercion.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“Without intentionality, there was no agency, no control, the work was happening to you. An impossible inversion.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“But although Xavier was so evidently at home, he did not behave as if he were actually in his own home, he never inhabited the space as someone who had previously inhabited the space might do.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“the truth was I had almost no idea what she was talking about, it was all a way of talking rather than talking itself.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“You can make it your own, she said. It doesn’t need to be true to my vision. But it needs to be true.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“Xavier gave good son. He loved the part of it, he longed for the role, that was why he had contacted me in the first place. He was now giving good son to Anne, and she was responding, and through that mutuality a membrane had formed around them. I moved down the aisle, away from them, and stared at the empty stage.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“Anne had recognized in Xavier an archetypal son. He fell into the role, performing filial affection and duty, creating an atmosphere that Anne had been compelled to name, if only unconsciously and indirectly.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I opened the door to the theater too, so that he entered first and I saw again how the attention in the room moved toward him at once.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“He had a surprising air of competence, completely at odds with the personality he had exhibited before, again I thought he was like another person entirely.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“the performance I had experienced the first and even second time I watched the film remained extant, and I thought that it was true that a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience, that it existed,”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition