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THE PLAYWRIGHT.
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Though he has yet to turn thirty, David Schulner, the author of An Infinite Ache, has written a play about a love affair and marriage that spans sixty years.
A young man's fantasy about growing old with the woman he loves while surviving time's ruthless challenges to hope and fidelity, the play is rooted in a moment of the author's autobiography. The title comes from a love poem called "Body of a Woman" by the Chilean Stalinist, Pablo Neruda. Its last line is, "And weariness follows, and the infinite ache." Bowled over by this image, Schulner vowed that he would use the title 'An Infinite Ache' if he ever came to write a love story. Having made this playwright's promise to himself, Schulner took up the life of a television writer in Los Angeles, working on the series, "Once and Again." It was at this time that he met the elusive woman who would inspire this play. He fell in love with her, but she didn't return his feelings, and so he was faced with an affair that was thwarted from the start. In the absence of an actual bond between them, Schulner imagined how their lives together would have developed if things had gone differently. Thus the "infinite ache" of the title is the not the pain of something lost, but of a possibility never realized. Schulner worked on An Infinite Ache over a two-year period in collaboration with Greg Leaming, former artistic director of Portland Stage Company. It premiered at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, in December, 2001. Schulner is also the author of Isaac, a play based on the Biblical figures, Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah. With Craig Lucas, he wrote This Thing of Darkness, a study of a friendship as it evolves over more than half a century. |
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SETTING.
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The play takes place in Charles's apartment in Los Angeles, in what the script describes as, "An empty bedroom"--empty, that is, except for a "large antique bed. . . . Hand carved. . . . Ornate wood. . . . [A]lso a dresser and night stand in the same style." Also filling the emptiness as the action develops are "many props and furniture items," helpful in distinguishing the several stages of the rapidly unfolding lives on stage.
The most important item is the "antique bed," an inheritance from Charles's great-great- grandmother, and the sacred site where his "whole family was conceived." Embodying the continuity of the generations, the sturdiness of the marriage oath, and the permanence of family bonds, this durable piece of furniture stands as an awesome symbol of cultural stability amid the social whirlwinds of swinging L.A. Actually, the room in question is Charlie's only for the first few scenes of the play. After that, it becomes a room belonging to two people: Charlie and Hope, the casual date who becomes his wife of sixty years. As the play evolves, the identity of the room grows more complicated, incorporating ever more tokens of a life lived together: children's toys, gifts, mementos. But no matter what is added to or subtracted from the setting, the bedroom and the bed--the places where Charlie and Hope enact their love, engender their children, and endure their crises--provide the scenic focus of the play. |
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THE PLOT.
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As the play opens, Hope has invited herself back to Charles's apartment after a dinner date to get a glass of water. She makes it clear that that is all she wants from this visit, as Charles nervously tries his best to be charming and funny. This is their first time out together. Charles, we learn, is Jewish, while Hope's ancestors are from China and the Philippines--although the ethnic difference matters not at all either to them or their families.
Charles congratulates Hope on not being an actress (this being Los Angeles), and describes himself as "a historian. . . . [b]ut not academic. . . . I research you know every angle of an event and then write it into an imagined historical narrative. By using a fictional main character. . . ." However, such quasi-fictional history butters no bread in Charles's house, and he acknowledges sheepishly that he works in a coffee shop to earn a living. He has come to Los Angeles because, "it's as far as you can go" from "[e]very other disappointing place." As they listen to music, make small talk about their lives, and struggle with the awkwardness of the first date, Charles loses his patience with the game of courtship. "[D]on't you wish you could skip all this," he asks, "and get to the part when we're old and sitting on a porch and watching our grandchildren playing on a swing?" He confesses that during dinner he was "just like nodding while I played out our whole lives in my head. Marriage, kids, old age. Just flashing through everything 'til we got to the porch." Hope is unmoved by this vision, feeling that their date has been a dud. "When it really happens," she tells him, "you just know." And then proceeds to repeat her grandmother's story about how the gods bind together the people who are meant for each other at birth with a red string tied around their ankles. "As the years go by, the string becomes shorter and shorter until finally the couple is united. Nothing in the world can sever this string. Not distance. Not time. Not even love." At Hope's prompting, Charles recalls the Yiddish word for this notion of "a love that was meant to be." "Beshert," he remembers, sadly contemplating the end of this date, and of a love that was seemingly not meant to be. At this point, Hope, though she is eager to leave and bring their evening to an end, is overwhelmed by drowsiness, and asks Charles if she may nap on his bed. He is only too happy to oblige. Just as she is falling asleep, Hope begins to fantasize about the meanings of "beshert." Perhaps, she conjectures, the experience of fated love is like looking down from a cliff into the sea, "until every part of you becomes a part of that view . . . becomes a part of something that beautiful . . . " She drifts off, admonishing Charles to wake her in no more than a hour. At which point, Charles puts his clock-radio in his night stand drawer, sits for a moment on the bed with Hope, talks briefly to her in her sleep, and takes his clock out again. But this time it is a conspicuously different timepiece, and as we watch the following scene proceed, we realize that more than an hour has passed. Indeed, considerably more. It seems that in the few seconds between putting one clock away and taking another out of a drawer, days, perhaps weeks have passed, and that the nature of time itself has altered, become more mercurial and erratic. Charles and Hope, we infer from their conversation, have had sex. Indeed, after another exchange or two, we see that they have come to the point of Hope's moving into his apartment. Soon we realize that Charle's dinnertime fantasy is coming true. Their relationship is flying forward through time, moving from the first date to touch down now on a blissful Sunday brunch after several months of intimacy, and now on his proposal of marriage, then lurching forward to their first serious falling out, and so on through all the stages of love, until, in a matter of a few minutes, we have seen them break up, make up, agonize over the wedding, marry, and have a baby. The play continues in this mode through the rest of their lives together, time present sliding away into time future like slabs of ice falling off a glacier. One small example will suggest the texture of the whole. At one point, Charles asks, "Can I get a dog?" Here is the entirety of the dog episode that follows: HOPE: We're not getting a dog. What would have occupied several weeks in lived time--from bringing the dog home, to trying to train it, to growing disgusted with it, to getting rid of it, to washing one's hands of the whole process--is boiled down to five lines of dialogue and one stage direction.
As their lives plunge forward, we watch them lose their first child, raise their second, pursue their individual careers, drift apart, separate in mid-life, come together again, and, inevitably, face death. Just as Charles fantasized, their whole life together passes before our eyes, like one of those panoramic overviews of existence that we are supposed to encounter on the threshold of eternity. Then, near the end of the play, as Charles kneels by what has become Hope's deathbed, time takes another leap. Hope stirs and Charlie retrieves the clock, now the same one he first concealed at the beginning of her "nap." Time, we infer, has altered again, has settled back into its accustomed channels--a change we see confirmed when Hope wakes up and we find ourselves back on the evening of their first date. Has it all been just a fantasy, Charles's pipe-dream about an imaginary life with Hope? As they make their farewells, the always cautious Hope warning Charles not to expect anything further from their one night together, we begin to assume that it has all been a delusion. But a moment after they exit together, Hope darts back to the apartment to retrieve her forgotten watch from the night stand. "She puts it on. She stops. She looks at the room. She takes it off and leaves it on the night stand. She exits." Having thus planted the excuse for her return to the scene from which their future together may well grow, Hope leaves us with hope for Charles's benign dream of love. |
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THE CHARACTERS.
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Because there are only two characters in this play, it is important for the playwright to give them clearly delineated identities that contrast sharply and provocatively with one another.
At the play's end Hope says, "Deep down, I'm just a spoiled brat," while Charles declares, "Deep down, I'm just very average." Over the course of their decades together, these judgments are tested in a variety of ways. The "spoiled" Hope takes avidly to psychoanalysis, both as a patient and a practitioner. She loves exploring herself, and she loves the idea of guiding others through their own self-explorations. Charles, by contrast, is interested in creating alternative worlds blending history and science fiction--what others have done, and what has yet to occur. It is the "brat" Hope who betrays Charles midway through their lives, starting an affair that results in the temporary breakup of their marriage. But it is "average" Charles who selfishly wants Hope to abort their first child, so the distribution of attributes between them is by no means simply or easily symmetrical. The clearest distinction between them is most apparent at the beginning of the play: Charles is eager, open, yearning to make contact with a new person, to break out of his isolation as lonely newcomer to Los Angeles. He charms by his almost canine attentiveness, even executing a little tap dance to express his excitement or displeasure--like a dog leaping in impatience to catch our attention. Hope is reserved, guarded, cautious, skeptical about Charles, hesitant to open up to a stranger. These are the fundamental dispositions they bring with them to the many crises of a life lived together. |
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THEMES.
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The most striking feature of An Infinite Ache is its treatment of fictive time. We are accustomed to seeing long stretches of imaginary time elapse between the opening and closing curtains of a play. But the rapid passage of years usually occurs between scenes--in the space separating one dramatized block of stage action from another. Thus, in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale a Chorus who enters at the beginning of Act IV informs us that he will "slide/O'er sixteen years," so that the infant Perdita from the end of Act III may become the beautiful young woman of the rest of the play.
But in An Infinite Ache, time melts away between one line and the next, from the moment an actor stands up to the moment she sits down again. This process of ongoing temporal dissolution mimics our mental experience of living through moments of the past in our memories, or of anticipating the future in our imaginations. We are accustomed to seeing something like this in films, where a montage of shots will dissolve from moment to moment to move the action forward at an accelerated pace, as in the old-fashioned device of months peeling off a calendar. Treating theatrical time in this way, however, can be a roller-coaster ride for the audience. In films, we are accustomed to the visual language that cues us to expect a temporal fast-forward: lap dissolves, speeded up music, rapid fades--these all tell us we are marching forward. In theater, however, there is no such language, and we can find ourselves facing a constant process of shock and dislocation as we run to keep up with the action as it somersaults through time. Related to the play's unorthodox treatment of time is its exploration of the myth of fated love, expressed in the fable of the red thread told by Hope's Chinese grandmother, and in Charles's Yiddish notion of "beshert." The idea that the world holds for each of us one and only one necessary beloved is one of the most widespread and ancient of human beliefs, showing at least as early as the Fourth Century B.C. in Plato's dialogue, The Symposium. There, the drunken comic playwright, Aristophanes, tells his fellow revelers that all human beings were originally composed of a pair of people, physically joined together as one organism. But a jealous Zeus cut us in two, so that in our deprivation we perpetually seek our missing half. "And when one of them meets with his other half . . . the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together. . . ." If we are indeed destined to love one person only, and if all others are mis-mates to our hearts, then we would want to plunge forward in time to find that fated lover and to begin our lives together. This is what Charles does while daydreaming over his dinner, and this is what the play enacts. |