THE SHOW

Once, several years ago, Antoine took me to a one-man show. The performer was a legendary local actor who now worked only rarely. He was in his seventies, in fragile health. The show was held in a gallery space, for a small audience—perhaps twenty-five people; it felt very intimate. Antoine said we were lucky to get tickets. The stage was indicated by a soft, golden rug in the middle of the room. The only piece of furniture on it was an ordinary, folding metal chair; the same type of chair was set out in three rows for the audience.

Antoine and I were on the end of the middle row. We were chatting when the actor came in from the lobby. Antoine nudged me so I would know to begin watching. The actor came in as if he were only one of us, a member of the audience, and began walking across the stage as if he were heading to a seat on the other side. But he stopped at the chair on the stage. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back and adjusted and brushed off the shoulders. He greeted some people in the audience near him. The voices in the room tapered off. Someone fixed the lights.

The actor spoke for the next ninety minutes. In a conversational tone, he told the story of auditioning for, rehearsing, and performing in a play he didn’t like very much, that he thought was poorly written. Woven into this story was another, the story of his beginnings and development as an actor, from his early youth up until the bad play—which, we were given to understand, had taken place quite recently, perhaps just a year or two before this moment now when we found ourselves in the gallery with him. Aside from the essential artificiality of a person speaking at such length without pause, interruption, or response, his tale felt very real and natural.

I don’t know anything about the actor’s biography. And he is, after all, an actor, and the occasion was a show—yet, I took the story to be true. I believed that everything he said had happened had happened in essentially the way he described. It had the wandering, baggy quality of real life, and the character he spoke of as “I” shared his age and occupation, and, though what he was telling about was clearly meaningful to him, it was not unusually eventful. It was the account of some experiences in a working actor’s life.

As he spoke, he ambled to and fro on the stage. He walked a bit this way, speaking to this section of the audience, then back a bit that way. Nothing strenuous, but not stuck in one spot. A feeling of fluidity.

While he was moving about the stage, telling his very long story about coming to a rather delicate insight about the human condition that I cannot now reduce or recreate, he gradually took off the pale blue chambray shirt he was wearing over a black turtleneck, and then he took off his belt, and at last, he took off his trim, polished oxford shoes.

It was a striptease so slow and deliberate that it created a great deal of tension. As I watched his fingers push the button through the buttonhole of one cuff and then, many minutes later, reach for the other cuff, I lost track of what he was saying. He pulled the tails of his shirt out of his pants, undid the buttons, took it off, folded it in half across the shoulders, and laid it over his jacket on the back of his chair. It was hard to tell which was the real performance: was the business with his clothes performed only to give our eyes something to do while we listened to the story? or was the purpose of his story only to keep us in our seats while he undressed and exposed (or revealed) himself?

I didn’t hear anything he said during the long moment when he was working on his belt buckle. I felt my heart quicken. I didn’t know what he would do.

He pulled the belt out through his belt loops and laid it like a dead snake on top of his shirt. Then he sat in the chair, untied one shoe and the other, eased them off, and tucked them neatly side-by-side.

By the end of his story, he was still clothed, yet undone. He sat with his stocking feet apart; he’d untucked his turtleneck from his pants and pushed the sleeves up. He leaned on his forearms over his knees and clasped his hands together. A gloss of sweat had been raised at his temples and his hair was roughed up. When his story was over, he stopped speaking and, after gazing out at us for a moment, he let his head drop. His face was hidden and we saw the crown of his head, the body part first to emerge at birth.

In the car on the way home, I asked Antoine if he’d thought the actor was going to get fully naked.

“For a moment there, when he was talking about his argument with that one director who tried to emasculate him, and he was fumbling with his belt—yes, it looked like he was going to strip down,” Antoine said.

“And what would you have done if he had?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Antoine said, and it didn’t sound like he’d worried about it at all. He was untroubled. “I guess I would have beheld him naked. Watched to see what happened next. What would you have done?”

“Depends on his intentions.”

“How would you know?”

“Like, is he showing himself to us as a representative human, stripped of his defenses and guileless? Is it vulnerability? The fragility of the flesh? The aging human form?—Or, is he using us? Exposing himself without our consent as a kind of attack. Taking pleasure from us, his

captive audience. Enacting a revenge upon us for objectifying him. Acting out. Flailing against mortality.”

“Maybe all of the above!” Antoine said. He laughed.

But I’d had a real moment of fear.