20 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER18, 2019
1
THEBOARDS
AHUNDREDS PATS
J
ust before the New York première
of “The Second Woman,” a twenty-
four-hour-long play starring Alia Shaw-
kat, of “Arrested Development,” Celine
Abdallah was backstage at the Brook-
lyn Academy of Music, whispering into
a walkie-talkie that was labelled with
her job for the evening: “Man Wran-
gler.” In the play, Shawkat would enact
the same spat a hundred times with a
hundred different men. The men were
amateurs. It was up to Abdallah to cor-
ral them.
The show’s creators, Nat Randall and
Anna Breckon, first staged the piece in
Sydney, in 2017. They reached out to
Shawkat by phone, explaining that they
wanted a local performer for the Amer-
ican production; she agreed immedi-
ately. (“I’m into these weird, masochis-
tic projects,” she said. “This is much
more of an anthropological study than
an acting performance.”) The marathon
experiment in intimacy would be Shaw-
kat’s stage début. She would be allowed
a fifteen-minute break every two hours,
or approximately every ten men. Her
plan: “Pee. Maybe poop. Maybe have a
cigarette. Drink water. Pee again. Touch
up.” Meanwhile, Abdallah would be in
the wings, keeping the men-in-waiting
out of Shawkat’s way.
There had been a rudimentary re-
hearsal a few days earlier, with actors
whom Shawkat called “test dummies.”
But she would be meeting her scene
partners for the first time during the
performance. As the men arrived back-
stage, holding their scripts, Abdallah
gave them their marching orders: each
would improvise a response to Shaw-
kat’s opening line (“How are you?”),
each would carry onstage two contain-
ers of plain rice noodles, and each would
choose whether his final line would be
“I love you” or “I never loved you.” Ab-
dallah refused to answer any questions
about the set, and she deliberately with-
held a key detail: where the men’s scripts
say “Virginia throws food on the table,”Shawkat’s reads “Virginia throws food
at Marty.”
The audience was solemn when the
curtain went up, at 5 P.M., but, after a
few iterations of the scene (Man No. 1,
an engineer, poured the contents of
Shawkat’s glass into his own; Man No. 4,
a sculptor, answered Shawkat’s opening
question by declaring, “My therapy has
been working great!”), minor distinc-
tions began to take on significance: a
slammed door or an ad-libbed toast was
enough to elicit gasps. The script is laced
with double meanings—depending on
the man, “You’re hysterical” can be a
compliment or a cruel dismissal—but
Breckon and Randall had kept the text
spare, wary of guys devising elaborate
backstories.
By 1 A.M., Abdallah had ceded her
man-wrangling responsibilities to an-
other crew member, and the crowd
seemed fully invested. Backstage, Man
No. 44, a bartender, whose call time was
4:15 A.M., explained that he had volun-
teered out of admiration for Shawkat.
“I’m the mirror for her reflected glory,”
he said. When he read the script, it felt
familiar. “Gender dynamics, power dy-
namics—this is huge for us right now.”
He was unfazed by the noodle ambush.
Breckon and Randall had created the
show before the #MeToo movement
took off. “The male participants have
shifted their game lately,” Randall said,
adding that guys had been asking a lot
of questions about the appropriate way
to interact with their female scene part-
ner. (Breckon speculated that New York
might be more “woke” than Australia.)
At sunrise, word spread backstage
that Shawkat was getting a second wind.
“That actually makes me nervous,” Man
No. 51, a bespectacled fellow in tweed,
said. Flipping through the script, he
questioned the choice of plain rice noo-
dles. “It’s not the most romantic meal
if you’re trying to fix this relationship,”
he said. Pizza, he suggested, would have
been a better choice.
“Pizza is more romantic?” Man No. 53
scoffed.
“He should really be cooking for her,”
No. 51 replied. “Just make some pasta,
come on!”
No. 53 nodded. “What’s the piece
trying to say about masculinity?” he
asked. “Are we really fucking it up?”
When No. 51 went on, fifteen hoursconsiderate of his fellow-enthusiasts.
“He realizes that if he danced like the
others he would hurt people,” he said.
“So he dances with his hands.”
The tempo of the music picked up—a
little bit, anyway—and Ole Polos began
to dance. People offered him joints (he
declined), stepped on his bare toes, and
moved in for selfies, some of them as-
suming he was in costume. A woman
asked Ole Polos what his sign was. He
didn’t understand. She meant his astro-
logical sign. “I don’t know.”
“When were you born?”
“I don’t know.” (Earlier, he’d said, “I
think I’m forty-six, but I’m not sure. Every
holiday, my mother tells me, ‘This is the
day you were born,’ so I do know I was
born on a holiday.”) When the show was
over, he marvelled at the number of peo-
ple pouring out through the tunnels of
the Garden. He wondered, “Where do
they all go?” Outside, it seemed to him
that they’d vanished: “They just melted.”
A few days later, after watching his
fellow-Kenyans dominate the marathon,
he reflected on his night at the Garden.
“It was fabulous, man!” he said. “Peo-
ple take the music very seriously, and
it’s clear that it means a lot to Ameri-
cans. I didn’t know any of the songs. It
started like a slow music, and then it
got better.”
Had he found it at all silly, as many
Americans do?
“In a way,” he said, with some care.
“I come from a culture—for example,
when someone is dancing, there is a way
everyone moves. They dance the same
way. Here, everybody knows every song,
and yet everybody is dancing in their
own way. Some old dudes seemed to
take this as a golden opportunity to do
some exercises. They weren’t dancing.
They were doing exercises.”
He was heartened to have seen young
people there: “There are things I do be-
cause my grandpa did them. The fact
that the old people enjoyed it makes the
young people want to do it. It also seemed
that it doesn’t matter what class you are
from socially. I could tell there were some
very wealthy guys and also some people
who probably didn’t have a home. And
they were enjoying the same thing. That’s
culture. At home, we do believe that the
white community lost its culture long
ago. Now I know it hasn’t gone away.”
—Nick Paumgarten