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

“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

“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

“Always to be seen, in those days it was almost an end in itself, because it was in being seen that I could say for certain that I existed, that my limbs were real as I touched them, that my being was intact as it peered out into the world. A stay against the turbulence within me—that was, perhaps, the purpose of all this.”
― 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

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“I know that Xavier is seeking the same thing, and it is possible he has already found it. To know that he exists to the world, and in the world, in a continual sequence of recognition. But such things do not last, not in the way that he thinks. The recognition comes and goes, too many parts—those onstage and in life—don’t endure, and once they are gone, their logic is impossible to regain. Mostly, there is only the emptiness they leave behind.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“Or perhaps he was only acting out. Perhaps it was only that, and less than I thought it was. Can things be unsaid and undone, can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in both directions?”
― 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

“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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“The flirtation was a habit, one that had quieted over the years as I grew older, but that could still at times awaken. It was an error on my part. Xavier quickly leaned forward, as if he sensed an opening. I sat back again. 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

“One morning, in a sudden fit of nostalgia, I asked him why he no longer seemed to read. He stared at me, his face at once startled and blank, as if he had been caught off guard, as if the question were freighted in some way. Beneath the blankness I could see his mind at work, a series of rapid calculations, I understood that he had experienced the question as a criticism, even an accusation of sorts. The moment seemed to extend, I observed its viscous spread. I regretted having asked the question and was about to speak, to tell him never mind, when he cleared his throat and said that Anne had been keeping him busy, the one thing he regretted about the job was that he no longer had time to read. I remember thinking the phrase was odd, too generic for intimate conversation, but I only nodded and changed the subject, I left it at that. But even as we moved on to other matters, I could see that he remained preoccupied by the exchange, he sat at the kitchen table and he made conversation but I could see his mind whirring.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“He was changed, he had grown and matured in so many ways, and there were moments when I could see that Tomas was feeling no small pride in this transformation, and when I felt the same. In truth, it was not exactly like having our child back home again, it was like having some ideal version of him returned, altered in all the ways we had hoped. As the days passed, I realized how little continuity there was between the child or even the young man I remembered and the person now living with us. He was like a familiar stranger, someone you have known for a very long time but at a distance, or perhaps someone you knew long ago, for a brief but intense period, so that the familiarity was always mitigated, always compromised, always a little uncanny. This was, perhaps, what it meant to have a child grow up. That distance finally achieved, in itself a kind of necessary estrangement.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“I continued down the hall, I thought the apartment was quiet, quieter than I could ever remember it being, so quiet that all I could hear was silence.”
― 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. Without it, Salvation was only a snuff film. And so 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.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition

“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. Did it matter? It mattered in the sense that the work was what counted—not the activity that surrounded it, the energy that collected or dissipated upon its reception. But I didn’t know how to separate the work from its effect.”
― Katie Kitamura, Audition