During half of her twenties,
Yvonne's evenings were spent on stages acting in various parts. But the other
half of the evenings of her twenties were mostly spent at home. When she should
have been cultivating her career these evenings by party-going, she chose
domesticity when she wasn't in a play. Not that she and Julian made much contact
around the apartment. Contact wasn't their family style. Julian would scrutinize
television, practice lines for his commercials, listen to records, or take his
baths that lasted several hours. He had dozens of items of bath paraphernalia.
He had a hundred other toys that weren't bath toys that he never played with.
Ever. The bath, though, was a primitive tranquilizer, a catalyst, and there and
only there was he able to let go and play like a kid. So, during the
intermittent periods when Yvonne was home and not in a play, she, and not the
housekeeper, monitored these baths.
Yvonne had two homebound
activities that were her therapy. That were focus and release for her thwarted
professional and social yearnings. These forms of therapy were in themselves
professions. One was the writing of poetry. The other was a game played
meticulously and laboriously on paper called "Yvonne Directs".
The poetry Yvonne wrote was quite
similar to Adam Adamsky's though neither knew it, neither being published.
Poetry had come to a sad state in the world, and as in all generations there
were only a handful of real poets. Yvonne Yvette was one and so was Adam. Few of
the other real poets on the planet were lauded, either. Little real poetry was
published. There were a few hundred people scattered through the people of the
earth who could apprehend the sublime on the planet, and the grotesque on the
planet, and draw the two ends together in the new mathematica that each poem is.
Adam could do it, and so could Yvonne.
The psycho-intellectual
occasionings for a spate of poems from Yvonne's pen always carried one of the
other set of promptings. One was the the world utterly failed to pronounce a
truth anywhere in its writing, speaking, or other arts, and Yvonne felt
inexorably compelled to get that truth onto paper. The other compulsion arose
when Yvonne had a long pent-up passion that needed an idea and form to render it
logical and rational, and it needed images and poetic music to render it human.
The world being the palette created by and smeared by and employed by human
subjectivity, both causes of Yvonne's poetry were one and the same, really. What
they amounted to was the poetic drive.
That Yvonne's poetry was of the
first water was another matter altogether. There is no explanation for such
matters. Many people are floods of passion, many people are paramours of beauty,
and many people take pen in hand. And many a person is or has or does all or any
combination of these things. But a scant few out of millions can write real
poems. It was sheer luck.
Yvonne
often thanked her stars. She was sure that without this gift she would be a
murderess.
If Yvonne's life in
general and therefore the world in general caused her poetry, her specific
calling caused her other form of writing. "Yvonne Directs" was a game she played
in notebooks. It was not unlike "Dungeons and Dragons". By the time she was
nearly thirty and abandoned the game of directing when the opportunities came
for the real thing, there was a china cabinet full of notebooks from England
with excruciatingly narrowly ruled lines that she had filled. She wrote in what
amounted to micrography, using fine nibbed pens and jars of ink from Europe and
Asia.
The game was this:
Yvonne would read a play, see any productions of the play, see any video or film
recordings of other theater productions of the play, see any movie or TV
versions of the play, create discussions about the play among friends and
colleagues, and she would read all the literary criticism and commentary on the
play, read all the theatrical and cinematic criticism and commentary on the
play. There was one set of notebooks containing her writings from this research.
Another set of notebooks was full of actors and actresses, notes and essays she
wrote on their abilities and unused potential, lists she compiled of parts they
had played and parts they should have played. A third set of notebooks was where
Yvonne cast plays and moved actors through rehearsals to polished productions.
She would work word by word, speech by speech, scene by scene until she had
great performances.
She wasn't
encumbered by time. For instance, in 1974, she cast a thirty-five-year-old Cary
Grant as Hamlet. Her other triumphs included Robin Williams as King Lear,
Richard Pryor playing the Fool. She cast Paul Newman as Macbeth. Jerry Lewis was
a superb Richard II.
And so the
game went for a decade, though mostly the plays she directed in writing were
cast with actors who were more strictly theater people. She cast her friends and
other contemporary and former theater greats. And she gained a deep and detailed
training from the game in combination with her work and acute observations in
the real theater. In the notebooks she directed all of the great modern plays as
well as nineteen of Shakespeare's thirty-six.
The game had begun in 1970 after
Yvonne had watched the ridiculous 1930's Romeo and Juliet with Leslie
Howard late one night on TV. "They should have confined Leslie Howard to acting
only in TB sanitariums," Yvonne commented to a friend very early the next
morning during warmup in ballet class. The ballet mistress shushed her, but
Yvonne began a day-long round of the casting game in her mind. By evening as she
rode home from a late audition for a part in a play, she had chosen Cary Grant
as the ideal modern Romeo. "Cary, darling? How'd you like a classical role?" she
accidentally said aloud. The cab driver didn't even glance at her, but she
giggled, and felt hot blushes wash her cheeks. More over the vision of Cary
Grant very, very young and in a codpiece, rather than having slipped and spoken
out loud. When she arrived in her apartment, kissed Julian hello, listened to
the housekeeper's gripes, she was all the while ruminating the Cary Grant/Romeo
situation. He needed a lot of tuning and toning to do the play just right. So,
when the evening settled down, she took to her desk and the game was born.
Katherine Hepburn, a very young
Katherine Hepburn, was ostensibly engaged for the role of Juliet. But Yvonne had
cast herself as understudy, and so she kept pushing Hepburn down stairways and
breaking her legs or overdosing her with sleeping pills so Yvonne could play the
scenes up against Grant. "Oh! So sorry, Kate!" Yvonne would exclaim at her desk
and laugh with delicious venom in her heart. And the submarine engine imitations
or duck quacks or sweet five-year-old's extemporaneous songs would cease for a
few beats while Julian would halt in his bath and listen.
In this, her twenty-first year,
Romeo and Juliet was very dear. Though she was professional and bore
great objectivity and artistic balance even in this first notebook, the play was
also her own personal tragedy with a bit of convoluting of emotions--the sort of
convolution great art lends itself for. Because of her precocious neurosurgical
affair, the rape, Julian's existence, and her remarkable dedication to her craft
and career, there wasn't a lot of time or opportunity for rosebud gathering. She
had never had one Romeo or Juliet hour. It is debatable whether or not anyone
ever does--except for the Romeo and Juliet hours Shakespeare has set forth for
the world. But Yvonne didn't know that yet. And for a long time she wouldn't
know, and she harbored the notion that her contemporaries, at least some of
them, had Romeo and Juliet hours by the clock full, rosebuds by the closet full.
So when in her research she went
to a movie theater and saw the 1969 Zeffirelli version of the play, she wept
uncontrollably for three hours afterward. These tears were a great luxury. They
were fresh air and medicine to one so young with such a stuffy schedule and such
a sore biography.
An even odder
thing happened the next week when she took Julian to see the movie. He
wept. She had never seen him cry since he was a few weeks old. She glanced at
him when the young lovers on the screen were taking their lives in the
catacombs. His face was an oval of flooding tears. His face was so wet that the
movie was somewhat reflected there. Yvonne was so amazed that her own tears
stopped.
Julian cried all the way
home in the cab, saying, "Are they dead, Evie? Are they dead? Are Romeo and
Juliet dead? Are they still dead? Even now? But why, Evie? Why?" And he wept
inconsolably for an hour after they got home until he fell asleep in her arms.
Sitting in the darkened living
room, holding him at first tenderly and then with a growing sense of being
weighted down and pinned down by the child, she mentally mounted her first clear
rage at Julian. Silently in her heart, blood and brain, she knew her first great
fury that night.
"How dare you be
so perfect, so unusual?" she thought in yells as the boy slept. "How dare you
weep knowingly over Romeo and Juliet? It's my play. Mine. You were
supposed to appreciate the color and the costumes and the sword fighting. I
never dreamed you'd get it.
"And
why in hell don't you ever spill food or whine over bad reception when cartoons
are on? And why in hell don't you ever watch cartoons in the first place? And
who are you to be more handsome than any man even out of all the actor beauties
I know? And why won't you call me mom? And what are you doing on my lap? You
never get on my lap. Why don't you whine? Give me a bad time for all those years
I left you? Who the hell are you? You don't even cry when makeup gets hairspray
in your eyes. It's too goddamned maddening."
She lifted him and carried him
into his bedroom, anger splashing through every movement, and she nearly threw
him onto his bed. He didn't waken. She stood over him and though, "I can't go
on." She grappled for ways that would call a halt to going on. "I'll give you up
for adoption after all," she thought. "No, no," her thought countered, "I can't.
I can't. I won't. What am I thinking? What's going on?" And she started crying.
She covered Julian tenderly with his quilt, then sat on the floor leaning her
head on the bed. She cried a long time in the rasp of the frustrated.
Her frustrations were a mound of
steel splinters. She had done so much and been so shallowly sophisticated so
early and yet was still so young that she had to learn everything over and over
again. She had to learn not to be prejudiced against Black men. She had to learn
not to have tachycardia every time a friend came up behind her on the street
after a rehearsal. She had to learn that her impassioned side and the side of
her that was dutiful and meticulous were incomprehensible taken together to most
people. That most people could only see one side or the other and treated her
accordingly. She had to learn to reconcile herself with herself. She had to
learn not to tear at the places where duty, pride, talent, chance and ambition
nailed her to her life.
Sometime
during this hoarse weeping, Julian did or did not--Yvonne was never quite sure
because she was drugged with misery and half asleep with not just the day's
weariness only, but two decades worth of weariness--Julian did or did not wake
up a bit, pat his mother on the head, and say, "It's alright, Evie. We're
alive," and then go back to sleep.