Process & Unprocess
I remember completing the initial draft of my first play, Nothing But The Truth, during the summer of 2013; I was convinced I’d created a masterpiece. After all, Paula Vogel had done so with How I Learned to Drive and The Baltimore Waltz, whipping them out in a matter of weeks in perfect form — she reports she never changed a word. (Her 15th play, Indecent, on the other hand, went through 40 revisions over five years. But hey, maybe the Pulitzer winner was just off her game with that one!)
Fifteen minutes into my first table read, I realized I was horribly wrong and had inadvertently written something akin to a novel. Three hours in, and I was sweating through my shirt, desperate to skip to the end. I look back on that reading as a valuable lesson in script development and have come to learn that it takes a village — my work would not have evolved without input from directors, dramaturges, producers, actors, writers and audiences. Feedback, critique and collaboration have been essential in helping to shape the story beyond my own perspective.
Two years and 20 revisions later, I’ve “trimmed” 13,000 words, added three new scenes and expanded others; however, the structural bones of the script with the punch/counterpunch flow from therapy to deposition scene, have remained the same all along. I started the play as I begin every large project, with a single Word document containing a data dump of ideas: family stories, memories, napkin scribbles, dialogue scraps, funny things experienced on the street, therapeutic insights, quotes from New York Times’ articles and more. When that ballooned to perhaps 25 pages, I printed the file, tore out each idea and organized them into piles labeled by category: mothers, abuse, dating, therapy, favorite teacher, and so on. As the play started to take shape, I’d tape in an idea where I thought it fit and then transform it into dialogue. If it didn’t work, I untaped it and moved the puzzle pieces around.
This is the early stage of discovery, when the material is new and still finding its place. Later, I experience a kind of “quickening,” where I grow to know the story in a visceral way and it’s alive inside me. I can shift dialogue from one scene to another in my mind and see where it snaps together without my patchwork quilt.
That’s my tangible process. But then there’s the unknowable one.
MARILYN
I was reading through your intake questionnaire and I see you’re looking for a therapist with maternal qualities. Can you tell me about that, Rachel?
RACHEL
Well, yes; ones I missed out on.
MARILYN
What kinds of attributes?
RACHEL
Someone who understands me and…notices when I enter the room. A mother figure, I guess.
MARILYN
(placating) So how many mothers did you interview before me?
RACHEL
A few.
MARILYN
They didn’t make the grade?
RACHEL
Well, there was a therapist in Brooklyn who seemed hopeful, but then she said “so, you wannatellmeaboudit.” And there was a doctor on the west side, but I rode my bike there in the rain and she was all worried I’d stain her couch. (prattling) What’s the etiquette of returning a damp pink bath towel to your shrink at the end of a session that’s wet with muddy water from your butt? I would have offered to wash it but since I never wanted to see her again it seemed like too much of a commitment so…
MARILYN
Sounds like maybe there’s no perfect therapist out there? (beat) Tell me three things about your mom. (Rachel is at a loss.) Maybe something you loved doing together as a kid?
RACHEL
We used to play charades for hours on Saturday afternoons. It’s so ironic…
MARILYN
Why is that?
RACHEL
We understood each other best when we weren’t speaking. I think I would have had a happier childhood if we communicated by semaphore (mimics moving the flags).
MARILYN
What’s your earliest memory of your mother?
RACHEL
Hmmm…calling her upstairs to see this huge poop I made in our pink toilet.
MARILYN
How old were you?
RACHEL
Seventeen. (laughter) Maybe four.
MARILYN
Well, Freud did say that a poop in the potty is a child’s first praiseworthy gift.
RACHEL
It’s probably the only one I ever gave her. I remember being so proud and she was so…distant.
MARILYN
How did that make you feel?
RACHEL
Lonely. I remember once, I was maybe five, I picked my nose and it started bleeding. I went to her and she just glared and said, “you did it to yourself.” Instead of hugs she gave us a slap on the back, like a gym teacher.
MARILYN
What was your father like? Was he more affectionate?
RACHEL
(sardonically) You could put it that way.
MARILYN
Can you say more about that? (a weighted silence) Do you have any other fond memories of your mother?
RACHEL
I remember her taking me to the voting booth with her. That made me feel special… once every four years. What I recall most was her cancer.
MARILYN
Tell me about her illness.
RACHEL
We had to keep it a secret. We weren’t allowed to even tell my grandparents. My Jewish mother is wearing a bandana to hide her bald spots, and what do they think, she’s joined the rodeo? You have such beautiful hair.
MARILYN
So how did you feel about taking care of your hair while your mother lost hers?
RACHEL
That’s an interesting question. Actually I didn’t feel anything. I’ve had an ache for a different mother as long as I can remember. Does it…smell like nail polish in here? It reminds me of that antiseptic odor in the cancer ward.
MARILYN
I’m sorry, Rachel, I guess it does. Is it bothering you? I’ll crack the window.
RACHEL
No, I’ll live. But if I start hallucinating, it’s from the fumes, so don’t cart me off to the looney bin.
MARILYN
I don’t think you have to worry about that…do you? So, how would you feel if I was doing my nails in here?
RACHEL
It’s…strange. I mean, a patient’s sitting here sobbing, and then in the ten minutes between sessions you’re doing a manicure. If you’ve got a free hour, do you do a bikini wax?
MARILYN
Sounds like you don’t want to know that I’m a real person. That I paint my nails or shave my legs or deal with cancer like you do.
RACHEL
In a way you’re not. I mean, you’ll learn all of my secrets, and I don’t even know what your profile looks like.
MARILYN
Did you feel like your mother knew you growing up?
RACHEL
Only the parts she didn’t like. She used to berate me: “What’s wrong with you?” I had no friends; I was afraid of people. Actually, I was terrified of just about everything.
MARILYN
Like what?
RACHEL
Play dates, class trips, piano lessons; you name it. She always threatened to drop me off at this counseling center behind the library. I feared I’d end up reading Nancy Drew in a straightjacket in some hidden mental hospital inside the stacks.
MARILYN
During my graduate training I had an eight-year-old who came to a session with her psychotic older sister—she was glassy eyed, probably on Haldol, and the young girl got on her sister’s lap, picked up her arms and wrapped them right around herself. At what point did you give up asking for affection?
RACHEL
I didn’t. I just found a substitute mother instead.
MARILYN
What do you mean?
RACHEL
My math teacher in fifth grade, Jane. I used to stay after school doing my homework just to sit with her while she graded papers.
MARILYN
What was she like?
RACHEL
I remember the dimple in her left cheek and how her skirts were hemmed too tight. I knew where she was every second, passing me at the water fountain or behind my desk, and I felt this charge between us. She’d drive me home and I’d pretend I was her child. I wanted to hit every red light just to have an extra minute with her.
MARILYN
It sounds like she was really important to you.
RACHEL
After I switched schools, I kept my eyes peeled for her station wagon for years and I’d whirl around to see if it was her. My mother would bark at me: “What are you looking at?” What could I say? The woman I wish you were? I still have that same ache for a mother now.
MARILYN
Can you describe it?
RACHEL
It’s a desperation, like hanging off the side of a cliff and clinging to Jane’s pant leg because I needed her to save me.
MARILYN
If we work together, I think you’ll be strong enough to save yourself.
The Unprocess
“When I read a script, I notice when the hair stands up on the back of my arms and my neck and I don’t know how they did it. I have no idea how the person who wrote the script is doing what they’re doing,” Paula Vogel observes in a 2016 interview at the Minneapolis Playwrights’ Center.
I recall sitting in rehearsal for my play’s 2015 festival production at Theater for the New City, and my director said to the cast, “Look at this intricate dialogue Eve gave you: Scene A connects to scene C, which loops back to scene B while building dramatic irony …” and I thought “Wow, I wish I could take credit, but I didn’t intend to do that!”
While we certainly spent substantial time discussing scenes and poring over line edits, a lot of the creative writing just kinda sorta happened in some mystical way. That magic is both imbued with awe and laced with trepidation: After all, if I can’t know it or define it, how can I possibly repeat it?
Vogel encourages me to trust the fairy dust: “I believe we have to be subconscious as we’re writing and not look directly into the sun or we become blind,” she says. “Thinking about what we’re doing is in many ways the enemy of art.”
SHARON
I want you to recount everything you told me—that you rarely leave home; how you haven’t worked or had a date in three years. Fill that record with your damages.
RACHEL
I still keep wondering though whether it was my fault. If I was too needy and desperate, maybe I drove her away.
SHARON
You were supposed to be yourself in her office. Listen to me—you did everything right.
(Stan enters and activates a recorder.)
STAN
Good afternoon ladies; hope you had a pleasant lunch. Rachel, what was your week like after the termination of your therapy?
RACHEL
I cried. I slept. I remember all I ate was a peach and a bagel for three days.
STAN
Were you suicidal?
RACHEL
I thought about shooting myself in front of Marilyn. I wanted my blood on her briefcase.
STAN
When you left her office by ambulance on the last day of your treatment, did you feel you needed emergency psychiatric care?
RACHEL
No. I mean, I broke her mirror because… I felt shattered.
STAN
What was your experience like when you got to Bellevue?
RACHEL
There was a woman handcuffed to a gurney. I was scared. But the worst part was the way Marilyn walked right past me after speaking to the doctors. I stood up and called her name. She turned around and said, (in a degrading tone) “What do you want, Rachel?”
STAN
The way you’re saying it now?
RACHEL
Yeah, like “what the hell do you want.” Then she said goodbye, but it was like “goodbye bitch. Hope you rot in here.”
STAN
How many times did you call Dr. Morganstern after your termination?
RACHEL
Maybe 10 or 20 or something. I thought if she heard my voice, she might soften and speak to me.
STAN
A couple months later you filed a complaint with the American Psychological Association. Can you explain why you’d still want to stay in treatment with Marilyn when you stated that her unethical conduct compromised her ability to render professional and effective care.
RACHEL
Because I was devoted to her; you can hate someone and still long for them.
STAN
Was Dr. Morganstern a good therapist up until the last day?
RACHEL
Yes.
STAN
How did she help you?
RACHEL
I told her everything; I’d never opened up to someone like that.
STAN
Anything else?
RACHEL
We made progress; I began to understand that the abuse wasn’t my fault. And neither was this.
STAN
How did you come to that determination?
RACHEL
Marilyn acted like my internet search was an assault. I figured she must have been stalked before, I triggered her overreaction, and that’s why she filed the restraining order.
STAN
Did you ever say or do anything that would cause her to be afraid of you?
RACHEL
No.
STAN
How about when you started sitting on the stoop across from the doctor’s office; do you think that scared her?
SHARON
Objection, you haven’t established that she was sitting anywhere.
STAN
Did you sit on the steps of a building across from Dr. Morganstern’s office?
RACHEL
Yes, after she rejected me because I was destroyed. I wasn’t watching Marilyn. I wanted her to comfort me.
STAN
How long did this stalking persist?
SHARON
Objection to the form of the question. She admitted to sitting, not stalking.
STAN
Fine, withdrawn; sitting…and watching.
RACHEL
Maybe six months.
STAN
Did you sit there in the rain?
RACHEL
Yes.
STAN
In the snow? (Rachel nods) Please answer for the record.
RACHEL
I did.
STAN
Not unlike your behavior with your ex-boyfriend Martin?
SHARON
Take it outside, Counsel; I want this off the record.
(Sharon and Stan walk to stage left.)
Where are you going with this line of questioning?
STAN
I’m filing a motion to dismiss this case. Your client is the same jilted lover yet again, fixated on revenge.
SHARON
Then it was your client’s job to treat Rachel’s attachment issues instead of kicking her to the curb.
STAN
I want this on the record, Sharon. There’s a pattern here. She’s not depressed, she’s diabolical.
SHARON
She was a lovesick teenager. File your motion, waste your time if you want, but this line of questioning stops now.
(They return to Rachel.)
STAN
Do you still pinch your skin with pliers?
RACHEL
Yes, I−
STAN
Hit yourself with the heel of a shoe?
RACHEL
I couldn’t manage the pain of being discarded. I had problems before, sure, but I went out, I had fun. Now I’m afraid to be around people—if I can’t trust the person I paid for that purpose, how can I possibly trust anyone?
SHARON
Rachel, do you need a break? (Rachel nods)
STAN
When I’m done. Did you fantasize that you were Marilyn’s daughter?
RACHEL
Yes.
STAN
Were you jealous of her family?
RACHEL
Yes.
STAN
How deeply did you care about Marilyn?
RACHEL
I loved her. I still do. And she invited me to love her.
STAN
What do you mean by that?
SHARON
She told me that my writing was special.
STAN
So?
RACHEL
She held my hand, caressed my face.
STAN
Or did you push the boundaries?
RACHEL
She accepted me, something my mother never did. She had this way of gazing at me…so now, am I precious or a pariah? Which truth should I believe?
STAN
So Marilyn kicked you out, had you arrested, filed a restraining order and you call that love?
Mirror, Mirror…
Looking at one’s reflection is known to help tap into the unconscious, and mirrors happen to play a prominent role in my play similar to the “looking-glass shame” that Virginia Woolf speaks of; she was molested when she was six in front of one. “I’m so awful I can’t even look at myself in the mirror,” my character Rachel laments before revealing that was sexually abused as a child. When the relationship with her therapist Marilyn implodes, Rachel smashes a mirror in the doctor’s office because she “felt shattered.”
How I Learned to Drive similarly portrays a girl’s incest. Vogel is cryptic about claiming that experience. On one hand she’s adamant that “everything that comes out of us is autobiographical.” Yet when people ask her for the thousandth time, “Okay, so did you sleep with your uncle?” she caustically laughs it off, saying she wishes she had a dollar each inquiry. Her response is ambiguous, towing the line I hope to create with my character as a woman who shifts from victim to survivor to warrior.
“All great art comes from a sense of outrage,” Glenn Close once said, and the same sentiment drives me to write about childhood traumas that are salacious and shocking — even shameful. The undercurrent of Nothing But the Truth addresses the real-life ramifications and complexities of sexual abuse, and I strive to bring those tragedies to life by depicting the unspeakable —sometimes with subtlety, often with mockery, and always in full color. It’s a netherworld of nullibiety, however, and one that Georgia Lavey wrote about so eloquently in this magazine. Abused women belong to a group that is powerful only in numbers, unified by an emotional state of non-existence and no matter how fiercely depicted, they belong to a group they never would have chosen to join.
The word “trauma” in Japanese combines the two symbols for “outside” and “injury.” Trauma is a visible wound, one that’s increasingly being made public and transforming into an identity as women lug their mattress around campus, write impact statements that go viral and join Lady Gaga onstage at the 2016 Oscars. As Rachel ambivalently realizes: “It’s what makes me special.”
After my June reading at the T. Schreiber Theatre, a woman wrote to me saying that by the time she got to the subway she was sobbing. However, she wanted to thank me because she gained significant insight into her own life through my characters.
“There are people who when they read my first play, said, ‘You’re sick; you’re a sick woman,’” Paula Vogel says with a touch of pride. Her response: “Congratulations, you just pushed someone’s button.” Whether my audience is gasping or guffawing, I want these truths to grab them by the throat.
MARILYN
(A weighted silence) You seem pretty down…what’s going on?
RACHEL
My sister is having another child.
MARILYN
And that feels like…?
RACHEL
Like finding out I have cancer.
MARILYN
Sounds to me like it’s about loss.
RACHEL
What do you mean?
MARILYN
Well, cancer is the loss of your health, the loss of your world as you know it.
RACHEL
At least people with cancer have a disease with a name and a treatment. Where are the pink ribbons for women who think dying is preferable to hugging a child?
MARILYN
Why don’t you try hugging your niece and see how it feels?
RACHEL
Why don’t I try cutting off my arm? (A weighted silence)
MARILYN
There are lots of people who don’t like kids—
RACHEL
God! You don’t get it!! It’s not about not liking kids…
MARILYN
Then what is it? Help me understand.
RACHEL
I met my sister in the park last week. Her daughter was catching snowflakes on her tongue with her head thrown back and mouth open—and suddenly this innocent image twisted into something lewd. (beat) She came toddling over and fell face down, wailing in the snow. I just stood there. I couldn’t pick her up.
MARILYN
Her daughter is your trigger, like a backfiring car to a soldier. You couldn’t run or fight back as a child, so you froze. If you tell, you throw the family into chaos. If you keep quiet, you’ve dug your own grave.
RACHEL
When I was five, my father and I had this game—I was the cowboy and he was the horse. I straddled his lap in the leather chair…riding…(hesitation) him. Once when my mother went shopping, her car stalled on the block so she came back and walked in. I jumped up like a pack wild of Indians had appeared and ran off sobbing.
MARILYN
Kids at that age just want to play and your father took advantage of your trust.
RACHEL
At night he’d come into my room so I made my mom wake me for cookies. I said I wanted a midnight snack. What I really wanted (beat) was to never fall asleep. I sat at my pink ruffled table alone, ate Oreos and prayed—please god, don’t let this happen and I promise I’ll be good. (beat) I remember riding with my mother on the highway and I unlocked my door and flicked the handle like I wanted to fall out. You know what she said? (angrily) “Stop making that noise!”
MARILYN
And now you’re reliving an experience that did make you want to die.
RACHEL
God, I swear if I joined that Ethiopian tribe and came home with a plate in my lower lip, my mom would just heap a pile of pot roast on it. (beat) So how do I make something not real now, not real?
MARILYN
Well, we have to work on separating the fear from the paralysis. Can you identify where you feel trapped?
RACHEL
Between needing to be around people and not wanting people around me.
MARILYN
That’s the hallmark of trauma right there. Ask someone who fought in a war and you’ll hear the same sentiment. When your abuse ended, you lost what little affection you had. You didn’t want it but you also craved it, and that’s the same contradiction you feel around people now. Tell me where else you’re stuck.
RACHEL
Between wishing I could forgive my parents and wanting them to suffer. My mom doesn’t believe my accusations because she says I’ve been contrary all my life. According to her, when she tried to get me to take a bath as a toddler, I’d say no and she’d insist and I’d refuse; then she’d concede, Ok take a shower, and I’d say, (petulant child) fine, I’ll take a bath.
MARILYN
Your mother should have protected you.
RACHEL
And I’m angry, but I also understand because she needs him to survive. My mom doesn’t have her own bank account or email; my father still hands her a twenty on his way to work.
MARILYN
Your mother’s certainly a product of her time.
RACHEL
She reminds me of the wife in that film Capturing the Friedmans—about the father convicted of molesting kids in their basement. He had piles of child porn around the house and she wouldn’t allow herself to notice. Ugh, she sickens me even more than her husband.
MARILYN
Why would you blame that woman?
RACHEL
Because she chose not to see. She probably sent her husband off each morning with his lunch and her perfect Miss America wave…
MARILYN
Her what?!
RACHEL
You know…(mimics the pageant wave) buh-bye dear, have a good day…
MARILYN
But how could she know?
RACHEL
How could she not know? Kiddie porn was arriving in their mail! (beat) Did you know there are pictures of babies sexually abused with their umbilical cord attached!
MARILYN
It is horrific−
RACHEL
And the toddler raped in New Delhi, lured away with a banana. The police offered her parents 2000 rupees to keep quiet. That’s $37 dollars. And you know what I read in the Times? Ten million computers in the US contain child pornography. There are 100 million men, so that means one out of every ten of them looks at kiddie porn. If they were arrested all at once, our economy would collapse. Think of ten male relatives or colleagues; one of them indulges in child porn. (beat) There’s one more place I’m trapped.
MARILYN
Where’s that?
RACHEL
I’m stuck between wanting to live and hoping to die. My father robbed me of what I could have been.
MARILYN
Have you ever considered suicide? (Rachel snorts laughter.) What’s so funny?
RACHEL
It sounds like you’re posing it as an option. Are you gonna suggest the most durable rope?
MARILYN
I didn’t mean that. But I need you to tell me if you have a plan.
RACHEL
Last week I bounced around online from Pottery Barn to suicide with a plastic bag to cupcake recipes. Google can’t tell if I’m shopping, binging or asphyxiating. (pause) My writing is the one place I don’t feel frozen. I started this new piece. (She retrieves a paper from her purse.)
MARILYN
Can I read it? (She unfolds it like a gift.) “My mother’s house is filled with cancer memorabilia. She saved ointments and capsules like baseball cards shelved in shoeboxes, ordered by ailment. (She reads quietly to herself briefly.) Sometimes I sit in her cool, dark closet, putting memories into remission and recalling the simplicity of a scraped knee.”
RACHEL
Will you…(their eyes meet) sit next to me?
Follow the Joy
“I think we have a responsibility to point out when joy is on someone’s face … please follow the joy,” Vogel implores. I’ve found it in writing a play. When I laugh out loud at a line I wrote and chuckle at it again for the fiftieth time; when I’m typing at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night; when working on revisions feels like sitting down to a nourishing meal — that’s where I belong.
Edited by Joyce Chen.
The featured image is "broken mirror” by Bridget.
