"None of us has ever been unintentionally rude."
made by me
Okay, this really is my last Fifty Book Challenge Entry for a while, I promise. I'm being really horrible about regular updates, but even when I had a weeklong break I spent almost the entire time doing schoolwork. On the other hand, it snowed about a foot here today, and so tomorrow before double tech for Measure for Measure I hope to be able to play in the snow. I've gotten everything done that I need to do this weekend except do some serious work on adjusting my IS for the conference at which I'm presenting part of it at the end of the month.
So, at the beginning of February I was in one of my favorite plays I have ever done, if not my favorite hands-down. It was called Hay Fever, by Noel Coward. It's about a family of eccentrics and the guests they invite over for the weekend. It has no plot. It is really funny and so rewarding to play in front of an audience that laughs. I loved the entire cast, everyone was brilliant. Anyway, Coward wrote this play based on a real family he occasionally stayed with: that of the actress Laurette Taylor, her husband, the playwright Hartley Manners, and her two children, Dwight and Marguerite. The character I played, Sorel Bliss, was based on Marguerite. Well, come to find out, Marguerite wrote a biography of her mother, and so I ILLed it for research purposes, intending to skim through quickly. I ended up reading the whole thing cover to cover. So here is Fifty Book Challenge book 23:
Laurette by Marguerite Courtney is my favorite biography I have ever read. It chronicles Laurette Taylor's life and career as they were, interweaving, and manages to paint a largely sympathetic portrait. It is a fascinating chronicle about what theatre was like in turn-of-the-century America. Apparently special-effects plays were very big then, with acrobats and fire and preferably both at the same time. I'm still stumped as to how they managed a sandstorm on a stage. I found it so interesting. The reader also gets some surprisingly good advice on acting in quotes from Laurette and analysis of what she did. The prose is absolutely beautiful-- I've never read a biography that read with such lyric eloquence in its descriptions. There are hilarious anecdotes galore about Laurette's relationship with her children, which I took pleasure in sharing with the actor who played my brother ("Marguerite. I need you to be honest with me. Are you going to have a baby?" "Mother, please. I am thirteen years old.").
What I find most fascinating about this biography is that Marguerite Courtney spent six years after her mother's death researching her and trying to find out who she really was and why she was that way, and then she wrote the biography and dedicated it to her daughter. It's like real-life Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. Or Big Fish, with women. The result is a book that reveals almost as much about the daughter as it does about the mother. Marguerite writes about herself in the third person, trying to distance herself from the things that hurt her, but she writes herself as the tragic, misunderstood heroine-- while she's trying to come off as not bitter at all about these things that happened in her childhood, it does not quite work. One can easily tell that she is still very bitter indeed. Yet the whole project strikes me as an act of atonement. She's trying to understand what she never could while her mother was alive, and I think she believed she did come to terms with her mother after her death because of writing Laurette. I hope she did. I've come to feel a lot of affection for her, so I hope she was happy after all.
The Taylor-Manners family was very upset when they found out that Noel Coward had written this madcap play about them. According to Marguerite, Laurette's official statement was, "None of us has ever been unintentionally rude." But I think Noel got a little more to the heart of the matter than they realized, maybe. A lot of his characterizations are spot-on according to the way Marguerite describes life in their house. From Laurette, you get a picture of the mother trying to solve everything and express her love through creating a scene. You get the father as the glue that holds the family tenuously together (and I think it's interesting that both children dabbled in acting, but both chose careers in writing, the career of the most stable influence in their lives). You get the multi-talented son who can use his charm to get him out of any situation. And you get the daughter, the more awkward of the children, the occasional victim of her mother's jealousy, the dreamer who knew all the rules of drama and could imagine herself into the role of heroine in any scenario, for whom the boundary between fantasy and reality had always been somewhat blurred, the girl with the princess complex who sometimes longed for a more normal sort of life. They're all reflected in Hay Fever, if you do the characters proper justice. And I hope I did.