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Kat

“The emotional motivation isn’t actually important in this scene,” Richard Gottlieb said.

“Because in this scene you’re not playing yourself—you’re playing the version that he sees, right?

So it’s okay that the character feels a bit like a caricature.

Because in that moment she is. Because we’re looking through his eyes. Got it?”

The honest answer was no, but the scene had already been stopped for ten minutes while Richard walked Kat through his vision for this particular part of the script. Her castmates were all leaning against pieces of the set, watching with thinly veiled impatience. “Yeah. Got it.”

“Okay!” Richard clapped his hands and the other actors stood up. “From the top.”

It was their second week of rehearsals, and they were blocking out the big vagina scene today—the one where the professor spoke to every vagina he’d ever been in.

The female actors were supposed to circle around him onstage like ghosts, holding their hands in pointy ovals over their heads.

Richard hadn’t yet decided if he wanted realistic costumes or for the vulvas to be implied.

Kat was really hoping he went for the latter—she hated the thought of herself in a vulva costume making the rounds online.

Kat fought the absurd urge to giggle as she held her hands over her head and swooped around. She glanced at the other actors, but they all had very stoic expressions on their faces—clearly, they were having no trouble taking this seriously.

“With scream and shove and squeeze. Cast out into coldness from this life of ease!” The actor playing the professor’s mother began to shout in a dramatic thunder. “Once belonging, now alone. Once whole, now on your own. Seek to return forevermore, but you can never reenter this closed door!”

Kat’s mouth twitched and she fought to get it back in line. Someone had been reading way too much Freud.

The actor playing the professor’s high school sweetheart shouted out her lines in the same dramatic-monologue voice, as if reciting the opening lines of Macbeth. Her lines were about the awkward fumblings and ecstasies in the back of a Toyota, then the loss of first love.

Kat prepared herself for her upcoming lines.

She didn’t want to deliver them in the same recitation tone.

She wanted to add some nuance, lean into the cold and calculating way the professor saw her character.

How she was more dangerous—dynamite that could light up his entire life—but also more seductive than any of the women he’d known before.

She thought she could pull it off, but it was hard to sound dangerous in rhyming couplets.

Why did the vulvas have to rhyme? The rest of the play didn’t.

The actor playing the professor’s wife finished up her couplets about how the initial passion of their marriage had faded to obligated routine. On her cue, Kat swooped toward the front of the stage and began intoning, “With youth and life’s eager flush did I make you stutter and blush. But as the—”

“Stop!” Richard shouted from the front row. He dug the heel of his hand into his forehead. “Kat, what did we just talk about?”

Kat could feel the other actors’ eyes on her, but she didn’t let herself glance back at them. “You said to play the character as the professor sees her. And he sees her as dangerous and seductive, but—”

“Never mind.” Richard cut his hand through the air while snapping his fingers shut, like a choir director cutting off a song. “Just say the lines like the others are saying the lines, okay? Match them. Dramatic. Loud.”

Kat knew she should just follow his directions, but she was pretty sure she was right about this. “But shouldn’t there be some difference between the women in his past and the woman who’s looming large in his present, urging him to destroy his entire life? Shouldn’t she feel unique somehow?”

“You’re overthinking, sweetheart,” Richard said, but it came out sounding like You’re an idiot, sweetheart. Someone snickered behind Kat. She heard one of the other actors whisper something and distinctly made out the word Hollywood. “Just say the lines and let me handle the thinking, okay?”

Kat bit down on the inside of her cheek. A tang of blood swirled between her teeth before she could force herself to wrench open her mouth and say, “Right. Okay.”

Then she returned to her mark and took it from the top.