The Mother Act

BEFORE THE SHOW
December 13, 2018
New York, New York

JUDE, 24


The Arianna Atwater Theatre is a West Village landmark nestled between a psychic and a sex shop, one of those old, not‑quite‑kept‑up theaters off Broadway: sweeping staircase, ornate moldings, the appointments of its former splendor battling to keep it on the right side of dingy. The carpet is stained.

“Judith Jones‑Linnen,” Jude says to the woman at the box office. She flushes, hoping her name and the fact that the tickets are comps won’t betray her identity. But if the woman knows who Jude is, she keeps her smile innocuous and hands over two tickets with no more than a chirpy “Enjoy the show.”

The lobby buzzes with an opening night’s voltage of anticipation and nerves, reserved judgment, pressure, need. Jude feels attuned to the mood of each person around her, hundreds of signals radiating outward, she their exhausted receiver. That woman in the tortoiseshell glasses—doubtless an academic, women’s studies or theater—seems guardedly hopeful about tonight’s performance. Those thirtysomethings conversing loudly, heads bent toward each other, likely know and love Sadie Jones from TV. The matron in red, around her mother’s age, probably saw the original show twenty years ago, left her husband, got a college degree, and became an art therapist whose kids never speak to her. She’s the type to wait at the stage door for an hour afterward, then bumble through a breathless declaration that Sadie Jones changed her life.

Jude’s mother may have been disgraced, but that isn’t stopping people from buying tickets.

Jude texts her father: I can’t do this.

Go, he responds immediately. Just the one word, which could be interpreted as “Go to the play” or, if she prefers, “Go home.” Knowing him and his ever‑optimistic desire for understanding between Jude and her mother, it’s probably the former.

Her phone vibrates again: You know I’d be with you if I could swing it. You can handle this. You’re the strongest person I know.

Ha. “Narrow‑minded,” “unimaginative,” and “bitch” are the words Jude’s mother leveled at her in their last confrontation. She doubts “strong” is an adjective Sadie will use to describe her in tonight’s show.

Jude tries calling her husband, Miles, despite the current impasse between them, despite his refusal to come with her tonight. She waits in the lobby, rocking from one foot to the other as people surge and pool around her. Miles does not pick up.

Finally Jude checks her coat. In front of the open double doors at the top of the stairs, an usher scans one of her tickets and offers her a program. She hesitates, then takes it reluctantly and holds it lightly between her thumb and forefinger. She hasn’t seen or spoken to her mother in more than two years, she’s avoided all photos and press about her, and the picture on the program hits her like a shock of cold water. She forces herself to study it. Sadie, curvy and abundant in a purple dress with a tasteful hint of cleavage, chunky green earrings spiraling to her shoulders. Purple and green, the two colors that show Sadie Jones to best advantage. They are Jude’s colors, too, though tonight she’s opted for neutral tones that she hopes might blend into the walls.

There are new lines at her mother’s mouth. The strawberry blonde might no longer be natural. Her expression is serious and determined with a hint of questioning, as though she’s not entirely certain she should be doing this. Except that when it comes to her career, Sadie Jones can justify anything.

The cursive mauve font reads, the long-awaited sequel to the Mother Act. Underneath that, the title, bigger, bolder: Mother/Daughter. The upside‑down “Daughter” suggests opposition, obviously. Conflict. Error. Fault.

People jostle from behind, eager feet carrying them forward and propelling Jude down the raked floor toward 3E and 3F. Their glossy programs press at her back.

...

“I can’t believe your therapist thinks it’s a good idea,” Miles said when Jude told him she was thinking of attending. “Especially now.” For Miles, watching Jude agonize and justify and wring her hands as if in a parody of anxiety, the situation was uncomplicated. The thought of attending her mother’s play—“performance,” Jude prefers to call it, because Shakespeare wrote plays and her mother merely spews intimate confessions onto a stage—distressed her nearly to the point of incapacitation. Therefore, she should not go.

This straightforwardness in Miles was the first quality that attracted Jude and the one she most loved in him. She equated it with being neither an actor nor any other type of artist. He was the first person she’d known with any familiarity who wasn’t. It was like encountering rock when you’d only ever stood on shifting sand. Thank god, she’d said over and over in her head on the subway home from their first date.

“If you go,” Miles said, “I can’t go with you.”

“Maybe Papa can get out of—”

“Damn it, Jude. Damian shouldn’t be supporting this toxic cycle between you and your mother either. Are you forgetting what happened after your last run‑in with her?”

“I’m not going to fall apart. I’m ready.”

“You’re falling apart right now.”

“It’s fine. I’m just catastrophizing.”

“With all the traveling you’re having to do, everything that’s being asked of you—you’re stretched to the limit. You’re exhausted.”

He didn’t mention the other, bigger issue between them.

She was relieved when he wrapped his arms around her, sturdy arms more suited to a football player than an accountant. She leaned against his chest and looked over their apartment, dishes stacked neatly and drying on the drainer, the bedroom with its smooth white coverlet. The home and the security she’d built despite it all.

“You do know that normal people would just talk to each other,” he said. “Your mother puts on a play about your relationship and invites all of New York.”

“Performance,” she reminded him, stepping back so he could see on her face how wryly lighthearted she was, how shored up and not crumbling. How ready, at last, to face her mother.

...

The red velvet seats are worn through in places to ladders of white thread. As Jude lowers herself onto the edge of 3E, she takes some petty satisfaction in seeing Sadie reduced to performing in genteel shabbiness. She tucks her purse onto 3F and presses her fingernails into the backs of her knees until she feels the dig of ten stinging impressions in her skin. She is so perilously, unnecessarily close to the stage.

The auditorium is almost at capacity, the empty seat next to her a gap in a full set of teeth. She forces away a pang of conscience. She could turn in the extra ticket at the box office, but she wants—craves—requires—the empty seat, a buffer between herself and her mother’s fans. Even if the blank expanse beside her only makes her more conspicuous, she needs space to breathe.

She should not be here without Miles or her father. A supportive hand pressed into hers on the armrest, a shared eye roll when she needs it. She half rises to leave, the folding seat catching at the backs of her knees.

From the aisle a black‑clad usher is pointing in her direction, a woman peering over his shoulder. Jude starts—do they recognize her?—but no, it’s the empty seat they’re eyeing.

There are five minutes to curtain.

“I’m sorry.” Jude sags backward. “Both these seats are mine.”


SADIE, 54


The bulbs around Sadie Jones’s gargantuan mirror emit a sacral glow. In front of her is a mess of hair and makeup products and a bouquet of gerbera daisies from her agent. On either side, the rest of the counter stretches vacantly, empty chairs reproduced in empty mirrors for actors who are not there.

Her best friend, Rufus, leans against the counter, dapper in a tux and bow tie.

“Wish you could stay,” Sadie says.

“No one wishes it more than I, my dear. But duty calls.” He pushes back his sleeve and peers at a wristwatch. “Terribly soon, I’m afraid.” He’s on his way to a fundraising gala for one of his operas.

Sadie’s stage manager, Lucy, sticks her head through the dressing room door, all business with her clipboard and her headset over short spiky hair.

“The tickets were picked up,” Lucy says.

“Shit.” It’s the outcome she’s hoped for, but now that it’s real, the stakes feel dauntingly high. “Both of them?”

“Yes.”

“Shit. Thanks.” Sadie raises her arms, shakes her fingers as though flicking off water, and lets out a long, multi‑octave sigh.

“Five minutes,” Lucy warns before leaving.

“Do you think they both came?” Sadie asks Rufus, though he’s no more likely to know than she is. She grips one round wooden handle of her quilted makeup bag and rummages through the tubes and compacts for something else to distract herself with.

“You invited them both?”

“I reserved two tickets for Jude. I assumed she’d bring her father, but what the fuck do I know about what’s going on in that one’s head.”

Rufus looks amused. “Hopefully something, given that you’re about to be performing her.”

“You’d think, right? I toiled over Jude’s side of the story. I have studied Jude like there was a Jude exam.”

“You could have sent them each a pair of tickets.”

“Then Jude would bring her husband and Damian might bring—I have no idea who. We haven’t talked in two years. He could have remarried by now for all I know.”

“You’re the puppet master to the end.”

“I wanted it to be just my family.”

It isn’t about us exactly, she wrote to Jude in the carefully worded email inviting her to the opening. Carefully worded and over‑thought and edited to death, about five hundred percent more painstaking than she’d ever been in her life.

Obviously I’m drawing on my own experience, and a lot of what Ineeded to process is based in reality. I’ve done a great deal of thinking—self-reckoning, you might even call it—not just about what happened twoyears ago but about the last several decades. This show is the result of thatreckoning. But it’s also fiction.

Her fingers close around a slender wand of mascara. She un-sheathes it, widens her eyes, gazes at her buggy and astonished self.

“It is fiction,” she says to Rufus.

“Of course it’s fiction,” he says. “All memoir is.”

“Right? You pick and you choose. You invent scenes and dialogue. You massage the facts.”

“You do know audience sympathy will be with the daughter character.”

“You’re telling me that?” She lets out a laugh.

Rufus smiles. “Brassy, bold, no‑holds‑barred,” he says. Words from a long‑ago profile.

“Oh please,” she says. “I’m only trying to find and speak the truth. That’s all I’m ever doing.”

A knock interrupts their conversation, and a teenage boy ventures into the room with a bouquet of delphiniums and asters. Sadie thanks him. As he places them on the counter and turns to leave, her heart begins to race, her hands, almost imperceptibly, shaking. Her body knows before she opens the envelope to confirm it.

You will shine. xo

Her fingers fly to her mouth. A whimper like a dog that wants to be let out.

Damian.

The handwriting is his. He’s here. Or at least he’s recently been in a flower shop thinking of her.

She turns to Rufus and tries to smile as she says, “Sadie Jones mesmerized until she spied her famously estranged daughter in the audience, seated next to the ex-husband who remains the love of her life, and from there the whole night went to shit.”

Lucy pokes her head in. “Places,” she says.

“Place,” Sadie says. “There’s just me. Regrettably.”

Rufus kisses Sadie’s forehead. “Don’t write your own reviews before you’ve given the performance, honey.”

“Come to the party afterward?” she asks.

“The gala will go late, unfortunately, and I am required to schmooze.”

“Worst timing.”

“I’ll be in the front row tomorrow night.”

She squeezes his hand. He squeezes back, and she pulls away from him and walks into the hall. The brightness of her dressing room gives way to a dimly lit passageway as Sadie follows Lucy’s light‑footed tread, a labyrinth to her fate. Up a worn staircase. An exit sign beams, red and tempting. A door at the top of the steps, and there, the wings, black drapes, a ladder to the fly gallery. Lucy thrusts a water bottle at her, and she gulps from it. She inhales deeply, throws her shoulders back, then casts herself off through the darkness toward her stool in the spotlight on the stage.

The rustle of programs, legs crossed and uncrossed, a cough. She squeezes her eyes shut. No Damian, no Jude. Just her, these lights, this stage. An audience that is her audience, an audience that wants her.

Power surges into her, narrowing her focus to what she must now do. The curtain on its pulleys begins to climb. It’s unstoppable now. She’s about to crest the wave, and for the next two hours she will ride it.