Audition Katie Kitamura Quotes

There are always two stories taking place at once, the narrative inside the play and the narrative around it, and the boundary between the two is more porous than you might think, that is both the danger and the excitement of the performance.

It had been a heedless moment. I had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.

More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.

This was undoubtedly because, for the first time in many years, I saw our marriage for what it really was, something fragile that could still be tarnished or lost.

You’re not cheating on me again, are you? No, I whispered at once, and I was a little frightened as I said it. He nodded and said, Forget I mentioned it, and opened the door for me and we stepped out.

I looked across at Tomas and I knew he was not convinced, that some part of him wished to stay inside the performance, inside the fantasy, I could see the thought moving through his head and nearly settling, what was a family if not a shared delusion, a mutual construction?

People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn’t a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.

But then I also thought that if ever an actor had lost sight of the shore then it was this one, he had stumbled deep into the interior, and I wondered if he worried that he would never find his way out, if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.

Because in fact we don’t want to see the thing itself, on a screen or on a stage, we don’t want to see actual pain or suffering or death, but its representation. Our awareness of the performance is what allows us to enjoy the emotion, to creep close to it and breathe in its atmosphere, performance allows this dangerous proximity.

I knew that what Tomas—what the waiter, and the middle-aged couple sitting at the nearby table, what they had all been misled by was the current of intensity running between Xavier and me. Its source was an imbalance of want. Two people who want the same thing will never generate the same intensity as two people who want different things, or one person who wants into an absence, a void—as was in fact the case with Xavier, who wanted something from me that I could not give. More than that—he wanted something that I could not begin to fathom, a desire with which it felt dangerous to collude or to involve myself.

It seemed an unlikely choice, this large establishment in the financial district, so that I stood outside and checked the address, the mane of the restaurant, I wondered if I had made a mistake. And around me the waiting darkness.

the most obvious explanation is often also the correct one.

I need to go, I said to Xavier, and before he could reply I rose to my feet and stepped back from the table, I had nothing else to say, I could only repeat, I need

But never mind about his love life—we had known Said for many years and it was always the same thing, too dull to relate much less live through, I didn’t know how he did it—how is the new work?

After that day in the restaurant, things were never entirely the same between Tomas and me. It wasn’t a façade or a pretense that suddenly fell away—our marriage was much more than mere surface or appearance—it was the substance of our relationship itself, guarded by a shared reality, that changed. You pull at the ropes tied to the statue, you pull and nothing happens, and then you pull and you pull again and the whole thing topples over.

It was in the aftermath of the miscarriage that the affairs began in earnest. They were usually brief, they never threatened to encroach upon our marriage, although at times they could take me by surprise, I could become more absorbed than I intended. They were an expression of restlessness rather than discontent, of that I was certain. Still, it became increasingly difficult to find my way back to Tomas, and I was aware that the situation was becoming fraught, the apparatus of our marriage growing rickety, things could not continue in this way. I assumed Tomas knew about the affairs, perhaps some part of me was waiting for him to say something, to intervene, perhaps some part of me needed him to.

But it did, first for a week, and then for a month, and then for so long that it became habit and routine, and in that small act of domesticity, I recommitted myself to the marriage. It was banal, indisputably bourgeois, the coffee cups and the stupid pastries—but that was almost the point. To return to that ordinary life, with its coziness and safety, all those things that are so easy to despise and dismiss. In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again. At least for a time.

But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse.

Or perhaps he was only acting out. Perhaps it was only that, and less than I thought it was. Can things be unsaid and undone, can the clock run both ways, backward and forward, can the story unspool in both directions?

The play closed. Those final performances were empty, I was only going through the motions, everyone around me and in the audience could tell. I had wrung the thing dry. And yet when it was over, I still felt its absence.

Here, it is possible to be two things at once. Not a splitting of personality or psyche, but the natural superimposition of one mind on top of another mind. In the space between them, a performance becomes possible. You observe yourself, you watch yourself act, you hear yourself speak, a line that is articulated and then articulated again, and the meaning that is produced is at once entirely real—as it is experienced on stage, as it is experienced by the audience—and also the predictable result of your craft, the choices you have made, the control that cedes freedom.

Always to be seen, in those days it was almost an end in itself, because it was in being seen that I could say for certain that I existed, that my limbs were real as I touched them, that my being was intact as it peered out into the world. A stay against the turbulence within me—that was, perhaps, the purpose of all this.

I know that Xavier is seeking the same thing, and it is possible he has already found it. To know that he exists to the world, and in the world, in a continual sequence of recognition. But such things do not last, not in the way that he thinks. The recognition comes and goes, too many parts—those onstage and in life—don’t endure, and once they are gone, their logic is impossible to regain. Mostly, there is only the emptiness they leave behind.

...they were strongly attracted to each other, in their mutual admiration, their curiosity, but at the same time there was an edge of rivalry between them that had the potential to flare into open antagonism, it was the nature of the work and its rapid, temporary intimacies.

More and more often, I was surprised by the person in the mirror, it was not the lines at my mouth or the hollowness around my eyes, it was the lag in recognition that was the most troubling, the brief moment when I looked in the mirror and did not know who I was.

I was used to people armed with tremendous will, I was frequently with people whose job consists of imposing their reality upon the world. But now, as he seemed to shrink into himself in a manner subdued and uncertain, I wondered if in the end he was not one of these people, and did not truly know what he wanted from me.

I had entered the stage of life where there is a certain amount of immutability, in middle age, change is experienced primarily as a kind of attrition.

would breed the kind of desire that would turn upon itself, too much to be useful to him, I had known such men and women.

he was handsome, perhaps even excessively so—his face

We were silent as we moved across the densely carpeted lobby, our footsteps muffled so that we made no sound, it was as if we had entered another world.

I had reverted to the most distant version of myself, the version that sounded like a bank manager or hotel concierge,

I fell regrettably in between roles, neither young enough to be romantic quarry nor prone to any maternal feeling.

And so, in addition to the story of the play itself, the narrative that was being enacted by Josie and Clarice, I was also observing the drama between the two women, who at times circled each other in the manner of prizefighters, wary and in a posture of constant assessment.

It was only later that I discovered the source of the performance’s strength, which is the fact that it is no performance at all. That confusion that you see on-screen is completely real. You are looking at a man lost, with no sense of what the story is, trapped inside the scene, with the camera lens staring at him, you are watching a man who is seeing his life and his career drift away.

I had the sense that I was still too much clinging to the shore.

And later still, there were parts that consumed me, so that I could say the life that was performed, on a set or in the theater, could at times feel more real to me than my actual life.

But it was also a danger for a person of my disposition, for whom the managing of these borders was not always easy.

the performance I had experienced the first and even second time I watched the film remained extant, and I thought that it was true that a performance existed in the space between the work and the audience, that it existed,

I barely knew what the performance was for, what form it took or what purpose it served, but I understood even then that it was a performance of the highest order.

I saw that he was absorbed in, or had been absorbed by, the role of the assistant, that he was performing a part he had studied carefully, just as he had presumably studied the part of my long-estranged son. Like an actor moving on in the wake of a disastrous audition, shedding the skin of a role for which he had not been destined, and seeking out the next opportunity.

He had a surprising air of competence, completely at odds with the personality he had exhibited before, again I thought he was like another person entirely.

I opened the door to the theater too, so that he entered first and I saw again how the attention in the room moved toward him at once.

Anne had recognized in Xavier an archetypal son. He fell into the role, performing filial affection and duty, creating an atmosphere that Anne had been compelled to name, if only unconsciously and indirectly.

Xavier gave good son. He loved the part of it, he longed for the role, that was why he had contacted me in the first place. He was now giving good son to Anne, and she was responding, and through that mutuality a membrane had formed around them. I moved down the aisle, away from them, and stared at the empty stage.

at one point Clarice had pulled me aside and told me that the play was not about what she had thought it was about, that it was better, subtle and more mysterious.

You can make it your own, she said. It doesn’t need to be true to my vision. But it needs to be true.

But although Xavier was so evidently at home, he did not behave as if he were actually in his own home, he never inhabited the space as someone who had previously inhabited the space might do.

In the end, it didn’t matter, because I felt pain and then I was bleeding, and when I talked to other women they would say they knew or they intuited that something wasn’t right, that you miscarry because something is wrong with the baby, but I didn’t know and I didn’t intuit anything, because this was the only time in my entire life that I would be pregnant in this way, for this long, that my body would carry another body.

I was made to understand that it had been a long time since I had performed even so small an act of kindness.

it’s something that happens every time I prepare for a role. In some ways the part is only working if I lose sight of the shore. But at the same time, it’s important to be able to come out the other side, you have to be able to come up for air. Otherwise, you won’t survive.

He sounded thoroughly rational, not at all like the kind of person who could have believed so fervently in a fantasy, let alone acted on it.

And while you might imagine—and sometimes even I could misremember the truth of how those eight or nine weeks passed—that it was a period of renewal, or hope, or whatever other words you might associate with the springtime of reproduction, even accidental and unintended reproduction, in fact it was something rather different, a remarkably cagey period between the two of us, when neither of us was entirely straightforward, entirely honest, about our feelings and desires, either with each other or with ourselves.

the truth was I had almost no idea what she was talking about, it was all a way of talking rather than talking itself.

Like all women, I had once been expert at negotiating the balance between the demands of courtesy and the demands of expectation. Expectation, which I knew to be a debt that would at some point have to be paid, in one form or another.