by Lauren Groff
—
AND THEN IT WAS CHRISTMAS. Mistletoe hanging from the hallway chandelier, blue spruce wrapped up the banister, a smell of cinnamon, baking apples. Lancelot stood at the bottom of the stairs, smiling at his cragged face in the mirror, fixing his tie. Looking at him, he thought, you’d never tell that he had been so broken this year. He had suffered, had come through it all stronger. Even, he thought, possibly more attractive. Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age. Poor Mathilde, with her corrugated forehead. In twenty years, she’d be silver-gray, her face full of wrinkles. Oh, but she’d still be beautiful, he thought, loyal to the marrow.
The sound of a motor broke in and he looked out to find the dark green Jaguar turning off the road onto the gravel among the bare cherry trees.
“They’re here,” he called up the stairs to Mathilde.
He was smiling: it had been months since he’d seen his sister and Elizabeth and their adopted twins, and how they would love the rocking turtle and the rocking owl he’d had carved for them by an eccentric hermit woodworker out in the deep upstate wilds. The owl bore a startled scholarly look and the turtle seemed to be chewing a bitter root. Oh, for the kids’ spritelike bodies in his arms. The soothe of his sister beside him. He came up on his toes in excitement.
But he saw, under the bowl of peppermint bark on the cherry hall stand, the corner of a newspaper peeking out. Unusual. Mathilde so neat, usually. Everything in the house in its proper place. He pushed the bowl aside to see. His legs went liquid under him.
A grainy photo of Leo Sen, smiling shyly. A small article beneath his face.
Promising British composer drowned off an island in Nova Scotia. Tragedy. Such potential. Eton and Oxford. Early prodigy on the violin. Known for his aharmonic, deeply emotional compositions. No partner. Will be missed by parents, community. Quotes by famous composers; Leo had been better known than Lancelot had believed.
What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear. Another sinkhole. Someone there, suddenly gone. Leo swimming in such cold water. December, rip currents, spray above the wild waves instantly freezing to bullets of ice. He imagined the shock of cold black water on the body, shuddered. Everything about it was wrong.
He had to breathe to keep on two feet. He gripped the table and opened his eyes to see his own face gone white in the mirror.
And above his left shoulder, he saw Mathilde at the top of the stairs. She was watching him. She was unsmiling, intent, bladelike in her red dress. The weak December daylight poured through the window above her and touched her around the shoulders.
The door opened in the kitchen and the children’s voices were in the back of the house, shouting for Uncle Lotto, and Rachel yelled out, “Hello?” and the dog barked joyfully and Elizabeth honked out a laugh, and Rachel and Elizabeth began to softly bicker, and still, Lancelot and his wife looked at each other in the mirror. And then Mathilde took one step down and then another, and her old small smile returned to her face. “Merry Christmas!” she called out gaily in her deep, clear voice. He flinched back as if he’d put his hand down on a hot stove, and she fixed him in the mirror as she slowly, slowly, descended.
6
“MAY I AT LEAST READ what you wrote with Leo?” Mathilde asked, one night in bed.
“Maybe,” Lancelot said, and rolled over on top of her and put his hands up her shirt.
Later, after she submarined below the sheets, she came up, flushed with his heat. “Maybe, as in I can read it?”
“M.,” he said softly. “I hate my own failure.”
“That’s a no?” she said.
“That’s a no,” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
But he had to go to the city the next day to meet with his agent, and she went to his aerie at the top of the house, all scattered papers and coffee cups growing fur, and sat and read what was in the file folder.
She stood and went to the window. She thought of the boy who had drowned in the icy black water, of a mermaid, of herself. “Shame,” she said to the dog. “It could have been so great.”
THE ANTIGONAD
[First sketch, with notes for music]
CAST OF CHARACTERS
GO: countertenor, offstage; onstage, a puppet in water or a hologram that remains the entire opera in a glass tank
ROS: tenor, Go’s lover
CHORUS OF TWELVE: gods and tunnelers and commuters
FOUR DANCERS
ACT I: SOLIP
No curtains. Stage black. In the center, a cylindrical tank of water lit or composed to look like a cave. Go: inside. It is difficult after all these aeons to tell she is human. She is whittled to the necessary.
[Leo: The music begins so quietly it is mistaken for ambient sounds. Drips, rumbles from far off. Hissing, a windlike whistling. Shuffling. Heartbeat. Leathery wings. Fragments of music so filtered it is no longer music. Static of voices, as if through rock. One hopes for the audience talking, the sounds of people settling in deep into the score. The sounds gather a rhythm, a harmony, as they grow louder.]
In imperceptible increments, the lights brighten on the cave, darken on the house. The audience eventually quiets.
Go wakes, sits. She begins to sing her first aria, a lament, as she moves around her cave.
Surtitles in English projected above the proscenium arch. Go’s language is her own. Ancient Greek, stripped down, no verb tenses, no cases, no genders. Also warped by millennia of solitude, changed by the fragments of words that have filtered down to her from the world above, German and French and English. She is mad in both senses: angry and insane.
Go narrates how she lives as she moves: garden of moss and mushrooms to tend, worms to milk, garments of hair and spider silk to weave more of every day. Slow showers from the water that drips off the stalactites. Terrible loneliness. Bats with baby faces that she’d bred, unable to speak more than ten words, unsatisfying conversationalists. Go is not resigned to her fate. She speaks against the gods who cursed her with immortality; she had tried to hang herself but couldn’t. Woke up in shrouds with a rope burn on her neck and Haemon dead beside her. His bones she turned into the spoons and bowls she eats with. She holds her bowl, his skull, and becomes furious again, shouts imprecations against the gods.
Lights cut away from Go’s cave, up to the chorus, in god garb, small lights embedded in their garments so they’re almost painfully bright. They first appear to be six pillars in a half circle around her tank until we see the symbols that make them who they are: wings on the heels for Hermes, Mars’s gun, Minerva’s owl, et cetera.
They sing in English. They wanted to give Go immortality, a gift, but they put her in the cave until she showed gratitude. She has yet to show gratitude. Furious Go. Arrogant Go.
Flashback: the story of Antigone, in dance. The dancers are behind the tank so that the water magnifies their bodies and makes them wild and strange. They act out in a short mime how Antigone’s brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, fight on opposite sides, how both die, how Antigone buries Polynices twice, against Creon’s diktat, then Creon versus the gods, Antigone led away, hanging herself. Haemon killing himself, Eurydice killing herself, Creon dying. Bloodbath galore.
But one of the gods, Minerva, cuts Antigone down, revives her. Seals her into the cave.
The gods sing that they meant to let her, last root of a rotten house, daughter of incest, survive. All she had to do was to humble herself to them. But millennium upon millennium, she wouldn’t. Bow, Go, and you will be set free. For the gods are nothing if not kind.
Go: HA!
Lights return to Go, and she sings a new, swifter aria in her language: The gods forgot Go. Go would kill them with her hands. Chaos would be better than they. Curse the gods; Go curses them. The humans, Go knows, are growing hot, like a volcano; they will explode, sink to nothing. The end is upon them and they celebrate themselves
. Who is worse: the gods or men? Go doesn’t care. Go doesn’t know.
[Entr’acte: ten-minute video overlying the stage. A sparse brown field with a single olive tree, time passing with radical swiftness. The tree grows, withers, dies, the field is covered with new trees that grow, wither, die, a house is built. An earthquake, house collapses, and Go’s cave is dislodged, begins to travel underground. Now the video pans. Cities are built, armies swarm, burn them to the ground. Under the Mediterranean for a few beats, sharks passing. Go’s cave travels under Italy as we see the earth changing from Roman empire, aqueducts and agriculture, Rome rebuilt, under the Alps, wolves, into France in the Dark Ages—quick scroll of time—and land through Eleanor of Aquitaine, Paris, under the Channel, into London burning in 1666, where the cave’s trajectory halts. We see the city’s organlike growth up to 1979.]
ACT II: DÉMO
[Video narrows until it’s a thin band above Go’s cave, under the surtitles. Passionflower unfurling in real time. Forty-five minutes, bud to bloom.]
Go does pull-ups inside her cave. Planks. She runs on a treadmill made of spider silk and stalagmites, to a ghostly, echoing, atonal music. Applause from the upside-down baby-faced bats.
She slowly strips naked and stands in a slow shower from a stalactite.
She hears something. Offstage, voices growing louder. Go presses her ear to the side of the cave, and the lights illumine a chorus of diggers in hard hats who have emerged. Their voices provide the rhythm and noises of digging, and a singing saw provides the melody. Out of the mass of working men, one, Ros, stands, taking a break: he is young, very handsome, dressed more neatly in his late-seventies clothes than the others. He is extremely tall with a full beard. The men sing about the Jubilee underground line and how the glory of mankind has killed the gods.
The gods are dead, they sing, in English. We have killed them. Humans have overcome them.
Go laughs with pleasure to hear voices so close, so clear.
But Ros breaks in with a counterpoint song, We, moles. Unthinking and blind. Stunted in the darkness. One can’t be good if one can’t see the sun. And what does it mean to be human if you can’t end your life better than how it began.
Go presses her whole body against the wall. There is something erotic in the way she moves.
Break time: a soprano offstage sings a lunch whistle. The men’s song ends. They huddle around, eating their lunch, except Ros, who sits with a book and a sandwich, apart from the others on the other side of the rock from Go.
She quietly tries to sing the song he sang. He hears and eagerly presses his ear up against the rock. He looks astounded, then afraid. Slowly, he begins to sing back to her. She modifies his song so that it becomes her own, as he and she sing quietly back and forth, in strange off harmony, Go transliterating into her own honed language, making entirely new meanings. [Surtitles are split in the middle, her translations in English, his actual words.] Their faces press at the same level, Go very shrunken, Ros on his knees. He introduces himself; she says, softly, that her name is Go.
The other men get up and work silently as Go and Ros sing louder, harder, the soprano singing a day’s-end whistle, breaking off the duet, and though Ros tries to stay, the foreman won’t let him. As they leave, the men modify their song to make fun of Ros: Ros is a dreamer, they sing. Dumb as the rocks around us. Useless book reader. Not a real man, Ros.
Go sings a love song, an aria, almost beautiful, and the cave music is less cacophonous behind her and seems to sing with her.
Ros returns and frantically tries to dig at the wall, not understanding that the rock has a curse on it and can’t be broken. Days pass, symbolized by the workers moving down the track, the soprano singing the end-of-day tone, and still Ros tries. The eroticism of their movements has turned to downright fornication with the walls. [Leo: the music aches with longing.] Ros sings over the days going by, more and more frantically, I won’t leave you, Go. I will get you out. He stops hiding what he’s doing and starts doing it openly, and the others surround him and put him in a straitjacket to drag him off. He tries to make them understand, but they become vicious. He sings his love song to Go as he is dragged away to the asylum, and she sings back. It seems as if only one other person might hear Go—there’s a flash of recognition—but he shrugs and helps drag Ros away.
Go sings, alone, her love song. She begins to slowly weave her wedding dress. Red.
Outside, the underground station is finished, people start getting on, getting off. They are the gods, in street clothes. You know they’re gods by the shine they emit compared with the other passengers. We have been diminished, they sing. Gods are only stories now. Immortal still, but powerless.
They get on and off the underground train as they sing.
Ros returns in ratty clothes, looking urgent and hairy and homeless. He presses his face against Go’s wall and sings the love song. In relief, they sing a bit of their duet, but Go’s version has changed again. She takes the song darker, getting more and more frantic and fervent, fighting against her wall, punching and kicking it as Ros constructs a small cardboard house, pads it with newspaper, rolls out a sleeping bag, settles in.
I won’t leave you, Ros sings. You’ll never be alone again.
[Entr’acte: a five-minute video overlay like before. London swells and grows above them, the Gherkin, the Olympic Village, forward into massing overwhelming overcrowding, riots, fires, darkness, disaster.]
ACT III: ESCHAT
Opens to find Ros lying where he was at the end of the previous act, but he is ancient, the underground station filthy, graffiti-tagged, nightmarish. The apocalypse is upon them. Go is exactly the same, but more beautiful in her great floating red wedding dress, the bats even more uncanny; bald pink babies with wings, hanging upside down. Muzak, or the most soulless music on the planet. [Apologies, Leo.] It is interrupted with static and strange distant rumblings growing closer.
Ros sings to Go about the people going by, he has learned her language, but we begin to understand that he’s turning the ugly world to beauty.
There’s a fight on the platform, and the audience slowly realizes that one of the fighters is a god, his light diminished, looking as bedraggled and ancient as Ros; it’s Hermes; one knows by the wings of dirty light on his sneakers. Ros gapes.
Tell me about the sun, Go says. You’re my eyes, my skin, my tongue.
But Ros is disturbed by what he has witnessed. The gods have forgotten themselves, Ros sings, as if to himself. He presses both hands on his heart, suddenly stricken with pain. Something is wrong, Go. Something has gone wrong inside me.
She says no. She says he is her young and beautiful husband. He has made her love mankind again. He is only good, inside.
I am old, Go. I am sick. I am sorry, he sings.
The gods gather around, sing, complaining about their woe and the woes of the world. Where in the beginning there was grandeur, brilliant light, great seriousness, there is now unutterable, almost comic, diminishment. Go is overwhelmed, presses her hands over her ears.
Ros crumbles. The world is not what you . . . he begins, but doesn’t finish.
Go sings a love song to him. A video projects on Ros’s body, his soul rising, young, with coins on his eyes; it walks off on a slant of light; on the singer’s prone body, a video is projected of deflation, a whittling to bones.
Ros? Go sings. The single word, over and over and over, no music. Shouting.
At last, she screams to the gods to help her. In English, now, Help me, gods. Help me.
But the gods are preoccupied, the blasting sounds so very loud and close now, their columns of light empty, and they are fighting, all hoboes, dirty slapstick fighting; yet it’s deadly stuff. Minerva garrotes Aphrodite with a laptop charger; Saturn, a filthy, naked giant of an old man, reaches blindly for his son Jupiter, but gobbles a rat à la Goya; Hephaestus comes in with great steel
robots; Prometheus throws a Molotov cocktail at him. It’s all terrible, bloody, until Jupiter wheels out a great red button.
Hades summons his shades, who bring out another red button.
A standoff song, each faking the other out.
[Go has been swirling around her cave, first slowly, then with increasing speed.]
In the silence, one can hear Go moaning, Ros, Ros, Ros.
Suddenly, both gods press their buttons. Huge light flash, cacophony. Then silence, darkness.
Go begins, slowly, to glow. [All other light in the theater—aisle lights, exit lights—extinguished. A darkness to inspire panic.]
Please, she shouts, once, in English.
Nobody answers.
Silence.
[Leo, hold the silence until it is unbearable; one minute, at least.]
Go is alone, she sings. Deathless Go in a dead world. There is no fate worse than this. Go is alone. Alive, alone. The only one. She holds her last note until her voice breaks, and then beyond.
She folds in half on herself until she is in the position we have found her in.
The only sounds are wind, water. A slow and ancient heartbeat increases until it overcomes the wind and water noise, and becomes the only thing we can hear. There can be no applause in the intensity of this noise. There is no curtain closing. Go stays folded in her position until the audience files out.
END
7
THERE WERE FOUR PLAYWRIGHTS for the symposium on the future of theater, the university so rich it could bring them in all at once: the girl prodigy in her twenties, the Native American dynamo in his thirties, the antique voice of theater whose best work was forty years deep in the last century, and Lotto, forty-four, representative of middle age, he supposed. And because the morning was glorious, brimming with chill wind and neon-pink bougainvillea light, and because all admired one another’s work to various degrees, the four playwrights and the moderator fully partook of the bourbon and gossip in the green room while waiting for the event and they were soused by the time they took the stage. The auditorium held five thousand seats and all were full, as was the overflow room with an LED screen, and there were people sitting in the aisles, and the lights were so bright those onstage could barely see beyond the front row, where the wives sat together. Mathilde was on the outside edge, elegant platinum head on fist, smiling up at him.