Many parts

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…”

--Jacques, As You Like It (Act II, scene vii), William Shakespeare

[Nameless… wordless… swathed in black and creeping purposefully through the shadows… a killer stalked.  Silently, the hooded figure moved forward.  The quarry, unknowing, took a final breath at the cliff-edge.  At last, with a single cold-hearted shove, the murderer sent the victim plunging to certain doom.]

As the slayer strode remorselessly offstage -- as quickly and purposefully as a four-foot-tall person can stride while wearing a sweatshirt that hangs well past her knees -- her hood slipped a bit, and one of her long blonde pigtails sprang out.

Last week, I was part of a small but appreciative audience who were treated to a theatrical smorgasbord of unprecedented oddness: namely, sixteen three-minute(ish) plays written, directed, and acted by children aged 8-15.

The performance was the culmination of my kids’ Spring Break Camp with Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater, and was therefore one of those Things Parents Have To Show Up For.  I expected it to be, at best, cute, and perhaps unintentionally funny.  I did not, however, think it would inspire any degree of artistic contemplation.  But after I watched one of my twin eight-year-olds send a fellow actor to his purported demise, I began to wonder.

The audience giggled, of course.  I did too.   I simply couldn’t help it.  But I knew, in my heart, that Lizzy, the most diminutive of all sixteen playwright/thespians, was not trying to be funny.  She was being, wholeheartedly, The Mysterious Killer.

“All the world’s a stage…”

Acting has always tempted and intrigued me, although I’ve never had much success with it.  As a ten-year-old, I longed to follow in my big sister’s footsteps and earn a lead role in the school play.  I didn’t.  Instead, I was given a green pointy hat and placed among the ignominious horde of awkward elves on the rickety risers at the back of the stage. 

By high school, I was too intimidated by the apparent coolness and popularity of the theater crowd to seriously consider signing up.  Besides, I was busy with the math club and the track team. 

Math meets and track meets did not garner much in the way of audience. Not that it was really an audience I wanted – certainly not in my teen years, when being entirely invisible seemed far more appealing than being noticed.  No, what appealed to me about theater – and what still does – is the idea of being someone else, while still, enigmatically, being myself.

“…and all the men and women merely players …”

Looking through the Spring Break theater program, I noted that Molly was playing the role of “Mother” in two plays, and “Chatty Kathy” (a talkative young woman vying for the hand of a prince via a jump-roping contest) in a third.  Her twin, meanwhile, in addition to playing the nefarious (and seemingly motiveless) murderer, had garnered roles as a boy who befriends a dragon, and as a monster who devours children in their beds. 

I knew that the camp instructors had set things up such that each child, regardless of age or gender, could audition for any role he or she wanted.  Thus, the program reflected, at least to some degree, the parts my kids had chosen to play.  That fascinated me – because, what roles, real or imagined, do any of us choose? 

I’ve never had the luxury of choosing a theatrical role, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to find myself in the roles assigned to me. This past summer, I helped out with Fairbanks Shakespeare Theater’s annual outdoor production.  It was the third time I’d done so.

The first time, years back, I was part of all the crowd scenes in Julius Caesar, including the bludgeoning of an innocent poet.  While I’m not actually in the habit of bludgeoning poets, no matter the odiousness of their doggerel, the role did make me think more deeply about what can happen – and why -- when mob-madness takes hold.

In my second Shakespearean foray, I was assigned to be a dancing shepherdess.  Yes, really.  Dancing.  Also, giggling, flirting, and singing, in a shepherdess-y dress and hair ribbons.    And you know what?  It was hugely fun.  Part of my psyche (unbeknownst to everyone, including myself) actually enjoys giggling, flirting, and -- heaven help the audience -- dancing and singing.

This year, I gathered props, mended costumes, and spent a couple of scenes onstage in a non-speaking role as a “forester”.  There wasn’t much skill required, but in every tech rehearsal and dress rehearsal and each of the show’s thirteen performances, I pretended to be a stalwart member of a down-to-earth woodsy cadre.  I pretended to be terrified of the knife-wielding Orlando.  I pretended to be amused by the banter of my betters, touched by the plight of an exhausted old man, and fascinated by the ruminations of the melancholy Jaques: 

“…they have their exits and their entrances …”

Rather than merely pretending, though, I decided to find the corner of my brain that really, truly, was intrigued by this speech.  As I sat on the stage – which usually meant sitting in a dirty, frigid puddle, because it never stopped goddamn raining last summer – I let my heavy ragged brown dress fall haphazardly around my booted ankles, and I wondered. 

I wondered about the roles we assign ourselves, and the roles we are assigned by others, and how they differ.  I pondered to what degree we really get to be the directors of the ongoing improv shows known as “our own lives”.  I speculated as to what roles my friends, my family, or my kids might cast me in.  I questioned my interpretation of the roles I already play – mother, scientist, outdoor enthusiast, wife, writer, professor, activist, friend, daughter.  I contemplated what other (astonishing, rewarding, hilarious, shocking) roles I might be capable of playing, were I ever to assign them to myself.

Some of these same questions floated back into my head, as I watched sixteen kid-crafted plays unfurl on stage last week. The participants in the Spring Break camp varied widely in their acting and writing abilities, but I found myself more interested in their intent than in their skill.  What iconic roles did they create and fulfill?  Why did the plays include seven mothers (no, eight – I forgot the mother dragon), and only two fathers?  Why were all the parents (even the dragon) so bland, dysfunctional, and naysaying?

Lizzy was not the only kid whose roles reached far outside the realm of the predictable.  The iconoclastic eleven-year-old daughter of my good friends (whom Lizzy blatantly looks up to) was cast as a delightfully spacey father in Molly’s play, as well as a dashing (if argumentative) Romeo.  Then there was a boy – he looked to be about eleven – who put on a lilac wig and a skirt to play the part of “Pretty Lulu”.  I kind of loved that boy. 

Ever since Robert Rosenthal’s 1964 classic classroom experiment showed that merely telling teachers that some (randomly selected) children had great potential caused actual increases in IQ in those kids, study after study has likewise demonstrated that expectations – and the roles we are assigned based on those expectations – deeply impact our reality.  Just knowing this, and having the tiniest inkling of the terrible injustices that it engenders, chafes and angers me.  If the whole world says you’ve got to play the part of “adorable little girl” or “suspicious black teenager” or “skinny white boy who definitely shouldn’t put on a skirt and jump rope” it’s all too easy to just say, Yeah, sure, that’s who I am.  And… that’s who I’m not.

Over the course of a single airplane journey this winter, Lizzy was off-handedly called “Princess” by three different strangers.  All of them were, I’m sure, entirely well-meaning, but I longed to correct them. That little girl in slightly grimy old jeans is not a princess.  Really.  Trust me on this one.  Clearly, each of these men (they were all men) had badly miscast my kid in their personal stage-plays. 

But, to be fair, perhaps I’d miscast them in my own.  I’d assumed, with a shocking lack of creativity, that Guy #2 was “Bored Fiftyish Male TSA Agent”.   But who was he, really?  What if he also played a secret nighttime role?  Perhaps, mentally, I should have called him, “Princess” too. Yes, I’ve removed my laptop from my carry-on, Princess.  Yes, those are my shoes, thanks, Princess.

Maybe it seems frivolous – or even insulting – to imagine random strangers as clandestine drag queens, but I assure you I don’t intend it that way.  To me, humans are intriguing precisely because each of us can, and does, play so many roles.  My most fascinating and wonderful friends – the ones I long to spend more time with -- tend to be individuals who contain multitudes.  If you’ve worked as a nurse, a shipwright, a stay-at-home-dad, a mathematician and a gardener, you’re probably an interesting person to eat dinner with.  If I’ve seen you as word nerd, apple pie baker, guide-puppy caretaker, computer programmer, hiker, and gay-leather-fetish-gear-wearer, you are all the more human to me. 

“…and one man in his time plays many parts…”

Sixteen kids got up on stage last week, and my optimistic core rejoiced.  Yes, other people will always try to force roles upon us, try to direct us, try to limit us.  But, ultimately, we are all still our own writers, our own directors, and our own actors.   No matter where our name appears on the playbill, we all have many, many roles to play.

[Nameless… wordless… the four-foot tall murderer strode offstage, hoodie flapping at her shins and pigtails askew…]

Moby Whatever

“I’m reading an interesting book,” Jay told me.  “It’s called Railsea.  I think you’d like it.  It’s hard to describe, exactly, but it’s full of allusions to Moby Dick.”

I looked up from my laptop.  I’d been writing.  Ok, no, I’d been thinking about writing, but mostly dinking around on the internet.  “Oh.  Um…”  I hesitated, my ambivalence practically leaking out my ears.  I ought to be eager, I thought.  Why wasn’t I thrilled?  I’m always looking for book recommendations, and my husband was touting this one as fabulously literary.  And -- I’m a literary-type person… aren’t I? 

Or… not.  Oh, I like to think of myself that way.  It’s part of my self-image as Renaissance Woman and Utter Dork.  Moreover, a lot of people seem to assume that I’m wonderfully well-read, given my fancy-pants predilection for ten-dollar words, not to mention my more generalized cerebral nerdery.  But, faced with the prospect of a whole novel’s worth of references to Herman Melville’s greatest work, I was uncomfortably aware that my biblio-intellectual aspirations were more pretense than reality.  

I’ve never read Moby Dick.

This doesn’t seem like such a terrible admission, I suppose.  Although Melville is extolled in the lit-crit world for his writing talent, plenty of other folks agree that he had an even greater talent for inducing catatonia with his 135 chapters about monomania… and whales… and ships… and some more about whales.  So, yeah, I gave up on him -- so what? 

The problem is, my liter-idiocy regarding Melville is just the tip of the whale’s fluke.  A quick perusal of “The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time” – as selected by The Guardian/Observer -- reveals the depths of my shame.  I have not read Don Quixote, although I can make vague references to tilting at windmills.  I also skipped Robinson Crusoe; while I’d like to think I have some sort of clue about wilderness survival, I doubt my strategies would include naming someone “Friday” and converting him to Christianity.  I never got past the first couple of chapters of The Brothers Karamazov or Wuthering Heights, although both mutely torment me from my bookshelves.  I’d rather wade through ice floes on the Yukon River than make any attempt to wade through Pilgrim’s Progress.

I’ve read a few from the list, but I suspect that titles absorbed under duress don’t count for much.  The Scarlet Letter was dreary, to put it mildly, and The Great Gatsby might have been better if not forced into me, page by dull page, in high school English class.  I did get through Emma semi-voluntarily, based only on maternal urging, but (to put it in properly literary terms) it annoyed the crap out of me.  The same is true of almost every example of the genre that I think of as “Uppercrust Twits Obsessing.” Although Pride and Prejudice and its ilk make me desperately grateful to have been born in a time and place without crinolines, arranged marriages, or a need for me to refer to my husband as “Mr. Cable,” I still don’t want to read them.  (I’ll make an exception for Cold Comfort Farm, which is not only a brilliant parody, but also contains the memorable phrase, “You have a simply smashing set of unmentionables.”)

Jay, undaunted by my hesitation, continued touting Railsea.  It was, he elaborated, kind of sci-fi, and kind of steam-punk, and kind of post-apocalyptic.  It was written, he added, for young adults.

Now, that sounded a lot more tempting – and yet, at the same time, more embarrassing.  I’m forty.  I have a PhD and a career and all that.  Shouldn’t I want to read books that are intended for honest-to-goodness grownups, and that don’t involve wizards, spaceships, androids, or elves?

In the same vein, I’m not sure that the titles that I can wholeheartedly endorse from among the “100 Greatest” offer a more flattering reflection of my acumen than those that I can’t.  The stories I’ve enjoyed seem to be mostly children’s tales, satires, or farces – not a combination that speaks well of my intellectual prowess.  Sure, I loved The Lord of the Rings – who wouldn’t?  It has wizards AND elves!  I also enjoyed Gulliver’s Travels, Tom Jones, The BFG, Charlotte’s Web, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Little Women, Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows, Catcher in the Rye, and Lord of the Flies.  Some of these I’ve loved more than once, and some I’ve already shared with my six-years-olds – but that doesn’t exactly confer genius status upon me, or qualify me to write novels of my own.

Writing.  Yes.  That.  The reality of my limited reading is all the more undermining because I so desperately want to write, and always have.  These days, I foist page upon page and chapter upon chapter of unpublished dross on the patient members of my writers’ group.  But even at the age of seven, I fancied myself a novelist when I won ten dollars (ten whole nineteen-eighty dollars!) from Huntington Public Library for Freddy Goes to a Baseball Game.  Three years later, I conned my poor mother into copy-typing almost a hundred pages of Summer Search, a tale of mystery, riddles, and adventure enjoyed by a set of not particularly intrepid fraternal twins. (Does that count as real-life foreshadowing?). 

For much of my childhood, books didn’t merely interest me, they consumed me.  I knew all the idiosyncratic rabbit-vocabulary in Watership Down, and I wept for heroic Justin in The Rats of NIMH, even though he was fictional…. and, you know, a rat.  I explored Pern on dragonback.  I visited countless other planets, and at least one neutron star, thanks to Robert Forward. 

I was as omnivorous as I was voracious.  I didn’t stick to “good” books.  Sometimes, I deigned to even touch them.  I tested out Nancy Drew before realizing that every mystery was pretty much the same.  I spent some time with Piers Anthony and Jean Auel before stumbling out, befuddled and chagrinned, on the other side of puberty.  But along the way, I found Jane Yolen.  I dug into Lois Lowry.  I spend days – weeks! – on Wildcat Island, and traveled through time with dangerously liberal Victorian E. Nesbit.  I discovered the ABCs of science fiction -- Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke -- and many more, less well known but equally visionary.  I plunged into the realms of my parents’ bookshelves, and kept myself nightmare-enhanced with Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Lolita.  Although more prone to the fanciful than the factual, I hit the nonfiction shelves long enough to meet Anne Frank and Stephen Hawking, and to educate myself about ancient Sumerian counting systems, edible wild plants, and innovative methods of cryptography. 

“I think you’d like Railsea,” Jay reiterated, then phlegmatically left it at that.

Ok.  Fine.  What was this book all about, anyhow?  I was already wasting time on line; I looked it up.

The novel, it seemed, was about moletrains.  And pirates.  It was about a young man named Sham Yes ap Soorap, and a one-armed woman with a vengeance-quest against a massive ivory-colored moldywarpe, and a discovery that just might turn an intricately imagined world inside-out.  This sounded not in the least bit literary, and immensely appealing – for its sheer weirdness, if nothing else.  

Upon reflection, it occurred to me that I am not actually anti-intellectual in my choices of reading material, but merely just as omnivorous as an adult as I was as a child.  Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned that I truly enjoy Shakespeare and Dickens, and I’ve relished a few others from that darned 100: Frankenstein, David Copperfield Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Call of the Wild, A Passage to India, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, and On the Road.  On the other hand, I’ve also learned that I like Dave Barry, Bill Bryson, Dan Savage, George Martin, Terry Pratchett, Suzanne Collins, and a whole host of others who definitely don’t make it onto any highfalutin lists.  Many of them write, ostensibly, for children.  Most of the poetry I’ve read – not just in the first two decades of my life, but in the latter two as well -- was written by Shel Silverstein.

But – maybe that’s ok.  Young adult fiction, I realized, is written by writers who are at least as “real” as Herman Melville, and sometimes a great deal more so.  In the past few months, I’ve dived wholeheartedly into a dark comedy about a boy who goes on an epic quest while dying of mad cow disease; a gritty tale of children in a bleak future who strip vast beached tankers for scrap; a fanciful imagining of a semi-alive genetically engineered flying leviathan; an entire retelling of the Greek myths from the perspective of a teenager who discovers he’s one of Poseidon’s half-human bastards; the tangled adventures of a girl who has the power to read characters into and out of printed pages… oh, and so many more.  Yes, these are kids’ books.  I would love to be able to write half as well as their authors.  

Besides, deep down, I know that sticking to the esteemed ought-to-reads would, for me, destroy the decadent bliss of the sport.  Really, isn’t the joyful immersion what it’s all about?  The edification is only a byproduct.  It’s optional.  It’s the reading itself that spins words from the page, spins my brain, spins my galaxy, and makes me want to write.  And write.  And write.

There are a few classics on the Guardian’s list that I really would like to get to – given world enough, and time.  I will read them one day.  I really will.  In the meantime, though, I read Railsea.

It was quirky, wildly creative, and highly entertaining.  It made me think.  It helped me write.  It did, in fact, fairly wallow in Moby Dick references, allusions, motifs, and themes – but it did not foster in me any particular desire to crack open that classic, ever.  And… I’m just fine with that.

Sorry, Melville, but everything’s copacetic. Now, pardon me while I go looking for a Top 100 list that includes a whole lot of centaurs, quasars, subterranean kingdoms, and something containing the phrase, “You have a simply smashing set of unmentionables.”