ABSTRACT
If I felt moved to stand and walk onto the stage, sit in an unavailable seat during the performance, could the performance accommodate me? Though the performance would have anticipated my arrival and made it clear I don’t need to leave my seat and join the actors because the actors are already standing next to me, should the performance accommodate me? The weight of my hand on my thigh is not only mine. The actor sits next to me. She holds my hand. I would follow her onto the stage but we have met as humans so close in our fears that we are inside each other’s thoughts already. We have been dreaming of each other and our future together. We have each kept the other up at night, night after night. But then I arrive at the theatre for the performance to discover we were never awake. Over there, as if we are meeting for the first time, as if there could be a first time, is the performance. The performer speaks the words I spoke the day before. I am flattered—pleased that she remembered all that was said though she looks away from me now into the face of another who answers her with words I spoke long ago. The recognition is so accurate I wonder what I will do next. I do nothing. Nothing, because I am not needed, except as a receiving body. Every word I recognize has changed, emptied of its original context and replaced with “story.” It’s not one I know. The actress moves a chair slightly. The strange movement undercuts everything. I am watching her and the tears form. I do not know her and her words are now unfamiliar but I find it unbearable what she says. Her responses defeat me. In every world the force of her story, its truth, is without remedy. I will fail her though in this moment I can’t abandon her. We have never met and yet she is the only one I’ve ever known. She is the only one I seek to understand. I get up and walk over to her. I bring my lips to hers. Rather, why don’t I? When you hold me before you release, in the midst of everything unfinished, I wish this feeling would happen. Surrounded, I feel alone in the theatre. Feeling completely always makes me feel incomplete. What does it matter what you recognize if you aren’t touching? Tears make me know there is an outside and inside and I will always be trapped in here—here within an audience of strangers that I am part of. The audience—alternately weeping and disengaged, unwrapping candy, pulling themselves back from the brink of nodding off. Someone leans into the spoken artifice so deeply the person next to them must shrink away or turn from the stage to attend to the person falling apart. I am full of recognition with nowhere to go, except I’m an actor. I’ve rehearsed a lot. Together we imagine not being abandoned but abandoning. In life and in theatre, what if no action completed? Would we accept this unending, this lack of resolution without displeasure? In the moment, in theatre’s false endings, we’re in love with theatre that abandons. Left in our seats, we go where we want (which is probably not what theatre is or what a play does). Abandoned, we go in search of the next moment. Abandoning. Love.
