it's later
M is for Mother
If Maria had lain down and shut her eyes and endured the sinning but not the stabbing, would she still be a saint? […] If Maria had stabbed Alessandro to death with his own awl would she still be a saint? [...] If Maria’s mother had not forgiven Alessandro, if instead she had spat in his face and cursed his name, scratched his face […] would Maria still be a saint?
— Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional
I’m leading a playwriting workshop for Jesuit Media Lab and the first play I assigned our group was Will Arbery’s Plano, which was one of my favorite plays I saw in New York in that fragile crust of time right before the pandemic.
To me, the play has always hovered around that central question—discerning between the divine and the demonic—how do you know that what’s haunting you is an angel? Was it a divine apparition or something occult? Reading mystics like Julian of Norwich, you see that this question is far from being a “new age” concern and is the dark aura at the fringes of ancient spiritual sight as well. Is the beautiful woman appearing in the dark or the lovely man with shining face friend or foe? If you follow them, will you save your life or lose it?
We’ll talk about it later—it’s later, is the antiphon repeated throughout the play. Time is slippery—you delay something and find you can’t escape it. You wait but find time is moving faster than you can grasp. You sit in a cubicle, staring at the clock, week in, week out, waiting for the weekend, then, all of a sudden, it’s Sunday night and another week looms ahead. You are stuck: like you are in the same place, on the same porch, having the same conversations with the same people over and over again. Later and now—what is the difference?
Plano crawls through daily living’s wormhole of time from one dingy Texas front porch. The show begins with three sisters all sitting on a porch. But instead of yearning for Moscow, they are haunted by “Plano” which is both a bloodless suburb, a state of mind, a status achieved, an embodiment in place that seems to elude all three of these sisters. Anna announces her pregnancy and the paternity of her baby as John from the new Bolsa Mercado that has opened in town. Well, his name is Juan, but he’s always wanted to be called John.
How does one escape the identities that we are born into? Juan Americanizes himself by calling himself an anglo name, he un-queers himself by marrying Anna. A man who has infinite desires for multiple lives splits himself into two parts and then into three. Would that it were so simple for our protagonists.
The thing about the occult is that it traps us, and the thing about the divine it transcends our limitations. Or does it? One of our sisters knows she is called to be a saint, but she accuses her mother (Mary) of locking her in a room with the divine. Is the divine something that traps us in a narrative? Does it foreclose the horizon of our possibilities? Is God something that attacks us in the middle of the night, like anxiety, a panic attack or a Don Juan? Is the closest thing we find to transcendence a demonic invasion of slugs? How can we be sure that the world of faith in which we dwell is one that is good? What is the mysterious illness that haunts our sainted youngest sister? Is it God who haunts her in the night—or something more sinister? Is her saintliness a narrative that traps her: is holiness an undiagnosable disease with no cure? If Maria had stabbed Alessandro to death with his own awl would she still be a saint?
The sisters gather together around “the world their parents invented” a beautiful image of the generational passing-on of faith. We look so small, they say, in astonishment. How are we this small? How can they—and their wild, beautiful lives—fit into this small world? Why would anyone want to fit their life into such a small world, to make themselves smaller to fit inside of it?
The men in their lives so not seem to make themselves smaller to fit in their relationships, although the intellectual Anna is scolded for “marrying beneath her” the Bolsa Mercado worker, Juan. Their mother, when asked to say something nice about each of them, can’t find anything good to say about Anna.
One of them wishes she had remembered to take the small world their parents made for them from her Mother. She forgets to, but, for a moment, she had thought: I can take that world, hold it in my own hands. What would it be like to hold that fenced-in ecosystem, the narratives it grows in its garden, within your hands? It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God, Paul says, but what if the everlasting arms caught your fall?
Mothers—the bedrock we come from—part of the ecological examinations of Stone Yard Devotional, a Booker Prize short-listed novel that I just reviewed for National Catholic Reporter.
I love a book that looks at—like Plano—maternity’s Janus heads: motherhood is the divine source of life and the death lurking in every life. Motherhood is the frail safety fence running along the cliff of death. It’s the membrane we see the world through, it’s what prevents the demonic from getting in, it filter the divine. You can never escape motherhood, and is that a curse or the greatest blessing?
In Stone Yard Devotional
Life lived in the shadow of death is a life stripped down to the bedrock, a doctor tells our narrator. Death — of mice, of humans — provides the novel's antiphon. As the community seeks to stem the unending tide of mice, as they wait for frost and winter rain to spell the end of the plague, they also wait for an opportune moment to bury the bones of a slain nun that lie in prolonged state in their parlor. As the bones wait, the community confronts the limits of empathy and our own blindness toward the suffering of others, even those with whom we share an ecosystem.
You can read the full review here.
Sweet Unrest in the Streets
Important postscript: I wrote about our newest venture at St. Martin de Porres House in Harrisburg: chickens! You can read about it here.
Also, I wrote about the limiting narrative of perfection for Wisdom’s Dwelling. You can read that here:
You write beautifully about one of my favorite playwrights. Thank you.