She composes a text message. I’m trying not to be hurt that you communicated with your father but not with me. Speaking of not being passive-aggressive, that is not passive-aggressive, it is merely the truest thing she can say about her feelings right at the moment. But it certainly sounds passive-aggressive, doesn’t it? She deletes it.
Can’t you just tell me where you are?
Deletes.
Can’t you just tell me what happened?
Deletes.
I love you.
Man, that really sounds passive-aggressive. Deletes.
Thank you for communicating with your father. I appreciate it.
Sends.
She cleans the kitchen, vacuums the apartment, does a load of laundry, alphabetizes her spices—well, not the last, but otherwise putters around, not merely to distract herself from worrying about Mette but also to delay working on her Joan play. Eventually the rising tide of self-disgust crests the grand dike of avoidance and she turns toward her desk—but first she has to brew another cup of tea, honey, lemon, remember that woman in the deli, imitate her grimace, etc—she advances on her desk—but now she needs to take a dump, hot liquids do this to her—she marches to her desk, boots up, booties down, opens the file containing her latest batch of notes, reminders, admonitions, half-baked ideas.
Saskia wants to become a director. Go, 8 percent!
Okay, complaining is fun, but that figure applies only to television and film. Saskia wants to direct her own play, off- or off-off-Broadway, or really, anywhere short of the horizon in that famous New Yorker cover. Among off-Broadway plays during the last five years, 33 percent have been directed by women and 30 percent have been written by women. As for plays written and directed by the same woman, who knows? Saskia would bet it’s rare, because directing your own play is sort of a big-swinging-dick thing to do. But why should she even think that? What socially conditioned, shrinking-violet, who-me instinct overcomes her at moments like this? Of course she wants to direct her own play! Take your stinking paws off it, you damned dirty ape! She’s rewriting the latest draft and there’s a woman who’s directed her twice in the past who’s just become Artistic Director of an off-off theater in SoHo, and this woman has expressed interest, and has not immediately nixed the idea of Saskia directing, so . . .
Anyway, she’s had an interest in Joan of Arc ever since she was a lonely and strange thirteen-year-old. Maybe because Joan was a lonely and strange thirteen-year-old when the Archangel Michael first assured her, against all the available evidence, that she was an important person. Or maybe because Joan idolized a distant father figure, otherwise known as the Dauphin of France, who eventually betrayed her. So here’s the thing, don’t laugh—Saskia is writing it as a mystery play. Not as in The Real Inspector Hound, but as in the kind of play performed by English craft guilds on decorated wagons during religious festivals in the fifteenth century, the older actors doing Herod and the Almighty, the younger ones Jesus and Lazarus, boys cross-dressing for Mary, both Madonna and whore, Eve, etc. Saskia first tried writing her play in the same mix of clunky, homespun stanza styles that the original mysteries used, for example the Chester stanza, which might be her favorite for sheer galumphing balladry:
All peace to you that be present,
And hearken now with good intent,
How Joan away from home is went
With all her company.
Attendants few, of small renown,
Avoiding hostile field and town,
Asleep in woods, with stars their crown,
The Dauphin gone to see.
But no matter how much she tinkered, it came off sounding hokey, like one of those coastal-city Christmas revels with mummers and wassail and figgy pudding. She’s currently rewriting the whole play in irregular four-beat couplets, the simplest of the medieval forms, with abundant use of half rhymes:
Jean de Metz:
Eleven nights on horse we rode
Through Lenten fields not yet plowed.
The frozen stubble made weary bed
For men and girl alike, but the Maid
Tired not, nor feared anything, not even
The soldiers with her who might be forgiven
For thoughts impure while lying by her,
But the wonder was, none sought to try her,
Nor ever felt a natural lust
Which alone seemed miraculous.
She first conceived the idea of a mystery play six or seven years ago when she briefly dated an older woman who’d been flatteringly pursuing her for months, an NYU professor and poet born and raised in Budapest. This woman took her one evening to the Hungarian House on the Upper East Side to see a Genesis mystery play that had been discovered a few years previously in some Transylvanian castle’s closet, and had already been staged in Budapest to great acclaim (probably 98 percent on the paradicsom-meter). The thing was in Hungarian, mind you, so Saskia didn’t understand a word, but it was the best night at the theater she’d had in ages. Much of the story could be followed from emblematic action and props: Adam and Eve wore fig leaves, God the Father looked like Dumbledore (or vice versa), the snake spoke with a hiss, the luscious apple was straight out of Snow White (or vice versa), and so on. The actors stood hieratically, facing the audience wide-eyed and without expression, sometimes raising one hand when they spoke, as if to say “Hear me,” or adopting a strange pose and freezing, as if to signal, “This is my intention,” or “This
