Staging Direction
(1)
“Why don’t you have a notebook out?”
“It’s not my style to write notes after the intake.”
“Well, I thought about it in the waiting room today.”
“How you would stage it?”
“Yes.”
“-”
“I imagine a thousand pins through the skin of each audience member, holding them to their seats. They would be seated all around the stage, and below, and above the firmament that made the walls, and they would be pinned in place. They would have just enough space to breathe.”
“Wouldn’t that be uncomfortable?”
“Not once the pinpricks became their new normal. Have you ever swum in a lake while the sky poured rain? Felt the crash of millions of droplets of water from above and below, until you had no sense of self or other? I want that. I want them to truly experience witnessing.”
“What does it mean to witness?”
“A reduction of self. To become a wall. Most audience members are accustomed to being lamps, but not walls.”
“Lamps?”
“Illuminating.”
“I see.”
(2)
“What precisely would you want to stage?”
“A man in a cement cell. He is a paper son. He has been kept there for thirty days. He is sure his wife in China has already given birth to their baby; he secretly hopes and knows that it is a daughter, even though that would kill their family name, but he’s already done that, hasn’t he? By becoming a paper son, by purchasing the name and papers of a boy drowned at sea. But he cannot communicate to her until he gets through immigration. He is scratching his former name into the wall—risky move, but the guards can’t read Chinese—and then a poem taught to him by his father, left behind to grow old and die in the fishing village. Clawing words into walls is the only way he knows who he truly is. He scratches his new name. His fingers bleed. He squats and rests and then sits and rests. He paces. Before coming to America, he could not have fathomed that sitting and squatting and resting and pacing would be so interminable, so exhausting, but they are. Surrounding him are other men, similar to him, but without faces. None know that even if they get through, they won’t be seeing their wives or children for years.”
“Is this man someone important to you?”
“Of course, he's the protagonist of my play.”
“But who is he? Who is the actor, or who is the character? Does he have a name, or significance to you?”
“He has two names. A third forthcoming —they’ll give him an English name at immigration. He is significant because he is a man.”
“A man?”
“A person. A living human being. He is onstage; why question his significance? No insignificant thing could inhabit a stage. That's just how plays work.”
“I am sure you are correct. But theater isn’t my strong suit, I apologize.”
“No worries. It took me time to see it the right way too.”
(3)
“Would you want it to be open to the public? It is something you would want to share with the world, or would you keep it a private event?”
“-”
“Your mother, how is she?”
“-”
(4)
“Do you suppose that man is a relative of yours? Would you mind telling me the story of how you came to be here in America?”
“My father was accepted into a PhD program in electrical engineering at the University of Kansas. My mother was a master’s student in immunology. They met at a Chinese restaurant that all the Asian students went to. They drunkenly confessed their undying love for one another three months later at the same restaurant, over greasy plates of beef and broccoli and tumblers of 90-proof rice wine, got green cards through the university, and then had me. Boom. Instant citizen.”
“I see. I looked up the term ‘paper son’ after our last session and wondered if you were attempting to imagine the story of your family’s immigration here.”
“I read about it. My ex told me that that was how his family got here. It’s much more romantic and definitively more theatrical than my own story. In fact, I made up that last bit about my parents. I have no idea how they fell in love, if they’ve ever been in love, if they are in love now. Relationships just exist where I’m coming from. There’s no passion.”
“Do you feel the same about your own?”
“I’m single, aren’t I?”
(5)
“So, how would you stage it?”
“I would want a fairly bare principal set. A lot of space for interpretation. Actors would move around these pale crates to create the illusion of settings; the stage in a round. The man would enter, opposite to the women—I’m thinking downstage right—though if it’s in a round, that doesn’t mean much. The southeast corner. Lights go up just as he walks in—no, they go up a moment before. For an achingly strange moment, the women are onstage alone. An older woman and a younger woman. They’re dressed simply in plain shifts, to exaggerate their relationship and how they could be anyone, except they couldn’t be anyone because they are Asian and frustratingly, eternally foreign. They don’t belong onstage. But they resist; they are. And they wait, except the man forgets to enter, or he forgets his entrance. He comes in from the northwest corner instead of the southeast and bumps right into the two women, and they try to play it off because there is an audience watching all around them. But the younger woman forgets her first line, and then her second, and the man’s body falls to the floor—an unnatural human scrawl—and he can’t get back up, and the older woman doesn’t know how to call for help anymore and then she goes weak and limp and her body stains the ground too—”
“-”
“-”
“There are tissues to your right.”
“I don’t usually cry.”
“If it’s time to cry, cry.”
(6)
“I’m sorry. I have to cancel this week.”
“Just let me know when you can reschedule.”
(7)
(8)
(9)
“It’s been a few weeks. How are you? How are your parents?”
“Settled. There wasn’t any brain activity left in my mother. I signed the DNR and let the doctors pull the plug. My father’s back at the nursing home now.”
“-”
“You haven’t asked how I’d like to stage it.”
“If that’s what you’d like to talk about. It’s your hour. But no need to force it.”
“This is how I would stage it: the audience in a round, all eyes on the stage. The lights would come on; the younger woman would be onstage, four crates boxing her into an even smaller stage at the center. She would sway, pendulate, slowly towards the floor, before she lays her body down. The man would come in at the southeast corner; the woman at the northwest. They would slowly approach, move the boxes away. Pull her up. Wordless. A pre-verbal lullaby spilling from their lips until she began to hum with them too. And they would embrace.”
“-”
“-”
“-”
“-”
Bronte Lim (@BronteLim) was born and raised in Burnaby, British Columbia, to immigrant parents who accidentally gave her a literary name. She graduated with honors from Harvard, majoring in English and minoring in Chemistry. She works as a researcher and writer and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.