This essay is about an Irish play and ugliness and generosity and stage blood and some weird sideways healing that happened after my brother, Brandon, died three years ago today. It’s inherently sad which is maybe weird for the 4th of July but y’know welcome to my ACTUAL life, plus it gets kinda hopeful right at the end.
And off you go
After the graveside service for my brother, everyone gathered at Mom and Dad’s, sweaty in our funeral clothes. Dad opened the garage doors, where the tables inside were filled with casseroles and ice buckets and bottled water and paper plates that the crowd had brought. And cheap beer—stacks and coolers of it, labels peeling in the already-melting ice.
My brain was stuttering from no sleep; I’d finally pushed myself up from my brother’s bed at 3am that morning to stand in the kitchen in my underwear, rooting for a pen and paper to write his eulogy. I’d choked my way through that eulogy at the funeral home podium, head down, avoiding the faces in the folding chairs in front of me. Now, standing in my parents’ garage, I was stoned on a double dose of Ativan and hollow with the unbelievable loss of my only sibling. I felt halved. I wanted a beer, bad. I wanted to stop caring about anything. And it was hot—a sopping Midwestern August. Dad had set giant industrial fans to blow from every corner and doorway, filling the space with a quieting noise. Plastic tablecloth corners fluttered in the artificial wind.
Kay asked me to be in the play right there in my parents’ garage, just after we ate chicken salad and chips and just before I cracked my first of many Coors Banquets and pressed the cold can against my tear-salted cheek. She and I had been sitting at a high-top table together for a while, talking, and she’d asked me about Brandon. In the few days since Brandon had died, people talked to me plenty about their condolences, about the funeral arrangements, about how my parents were doing. But they didn’t talk about Brandon much. It was as if they didn’t want to upset me, as if they could remind me that my brother was dead, as if I'd somehow forgotten. But Kay knew better. She was a counselor and teacher. Tell me about him, she said. I’m so sorry I never got to know him. The fact and history of him, my little brother who was born almost thirty years earlier, blonde and baby-voiced, who grew up to have a broad smile that got him past VIP bouncers, charmed skeptical girls, coaxed smiles from high school teachers shaking their heads.
It felt so good to talk about him. To not have to whisper about his overdose, tiptoe around him like a fenced-off graveyard, a locked bedroom door.
I’m sure that’s part of why I said yes to the play, wanting to sink into Kay’s sweetness like a body of water, feel it slip closed at the crown of my head, fully submersed. She approached the question carefully, after a lull between stories, as we gazed at the funeral-goers filling their paper plates: Would I by any chance want to be in a play in October? Maybe it would feel good to me. Maybe it could help. I didn’t have to answer then, of course, I could take my time, she said. But the performance dates would mean we’d start rehearsing within the next few weeks.
Did I want to be in a play, my body beat up by grief and my heart a crumpled styrofoam cup of lobby coffee? I did. I turned to Kay and I said yes. Yes to a project, yes to a plan for my grief, yes to a routine for my body. Yes to five nights a week at the theater where I’d been a company member for over a decade, since I was twenty-two and just out of college. I yearned for someone to tell me what to do. A director seemed to make sense.
The play was The Night Alive by Irish playwright Conor McPherson. It’s about Tommy, an aging Dubliner who has scrimped along his whole life on petty scams and blue collar labor until he meets a girl. The girl is a couple decades younger than him, in need of his help, mixed up in an offstage addiction and an onstage abusive boyfriend with mean eyes and balled fists. The girl, of course, changes Tommy’s life, in the way that half-drawn girl characters often do for richly-imagined male characters. I was cast as the girl that stifling afternoon after Brandon’s funeral.
Plays arrive with their own unique elements and places: a hotel room in Manhattan, the underworld, a 17th-century prison. I’ve been in plenty of plays that require elaborate lists of props to check before the audience arrives, costume pieces to pin down or lace up, stunt guns to fire or sound cues to trigger, turned up loud. But the stuff of The Night Alive was the familiar stuff of life: I woke up from a nightmare in my underwear. We ate salty french fries onstage from a paper bag, shuttled in every night from a nearby bar, still warm. I sat cross-legged on a low cot piled with blankets in Tommy’s flat, a cozy set insulated with stacks of faded paperbacks and crinkled take-out bags, teacups towering in open cupboards. I brushed my teeth into a sink rigged with a faucet that spat water from a little hidden tank. We talked in Dublin dialects; a coach sat with us at rehearsals, asking us to repeat words like “countryside” and “longer,” our syllables a playground of slides and swings. In one scene, we sloshed a rum bottle full of dark tea into coffee mugs and got up and danced and sang with abandon, in our hopping-bunny dialects, to a Marvin Gaye tune piped through a prop radio. No choreography, moving however we damn well pleased, joyful and unsophisticated.
I didn’t have to cover my tattoos or cut or dye my hair, which by that point had grown from a careful bleach-blonde to a two-tone jalopy. I’d stopped getting my eyebrows done because I couldn’t stand making small talk with my waxer when nothing I wanted to talk about was small anymore. I got to look more or less like myself, even as I got to live the moments of another girl’s life.
And then there was the blood.
My first task when I got to the theater every night was to hole up in my dressing room, squinting into the hot lights surrounding the mirror, and use my fingertips to dab blue and red pigmented cream around my eyes. A color called “fresh cut” under my nose, crusted on my lip. Just before I went onstage, I tipped my head back and drizzled syrupy fake blood from my upper lip, felt it drip from my chin, soaking my T-shirt. The makeup artist taught me how to change the bruising to show time passing—the next morning, blood turning bluer as it pooled—a few days later, purpler and darker—a few weeks later, a greenish haze. Between my scenes, I applied each healing stage from the dressing room, listening to the other actors onstage, the crowd bubbling with laughter or cooing with sympathy.
Over three weeks of performances, the cuts I made got wetter and fresher-looking. My bruising spread and sank my eyes. I wanted to look pummeled. I wanted to look grotesque. I wanted to make a mask of suffering. When the lights came up and the audience saw me, they murmured to themselves, and I could feel them wincing.
I said the first line of the play, holding a jacket to my bleeding nose: “Is it broken?”
In that practiced Dublin dialect, “is” transformed to “ess,” like a little drawer sliding open, a small, vulnerable sound.
I didn’t particularly care whether the girl was a full-fledged character or not. I didn’t need to be the hero or give a monologue that shifted the air in the room. She was hurting, and that I understood.
Later in the play, the girl stabs her rageful boyfriend to stop him from attacking Tommy, and he dies onstage from the wound, on the same quivering cot where I’d eaten french fries and winced at the false bite of prop rum. In rehearsals, Kay directed me to sit with the girl’s complicated relationship with her boyfriend: how much he had hurt her, how she had been trapped by him and had believed in him and loved him and hated him. How it wouldn’t be so easy to let him go. There’s a scene where the landlord wanders into the flat, unaware of the dead body beneath a blanket on the cot, and the girl and Tommy have to make casual conversation without screaming or sobbing.
I knew all about playing it cool. When I was onstage, pretending to be this damaged Irish girl, every so often I’d jolt as if remembering something very important: my actual life. My brother is dead, I’d think, but could not say. My brother died! Instead of turning my head to howl this at the audience, I would focus hard on the actor in front of me. Crawl back into the moment. Grip the edge of the cot so hard my hands ached.
I felt the loss of Brandon ripping like tissue paper in my chest, tearing forever. The same ripping I felt when he died, and when I read his eulogy, and standing in our parents’ garage afterward without him. I felt it when I went back to work and nodded dutifully through meetings. I felt it onstage, in front of the murmuring audience members, while looking into the other actors’ eyes. I felt it in the lobby afterward, smiling at audience members, while I said thank you and goodnight. Around other people, I was always acting, onstage and off-, not screaming, not sobbing.
Near the end of the play, the girl exits for a long time, while Tommy and a buddy remain onstage. One tells the other about a dream he had where he was visited by God.
DOC. Oh, and he told me to tell you what heaven is, Tommy.
TOMMY. Oh, yeah?
DOC. Yeah, apparently, when you die, you won’t even know you’re dead! It’ll just feel like everything has suddenly … come right, in your life. Like everything has just clicked into place and off you go.
I stood backstage listening, waiting for my cue, dressed in the all-black of my final scene, washed clean of salt and stage blood. I leaned against the wooden flats, unseen by God or anyone, and ached with wanting. Wanting my brother back. Wanting the lines Doc spoke to be true. Wanting to understand any of where Brandon had gone and what he now understood. Maybe he didn’t know he was dead. Maybe he was eating french fries, turning up the music, sneaking into VIP, everything clicked into place. Every night, I covered my face with my hands for the last few moments before I entered onto the set again, the rows of eyes watching. And off you go. I tried to be wherever my brother was. I leaned my head back toward the stage lights as if they were the sun.