So in effect it was just the four of them—Saskia, her mother, Bill, and the baby—and for fifteen months it formed enough of an idyll that no one would ever have made a movie out of it. The year of living somnolently.
But a gal has a brain. And too much timelessness starts to look like death. So once Mette was stumbling around upright and burbling in code, Saskia got a part-time job at a coffee roaster for the money and joined the Shakespeare Duffers for the grins. For the next three years she did the sort of thing wannabe actors do when they live near a little college town and can’t go anywhere because they have a young child and no money. She showed up at every piddling audition she saw posted and got used to making a fool of herself. She looked at it this way: an actor, ideally, is an empty vessel filled with inspiration, or in other words, a holy fool. So she was a fool in training. There was a line from Love’s Labour’s Lost that she ritually said to herself before entering an audition, to summon luck. Berowne is speaking to his king after they’ve put on a courtly masque and failed spectacularly. They’re about to present a second theatrical effort to the same women who mocked the first, and the king says, with endearing boyish pathos, “They will shame us.” To which Berowne responds, “We are shame-proof, my lord.”
For its size, Ithaca had a lot of theater and filmmaking going on—student films at Ithaca College and Cornell, one semi-professional theater of decent repute, one mostly amateur company of no fixed abode, plus, in the summer, Shakespeare alfresco in the Cornell Plantations and a more commercial enterprise (Guys and Dolls, The Crucible, etc) housed in a repurposed airplane hangar built back when airplanes had more than two wings. In addition, there were several small production companies doing documentaries, commercials, HR training films, and the occasional short narrative fledged with its creators’ hopes of Robin Hooding some bull’s-eye at Sundance, Berlin, New York, you name it.
She remembers her first audition, for a student film at Ithaca College, a pink basement room inhabited by two giggling nerds (director and writer), and a lifeless page of stoned dialogue about some betrayal. She couldn’t summon up a thing except embarrassment, which the nerds, to their credit, figured out in under a minute. Other early auditions have gummed together in her memory. There were stages with dazzling lights in her eyes, offices with comfy chairs and a glass of water, long readings and brutally short ones, asshole directors and kind directors and clueless, insecure directors. Meanwhile, she did more Shakespeare—ironic that the only work she could get at first was with the immortal Bard—although the long-entrenched regulars of the company (speaking of immortal) continued to take most of the best parts. Still, she landed Hermia in Midsummer Night’s Dream, probably because for once, here was an actress hilariously short enough for all the dwarf jokes to make sense.
She learned how to be a bigger and better fool. She took a Meisner workshop, which helped her to stay true in the moment. In one of the showcases she performed a twelve-minute playlet with her favorite fellow attendee—bald, big-browed Paul; the scene was a bitter marital argument about a dead son—and she felt it lift off in front of the audience, she could see that Paul felt it, too, and they mentally joined hands and flew out the window. Like Wendy and Peter, they could keep flying so long as the audience kept thinking, You can fly. All her life, she had worried that she was too self-absorbed (have you ever noticed, by the way, that no man ever worries about this?) but this felt like a profligate sharing. It felt shame-proof.
But you’re only a good actor until your good scene ends. Then it’s back to being a fool. She started to land a few parts. And she had to learn, as all actors must, how to keep searching for something true in the succession of false moments of a bad script. (Who knew that not every writer out there is as good as Shakespeare?) This was particularly true with regard to the student films. There was one about cutting, for example, in which—milestone!—she played the lead. That being said, her humble goal ever since has been never to recall a single second of it. In her last year in Ithaca she had small roles in five of the nine plays put on by the second-best non-university-affiliated theater in town, which she liked to refer to by the Marquez-y name MACONFA—Mostly Amateur Company Of No Fixed Abode—although its official name was The Other Shoe. They rented out different venues for different productions, depending on availability and cost. The artistic director, Jules, was a forty-five-year-old woman who’d done some theater in New York but disliked the city—she’d grown up in a Nebraska town whose only claim to fame was that in 1936 a tornado destroyed every standing structure in it—and had moved to Ithaca when her partner landed a job in the Cornell chemistry department. Eight months later she got dumped when said partner moved in with one of the professors on the hiring committee. Turned out the two women had been carrying on a torrid affair for years at conferences around the country. (A joke not to make to Jules: “Talk about chemistry!”)
Jules figured that the way to compete with the more established theater in town was to be adventuresome and high-concept. The Other Shoe’s much lower production costs made it practicable to throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what stuck. So in the
