An Auditorium, Sylvia Plath and Me.

One of the best parts about doing theater is that there’s something for everyone. The wrong perception that I had about theater being mainly about the ones on stage has changed completely over the past year. The ones on stage I have realized are unluckier. Their exploration is mostly limited to their character, while the rest have the entire world to discover within the four damp, dark walls of the auditorium.  Lights, sounds, scripts- each of them gives you a chance to discover something new, both within yourself and outside of yourself.

I am trying my hand at both lights and sound this year. Given that I have only done a street play last year, which had a charm of its own, coming directly to directing a stage play is scary but it is something I trust myself to handle or at least learn from. It gives to me what I like best about what I do- Words. Bringing something that was written years ago to its last destination, the stage.

I discovered the passage I have published below a few months ago while preparing for the auditions. While we frantically searched for passages to give to people who would be coming to audition for our society, I came across this in a book titled ‘Audition Passages For Women’. I couldn’t find a copy of this on the internet anywhere so I sat at the back and copied it into my diary because I couldn’t get over how similar it was to how I felt, each and every word. At 17 and even now. Sylvia Plath had a troubled life untill she eventually committed suicide at the age of 30. Her first attempt at suicide however was at twenty, three years after this was written (Virginia Woolf’s first attempt at suicide was also at the age of twenty..and they still ask me why I’m dreading my birthday). She’s one of the people I have discovered through theater first and then through her poetry. She is one of the women I would want to meet, want to go over the thoughts that at least at the beginning sound so much like mine. But maybe we will never be able to figure out this  ‘dazzlingly, maddeningly fragmented woman as an integrated being’ (as author Kate Moses Puts it). Maybe it’s best that way.

LETTERS HOME- SYLVIA PLATH
As of today I have decided to keep a diary again. Just a place where I can write my thoughts and opinions when I have a moment. Somehow I have to keep and hold the rapture of being seventeen. Everyday is so precious. I feel infinitely sad at the thought of all this time melting farther and farther away from me as I grow older. Now, now is the time of my life.

I still do not know myself. Perhaps I never will. But I feel free-unbound by responsibility, I still can come up to my own private room with my drawings and hangings on the wall and the pictures pinned up over the bureau a room suited to me, uncluttered and peaceful. I love the quiet lines of the  furniture and the two book cases filled with poetry books and fairy tales saved from childhood…

I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day spare me from thee relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free- free to know people and their backgrounds , free to move to different parts of the world. I want, I think, to be omniscient. I think I would like to call myself  ‘The Girl Who Wants To Be God’. Perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I.

I love my flesh, my face, my limbs. I have erected in my mind an image of myself – idealistic and beautiful. Is not my image free from blemish, the true self- the true perfection?

There will come a time when I must face myself a last. Even now I dread the big choices which loom in my life. I am afraid, uncertain. I am not as wise as I have thought.

I can now see, as if from a valley, the roads lying open for me but I can not see the end, the consequences.

Oh, I love now with all its fears and forebodings. For now I still am not completely molded. I am steam.

My life is just beginning.