She Plays Younger

I play younger than I am in almost every customer service interaction I have.

And for many reasons, I’m happy to be out of that profession — at least for the time being. The youth emerged this morning, while I was buying bread at a grocery store. I was using self checkout, there was no reason for me to interact with anyone other than the robot I was handing my credit card to. And yet, for no reason and at a register higher than my natural speaking voice, I turned to an employee near the store’s exit and walk and talked the following phrase, “Thank you so much for your help! Have a great day!” And then, subconsciously, thank you for not catching me in a lie I didn’t tell. I am a child, I am a child, I am a child.

I’m very much not a child. Ask anyone who knows my 32 years, my financial independence, my love of soups that don’t come from cans. That’s two food items in as many paragraphs. This is how you know I’m hungry.

I spent the last two weeks in a high school classroom.

Only I very much wasn’t in a classroom. I was on the other end of a FaceTime call, cut off quite literally and traveling 3,000 miles and two time zones in the time it takes to answer the phone. I was workshopping my high school-friendly play Frankenstein, an adaptation originated by a woman so much younger than me about students and teenagers so fascinatingly young that every other adaptation puts Victor Frankenstein well into his 30s. These kids were in college when they created new life, longed for loves they could not have, fulfilled promises long kept, and mourned their parents.

I love working with high school students, but it is a challenge to take 1818 given circumstances — yes, you promised your mother you’d marry her, but also she’s your sister — and create room for subtext in the process. (But she’s your sister. Did I mention she’s your sister?) Everything is text or nothing and my next task is stripping away the heavy-handed lines I created in this short time.

I’m playing younger without writing down. I’m creating space.

There’s a unique frustration of being the only person not in the room. I always say yes to FaceTime collaboration and then forget that I’ll be forgotten, that I’ll be on someone’s computer and maybe not loud enough or maybe not even in a visible space. One time I Skyped into a first rehearsal, only to be turned around to face the cast at the end of the read. Where was I looking before? Why did you not let me be seen?

So there was a lot of that. A lot of I’m here, but not really. A lot of are you yelling so I can hear you or is that just your acting style? Or is it because you think horror is loud, when my brand is fun and then not, quiet and then terrifying? And did you know you just walked out of my line of view? Who’s talking right now? No, I remember your names. I just can’t see you.

I’m trying to read more this year. I don’t know why I said that. Maybe because there’s a fascinating biography about Mary Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft that I absolutely loved. (Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon.) Or maybe because I don’t know how to end this thought, this sentence, this topic, this breath.

Mary Shelley played younger too. And she was already so young to begin with.