a self refracted in vernal & Sere’s the glass essay
Erin O’Connor stands tall as Nude.
All images by: Haley James
For Vernal & Sere Theatre’s tenth show, Sawyer Estes adapted and directed Anne Carson’s poem “The Glass Essay,” a 36-page lyric exploration of (among numerous other vast themes) relationship, family, the intimacy of scholarship, and a paradox: the simultaneous reflective stillness and churning, muddy turbulence we find in the wake of loss. The poem was used in its entirety for the production, supplemented only by the addition of a few poems by Emily Brontë, the “favourite author” of Carson’s speaker. “Turning into” Brontë is also the speaker’s “main fear,” which she “mean[s] to confront” by diving into the writer’s work and life in the aftermath of the breakup around which the story of the poem spins. My background in poetry, both academic and creative, keeps nudging me toward a literary analysis of the production -- an urge redoubled by the fact that the source material is, in part, itself a work of such structure. I’m tempted, by what is likely a drive toward familiar territory, to look at how Carson’s words -- the patterns into which they fall, the larger shape they form, their music, the spaces they open beyond the reach of language -- have been lifted from page to stage. That the text, which I have loved for well over a decade, calls so clearly to me through VST’s production is evidence that those involved share in this love, and kept it close at heart as they composed their transposition. But the show deserves investigation on its own terms, with a focus on the tangible, corporeal, time-and-place-bound particulars which push it past the confines of Carson’s (or any) text. Moreover, as I owe Estes and his collaborators at least a degree of the vulnerability they offered those of us in the audience, I feel the need to venture beyond what is, for me, the safe terrain of writing about writing. After all, nothing about VST’s The Glass Essay plays it safe.
Kayli Keppel as I and Mustapha Slack as Law relive a moment of joy in Vernal & Sere's “The Glass Essay”.
I am immediately made aware of the production’s materiality upon stepping foot into the black box at the Windmill Arts Center, where VST is one among several resident collectives. The space is completely transformed for The Glass Essay. A square of white scrim has been constructed to house the set, a spare room furnished with a bed, kitchen appliances, a small table and chairs, a storage chest, and a wheelchair. The audience, seated on three sides, remains separated from the performers by the gauzy barrier for the duration of the show. As with all three VST productions I have experienced so far, something is already happening on stage as the audience sifts in. In this case, I can just make out the shape of a man standing at the foot of the bed, where a woman lies asleep. These figures, already rendered ill-defined by the scrim, are further obscured by the projection of a seemingly endless stream of sepia-toned photographs displaying the two of them in full couple mode -- limbs tangled, laughing, sharing in effervescent eros. Once the show begins and lights come up on the set within the sheer cube, the obfuscation lessens considerably, but I am never not aware of the fabric wall between myself and the performers. This awareness not only resonates deeply on a thematic level (the haze that accompanies deep emotional duress, the only-ever-semi-permeable film between self and Other, our own “mortal boundaries”), it also enhances my interest in and appreciation for the other tactile components of the production. I am particularly drawn to these textures: milk poured from high into a glass, the glossy white linoleum coating the floor, a stack of golden toast, a green knit blanket, a dusk-pink silk camisole, the performers’ skin and hair, the mid-show revelation of a mattress of dark dirt underneath the bright white bedclothes, bands of peach vinyl. That I am only able to see these materials from behind the mesh membrane that encloses them makes them somehow both alien and painfully familiar -- at once recognizable as of this / my planet, but also distant, foreign, soft and homogenous in their mystery. The effect makes me want to tear past the partition and feel them; the notion that I cannot (or won't, more accurately) creates a satisfying sensory and psychic tension. The production’s use of digital projection -- the aforementioned photography, certain key words and passages from the poem and, at several points, live footage of the performers -- adds yet another layer, further piquing my attention to the palpable. Though Carson’s text is replete with its own consistencies, the production creates a fully idiosyncratic world through its careful selection and combination of materials.Another integral element of the show’s (and, arguably, any show’s) material reality is its use of human bodies. As do all of VST’s projects, The Glass Essay asks a lot of these bodies. Erin Boswell’s choreography, which pierces and draws flavor from many of the poem’s emotional layers, coaxes them into multiple modes. Sometimes they move like we do in “real life;” other times they writhe, splay, claw, caress, merge, melt, whip, or drift across their scrim-cage in slow motion. Every once in a while, they mirror one another. They occasionally dance. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the production’s employment of human bodies catapults it from the source material’s orbit; though poems are created by bodies with the purpose of being taken into other bodies, they themselves do not and cannot entail a single one. Unlike the dirt and linoleum, the bodies at play in VST’s The Glass Essay do not just construct a concrete world from / upon the one that was designed to exist in a reader’s mind -- they tell their own version of the story Carson offers up in her “The Glass Essay.” Through the many and varied modes of motion Boswell’s work requires of them -- the stylized, the grotesque, the lyrical, the exhausting and exhaustive, the evocative, the repetitive, the ragged, the raw, and (suddenly, jarringly) the acutely realistic -- The Glass Essay’s bodies alchemize the poem into something completely new. The poem’s unnamed speaker takes shape as “I,” and it is the slight, sinewy shape of Kayli Keppel. The idea of the lost lover Law, once endlessly variable in the imagination of every past, present, and future reader of Carson’s poem, solidifies along the stable slopes of Mustapha Slack. 
It’s true that every theatre production, in some way, makes singular what was, by virtue of its potentiality, multiple -- even infinite. Works composed for the stage come equipped for the transformation from something sprawling to something specific; it is inherent in the form. Indeed, most theatre pieces are designed to undergo this process over and over again -- to make for the audience a solid thing from an amorphous one. Though each member of said audience might see this thing -- the material entity that is a production -- from a different angle (both metaphorically and literally), some serious stratification has already taken place by the time they take it in. In Deleuzoguattarian terms, something arborescent has been conjured forth from the rhizome. But a poem is a different kind of creature. The craft of its composition is an exercise in making it able to graft onto the mind, soul -- and yes, body -- of each individual that encounters it in an entirely unique way. Moreover, if its “goal” is achieved, it will hit differently each time it is read by even the same individual. Though it might appear to congeal briefly as a somewhat-solid substance within its audience of one, a poem, by design, is always already on its way back to aporia. In this way, though a product of humanity and so rooted in the material realities of the body, the poem is of the mycelial realm more than the rhizomatic -- more mushroom than tree.In light of this difference between the two forms (which, depending on the theatre piece and the poem in consideration, sometimes yawns wide as a chasm and other times -- as in the case of The Glass Essay -- cuts only a thin sliver), I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge my strong sense that transposing a poem into a work for the stage necessitates a great loss. Perhaps I feel it as a loss because, as mentioned earlier, the study and composition of poetry nestles close to my core; while theatre is my most passionate romance (possibly even my soulmate), poetry will always be my first love -- untouchable, to me, as first loves so often are. Memory of our tender, early relationship almost certainly colors my thinking -- how can anything made of fiber, grit, and flesh capture a moment like this one?:
“Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is to watch the year repeat its days.
It is as if I could dip my hand down into time and scoop up blue and green lozenges of April heat
a year ago in another country.”
For me, it is just not possible. This particular species of magic -- the folding of time, space, color, temperature, and texture into one synesthetic burst of a moment spread over two slim stanzas -- belongs to poetry alone. When these same words are uttered on stage, through the vocal cords of a performer planted firmly in the physical realm, it is not only the fluid spirit of the speaker that becomes fixed in place. We are presented with specific images, sounds, and movements to accompany the words. The poem’s invitation to experience our version is, at least for the moment, replaced with the show’s version.
In my version of “The Glass Essay” -- irrevocably informed by the throes of a breakup in which I was caught when I first read the poem -- the speaker is quiet, almost catatonic, and deathly still for large swaths of the grief process she undergoes through the poem. When she nibbles white foods, or wanders the moors, or confronts the series of macabre Nudes in her mind’s eye, she barely makes a sound and moves only what she absolutely must. Even when her “anger travels through [her], pushes aside everything else in [her] heart,” my version of this woman is frozen and silent as ice… as glass. I imagine her as Carson has her describe herself: “not a melodramatic person.” “I” in VST’s version defies this self-description (as we humans so often do) and so bumps painfully against mine. The Glass Essay’s “I” flails, wails in pain, gulps her yogurt with ravenous anguish, quakes with violent sobs, claws at her Law in despair and desperation. From my experience of their work so far, VST believes in keeping their performers right in the pocket of the fever pitch for most if not all of a show’s runtime -- including pre-show, intermission, and conclusion. (Though the first two VST shows I attended did not include a curtain call, The Glass Essay did -- albeit a slant one.) For me, “The Glass Essay” has always administered a low, slow, freezer burn, where The Glass Essay serves the tale red-hot and writhing. It is admittedly quite difficult to set aside my version’s much subtler tones and rhythms. In this regard, I feel, as I watch, the loss that I maintain must come with such a transposition.
However, when a show’s version of a poem is a vivid projection of the one(s) the theatre artists’ received when they themselves read it (or a combination of their versions from several readings), the loss might feel more like a gain -- indeed, it might be more of a gain, overall. This is, after all, what theatre does best: it grants us passage to worlds other than our own. For me, despite the admittedly significant temporal loss of my calmer, chillier version, VST’s The Glass Essay overwhelmingly registers as a gain. Not only does it succeed on every technical level (the previously discussed thoughtful engagement with materials; inspired lighting and sound design; Boswell’s evocative choreographed movement; evidence of Estes’s thorough research into Carson and Brontë -- as well as into his own intellectual and emotional repertoire), it also grants me a glimpse of something I think I always sensed at play in the poem, but never quite understood: the idea that the self is a prism composed of myriad refractions… and / or that each self is one refracted version of a much larger prism -- a “body of us all.” VST’s production brings this notion into sharp relief for me, both infusing my reading of the poem with it, and -- larger -- prompting me to wonder if this is actually how I imagine “reality,” too.
The element of the production that illuminates this notion the most is, of course, body-bound. In The Glass Essay, almost all of the performers double or triple as different characters (or cross-sections of the same character sliced at different moments), drawn from disparate space / time coordinates into their little curtained playpen, where they move into and out of their configurations -- not unlike the fluid speaker of a poem. Keppel as “I” occasionally slips into Catherine from Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Slack’s Law at times embodies Heathcliff, of course. But we also get Slack / Law as “I”’s father, lost down the tunnel of dementia, “I”’s mother, played with remarkable rootedness by Kate Brown, as a reflection of “I”’s possible future, and “I” as a mirror into her mother’s own past, among other combinations. For me, the greatest triumph of the production is its inclusion of the whatcher herself, Emily Brontë, in the form of an utterly mesmerizing Lindsey Sharpless, and “I”’s aforementioned Nude visions, portrayed with knife-to-gut precision by Erin O’Conner. Sharpless’s Brontë is luminous, near-omniscient, shrouded in the stillness I sense in my version of the poem’s speaker, yet teeming underneath with vibrant life. She, too, becomes Other -- most notably when “I” recounts her and her mother’s difficult visits to her father. Here, Brontë steps in as a shade of “I.” 
Lindsey Sharpless is luminous as Emily Brontë caught in a moment with Thou.
When I ask him about this decision, Estes replies, “It’s a curiosity why that felt so right to me. I feel like I almost used Emily as a shield in some sense.” O’Connor as the twisting, tortured Nude is another revelation -- making manifest, through gloriously post-human movement work, “I”’s unbidden but not entirely unwelcome depravities. I’m tempted to interpret her as a foil to the buttoned-up Brontë, but there is also tremendous overlap, here. These two presences function similarly in that they both insist on dimensions beyond the material domain of a story told on a stage. They are also -- like the mother, like the father, like Law, like scholar-“I” and once-cherished-now-spurned-“I” -- just different sparkling crystal cuts of the speaker… Or maybe even of a larger Self. As Estes puts it, “the self presents itself as fractured and we see them all merge and blend.”As I rest in the afterglow of VST’s The Glass Essay, I return to my body in the dark space outside the small screen box, peering in. Brontë’s imaginary friend -- her “Thou” -- which Carson describes as “full of strange power,” is there with me. This Thou is a vast and many- (maybe infinitely- (?)) sided crystal, a prism that turns eternal, sending out glittering reflections of and around and through the room. This Thou might not “‘prove[] us one,’” but it certainly seems to have drawn me here, now, to bear witness to this tight, visceral production by Estes and his fiercely talented team. Thou (speaker?) seems, at the very least, to provide us with the chance to encounter one another’s versions -- to “influence one another in the darkness.”
Kate Brown is She, embodying the impulse of the play itself -