As we concluded, James said two things, which guided me through structuring the remainder of the play. We were in final table-talk, gathering up the nest of blankets, when James burst out: “You know, at one point in there, I just really wanted to stop her and shout, ‘I’m a god! Do you have any idea how great I am? Do you have any idea what I can do? I’ve been alive for millennia—millennia—and you…I chose you. Out of everyone, I chose you. And…you don’t even care.’” (You can guess what speech that turned into.)
I laughed and promised I’d turn that into a soliloquy.
James smiled, and went back to folding blankets. Then suddenly he stopped, and turned around to look at me. “But—none of that matters, does it?” he asked. “I mean, he—I—can be as great as I want…that doesn’t change what he’s done. This play is about Cupid growing up. This is a play about not getting what you want, but giving up what you deserve.”
He shrugged and went back to his chore.
I ran home and wrote all night.
The following week, I returned with the completed scene and once again James took on Cupid while another brilliant actress took on Psyche. We played with what it meant for Psyche to deny Cupid vision. The scene seemed to work.
I ran back and revised the remainder of the play. Whenever I wasn’t sure which way to go, I remembered that it was Cupid’s story and made a choice. Things seemed to fall into place. We organized a private reading of the full play.
That reading revealed that there were a few more gaps to fill in or smooth over (for example, it was my cousin, the fierce and elegant Susannah playing Persephone who convinced me to restore her agonized speech to an absent Cupid from a previous draft), but the scene I was most concerned with was this one.
I knew that everything fit together from Acts I-III. I had known that for a while. A caused B to happen, B knocked into C and so forth. This scene was the intrusion of grace—unmerited, undeserved, shocking—and I had no idea if my audience would accept it.
We got to the scene.
I held my breath.
They began.
And something surprising happened.
It had been, up to that point, a rather raucous read—as private readings among friends with beer and pizza and leftover scones from someone’s day job are often wont to be—yet as soon as Psyche began: “There was—one moment—wordless” we all grew very silent. There was, to my surprise, a quivering in the air: a desire, a yearning, the tenuous steel bubble of long-abandoned hope, the sense that this is what we all had been waiting for, and never, ever knew it.
A few months later, we had a loosely blocked public reading with a few more significant revisions in order to see how it would land on an audience.
Same thing.
By this point, James had some definite opinions about the script and having lived through a few iterations said to me one day: “You know that line from the spitdraft you sent us a while back? ‘You can catch them when they fall. They melt into your skin and make you shine.’ I liked that line. Can we put it back in?”
I put it back in.
But perhaps the best thing I can say is that after we performed this scene for the Turn to Flesh Gala, while we were all out for celebratory drinks after, our Aphrodite for that iteration, a radiant and warm young woman, turned to me and said:
“That last scene hurt me, Emily.”
“How so?” I asked soupily. (By which I don’t mean sauced, but a puddle of mush from elation and exhaustion.)
“It was beautiful, Emily. It was just brutally beautiful. One character speaks, and you fall in love with her. And then the other one speaks, and you hate him. And then you understand him. And then you side with him. And then she speaks, and it all begins again. You love them, and they hurt you.”
I smiled at her soupily—and sappily—and seraphically—and hoped that somewhere Jills knew that we’d maybe touched sublimity, and somewhere else Flannery O’Connor was nodding her sage head and unleashing Heaven on the unwary.
SECTION 2. THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR
As promised, what follows are bit and pieces of the Rhymes That Got Away.
(I fancy that in the Elizabethan equivalent, Shakespeare must have had a file of old crumpled papers and Renaissance Diet Coke cans scattered about his apartments, just full of alternate versions of his great plays. Or he just published them.)
I do not guarantee that any of these virtual crumpled sheets bear anything particularly divine, but they may help to illustrate the process of writing this play, and rediscovering verse drama.
[Extended Scene] Act II, Scene 1 – Four Rhyming Lovers
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What follows is what happens when you get just silly with far too many Molièresque rhyming couplets and bawdry, and then think that you’re terribly clever making a speech about a handful of unrelated Greek mythology.
Fortunately, my first Psyche took umbrage with the speech and so clued me in that the scene needed to be cut. Just for fun, though, you can see what mayhem used to continue ensuing.
CHRYSOS.
How supple, this bark!
BRONTES.
These branches, sublime!
CHRYSOS.
What a delicate twig!
BRONTES.
O, I’d love to climb!
(CUPID pushes the men off.)
PSYCHE.
(To BRONTES.) What man? Do you waver? Even here are you false?
LIVIA.
(To PSYCHE.) Name him false whom thou dost falsely love?
I’ll name thee false when I thee truly move!
PSYCHE.
You’ll truly move me, sister, when you can truly rhyme!
DAREIA.
Will you scorn her now when you have her love enthralled?
PSYCHE.
Her love? Cupid’s arrow never made Brontes fall.
BRONTES.
(To PSYCHE.) Excepting for thee, Psyche, my sweet!
Wouldst thou but trample with delicate feet.
CHRYSOS.
No! No! Not him! Pound me to pieces!
PSYCHE.
O, you’ll be pounded when this madness ceases.
DAREIA.
A madness indeed! You see what you’ve done!
LIVIA.
What spell have you cast?
APHRODITE.
Whose bow have you stolen?
DAREIA.
They call you a goddess.
LIVIA.
Think you divine!
PSYCHE.
O, yes—but I am.
Immortal, am I. Full-sprung from the bow of Bacchus,
I bubbled forward in a burp, when that great lord
Did laugh to see his Maenads caper for his pleasure.
Drunk with cheap wine and shadowy joys,
The god of Satyrs slept, and dreamt of being sober.
So, sleeping, was I born. And another time
Medusa cried out—her nightmares full of beauty;
But when she woke, she saw one more lovely than her dreams.
Full of love, she closed her stone-cursed eyes
That he might live, although she knew she’d perish.
So, dying, was I born. And yet again—
I! The goddess of a thousand names
Became the thought of Echo as she pined
After Narcissus. So, too, was I that vain boy’s
Pleasure, as he gazed in love with his own reflection.
O! I am born of other people’s voices
And I am born of other people’s thoughts.
And as God is no more than what all men believe—
Believe in me! That I am, indeed, a goddess!
Terrible! Divine! Sea-foam sprung, and swathed
In Nature’s tendrils. Bow down, and tremble!
Ye mortals whom I careless trod. Bow down!
Be still! And look upon your god.
LIVIA.
She has gone mad.
PSYCHE.
O! Never saner! At
last I know me for who I am…
But speak no more to me. Do not speak,
Nor do not think—I will not hear you.
CHRYSOS.
But we said nothing.
PSYCHE.
Good. Good. Thy silence best becomes thee. Very good.
BRONTES.
I can be silenter.
CHRYSOS.
I can be the silentest!
PSYCHE.
Enough! I will you all away from me. I am a god, and can no longer be seen.
(Everyone is silent. Until—)
CHRYSOS.
I can still see you.
BRONTES.
I can see more!
PSYCHE.
Begone! Begone! Begone!
(The Lovers exeunt. PSYCHE addresses the gods.)
PSYCHE.
And you, too. Whatever you may be. Begone, be silent, begone. And leave me to my misery.
APHRODITE.
O this is better than revenge. Thus to thy subtle ministrations, I leave thee. (Exits.)
PSYCHE.
And there, another voice, although fainter than the last.
[Extended Scene] Act II, Scene 1 – Pinching Scene
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Recently, while we were rehearsing for the “Will you kill me now” sequence, my Cupid and Psyche—the same pair that you see on the cover—got a little silly as we mapped out exactly when Psyche hears Cupid but can’t see him, and when she can both hear and see him (as a tree, or enfleshed), or when she’s just wicked smaht and sorts out where he ought to be, and so on and so forth.
While we were playing with the scene, there was a place or two where the text required Psyche to justify following in Cupid’s wake although he wasn’t currently talking.
In these cases, we got out what Sarah and James dubbed the “justification drums.” We’d hit a given or a snag that the damn playwright had thrown in, and out would come the air drums and we’d bossa nova our way through the givens until we lighted on something that worked: “How about Cupid brushes her arm as he passes by? So she gets a general sense of her trajectory? Yeah! Rimshot!”
The actors’ and director’s job is one of continual justification drums. It’s a fun game to literally fill in the staid meter with a little jazz. However, it’s only possible to fill in between the givens. Which means that it’s the playwright’s job to give the proper beat.
So, originally there was no near-death experience followed by making out with the god of Love. Instead, originally, Cupid and Psyche didn’t get sexy so much as they got philosophical. For the record, while I happen to find philosophy sexy in a man, it’s not quite as sexy on stage. At least when that man is Eros.
I had fallen back into both the traps. I put convoluted thoughtful words in Cupid’s mouth rather than Psyche’s tongue; and I got terribly clever about the nature of madness, when I should have just let Psyche freak out.
The scene went something like this:
PSYCHE.
I won’t. You pinched me!
CUPID.
Who I? The incorporeal air? Psyche, be still.
Love, struggle no more. But hear me.
PSYCHE.
O, I will not listen to one I cannot see.
CUPID.
No? Then farewell!
PSYCHE.
O! Will you begone?
CUPID.
Would you have your madness linger with you?
PSYCHE.
So long as you promise not to pinch!
CUPID.
I will. But this I cannot vow.
PSYCHE.
What’s that?
CUPID.
I cannot love.
PSYCHE.
No? Well, neither do I!
But come, come, my madness most discreet!
And answer me with phrase fantastical:
Why a voice I surely do not hear
Will not whisper words I wish he’d say?
CUPID.
Were I indeed a madness, not a man,
Then sure, I’d only speak what you desire,
For madness is no more than what one wishes.
But you are not mad, nor am I your madness.
And thus I speak only that which is true:
I cannot love.
PSYCHE.
Again, my own mind crosses me!
Or else this very cross is madness still…
I dreamt my love found me, and being mad,
I dreamt that he despisèd me. And yet,
Were this a phantasm, no more than a dream,
Or if I had faith in those things that seem,
Should not my mind and true heart accord,
And name my Madness: “My Love, and my Lord?”
CUPID.
If I’ve a will to speak other than your wish,
Then no word of yours can move me to be seen.
I cannot love.
PSYCHE.
You will not love.
CUPID.
No, by God! I cannot!
Thou wert better quit of me than ever
Fall in love with me. I am not what I am.
I have kissed a thousand people, and lain
With a thousand men—and still unsated.
Husbands I’ve seduced, daughter I have ruined,
Virgins I’ve deflowered with visions drunk on lust;
No mark to mark my passing but the mind.
And all, all in the terrible name of Love.
PSYCHE.
You speak as if you were the god himself!
But can it be?
Is Love himself in love with me?
If thou wouldst have me believe of thee so ill,
Then I’ll tell thee, good for good, what thou hast done:
If thou art Love, as now thou dost too much deny,
Then thou hast bloomed the unexpected love
Of Widow for her newborn babe, giving her
Much comfort in her loss. If thou art Love,
Then thou hast given strength to wounded limbs
Of men upon the battlefield, when Justice
Calls them to her need. If thou, O Love art Love,
Then thou has crept, most secret, through the keyholes
To the blushing chambers of my most inmost heart.
Therefore, let me see thee and name thee Love indeed!
CUPID.
So thou wilt have me as I am. I’ll trust myself to thee.
(They kiss, as unnoticed, PERSEPHONE and ADONIS enter.)
PERSEPHONE.
‘Tis pity she must die.
[Alternate Scene] Act III, Scene 4 – Vanity, Vanity
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It might be argued that the top of the current Act III, Scene 4 is highly reminiscent of that little recitative at the end of “Angel of Music” from The Phantom of the Opera. Such an argument would not be wrong.
I’d also argue that the tenseness of that piece of music is far more interesting and appropriate than what Psyche and her father’s last words together used to be. (See this Verse Trap.)
This is a good example of how an actor can alert the playwright to what’s happening within the scene. It was our first Psyche who, while we were all hanging out in the green room between the matinee and evening performances, casually mentioned to me that Psyche has a curious habit of first feeling something and then thinking about what she’s feeling.
My Psyche laughed and pointed to the following scene as a good example of how Psyche does this—and while Psyche certainly does tend to overanalyze what’s happening inside of herself, it alerted me to the fact that this particular scene probably needed work.
PSYCHE.
(To THANOS.) And will you still say that your daughter’s well?
That she unrulèd by her passions stands?
Or will you not look on me and recoil
To see such an one as I who looks like flesh,
Who feels like flesh, but is no more like flesh
Than the cold simacru
lum who stare
Upon the world with blank, unseeing eyes.
I am more made of marble than of flesh!
For I am no more moved by these deaths
Than the meanest corpse in Medusa’s cave.
My only tears now from the Heavens fall;
Should it not storm, I could not weep at all.
O, comfort me, good father!
THANOS.
Heard you his voice today?
PSYCHE.
O grief, I did.
Before that poor girl strangled was, I did.
THANOS.
And spoke you to him?
PSYCHE.
The same as I did before.
Have I done wrong? Should I this monster wed?
THANOS.
He may not be a monster when you take him to your bed.
PSYCHE.
Speak you from your heart? Have these lovers
Died in vain? In vain, I say? A vanity,
Indeed! For all reasoning is Vanity.
We speak in vain to list what we would hear:
“That it were better that ten thousand die
So long as Psyche lives comfortably.”
O foul, pernicious, damning vanity!
Why should I not this very night betake me
To a mountaintop and shriek aloud:
“Take me instead, and let these lovers live!”
THANOS.
No, good my Psyche, no! A vanity?
Cupid and Psyche Page 16