When I went to “Pass Over,” my first Broadway show after 18 months of longing, the performers were unmasked in every sense of the word. In certain cases, a return to what came before is not even desirable.ĪS WE COME BACK to the theater with our masks on, I find myself thinking about covered-up smiles. A neat resolution, a neat return to the old person, the old status quo, is often not possible. But there are so many illnesses that offer an incomplete recovery, and give us, instead, a messy in-between state of being to contend with, whether we’re talking about paralysis, pandemics, or even social upheavals. Our cultural preference is, I think, for an illness narrative that offers a complete return to health in the last chapter - an apotheosis - the chronic condition banished to the shadows. The chronic illness narrative is one that many of us would rather not wrap our minds around. But I decided that the disappointing, and the chronic, was worth investigating, partly because it’s so often invisible in a culture that prefers neat arcs. I resisted writing about Bell’s palsy for many years because it seemed to belong to the land of the private, the disappointing, rather than the narrative structure I was used to - which has a catharsis in the third act. But looking in the mirror, unmasked, is another method, which I finally tried, in the form of writing about my experience. Denial is one method of grappling with an in-between state, and I used it well for many years. I know how dislocating, and disappointing that can be. The realization that one is dealing with a chronic condition rather than a temporary one is painful. But for the unlucky minority that I was in, there was a slow and uncertain path to moving facial muscles again, and for years, an unfamiliar person stared back at me in the mirror.Īfter my diagnosis, the doctor told me I’d most likely be better in only a couple of months. “No,” I said, “my face is paralyzed.” Chagrined, he quietly took my photo and the next dazzler in line on the red carpet stepped forward.įOR MOST people with Bell’s palsy, relief comes relatively quickly, the vast majority recovering their smiles in three months. When I went to a photo shoot to celebrate the Tony nominees, a phalanx of photographers shouted at me, “Smile!” When I tried and failed, one photographer looked up from his camera at me and said, “What’s wrong with you? Can’t you smile for your Tony Award?” A month earlier, after giving birth to twins, I’d been diagnosed with Bell’s palsy, a paralysis of the seventh cranial nerve. I never expected that one day, during a pandemic, we would all come to the theater masked.Ībout a decade ago, I was nominated for a Tony Award for my play “In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play.” I was thrilled with the news, but you wouldn’t have known it from looking at my face. I didn’t want to be an opaque, judging playwright at auditions I wanted to mirror the actors’ joy, or sadness, and partake of the strange communion between performers and their first audience. Even writers, the least performative of the lot, smile. Unless we are performers in a tragedy, we put on some glitter and we sail out into the night, toward the theater district. We smile, to quote Nat King Cole, even when our hearts are breaking.
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