four women show what they don’t tell in Ariel Stess’s new play @ The Tank Aug 2nd-17th
In her new, ceaselessly surprising, deeply absorbing, and very funny play, KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA, Ariel Stess is pulling off a good half-dozen theatrical stunts at once. And she is so impressively self-assured in her high-wire acrobatics that we focus only on the flips and dips, forgetting the gaping peril, above which the wily tricks are being performed. That applies literarily as well as to the yawning crises inside which the four eponymous leads are spiraling.
Stess’s foremost feat is to invert that tried-and-true playwriting bromide, ‘Show don’t tell,’ on its head. From the jump, we are granted access to the women’s inner mental processing, spoken aloud, so it seems they ‘tell’ and ‘tell and ‘tell’ and ‘tell’:
KARA
Woke up and the kids, gone. Seth’s retainer still here.
Dennis gone.
Dennis’ phone is straight to voicemail.
I’m leaving voicemails.
It’s like call the cops or call Dennis’ sister?
* * *
EMMA
Woke up. I’m gone. But still here just in a new state, new hotel room.
Dennis gone.
[…]
Dennis’ phone is straight to voicemail.
I’m not leaving voicemails. Not a nag!
It’s like I’m suddenly rich up on top of everything looking down! My own fucking fancy ass comforter, yo!
Yet, it is quickly understood, as indicated by these excerpts, ‘telling’ is not quite fair, because what the characters speak is not direct address or some sort of formulated narration but, rather, their interrupted streams-of-consciousness.
BARBARA
“Aah!” I expel sleep-breath into Matt’s face. He must have broke in.
“What the fuck are you doing here in the middle of the night?” I ask him.
“How’d you get into my home?”
The incongruity between how they are processing and how they are received is the very source of these women’s struggles (and the play’s humor), so rather than expositional or explanatory, the immediate effect of the characters’ voiced inner-monologues is to do what any great theater does: reveal a dimension of experience normally inaccessible – because of cultural norms, unexamined action, social silencing – and, yes, show us the unspoken richness that society plainly suppresses.
I am leading with high literary praise here, but the play’s unique format is not some arbitrary dramaturgical conceit. Through their inner-experience, we see that the women’s profound losses and fears are surrounded by decidedly mundane and glancing frustrations – the very kind that eat away at all of our sense of agency but are the stuff of the everyday absurd.
In fact, it is no knock on the sophistication of the characters to say nearly nothing in their streams-of-conscious is particularly concerned with ‘high’ ideas (perhaps excepting Emma’s memories of a subtle argument regarding the Bechdel Test that she espoused in high school); yet, this does not come off as their lack of cultivation, depth, or pluck. Rather, the opposite: the immediate concerns they are forced to confront feel, cuttingly, as out of their control and cultivation as they could be. Dumb men. Dumb jobs. Dumb life-necessities – like heat and food – keep that most privileged and ‘high-minded’ goal, self-realization, tragically remote.
And all of this is hilarious!
MIRANDA
The band begins to play a loud, boring song. The crowd of vegan, Christian diners sway and sing. The busboy comes over to clear my plate and I wonder if he thinks I’m rich for coming here and opting to eat vegetables posing as regular food.
* * *
BARBARA
Maybe Jackalope, that huge fucking tchotchke store, will hire him. He’ll spend his days moving elk sculptures around their flagstone yards and moving fountains around their elk sculptures and digging ditches for newer, deeper, bigger stone sculptures.
Another unlikely triumph of the show is Stess’s ability to conjure such a specific, complex world that, yet, feels to have but one simple and generalized problem. To be only slightly reductive, these women’s problem is men. Rather than being fashionably post-modern or knowingly skeptical of heteronormativity and informed by gender-fluidity, the four women rendered so (tragically) realistically are straightforwardly subsumed by the cis-men in their lives – partners, exes, co-workers, customers… It’s all just too much. Even more (unfortunately) realistic, none of the men are villainous per se – several, indeed, are mostly just hapless or oblivious of any harmful effect. (It seems a smart choice that all the male characters will be played by master-of-the-flat-delivery and frequent Stess-world collaborator, Paul Ketchum.) By interpolating the women’s inner-monologues into their dialogues with various orbiting male characters, Stess offers the side-splitting miscommunications that are part-and-parcel of man-woman exchange in our tiered patriarchy.
EMMA
I’m looking out the window and trying not to think about him and to think about myself instead but he’s always right next to me. How am I supposed to focus on myself? … Great. Now he’s turning up the radio and some piece of shit song is playing in the car and in my brain.
“Who is this?” I ask.
* * *
BARBARA
I roll to Matt. He moves closer to me and exhales against my neck. He’s not snoring, finally. This feels comforting for now if I can forget I hate his mouth and his brain and the majority of his ideas, and it’s also not at all.
But neither is this a play about politics and power. The personal is centered and pure. There is too much immediate practical situation for these women to navigate to find much time for self-actualization, let alone detached philosophizing or geopolitical participation.
Upon introduction, Kara (40s) has just returned to Santa Fe from a three-month maternal caretaking obligation – states removed from her husband and two boys – that ended, to her natural shock, as life eventually always does. 21-year-old Emma’s wandering path to adulthood has found her youthful self-reflection and curiosities compressed inside her middle-aged lover’s projection of her. Barbara (60s) faces the brutal dismissals of her senior vulnerabilities (and wisdom!) and a life-long confusion of how her active intervention in the world has done little to affirm most of her life-choices as worthwhile. Miranda (30s) is finding the punishments of wage-work in conjunction with her incompetent partner accumulating into an acute crisis.
In short, we are hurtling along with parallel runaway trains – vertically aligned, if you organize their trajectories along the characters’ diverse social and generational strata – and the obstacles to maintaining fidelity to a track, any track, just keep on piling up. In a fitting distillation of the world’s misperception of her, at one point Barbara wonders, “How did I train myself to never be at ease and still lead the world to believe I’m okay?”
Oof, Barbara. Oof.
Given the above, it may be unnecessary to disclose that Ariel Stess is a writer whom I admire *ahem* to the point of extravagance. A friend and peer, we regularly exchange writing, and I know that many of her peers recognize, as I do, that Stess has that extra gear, that intangible facility with language and form that elevates her work and makes us all pay attention. Not seen on New York stages since 2017, Stess is reuniting with a cast of Downtown all-stars and hometown treasures for this presented run of KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA at The Tank, with artist support from New Georges’ In Collaboration program, August 2nd-17th. Directed by The Tank’s ever-innovative artistic director, Meghan Finn, and (along with Ketchum) starring Megan Emery Gaffney (returning from a 7-year stage-hiatus herself), Kallan Dana (a celebrated playwright in her own right), stalwart Colleen Werthmann (a member of the aforementioned NY treasures), and the irreplaceable Zoë Geltman, Stess has organized herself a tantalizing return to town.
When was the last time you saw a play that pulled off a hopeful resolution that you also felt was, somehow, pulling no punches? Consider some of Caryl Churchill’s plays, say, as counter examples: masterful, form-bending stories on feminist motifs that lead us along curious and and involving trajectories, but which almost inevitably wend themselves to dread-filled or devastating conclusions, deliberately emptying our appreciation of human resilience in the face of social or cosmic caprice.
Is it not that much more impressive to invert that model? Ground the story in the teeth-clenching conflicts and bewildering assaults faced by the modern woman, yet, persuasively render a hopeful sequence of accidents and effective impulses that believably offer a picture of collective transcendence?
Never sentimental or contrived, Stess’s play makes a strong case for female-allyship across class and generational divides. Maybe it is just the saturation in cynicism of our age, but such a feat in 2024 feels downright radical.
Stess shared with me recently that by “getting to know these women so well through writing [out their thinking], I felt they could make a small change that could help them. Which in other plays of mine, I don’t think I have felt.” She credits the 90’s British sitcom, Peep Show, as an inspiration for the form of her play – that show also mines the humor in the juxtaposition of thought and action, by broadcasting the lead male characters’ inner-thoughts in voice-over directly before their spoken dialogue. But humorous juxtaposition is not all Stess finds in the contrast between her characters’ private thoughts and public scripts. Instead, uncovering their suppressed selves suggests the latent possibility for mutual intervention in their “isolated crises.” She elaborated, “I do think I have a lot of characters [in my other plays] that process, inarticulately, what they are going through aloud, which is often funny and relatable, I hope.” Yet in this play, the characters discover how happy accidents just might present themselves when others are given opportunity to decipher their “inner-inarticulate.”
Finding a new format for a play is always a bold stroke. And after thousands of years of live drama, such boldness is not always a reward – the conventional wisdom constrains, ‘Hey, I think we know what works here, folks.’ Playwrights are instructed, as mentioned above, to ‘show, don’t tell,’ among other tired and anti-creative sentiments. Yet, Stess is a writer of uncommon linguistic agility, generating buoyancy with the strength of her line alone. Sometimes down to the word. It is a high-wire act where those of us watching in a state of suspended tension marvel as each foot gets placed in front of the other, over and over. And this care that she has taken translates. After everything her characters contend with, we are shown how, with just a touch of common care, these women may have shared, for once, the means for grace on the tightrope.
In these outrageous and outraged times, we are left to ponder if they may be on to something.
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