A Short Talk on Two Types of Glass: A micro Review of Vernal & Sere Theatre’s Production of Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay”

Photography by: Haley James
Erin O’Connor and Mustapha Slack perform Nude #12.

I emphasize this. I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinites and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

—Anne Carson

I’ve always considered this to be Anne Carson’s mission statement as an artist. It comes from the preface to her book Short Talks, a collection of brief prose poems which assume the guise of scholarly lectures. But to even call them “poems” feels inadequate, imprecise; they are what they are: talks. A classicist, translator, scholar, poet, essayist, librettist, playwright, and short story writer, Carson is known for being difficult to categorize, for resisting neat labels, and for bending (blurring, smashing) genre distinctions. I think this has something to do with her desire to avoid boredom, to impede the movement, and as she puts it, to leave the mind.

I have a hunch that Vernal & Sere Theatre had some of this thinking in mind when developing their recent production of Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay.” Carson’s text is an extended lyric essay masquerading as a poem, sentences chopped into irregular stanzas of tercets and quatrains. It is a breakup poem disguised as love letter to Emily Bronte. It is literary analysis wearing the dark robes of elegy. It is, as VST director Sawyer Estes shares in his note to the production, Carson’s “attempt at understanding what life feels like.” The goal of the adaptation, then, should not—cannot—be the same as that of the essay. The goal of the staged work must be to embody this attempt to understand the feeling of life, to draw blood from the mind on the page, and, so to speak, get skin in the game. Estes says that he wanted to “put a container” around Carson’s essay.

And what a container he and VST have made. When I first heard that they were putting on a production of “The Glass Essay,” my knee-jerk question was, “How?” It seemed to me to be such a singular vision of both form and content, an icy tightrope walk across the moors of Carson’s capacious intellect, no safety net below, just the permafrost of loss, the beloved’s departure a lens laid over (and under) the narrator’s meager relationship with mother, her father’s dementia, and her obsession with Emily Bronte. In other words, I could only imagine “The Glass Essay” existing on the page. While watching the production on opening night I saw my question answered time and time again, in startingly inventive ways, with cunning imagination and bravura to meet, match, and in a way, make rapturous, self-annihilating love to Carson’s text.

Whereas the poem is pure inner monologue, a stream of free indirect discourse sluicing across the stanzas, the performance has isolated its fissures, parceling out Carson’s distinct voice to its four characters: I (the poem’s narrator), She (the narrator’s mother), Her (Emily Bronte), and Law (the narrator’s ex-beloved). This isn’t as easy, nor as simple as it sounds, given that there are no preexisting dialogue tags in the essay, save for quotations from Emily or Charlotte Bronte. The tags had to be conceived, the conversation constructed, and Estes has done a brilliant job of cracking the glassy monument into shards, passing them from one character to the next, dramatizing and externalizing the narrator’s relentless interiority.  

Among the production’s many attempts at embodiment, the set design—the literal container of the performance—is another deft decision. Rather than an open stage, which would have been tempting in order to accommodate the vast spaces of the moors, the actors are enclosed within a sheer silk-screen square, upon which flash photographs of I and Law, who are played with exacting pathos by Kayli Keppel and Mustapha Slack, respectively. The screen acts like a steamed up kitchen window; we can still see through it, but the characters are slightly removed from us, a little gauzy as they go about the business of capturing the feeling of being alive behind a page (a pane) of smoky glass. I’s mother, She, played by Kate Brown, brings an unexpected, delightfully coarse humor to her character, and Lindsey Sharpless imbues Emily Bronte with all of the quiet, torturous literary genius we’d expect from a woman whose favorite pastime other than writing seems to be scrubbing the floor. Watching these characters perform behind the transparent scrim, seeing them just beyond the point of perfect clarity, has a wonderfully metatextual effect: Carson’s singular voice rendered into ghostly polyphonic layers, embodied and contained, yet paradoxically more distant, more vast.

Of course, I’d be remiss not to address one the text and performance’s most idiosyncratically strange features, that of what Carson’s speaker calls her “Nudes.” She explains that these are “glimpses of her soul,” Jungian visions of grotesque women that come to her after meditating and reciting Latin prayers. They are rather terrifying. For example, Nude #1 is a woman alone on a hill standing into a hard wind, with “long flaps and shreds of flesh” ripping off her body, “leaving an exposed column of nerve and blood and muscle/ calling mutely through [a] lipless mouth.” And what does a stage adaptation do about that? Again, VST and their movement director/choreographer Erin Boswell respond to this problem ingeniously, through hyper-stylized movement and dance. Erin O’Connor takes on the grisly task of literally embodying these Nudes (all thirteen of them!) with gusto and exquisite grotesquery, contorting her body into acute yet fluid angles, tensile down to her toes, which often seem to do things that toes should not do. The presentation of the Nudes in their various poses are supported, wisely, by transposing passages from the text onto the back panel of the stage, Carson’s lines looming in via audio recording rather than being put into the character’s mouths. The Nudes are the phantasmagorical apotheosis of the essay and the performance, the I coming face to face with her id, a kind of victory, though perhaps a pyrrhic one.

To keep a short talk from going too long, suffice it to say that the sum total of the production—script, direction, acting, set design, lighting, projection, movement, music, etc.—is not merely an adaptation of Carson’s text, but a radical transformation of it, and in doing so, VST give us their most ambitious work to date. Others have noted that the performance’s heat displaces (or erases) the essay’s “low, slow, freezer burn” (critic Asia Meana’s brilliant formulation), and this is true, but by no means a loss. After all, glass cannot be created without a tremendous application of heat. One has to imagine that the preservation of the essay’s chilliness onstage would run the risk of becoming, for lack of a better word, a little boring. If you have seen any of their shows before, you will know that Vernal & Sere Theatre, like Anne Carson, “will do anything to avoid boredom.” Their recent production and performance of something seemingly unperformable reminds us that they, too, take this to be “the task of a lifetime.”