I've known Marilee Talkington for two years, and she is an incredible force to be reckoned with. She has a commanding presence (have you seen her biceps?), and she has this sexy, self deprecating humor that makes the room buzz with laughter and warmth. Marilee and I have talked theater; we've talked grad school and career choices; we've talked romance and lovers; we've talked great triumphs and sorrowful failures. But we've never once talked about her vision.
Until now. Here we are in a rehearsal room with a script she has written with Justin Quinn Pelegano, and we're faced with the incredibly intimate task of peeling back layer after layer of the script, Marilee's life, and the complicated overlapping landscape of the two.
How do you approach a text that has come directly from the inner stirrings of an actor's heart, and say to her -- "nice, but try it again with less irony this time"?
Not an easy thing to open yourself up to material that, although it's on the page, and although you penned it yourself, is rich and fraught with emotions. Material that cannot offer an answer, or a pretty bow all neatly tied up at the end -- "that was hard, but now I've solved everything and all of my vision has been restored." Material that is still living inside of you now, whose source you wrestle with daily.
Marilee, generous, gracious, and well trained MFA toting actor that she is, always takes a note. She opens herself up to finding a new color, a new way into a scene or descriptive passage.
I've taken to calling the Marilee character, "Narrator," because that can sometimes allow a thumb nail's worth of distance between who Marilee is in real life and who she is on stage. All theater is a construction, of course. No "mirror to reality" here -- just our construction of images, sounds, and gestures, compiled together. As the incredible performance artist Guillermo Gomez Pena says in his book DANGEROUS BORDER CROSSERS, performance is not "a mirror, but the actual moment in which the mirror is shattered."
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Lucky enough to know Marilee as a friend, I once asked her about the nature of her limited sight since, well, she seemed so
ReplyDeleteunimpaired by it. I listened as she told me of the tiny black circle that appeared in the middle of her vision when she was little--a small and almost harmless dot back then--now grown to a circle of blackness big enough to leave her with only peripheral sight. It won't stop there; it will keep enlarging until it eclipses her visual world. "I'll eventually be in total darkness," she said, and I couldn't detect a hint of wavering in her voice. I wondered, in the face of such a cold hard finality, how long did it take her to find that unwavering voice? I also remember being a little in awe of her bravery.
In case it's not apparent, I'm really looking forward to seeing this play!
A.