Methinks, How Slow The Old Moon Wanes!
I have begun writing plays,
Voltaire said there are very few good tragedies, and that a playwright must “[Be] often sublime and always natural; to know the human heart and make it speak; to be a great poet without any of the characters in the play appearing to be poets themselves; to have perfect command of one’s own language, and to use it with fluent euphony, without forcing it, and without ever sacrificing the sense to the rhyme.” (Candide, p 60)
I have been writing plays trying to bring back the dead. The drive to polish my novel has escaped me, yet the need to manipulate the world has not.
I have begun writing plays because it is the most socially acceptable form of lying. I am ashamed to admit that I am not ashamed of lying. I have control issues, and the urge to control the narrative other people have of me is almost unstoppable. I am trying to stop lying, as eventually it will become the prime narrative about my life, and all my hard work will be for nought. I think of playwrighting as lying because when I write a play or scene, I am not writing about something that happened to me in real life, I am rewriting something that has happened to me. Characters I create can win arguments I lost, they can be pious where I am sinful; I write plays to rewrite.
My perspective on playwriting undoubtedly stems from my theatrical childhood. From the ages of eight to eighteen, I was faithfully engaged in a theatrical production at least once a year. Acting was my first love; I spent most of my time with Shakespeare. My parents named me Desdemona; these four syllables carry weight. My grandmother was the first to read me Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream. And what a dream it was! I fell in love with the words, perhaps only because my grandmother was fluid in iambic pentameter. She read the whole play to me one night, in the middle of summer. Summers on Shaker Ridge were mosquito-less and purple; the sun was low and hands were sticky; camping chairs on the porch creaked under our weight, not quite drowning out the quiet hum of adult conversation from behind the glass doors. “Four happy days bring in / Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow / This old moon wanes!” (Midsummer 1.i.2-4.)
That same year, three and a half months later, my grandmother died. It was sudden and accidental. Thirteen years later, my grandmother is still the great loss of my life— I miss her like she just left the room, as books on a library shelf miss their checked-out comrade. Thirteen years later, I still cry if I think about her for too long; I wrote this piece in the solitude of my room.
I took up reading Shakespeare myself after she died. My mother had a tome, The Yale Shakespeare Collection, and one day I snuck it into my room. It is a beautiful book; I now presume it is the very edition Harold Bloom would have consulted when writing The Invention of the Human. I could read well from a very young age, yet of course I still struggled with this text; I read it out loud, haltingly, mispronouncing o’er’think, Pericles, Polonius, sepulchre. I do not remember the first or second time I read Shakespeare by myself, but I remember reading it for the tenth, eleventh, twentieth, and fortieth time. I was reverent with The Yale Shakespeare Collection, and so I began amassing paperbacks to dog ear. My first-ever copy of Midsummer is gone; but it was purple, with pesto smudges dotting the binding.
While I processed my grandmother’s death, reading Hamlet became a compulsion. This play scared me; “Heaven and earth! Must I remember?” (Hamlet, I.ii.146-7, my emphasis). I felt, at age seven, so utterly scared of the world without my grandmother that I attempted to turn back the centuries to exist with her again. Shakespeare’s son died before he wrote Hamlet; Shakespeare and I have the same compulsion: we write to resurrect.
The next summer I went to Shakespeare Camp. I only went to this summer camp once; I do not know why. I do not remember if it was fun or not if I had friends or only one, or what part I played. I remember we put on A Midsummer Night's Dream. I remember that one of the instructors looked like my grandmother. I remember the dread at the bottom of my stomach approaching this woman who, from the back, looked like my grandmother; I felt this dread because I knew it was not her, and yet I wanted nothing more. I waited to smell her deodorant and never did. My grandmother was pranking me; “Mine eyes are made the fools o' the other senses, / Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,” (Macbeth. II.i.55-6).
Age thirteen I was cast as Macbeth in an uncut production. The Scottish Play changed my life— I fell into this role, dangerously. Shakespeare scares us with this play; we identify with Macbeth. Macbeth, the murderer, the usurper; a man who is flooded with ambition, plagued by hallucinations, and haunted by ghosts should not be such a poignant mirror for a thirteen-year-old. Yet I felt understood by Shakespeare, through Macbeth, in a way I had not yet experienced. I was plagued by self-set expectations and anxiety about my perceived character; the ghost of my grandmother haunted me relentlessly. Macbeth and I both leapt before we looked— seeing our ambitions played out in the mind’s eye was not enough— as soon as we see these visions, we cross the river, without checking to see if there is space on the opposite shore.
“I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. / Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible / To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but / A dagger of the mind, a false creation, / Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?” (Macbeth, II.i.46-50) I feel so close— an inch or two —to my grandmother; her dragonflies comforting me when I cried; her voice, dripping off the trees; her eyes in the mirror; her eyes behind my eyelids; her deodorant; her hand in mine.; her dreams in my hands. Yet she still evades me, hiding in tiger lilies and Princeton orange.
I have begun writing plays because— like Shakespeare —I could not continue living in a world without my loved ones. Both stage and script are my fantastical foxholes, allowing me to be in control, if only for brief moments. As I cannot become a woman with my grandmother, I must become one who remembers her.
I cannot go back in time and give myself more stage time with her; but on my stage, in my notebooks, she and I have many more years ahead. In our play, the house lights have just dimmed, and the audience is returning from intermission. Behind the curtain I stand alone; with a gust of velvet, I am shining bright. My grandmother is in the front row, the twinkle in her eye visible from any distance. She rises to join me, and I inhale as her wings unfold.
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time, / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! / Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage / And then is heard no more: it is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth, V.v.21-30)
what a wonderful woman