“I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”
– Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie
I.
Jamie is a psychiatrist. Blaise works for a marketing firm. They meet cute in an elevator, falling faster and harder than Romeo and Juliet at the Capulet feast. By the time Jamie exits onto his floor, they’ve experienced “the best kiss either of them has ever kissed.”
Or so we’re told in an early stage direction accompanying Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s Hypotheticals, which enjoyed a well-attended reading Monday night at Milwaukee’s Sunstone Studios under Mary MacDonald Kerr’s direction. It’s the 27th World Premiere Wisconsin play to make its debut, kicking off the four-plus month festival’s busiest week.
“When I started writing this, it was a straight-up romantic comedy,” Nguyen said to me last week over the phone. “I am obsessed with the concept of romantic love and, especially, forbidden love that puts people together who have no business being together,” she continued.
What’s forbidden in Nguyen’s play?
Unbeknownst to Blaise and Jamie when their lips come together in that elevator, Blaise is then on her way to an initial therapy appointment. As she’ll soon discover, it’s with Jamie. When Jamie himself becomes aware who his new client is, professional ethics require that he immediately head off a physician-patient relationship before it can even start. He doesn’t.
II.
For reasons that have everything to do with gender, romance novels and romantic comedies rarely get the props they deserve. We’re good at describing how noir or westerns – to choose two illustrative examples – are actually metaphors illuminating the hidden recesses of the American (and usually male) psyche.
Romantic comedies? Not so much, even though they tell us far more about how we live and what we dream. To borrow Nguyen’s title, a romantic comedy is the very best of hypotheticals: one that allows us a captivating but simultaneously safe exploration of what our lives could be, were we able to fully inhabit our best and most uninhibited selves.
“Part of what I wanted to play with, through Blaise, are the aspects of myself that I mask,” Nguyen said to me.
“I wanted to explore what happens when you take the mask off,” she continued. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if in unmasking, you discovered that the thing you’re most ashamed of is precisely the quality that someone else finds attractive and that therefore allows you to find the love of your life?”
Or, one might add, learn to better love and accept oneself?
“It’s very freeing to be able to say what you think and be who you are and not be rejected for it,” Nguyen told me.
III.
Nguyen played Blaise in Monday’s reading. Leveraging her advantage as a playwright who’s lived with her script’s words longer than anyone else, she was frequently off book, playing opposite Neil Brookshire’s Jamie.
Whomever I watch playing Blaise in next April’s first full production courtesy of Milwaukee’s Kith & Kin Theatre Collective, I’ll remember Nguyen’s all-in performance, which brought her character more fully to life than readings usually do.
Let’s be clear: Blaise and Nguyen are separate entities; one is a fictional character and the other is a flesh-and-blood human being. But theater regularly blurs the boundaries between the two; that’s part of what makes it so thrilling. And as Nguyen herself had told me, she and her character share some DNA, much as Tom Wingfield and Tennessee Williams do.
As is always true with theater and as is reflected in the title to Nguyen’s play, Hypotheticals allows an actor and her audience to explore alternate versions of themselves, through fictionalized characters and situations giving them – giving us – new ways of seeing who we are.
“When you unmask while writing or reading a book, you do so in private,” Nguyen said. “What’s exciting about theater is that actors do so in public.” Especially when one of them is the playwright.
IV.
For Blaise, that unmasking involves coming to grips with the incident that’s landed her on the couch: Frustrated by her coworkers’ inability to grasp what she sees as obvious, Blaise dumps a bottle of water on one of them. Human Resources responds by placing her on unpaid lead and requiring a psych assessment as a condition of returning to work.
“I don’t understand people,” she says to Jamie during an early session. “I don’t understand why they do the things they do. And I know it’s pointless trying to fight them because I’m always outnumbered and they’re not gonna change.”
Perhaps, Jamie suggests, most of the world’s simply on “a different operating system,” akin to the distinction between Apples and Windows.
“Once you understand someone’s operating system, you see that there’s not one way to experience the world, that there’s no superior way to be human,” Jamie adds.
“There’s just differences.”
V.
Blaise may, as she eventually comes to accept, be on the spectrum. And in a world where Jamie correctly notes that such “Apples are outnumbered,” they are regularly required to “make more adjustments”; as Nguyen pointed out to me, “the world is designed to cater to the majority, making it easier for them than for people with autism.”
But that doesn’t make Windows better. And, as Jamie also correctly observes, “Apples get to have their fun, too.”
“Not everyone who has autism stims or flaps their hands or has trouble making eye contact,” Nguyen pointed out to me. “I want to suggest in this play that this is just another way to be in the world,” she continued. “And that people with autism are as diverse and varied as people without autism. They don’t all resemble Sheldon Cooper; they’re not all white men with a flat affect.”
Similarly, not all romantic comedies need resemble the situationally driven You’ve Got Mail (which I adore and which also involves an elevator scene, but I digress); Nguyen makes the case that we could use romantic comedy’s hypothetical set-ups to explore so much more involving who we are and all we could become.
“I love that romantic comedy is getting this sort of treatment,” Kerr said during the talkback after Monday’s reading. (Nguyen had told me that balancing the light and dark in her play was her greatest challenge in writing it; the success with which she’s done so is the greatest of her play’s many achievements).
“It made me think more about what we mean by ‘normal,’” an audience member said during the same talkback.
VI.
Hypotheticals is especially mindful of how much more narrowly “normal” was once defined – and of how autism has historically been feared and marginalized – in scenes between Blaise and Betty, her mother (embodied by Gladys Chmiel at Monday’s reading).
Afflicted with dementia but still capable of lucid moments, Betty recalls how she’d once concealed from Blaise’s father and the outside world all the ways that Blaise was different.
Betty had given Blaise a name commemorating the fires she knew would burn within her little girl. “And then I snuffed you out,” Betty confesses. “It wasn’t safe to shine your light in that house. I had to keep you in darkness to survive.”
It’s the most moving and poignant scene in Nguyen’s play. But it’s not where or how the play ends.
VII.
Here’s a hypothetical for you, posed by Kerr during the talkback:
Imagine all the relationships that might be saved – and how much heartache might be spared – if we better understood all that the person sitting next to us is going through. Think about all the misunderstanding that might thereby be avoided and all the love that wouldn’t therefore go to waste.
When Blaise and Jamie first kiss in a black box – akin to the black box within which a theater audience watches them do so – we give ourselves over to a hypothetical through which we might see the truth, a distant country where what’s first experienced as an illusion might someday become real.
“My hope is that my play will become dated or even extinct,” Nguyen said to me, while noting that a younger generation’s more generous and expansive view of neurodiversity makes such a prospect real.
I share Nguyen’s optimism about where we’re going, even if I can’t quite bring myself to wish for her play’s demise once the world has indeed grown more empathic.
Even if we were to someday live in the more loving environment Nguyen imagines into being, wouldn’t we want to remember the country where we were from? Wouldn’t we – don’t we – want to hold tight to every hypothetical example of all that can happen when we suspend disbelief and allow ourselves to dream together in the dark?
Monday’s concluded reading of Hypotheticals will be followed by an out-of-town workshop in June and a staged reading in July, culminating in a world premiere production by Milwaukee’s Kith & Kin Theatre Collective next April. Learn more by visiting https://www.rebeccaannenguyen.com/plays.
