ABSTRACT
In the film, Myrtle Gordon, a celebrated stage actress, rehearses a new play with a familiar circle of professional colleagues: Manny Victor, the director, Maurice Aarons, the male lead and her former lover and David Samuels, her producer. Opening Night can be understood as Cassavetes's subversive version of a backstage melodrama about theatre and midlife, about acting and being, about illusion and reality explored in the context of ageing. He schematizes the problem as three generations or three ages of women. John Cassavetes quickly eliminated any interpersonal interpretation of Myrtle's distress. The actor-director Joseph Chaikin describes the process of emblem-hunting as identifying the genuine contact points, the places at which an improvised sound-and-movement story touches more than the storyteller, and then removing all the superfluities to let the emblems resonate in the empty spaces. For Chaikin, reality can be fathomed in the archaic literal sense of encircled with the arms, and it can be sounded.
