INTERVIEWER: You were saying the central metaphor of your play is mud?
WRITER: Mud? Yes, mud. People talk about living in a fog? Well, I’ve always been a bit extreme, and I live in mud. Movement is difficult. Sight is problematic.
ACTOR: Yeah, and imagine, it’s so visualistic: The stage is set: I bathe my fingers in mud, and then I play the piano.
INTERVIEWER: Hmmm. Interesting. Could you elaborate on how this play came about?
WRITER: A single moment, at the end of September, three years ago: I’m standing on the edge of a deep dark pit in the ground, I have mud on my knees and on my dress, I have gathered mud into my hands, I throw the mud onto a coffin that has been laid into the hole in the ground. We are burying my father. The cemetery is on the side of a hill in the middle of the nowhere countryside in Ontario, and would have been beautiful, except for the fact that my first major play—this was Seventeen [Anonymous] Women—is having its first public preview this very night at the Bain St.Michel and I’m going to miss it. Because my father has bad timing.
So I’m stuck. In this moment of mud. Plucked begins as a grievance; I am stuck in resentment towards my Dad for choosing this particular moment to die. Stealing my limelight. Buried in mud, six feet under, and he’s still overshadowing me. I race to Montréal, I miss the first act, I arrive covered in mud. In revenge, I find myself killing him off, repeatedly, a kind of ritualistic king-killing, you know, the patriarch within kind of thing. I think my new play is about this festering animosity…ACTOR: C’mon! Never ask a writer what her play is about, she hasn’t a clue! It’s, like, so obvious, at the very first reading, that what she’s actually written is a love song, a love story. It’s a requiem!
INTERVIEWER: And the central theme becomes “obsessive love”?
WRITER: Let’s just say I have a bit of trouble distinguishing myself from the different men in my life. Well-meaning friends call it “co-dependency issues.” But I don’t see how it could be that at all. I don’t depend on my lovers. I become my lovers. I fail to distinguish between them and me.
ACTOR: Mmmmm… Luscious…—
WRITER: —I’ll be lying there with some man, for example, and start to stroke some body part, his… forearm, for instance, only to realize that it’s me that I’m caressing. It’s my forearm. I am just confused. Is that co-dependency? These days I have to be careful not to go out with a guy who has some terminal disease, because experience tells me that I’ll start taking on all his symptoms. For instance, I went out with a guy who was a severe mutant hemophiliac and… when he would bleed, I would bleed. Which one of us was the mutant? “Symbiotic Sympathy Symptom Syndrome,” I used to call it. You could also call it a bit of an issue with “boundaries.”
ACTOR: Love confounds all, it’s so moving: I mean, check out the lyrics to one of the songs in the play, “I’m Your World.” It’s fabulous; she starts off wanting to “be” the arms that embrace the lover, then she wants to “be” the lover’s legs, wrapping around her. Or is it vice versa? You can’t even tell! From there it gets better. She wants to be his earth! His sky!
WRITER: Plucked isn’t actually about my hemophiliac lover, even though he was the first man I ever loved, the first man I ever made love with, and the first man I almost married. He isn’t even in the play. I should have put him in there, seeing as it’s a piece about the first time making love, and first and only love. I probably should have married him. He has a PhD from MIT—
ACTOR: —and lives in this fabulous house in Rosedale, right across the street—
WRITER: —from my old piano teacher.
ACTOR: The piano teacher is in the play—
WRITER: But the men are imaginary. One thing I’m really good at is inventing lovers.
INTERVIEWER: No relationship to real people, living or dead?
WRITER: Well that’s just it. The problem: I steal things. And then I lie. I pilfer stories. And I make things up. Then I mix it all up, so you can’t distinguish, one from the other. Lying and Stealing: Both are a crime. What is the solution? My Stage Manager will have to deal with it for me. There will be a list at the door of the people who are barred from entering, forbidden to set foot in the theatre. My mother, my ex husband, both my ex husbands actually, my best friend, my first teacher, my former boss, a colleague, make that three colleagues… I don’t want to think how long the list is. It would be fine if it were all lies. If nothing were recognizable. But that’s not what I do. I use the truth, twisting it, just enough, to make it… entirely believable.
Let me give you an example: I’ve created this marvelous persona, this guy named Samuel. If my children were to meet him, they would surely confuse him with their own father. And yet, he does these shocking things. Imagine the questions they would ask? “Did Daddy really do that to you?” Oh, what a scene. I despise drama in my life. I really do.
INTERVIEWER: What about the relationship between you, personally, and your characters? Any resemblance?
WRITER: Family members tend to make all kinds of assumptions, based on my plays, about certain experiences I have had, literally, in my life. It’s embarrassing. With Plucked I am certain there will be the same confusion. People will ask about my failed career as a concert pianist. Or my unusual religious convictions. Although I would think, surely, the audience will understand that the scene about being made love to while playing the piano is a pure flight of fancy. Even my mother wouldn’t suspect that of me. And she thinks I’m pretty depraved.
ACTOR: But it’s, like, super fun to incarnate all that on stage.
INTERVIEWER: You’re excited about playing the role?
ACTOR: Oh, yes, I am, I really am. At first, I was feeling a little overly-exposed, I thought the character was a little too close to the real me, you know? The only thing I really can’t play is myself. But as the work developed, the characters evolved, and I got all these different parts to play with, like different hats in a costume box, and now I feel much better.
INTERVIEWER: I thought this was a show about just one woman?
ACTOR Oh, it is, it is, only every time I sit down to play the piano, or sing a song, I pop up again, and, I’m someone else, you see. A variation. Someone who has never been in love before. Someone who has never made love before. It’s exhilarating. I fall in love over and over again. I discover the pleasures of sex over and over again. As if for the first time. I relive the grief of the loss of my father. Innumerable times. The madness of it is brilliant.
INTERVIEWER: Would you say this is a dark piece?
WRITER: Yes.
ACTOR: —No!
WRITER: —It’s illuminating.
ACTOR: —It’s dazzling, it sparkles…
WRITER: —With wit…
ACTOR: Not “dark.” “Deep,” maybe.
WRITER: “Visceral” is the better word.
ACTOR: Suffering is my most sacred muse.
WRITER: But if the Actor plays “dark”—
ACTOR: —I’ll ruin the play. I’ve gotta play the opposite.
WRITER: Humour is imperative.
ACTOR: Plucked is funny.
WRITER: It is playful. It is hopeful.
INTERVIEWER: In what way is it “hopeful”?
ACTOR: She gets the guy in the end?
WRITER: She buries her father.
INTERVIEWER: That’s “hopeful”?
WRITER: You didn’t know my father.
[Pause.]
INTERVIEWER: So what, exactly, is the significance of this father figure?
ACTOR: You can’t trust her! She twists everything. That fable about the genesis of the play? I happen to know how it actually began. She fell in love. Poopsie Woopsie! She wanted to write a love story. And sing love songs. Sooo Cute! Yes, the hermit Writer, herself, possessed with stage lust. The affair turned sour, naturally. But she couldn’t let go of the work, so Plucked became the means to an end: How to get over a misguided affair.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t answer my question, but is there any truth to this claim?
WRITER: You know, there’s something I really don’t like about Actors. A certain… lack of… humility? All that let-it-all-hang-out-there kind of blasé look-at-me-and-my-dirty-underwear-too lack of dignity. Devoid of self-respect. There is much to be said for maintaining invisibility and anonymity.
ACTOR: Yes, well, that self-deprecation of yours really is a bit of an act, wouldn’t you say? ‘Fess up. You’re right about one thing, though. Imagine, an Actor who doesn’t want to take up too much space! That’s theatrical!
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your Director. She’s pretty hot, I hear?
ACTOR: Yeah, fuck, the fabulous Arianna Bardesono, this passionate insanely brain-bursting franco-Italian wildwoman—
WRITER: —Currently leading cycling tours through the Alps—
ACTOR: —Gathering inspiration for the play.
INTERVIEWER: I hear the number five has some significance? Something about five different lovers?
WRITER: I’m not good at math. And I don’t know how to explain the significance of five. And this play is not unfolding as I intended. I actually didn’t want to write this material. I got writer’s block, at one point, maybe because I was too close to my subject, so I tried to write the show for Leni Parker, because she plays the piano—
ACTOR: —Leni’s just soooo brilliant.
WRITER: I guess the theatre couldn’t afford her, eh?
ACTOR: Hey, wait a sec! I was second choice?
WRITER: Leni said being alone on stage was her worst nightmare. Paralyzing. Impossible. Imagine having to play all five roles: writer, performer, singer, pianist, librettist, composer…
ACTOR: One, two, three… that’s six, not five.
WRITER: There’s nowhere to hide.
ACTOR: So we’ve asked the Designer to give us a bit of a disguise. Colour our hair a different shade, you know. From blonde to brunette. That’ll fool people.
WRITER: And I can continue to live my anonymous, solitary life.
ACTOR: Boring.
WRITER: I’ll bury you, next.
ACTOR: Suicide?
WRITER: Homicide.
ACTOR: Buried alive.
WRITER: Death by mud.
ACTOR: Mmmmmm.
INTERVIEWER: Dramatic!
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