Crop Motif

Excerpt:

I would wonder if I were a sociopath, but it was really that I hadn’t found alcohol yet, at least not in earnest. But that’s a less interesting part of the story, especially as it relates to a dead, revered, white male playwright and the words he wrote which freed me.

My favorite play of his is Fool for Love. It’s about incest. A lot of his work is. This play romanticizes it the way Game of Thrones did. Maybe this preference reveals my own narcissism, how I only swipe right on people who look exactly like me. How much safer I feel when the person is of me somehow, like all my shame is erased if shared or understood. How I do not have to hide my fragments. I always do with strangers. Strangers being (pl. n.) people who look or act strange; who don’t understand addiction or rapture or multiethnic emptiness.

My fiancé called me orange, called me spicy, made me call him Papi when he spanked me to make him stop. He understood the emptiness, but his process for grappling was different. I played along; told myself it was okay because they were his demons, too. When we role-played a border patrol agent and immigrant, I let him take pictures of me in a “wife-beater” and suspenders (why suspenders?), my bulging brown eyes looking away from the camera and dark brown lip liner framing my fake smile.

I won an award for my performance of Shelly in Shepard’s Buried Child, a play about a family’s denial of the worst shame a family can have. But it’s also about denial of the self, the grip of generational trauma, about isolation and rejection and the desire to be seen. It’s about America’s crop motifs. It’s about dicks. On stage during the high school one-act festival, I washed an ear of corn like a hand job. It said to in the script. Or at least that’s how my teenage-hormones-existing-solely-for-the-male-gaze read it. The imagery was purposeful, but maybe I could have let that be enough.

Later in the play, a character sticks his dirty fingers in my mouth after telling me to get on my knees. Then a blackout. The next morning I’m spending quality time with his father, friendly and relaxed, determined to know my partner’s family, his childhood, his cracks. As a teenager whose worst sexual assaults were ahead of her, I saw this tone shift as evidence of Shepard’s ethos. Shelly existed in this new moment as another person entirely, the core of her personality the same; her life experiences a linear hero’s journey, but who she was because of it always shifting. There was a freedom, an irreverence. Watch her drink beef bouillon after proclaiming herself a vegetarian like I did. Watch her not wince at a man’s touch hours after assault by another. If we are nothing but our choices, but nothing of them either, then our past neither dictates nor delivers us. We are our authentic feelings as they pass. We are the experience.

The door is amplified with microphones and a bass drum hidden in the frame so that each time an actor slams it, the door booms loud and long. (Fool for Love, 26).

Of course, what I lost in translation from script to teenage brain was subtext. Maybe the judges didn’t catch it, but I’d missed the emotions that arise from dishonesty; the same emotions gripping me in the years after. I projected the unencumbered woman, shamefully hypocritical but unbothered by its announcement. I didn’t see the mirror already there: that Shelly was faking all of it. Choosing the moments when we let the mask slip is one of the first lessons in acting school, how much more powerful it is to work to conceal. When the audience sees us fight for something internal, we become real to them. External action captivates us, and Shepard was undeniably gifted at dodging the postmodern stagnation-on-stage problem, but the internal is always the more riveting.