Individuals play multiple roles from day to day – child and parent, spouse and work colleague, friend and rival. Such exercises are more audition than performance, as the individual seeks approval from friends and strangers alike. Does moving more deliberately, strategizing like actors in a play, make us more content, more capable?
In Audition by Katie Kitamura, the aging actress protagonist frets about her multiple roles, whether on the stage or during daily life, and she regularly plots her approach, gauging her audience’s assessment. The quest can be for bit parts or roles central to a story. Each role, each encounter, can go “awry, or did not cohere,” the protagonist muses. “I had come to see it as something of a crapshoot, you never knew if this would be the one when everything would come together or if it would fall by the wayside, another disposable performance, the detritus of a soon to be forgotten artistic endeavor.”
She dines with a young man at the start of the book, reflecting on how she cannot completely control assumptions made by nearby diners. They might assume she is a mother treating a son to lunch or an older woman engaged in an unseemly affair. Theater audiences are generally familiar with the plot they have come to witness. Strangers in any public setting beyond the theater lack scripts or background knowledge.
Such insights energize her acting but complicate her relationships on and off stage. “Tension grew out of every scene, scenes in which nothing took place and people said very little, and yet the pressure grew and grew so that by the end of the play I realized I had been in a sickening state of unease for some time, and when I emerged from the theater I was simultaneously invigorated and physically exhausted, every nerve in my body still standing on end.”
The woman regularly muses on losing sight of "the shore," one's center and true self - when one “stumbled deep into the interior... if the world of fiction had lost its protective powers, the line between reality and invention undone.” She is unnerved about not being first to realize that a longtime treasured morning ritual has suddenly become a rut and frets about failures in reading her husband, a son and his girlfriend, her director. Routines and relationships can abruptly shift to some point of no return.
Boundaries between imagination and reality can become vague.
With her son, she discovers “I no longer knew what he was to me, or what I was to him. We had been playing parts, and for a period – for as long as we understood our roles, for as long as we participated in the careful collusion that is a story, that is a family, told by one person to another person – the mechanism had held,” Kitamura concludes. “But the deeper the complicity, and the longer it is sustained, the less give there is, the more binding and unforgiving the contract, and in the end it took very little for the whole thing to collapse. It was as if a break had been called, as if it had suddenly occurred to both of us that his lines were insufficient, my characterization lacking, the entire plotline faulty and implausible.”
The compelling narrative is a warning. We constantly audition and re-audition for the parts we play in life, and the connections produced are fragmented, exhausting, tenuous.
