Fictional better halves
Just got home from seeing the one-man show “Loveswell” in Hollywood, where I sat directly behind Michael Emerson, who plays Ben on “Lost.” It seems he got off that island after all. (In 2009, anyway.)
“Loveswell” was wonderfully funny, and at times unsettling in its honesty — unsettling in a dramatically good way, and honest in a dramaturgically complicated way because we’re seeing the husband’s perspective of a courtship and marriage. I wondered what the wife, who seems completely unreasonable in the play, makes of this portrayal of her, which led me to wonder how she might portray him if she chose to do so. From not doing dishes, to send mixed signals about whether to leave the bathroom door open or to close it but leave the light on, to obsessing about toilet paper and his daring to breathe in bed, she seems like a handful. It reminded me of what a well-known poet once told me when I asked how his wife feels about her many unflattering appearances in his work: “She knows how much I fictionalize.”
Given that my own new play, which runs the last weekend of this month here in Los Angeles, features a wife that I hope no one would confuse for my own, it’s incumbent upon me to dismiss all wifely portraits as straight up fiction.