Show #4
Saturday, September 14: 9 pm
While waiting in line for the late
show, I couldn't stop thinking about the Grocer. I'm a sucker for
metatextual horror, so a story about a man who possesses a script outlining his
future, which he must obey against his will, draws me like a moth to
a flame. I found myself wishing I had found the patience to wait for the
1:1 to end so I could continue his story, and resolved to remedy the
situation first thing.
Well, second thing, actually. First, I
needed to lead Shawn to Romola, because he insisted that he was incapable
of finding her on his own, and I really wanted to be able to talk about
her. So straight out of the lift, I led him to the saloon, where she
was talking to the barman. This time, she was played by Katie Lusby,
and the prospect of seeing a third version of Romola was a very
enticing one – but we had a semi-unspoken agreement to never
follow the same character at the same time, so I left. Besides, I
had a Grocer to catch.
I found the Grocer (Julian Stolzenberg,
same as the previous show) in his store, polishing cans of peas. It
wasn't long before Romola (with Shawn in tow) wandered in, which
threw me for a loop. This didn't happen before – we went straight
from the saloon to the gates. But no matter – I get to follow the
grocer and see a new Romola scene. I'm a happy guy.
Shortly thereafter, I became slightly
less happy. Badlands Jack came in and tried to steal the script, and
I realized that I was at the exact point I had come in a couple of
hours earlier, with the same actor playing the role. It was all
going to be a repeat. But I still wanted to see how it continued, so
I stuck around. When he brought me to the drugstore, I was pleased
to see that Sophie Bortolussi was playing Drugstore Girl. I've been
a fan of her since Sleep No More, where she played the definitive
Lady Macbeth, so I was quite excited to see her. I made the decision
that I was going to do a full loop with her that show, but not just
yet – it was still Grocer time.
Soon we reached the 1:1, and this time
he took me. It was, like so many of them, suitably horrifying and
devastating. Afterward, however, when he sent me back out into the
store, he didn't follow me, instead remaining in the locked back
room. All of that repeating, and I wound up leaving him at
essentially the same spot. At least I got the 1:1 out of it.
I wasn't ready to return to the
Drugstore Girl yet, as I wanted to catch her loop in order, starting
at the reset, so I wandered back around through the trailer park. At
this point, the hoedown was in full swing, and Dwayne (Oliver
Hornsby-Sayer) and Mary (Kate Jackson) were getting it on against the
window. Having seen the scene from inside, I stuck around with them,
then followed Mary to the woods, where she stripped to a negligee and
did a tragic dance of contrition. This introduced a major wrinkle to
how I viewed the murders. Before, they seemed almost abstract –
both the victims and the murderers were pawns, and I viewed them from
the perspective of the manipulators, appreciating the machinations
that brought them to that point. Now, suddenly, they were people,
and I no longer wanted the story to play out the way I knew it had
to. When Mary and William (Paul Zivkovich) reunited, I felt a flood
of relief. When they danced in the saloon to Faye's rendition of
“Walking in the Sand,” I was overwhelmed by the beauty and
tenderness of it.
Then I remembered where things were
going. As William picked Mary up and carried her to the stairs
leading to the desert, the song suddenly felt like a dirge, and as I followed them, I was
part of a funeral procession. The murder itself
stands in stark contrast to Wendy's murder of Marshall; where that
was harsh and brutal, this was tender and, dare I say it, lyrical.
The final moment, as Mary's body slips out of her negligee and
disappears into the sand, leaving William with nothing but that scrap
of fragile cloth in his hands, is perhaps the most heartwrenching of
the show.
I followed William back down to the
gates, where he encounters Wendy for the first and only time as the
reset music swells. I was contemplating sticking with him instead of
moving on to the Drugstore Girl, but when Mary showed up alive and
well, the spell was broken, and I felt free to return to the
drugstore.
Sophie's Drugstore Girl is quite
different from Miranda's. She feels much younger and more energetic,
even sprightly. Following her story is. . . well, not like
following a story at all, really. She doesn't really have a real
narrative arc, and, outside of a left-field twist at the end of her
loop, doesn't really change at all. Instead, a loop with the
Drugstore Girl is like hanging out with your fun, charming friend who
likes to wander around and show you cool things. She poured me a
glass of lemonade that magically turned bright red when it hit the
glass. She introduced me to the “Bulldog” number, which I love,
despite my general disdain for Grease, Bye Bye Birdie, and similar.
Admittedly, my opinion may have been swayed by the fact that the
performance featured my three favorite ladies (Sophie, Sonya
Cullingford as Faye, and Kirsty Arnold as Andrea) all in one place.
She even roller skated around the town. That last bit turned out to
be a little dangerous – while toying with the gatekeeper, she
nearly took a tumble, and only avoided it by catching my arm – very
nearly pulling me down in the process.
This is not to say that she's clumsy –
in fact, one of the things I remember most is how incredibly smoothly
she could move, like a cat. I never got a sense for that at Sleep No
More, because the choreography for Lady Macbeth tended to be a lot
more aggressive and herky-jerky, but as the Drugstore Girl, Sophie
was inhumanly fluid. At one point, she leapt on to the counter only
a couple of feet from me, and I couldn't even hear her land. I was,
and am, in awe. All in all, hanging out with Drugstore Girl was really
all just a fun, low-pressure time.
But then it came to an end. The grocer
arrived, and led her to her death at the hands of. . . I don't even
know what. Poison? A magic phone call? At least she died laughing.
This was also the scene that really sold me on Julian's grocer, even
more so than the 1:1. I could feel the tension he brought to the
room even before I turned and saw him, and it was his quiet
desperation and sheer misery that tipped the moment from horrifying
to tragic.
Of course, no one stays dead for long
at The Drowned Man, and come the reset, Drugstore Girl was revived
with a simple “Wake up, sleepyhead” from Harry Greener (James
Sobol Kelly). She spent the next chunk of time in, essentially,
housekeeping mode, moving props and costume pieces around for the new
loop. Sophie played this portion of the loop as a sort of zombie,
moving silently and simply around the set, and even walking backwards
at times, as if living out pre-programmed commands. I didn't make
the connection at the time, but it was remarkably similar to how
Harry responded to the Gatekeeper reviving him in Show #3. Is it
possible that he died out on the street, and the Gatekeeper brought
him back to life, rather than just waking him up? But back to
Drugstore Girl - it was suprisingly difficult to watch her - a pale
shadow of her former self wandering around, a body without a soul.
Finally, her work done, she sprung to life mid-stride with a literal
snap of her fingers. Drugstore Girl was restored, and I could move
on.
The very next character I came across
was Faye, who I had seen almost nothing of outside of the large group
scenes. That was a strong argument for taking up with her. The fact
that Sonya Cullingford was playing her was a plus, because she's
terrific, but also a minus, since I had spent a decent chunk of time
with her as Romola, including a 1:1, just a few hours earlier – and
it might seem weird to her if I showed up again so soon. Still,
that's two points for and only one against, so off I went.
Faye's story is essentially a parade of
rejection. No matter what she does, in the end, no one wants what
she has to offer. Even her great triumph at the audition is tinged
with rejection (she gets A part, not THE part). She lacks the
supernatural creepiness or mythical overtones of some of the other
stories, but there's something to be said for the power of simple,
human pain – not to mention the mention the fascinating tragedy of
watching Faye dig her hole even deeper by trying to mimic the
game-playing and manipulation she caught a glimpse of inside the
studio (I may be stretching a bit on that last point, but I feel like
that's part of what's going on). For me, the enduring image of
Sonya's Faye is just before “Bulldog”, when she's on stage, in
her green dress and black leather jacket, looking up at Stanford's
voice coming out of the speakers. There's so much hope and
excitement in that moment, that when I saw her later in her motel
room, chugging booze straight from the bottle, or in the saloon,
singing “Walking in the Sand,” it was hard to believe I was
looking at the same person.
On a side note, vis-a-vis the
aftermath of Faye's dance in the desert: running at full speed on
sand is really difficult.
This being the third loop of the night,
the story was cut short so that we could transition into the finale.
On the previous nights, these truncated third loops ended with
characters essentially just abandoning their stories to go watch the
final murder, but Faye was in such a state at that point that it
would be hard to pull it off – so I got to see something entirely
unexpected: A happy ending. After Faye completed her devastating
rendition of “Walking in the Sand,” her father, Harry, showed up
to invite her to the Temple Studio's wrap party. They rushed down
the stairs to the finale, and I stuck close to their heels, listening
to them excitedly babble on to each other about all of the famous
movie stars that would be there. Shallow, perhaps, but it felt
wonderful to see them both smiling.
Once we reached Studio 2, Faye looked
back and grabbed my hand, then pulled me in and held me during the
murder, just as Andrea had at my first show. Afterward, though, she
didn't immediately drop me off somewhere to watch the final number –
she dragged me on stage, where we danced. Or, more accurately, she
danced, and I moved around with something vaguely (very vaguely)
approximating rhythm. When she raised my hand above our heads, it
took two attempts for me to realize I was supposed to twirl. At
least all of the other characters were in the process of joining us
on stage, so presumably very few, if any, people were actually
watching me. A few moments later, she dropped me off at the edge of
the stage with a warm “enjoy the show,” and our time together was
finished. She didn't come back for me, like Andrea had – perhaps
she prefers to spread the love around, or perhaps I scared her off
with my atrocious performance as a dance partner. Either way, it
left me with the opportunity to stop off at the murder pools again on
my way out, which was already starting to feel like an integral part
of the show for me.
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