Acting and Performance Theme Analysis

Despite all evidence, it was nearly springtime in New Hampshire. My junior year was seven weeks from its completion but I kept thinking that this was the first day of my true education. None of the books I’d read were as important as this, none of the math tests or history papers had taught me how to act, and by “act” I don’t mean on a stage, I mean in life. What I was seeing was nothing less than how to present myself in the world.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be an actress, it was that I knew I could do a better job. Name the form said. Stage Name if Different. I printed my name: Laura Kenison. Other than my address, phone number, date of birth, I had nothing to offer, no way to turn my after-school job at Stitch-It into theatrical experience. I listened to the audition behind me. “Well, UP unTIL a YEAR ago I USED to like YOU a LOT,” Emily sang. I folded up the registration form and put it in my copy of Pasternak, then took a fresh sheet and started again. This time I spelled my name L-A-R-A, tossing out the “u” my parents had given me at birth because I believed this new spelling to be Russian and worldly. I decided Mr. Martin had been right. I decided that I would be the diamond.

Two years later, Emily decided Duke was her father, Maisie decided Emily had been possessed by Satan, and Nell decided she wanted to be an actress who would never come home again, though that might have happened anyway. Thanks to his ubiquitous presence in the world, the man I’d spent a summer with took up residence in our home, and still I thought of him remarkably little.

Of course, if some girl takes you to a room and starts telling you how cute this bikini is going to look on you, you figure it out. I thought of the sturdy navy one-piece my grandmother had bought, sitting in my duffel back at the hotel, the tags still on, and felt a surge of rage for having let myself be so duped. When I went back to the pool I didn’t say a word to any of them. I went to the diving board, bounced hard and high twice, then split the bright blue water with my hands. I did three laps with racing turns. Those fuckers wanted to see if I could swim? I’d show them how to swim.

[Duke] has a pipe and he lights it and when the flame pulls down we can see the drug hit him, the color draining from his face, his nose and eyes streaming, and then the look of relief that breaks over him, a violent gratitude, like he wasn’t sure it would come for him this time and it came.

I want someone to tell me how that was acting. I want someone to tell me how many people were on the set, and how many of them understood what was happening. They had to wait until the golden hour when the light was perfect because there could be only one take. He couldn’t do this thing twice. I wonder if Sebastian was there, but he couldn’t have been. Sebastian would never have let that happen.

All these years later, I feel like I let it happen.

I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore. Even if I’d gotten to play the part on Broadway with Spalding Gray, there still would come a time when I’d be finished and someone else would take the role. Many someone elses could do it just as well, because look, Pallace on her second night was every bit as good as I had been after years of practice. Day after day she had watched me in rehearsal and then made the decision to do the part her own way.

I had believed that Tom Lake was more enlightened than the average small town in Michigan, but the longer I stayed, the more I could see how it operated like the rest of the world. The directors and the choreographers were men. The men chose the plays, made the schedule, and ran the lights. The women made the food, styled the wigs, and glued false eyelashes onto eyelids. Cat was the woman with the needle and thread.

In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

But while we waited we watched them. We understood that there had never really been a world in which Pallace would have stayed with a tennis coach from East Detroit, never any world in which Duke would stay with anyone at all. We were members of the audience and they were slender gods, brilliant and terrifying. They lit the room with the lightning of their drunken grief and extravagant love. How could they get to the end of that show without going home and slamming one another up against the wall, the floor, the bed? Surely some actors in the past had managed, the same ones who swapped the tequila for water, but Duke and Pallace were just kids. Prodigiously talented kids.

When people asked if I needed any help I told them no, my friend was coming right back, but after another half hour, after every other person had trickled away, I had to concede that not even good old Saint Sebastian was coming to get me. That was when I saw how the backs of theater seats could provide a stable means of transfer. I stood and held one and then the next and the next, hopping my way to the aisle and then hopping my way up the stairs row by row, all the way back to where my wheelchair was waiting. […] Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.

“What about Pallace?” I asked Ripley.

“Who’s Pallace?”

“The girl.”

He shook his head. “I don’t need a girl. I have too many girls as it is.”

And there went Pallace, tumbling off in the breeze as Duke came with us. I knew what he was telling me, and I didn’t say another word about it.