The Brooklyn Rail

In 2015, I went to see Ariel Stess’s play Heartbreak at the Bushwick Starr, and it took my breath away. There was something so ruthless in its revelation of the thorn-sharp twists and mysteries of quotidian middle-class family life: the struggle to grow up, the struggle not to, the struggle to put anything true into words. I still have lines from that play stuck in my head.

Stess’s new play, Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda, premieres next month at The Tank with artist support from New Georges, directed by Meghan Finn. This will be Stess’s first show in New York since Clubbed Thumb produced her play The World My Mama Raised in 2017. In Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda, four women take turns telling their intersecting stories: Kara is a wealthy middle-aged housewife whose husband leaves her for their sons’ babysitter, Emma; Miranda is a broke REI employee who finds Kara’s erstwhile engagement ring and has to decide whether or not to return it; Barbara is Emma’s mom. All of them are white. Most of the play unfolds through their monologues as they process events in real time, although the men in their lives also show up onstage to engage in bits of brief, alienated dialogue; their juxtaposition with the women’s inner lives is often ironic and very funny.

All four of the heroines are ceaselessly trying to make sense of their relationships and themselves, and yet the play never feels overly philosophical or pedantic; the yearning for clarity is always still a yearning, even as these characters (as compared, say, to the people in Heartbreak) seem able to proceed through their thoughts with more self-possession most of the time. Barbara, addressing one of her lovers in her head, remarks: “With you, like with every man, I feel like something prehistoric in you loathes me, loathes any gentleness in me not spent on you, loathes how I can articulate my own emotions and perceptions in real time and words.”

In a way, the whole play is a challenge to this loathing, which it purposefully courts: can we bear to sit and listen to these four women talk about their feelings for a whole evening? Yes, we sure can. Stess and I spoke a few weeks before the start of rehearsals.

Julia Jarcho (Rail): There’s a line in the play, spoken by the youngest character, Emma: “I’m looking out the window and trying not to think about him, and to think about myself instead. But he’s always right next to me. How am I supposed to focus on myself?” Is that what the monologues in this play are? Four women’s efforts to focus on themselves for once, by telling their own stories?

Ariel Stess: Yeah, exactly. And also, what you’re telling yourself is your story can change at any time. The language you use to tell your story reinforces everything about your identity or the way you tell your story can change things about your identity. I’ve been thinking about the ways you can be trapped inside of your own story until you start to share certain parts of it with other people, and it seems to me like that’s the best way to break out of the story. To share parts that you are hiding, or that could be shameful.

Rail: I think about the moment when Miranda talks about how she hasn’t gone swimming in twenty years because she’s too hairy to wear a bathing suit.

Stess: That section with Miranda feels so liberating to me. I was working on it in an earlier workshop and the director was like, “I think these thoughts are quiet, you’re sort of muttering them to yourselves.” And the actor tried that. And then I was like, “Okay, I think these thoughts are really loud, you’re sharing this widely and loudly.” And that felt really good.

Rail: Speaking of shame, let’s talk about whiteness. All of the characters in your play are white. What’s it like to be a white woman writing a play about white women? Asking for a friend.

Stess: At the moment, I think I identify much of the time as a woman, and I am white. The play is indeed about white women of different social classes and ages who all live in Santa Fe. When I wrote the play, I pictured each character as a white woman with a whole life behind her that makes her who she is today. Each character is partly drawn from parts of myself and specific women I’ve known—mostly white women. I don’t want to pretend otherwise. And these characters have lived their lives with white skin and the privilege that comes with it. But I very much want the play to feel valuable and insightful to audience members other than white, straight women.

It’s important that I ask myself what other aspects of these characters could resonate with people with different identities. What are other elements of Kara, Emma, Barbara, and Miranda that audience members of any race, any sexual orientation, any gender identity might be able to connect to? I wrote this play for audience members who have felt lost, ashamed, and isolated and/or silenced by themselves or silenced by society. And for people who feel like they need and want to be mothered.

Rail: And this desire for relation connects to the play’s mode of address, too, right? Talk to me about narrative prose onstage. It’s more and more central to contemporary American playwriting, I think—but what made you want to use narrative language, rather than dialogue, as the dominant form here?

Stess: Well, first, I noticed at some point in the last ten years that often when I’m watching a play, I’m watching with the assumption that the men in the play are going to have the most interesting story. Even in my own plays. That was a big epiphany to me. And so I really wanted to play against the way I seem to have been taught to watch theater—but also TV and film; I didn’t feel like I saw a lot of deep, conflicted, complex women in the media growing up. So the first question was how to tear my own attention away from the men, which is so bizarre to say. I wanted to see if these women could just share what they’re going through, what they’re seeing and feeling in their bodies, because it felt like the most efficient and powerful way to get audience members to quickly land inside these women’s bodies and see the way they see and think about things.

Rail: And prose is better at that. More direct. Less alienating than drama. The intimacy of, like, a Judy Blume novel.

Stess: [Laughs] Yeah.

Rail: There’s something really hopeful about that project. The whole play is strangely optimistic.

Stess: Yeah. Did it make you want to vomit?

Rail: No, I’m hungry for it! But what the hell happened to you?

Stess: I used to want audiences to leave feeling unsettled and kind of icky, hoping they’d shift how they see the world. But then there was something about the terrible bleakness of the pandemic, the isolation, and my own experience in lockdown that changed that. At some point during quarantine, I had to go to the ER, and I was so afraid because I thought it was the most dangerous place to be and I thought people would treat me like I was a danger to them because I was sick. And then, once I was there, and there was a nurse, you know, holding my hand and looking me in the eye and super close to me just being like, “It’s gonna be okay.” And I was like, “Oh, my God, this is okay. Everything is going to be okay. Because this person I don’t even know is holding my hand, and is near me.” There was just something about this stranger helping me when I thought they’d be afraid of me, they’d be trying to stay away from me. That closeness changed me. I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna be okay.” Not because of medicine, but because someone was holding my hand.

Rail: There does seem to be this possibility of feminine collectivity in the play, even though it doesn’t fully emerge.

Stess: Yes, totally. When I was first thinking of this story, the end was gonna be that these women start a commune in the mansion one of them owns. That isn’t the ending I wrote, but I’m really glad that you feel like that’s there.

Rail: I’m glad they don’t start a commune, because I don’t think I would believe in the commune. But I believe in the possibility of the commune.

Stess: And the women are there at the end alone, you know, together. And they’re sort of sharing with each other, and they don’t know each other, and they’re strangers.