Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly, fluttering like a silk-moth behind me blocking my life, my scenes in whichever stage direction she wants. Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me, her ringing calls like an imperial decree. When she sleeps she crashes, like a car into the guardrail of my ambition. Her curse like a poison I cannot smell, an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell. Split personalities, we dream through the night, of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light, Not even my husband can feel her there between us—a secret contract under seal. When I awaken, her irises touch mine; an awful, indecipherable fault line. She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee, trying to recount her history through me, until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb, hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims, the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hair the forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer. Until her thoughts tumble into mine; colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought— My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin, when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in. Her cool white rising is meringue completing— the high-pitched silence of our congealing. She was always ceremonially unfolding his white shirts, unpressing the folds in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kept trying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent to have her near made her more invisible. Her electric breasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic— She never removes her hat upon entering the door to my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!

The goal of the Meisner acting technique has often been described as getting actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Here are some acting games we have found useful. I. THE REPETITION GAME: The Moment is a Tricky Fucker

I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message? The message was there wasn’t one. This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in. Divorced dad Sundays at The Greenwich watching the British Secret Service save the world. I thought he sent the knife inadvertently, but now I see it was code— he was boxed in without a knife to cut himself out.