Tolstoy Lied : A Love Story (9780547527307) by Rachel Kadish Page B

again. New York City shrugs and looks elsewhere; on this wide concrete stoop two conspirators can query and reply secure in the knowledge that, like children with hands over our own eyes, we’ve stepped outside the world.
    Â 
    We approach the theater together on the narrow sidewalk, our shoulders occasionally brushing. Fishing the tickets from my pocketbook, I lead George toward the small marquee, brightly lit: WHY THE FLOWER LOVES THE ROD . Below this, in smaller letters, reads: A PLAY OF PASSION POLITICS & POETRY.
    â€œThanks again for coming,” I say to George, and swing open the narrow black door.
    The theater is dingy inside. George and I take our seats at the front and wait as the small capacity crowd assembles. I barely glance at the audience, aware instead of George’s steady breathing, his expectant expression as he surveys the theater. The difference in our heights even seated.
    The theater darkens. There is a long silence. Gradually a vibrant blue light fills the stage. Sound effects of traffic on a rainy day.
    I hardly recognize Yolanda when she steps onto the stage. She’s regal, worn. Tragic. She taps across the stage swiftly in low heels and a tweed skirt, stopping at its very edge. She faces the audience. Her voice is hoarse like a smoker’s. “I’d been through every sort of war. The war of marriage. The war of divorce. The war of childbirth. And the war of wars. The Great War. I let life fling me. Almost break me. But I would not be broken.” She pauses to scan the audience. She sees me in the front row, and directs a slow nod my way, like a queen granting audience. “So
he
would be the one. Yes.
He
would understand. He would save me. And I would save him. But not before we’d set each other’s worlds on end.” Sheturns in profile. “Up the curved stone stairs to his office. There he sat, like an owl.”
    Under the stage lights, Yolanda has a ravaged dignity I’ve never noticed. I understand now why the playwright jumped to cast her. Onstage, Yolanda’s grievances are epic. Perhaps, I think, I judged this production too quickly.
    A spot comes up on Freud/Bill, seated at the far right corner of the stage, also in profile. And herein lies the first problem. In reality, Freud was old enough to be Hilda Doolittle’s father. By the time they met, he was battling illness and apprehensive about the mounting dangers of Nazism. But this Freud is a chisel-jawed hunk. The only concessions to historical reality are a trim snowy beard and wig that manage to look only like accessories on a remarkably pretty man.
    Freud/Bill lights a cigar. The smoke he blows lingers in the stage lights.
    In parallel monologues on opposite sides of the stage, Yolanda and Bill begin to speak, their lines alternating.
    H.D./YOLANDA : “I’d let a man name me once before.”
    FREUD/BILL : “Not many are able to understand the true depth of my philosophy.”
    H.D./YOLANDA : “I swore I wouldn’t do it again.”
    FREUD/BILL : “When she came she was a battered psyche.”
    H.D./YOLANDA : “I was at the end of my rope. I had nowhere else to turn, nobody who understood me.”
    This isn’t twenty-first-century Manhattan; it’s Vienna in 1933. And this isn’t a self-help show, it’s one of the most politically and emotionally fraught meeting of minds in intellectual history. It’s beyond me why the playwright didn’t use H.D.’s own words—Doolittle wrote beautiful, poetic volumes about her analysis with Freud.
    I resist the temptation to look at George. Let him draw his own conclusions without my interference.
    Freud says, “The female is of course defined and limited by her biology.”
    Yolanda turns downstage and eyes Bill. Then she faces the audience. “Despite his views of women I knew he was
brilliant.
” She hits the word like a pothole.
    â€œShe came to me because she was incapable