|
A few weeks ago, a memory drifted out of the past in the presence of a voice on the telephone. She was the niece of an actress I once knew and once loved. She told me that her aunt had passed away a few years ago in Argentina at an abrupt old age. She said that her aunt talked about me from time to time, always with a bit of a smile and a bit of sadness. Then, recently, she found a letter I had written and went searching on the internet. The only reference to her aunt she found was an article I wrote about her some years ago. So she called. She read the letter to me and also some pages from her aunt's diary about the time we spent together. It swept the lingering memory out of the shadows into the present. Though the entire effort of my life is a life in the present, these are the connections and the remembrances that continue to breathe and shimmer in that life. This is what I wrote about her.
~
I was working summer theatre near Lake George in the northern mountains of New York state. Her name was Irina Kasvane. She and her husband were Russian actors and had come to America after WWII as "displaced persons". For a number of years they ran a small theatre in this summer resort where they produced Shakespeare, Chekhov, other classics. Then he died. He was the last of what she had... they had lost their child and their family in the war.
At this performance, there were about 70 people in the small theatre. When the lights dimmed, the curtain opened, sweeping to both sides with a touch of faded elegance. There she was, standing still, lit with a small trouper light. She walked, from one corner of the stage to the other, a langorous walk threaded from the center of her chest, a quiet steady cross from upstage right to downstage left. In all the theatre I've seen since, I've yet to see anyone else do that again with such a daring, hypnotic effect.
After a moment, as the light focused on her, she began removing her clothes, everything until she was naked. Not a sound from the audience. Then she began to speak... Ophelia's last speech from Hamlet, then a verse from Rilke's Duino Elegies, then she stopped, looked at the audience, began again. Quietly at first, she spoke about her life in Moscow, the war, her travels to America, her husband, their love of theatre. She never sat, occasionally she walked, once she turned her back to the audience, once she covered herself with her hands and arms as if to withdraw when she spoke of her child. For a little over an hour, she created a portrait of a woman lost in the time of her memories, like an old tintype photograph kept under glass in a bell jar. She painted that same delicate self-possessed loneliness with the music of her voice and the careful, unpredictable changes in her face and body.
When it ended, and the light faded, there was a moment of silence and then the audience applauded. She did not take a curtain call. So they left, and I sat. Eventually she came through the curtain, looked at me and said, "You like?" I said, "I like." You see, I knew Irina (or thought I did) quite well. She had come to a performance at the summer stock playhouse and saw me in The Man Who Came To Dinner. I played the irrepressible Richard. She saw it and me and took me... under her wing, her arms, the rest of her. She was in no way like the woman she portrayed in that gripping performance. She hated her husband, despised the Europe she knew, loved what she was doing. She was 51 and I was 23 and she taught me that I knew almost nothing. About being a man - less than nothing. About women - even less. And she showed me that the art of acting exists not in the mind of the beholder but in the mind and sensibilities of the performer.
|
