Wish Granted

Posted by Sara Malinowski in Performing Arts

When I was four years old, my grandparents asked me what I wanted to be. With my hands proudly on my hips, I announced, “an octopus.” When questioned further on this answer, I said, exasperated, “So I can do everything at the same time with all my arms and travel the world.”

This past semester I worked with the New York Arts Program and a remarkable theatre company, Blessed Unrest, on their production of A Christmas Carol.

On the second floor of a building at 10th and 52nd Street, I have my wish. With my fingers interlacing around stitches, reaching through and out of 1800’s-inspired fabric, I also keep a hand on my pen over a note-covered script.

The lights go out and the show begins. I am laughing, crying, and altogether tired. It’s the type of exhaustion that only comes through in theatre. Simultaneously debilitating and exhilarating, it was truly multi-armed work. The money sparse and the feelings strong, I am inside 1800’s-England…before me is Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

The white, cracked door— a character in the show all its own—moves across the stage for the 18th time. The stage manager, Jaimie, takes note on one of her many labeled transition lists, and moves her ear-length curls back. She is the first fellow octopus I’d ever met, with four clipboards and 12 jobs to do every hour on the hour. She was always working to get the job she already had.

“Take five, everybody,” she announces at the end of the scene. I continue sewing small white threads and elastic onto Scrooge’s pants, as I finally have some light in which to work.

“Thank you, five,” echoes across the room, from our multi-ethnic cast and director, who pores over her own thoughts about the Christmas past transition we just watched.

The transition into past currently has each actor throwing white string around the stage while moving through a different memory: one girl undulating on a swing, another watching an imagined baby walk toward her open arms, another jumping so high above Scrooge, eluding his grasp in a game of tag.

Immersed in sewing and highlighting new notes from the run, I barely hear something placed on my desk. One of the actors has left me a chocolate bar, and another leaves me some tea. I look up and smile at them.

“What! Thank you.”

“You do more than any intern,” my friend Sora says as an answer. She plays Christmas Past, Mrs. Cratchet, and a multitude of other roles. Each actor plays, on average, four or five roles.

She checks in with the notes on my script, worrying about her accuracy. Her first language is Korean, and she has the fewest line corrections I’ve seen. She loves language and one of my favorite conversations to date has been us discussing the way the mouth moves with different dialects. She says her mouth and tongue are in different places altogether, and tend to be tighter, when she speaks in Korean. The different syllables move around differently, and she says it took years for vowels like “o” to be spoken with an entirely open circle on her lips.

Jaimie overhears the conversation about my “workload” while checking the location on all the costumes. More than 60 costumes move around the course of the run, hidden behind set pieces. I wink at her, knowing she does the most and I run around trying to follow her lead. I then jerk my head to the side, gesturing towards the fridge and her need to eat her sandwich. One of my jobs is making sure she remembers to eat. She shrugs her shoulders and I get up, grabbing her clipboard to check the costume locations, and pushing her towards sustenance.

By the time I finish, she calls, “We’re back, folks! Top of the dance!” with half a piece of turkey on her lips.

“Applause,” from Lady Gaga’s newest album, shakes the ground I mopped just an hour earlier. The first time I had ever been asked to mop I YouTubed “How to Mop A Stage,” terrified I would do it the wrong way.

Breaking into Christmas Carol Gaga, the cast of six run across the stage. Scrooge trips over his robe, dancing like the Tin Man pre-oil can. With tight, greased hair and tan skin, he taps his hips to the electronic beat. I can’t help but laugh at the old grouch they’ve managed to turn into a heartwarming, newborn character.

The group of actors, from all over the world, turn and spread across the stage. I begin another task—taping modern photos on period photos for a display in the dressing room. It would hang next to a note titled Bah-Hum Butts! regarding how to sell more tickets (more butts in the seats, so to speak).

Across the page I tape a woman’s face covered in lace, her brown eyes peering through, and a man in period clothing, carved cane holding him upright. It fits the show perfectly, its eeriness and its anonymity. The ghosts in Christmas Carol—movement-based and modernized—transform from a singular ghost in the Past, to an amorphous five-person quintessence in Present, into nothing but bodiless dark silence as Christmas Yet to Come.

I continue to work, my fingers and body aching with pride and exhaustion. I can see my four-year-old self, small hips jutted forward in determination. I had become everything she dreamed, my jobs interlacing, the people of the world in front of my eyes. I had traveled while standing still, into another culture, into another time, my heart beating fast to the beat of Gaga.