We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman

Author:Jen Silverman [Silverman, Jen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

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In the aftermath of putting my finger in Tara-Jean Slater’s eye, everything changed for me very quickly. There was video on Instagram and Facebook, and there were photos that media outlets picked up, and apparently a few playwrights live-tweeted the whole thing and some gossip blogs republished the Twitter thread, but I never saw any of that. Or the memes. I’m told there is a picture of us taken right at the moment I put my finger in her eyeball—Tara-Jean Slater is already screaming, and there’s some girl over my shoulder in the crowd whose face is doing jaw-drop shock, which everybody thought was hilarious. Nobody has told me what my face looks like. Nico told me that there were a variety of different captions. One was You got something in your eye, and another was Eye can’t with you! The only one that made me smile for just a second was Oedipus Rex the party, and then I remembered that the caption was about me, and then I couldn’t smile, and then I made Nico stop telling me.

Everything happened like a domino effect after that. Liz told me that we couldn’t be in contact. She said it had nothing to do with whatever happened at the party, which she wasn’t there for and she sincerely hoped that people were blowing it out of proportion, because it sounded crazy, truly insane, but anyway it wasn’t about that, it was about the fact that she was recommitting to her marriage. Then she told me not to call her in the future, and said that if I ever wanted to offer her a role in anything, I should have my agent go through her agent.

Marisa was not about to talk to anybody’s agent for me. Marisa was not calling me back after the single conversation we had, which was short and brutal and culminated in Marisa hanging up the phone. Radio silence descended. In general, people became very busy. Nico remained a constant, but a less available one—he had been offered a five-week gig choreographing a show in Berlin. Nico is nothing if not loyal, and before he accepted it, he asked if I’d be okay alone. I said “Of course,” because I could smell the relief on him at the thought that he’d get a break from all this. From me. He deserved a break. He packed a bag and left, and the apartment lapsed into a deep-space hush, a vacuum so immense it defied all life.

You would think the bad review of my play prepared me for the bad review of my life, but it didn’t. It is one thing to think that everyone is talking about what a failure your play is. It is another thing to know, definitively, that you have become a punch line that eclipses even your play. You are never prepared for the things you fear, and that’s why you fear them.

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