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A touching play about misery, a story that will change your life forever. Well, it at least changed mine.
I was 13 years old, and one afternoon, because by then I already was a "hate morning" person, I woke up with this idea stuck in my mind that I would study acting. All the plays I had ever seen in my life were school plays; my parents were not the kind of people who would go or take me to the theater. We would never watch classic movies, art movies, or musicals inspired by plays in my house. While growing up, I watched soap operas, children's movies, romantic movies, and comedies. However, I woke up in love with theater on that day. So, I worked hard doing my own research, and I found a group offering clowning classes for an affordable price! I couldn't be prouder of myself.
I walked into my mom's room with all the excitement of a young teenager, a smile of fifty teeth, and asked her to sign me up for the classes. The room was filled with the most awkward silence for a few seconds. Then my mother laughed as hard as a person possibly could; she tore laughing! My adorable mom took that entire afternoon, making jokes about how I would be the protagonist in the next Brazilian soap opera. Or, perhaps, the next Catherine Zeta-Jones in the film industry. Most importantly, she didn't even consider paying for such a pointless thing.
The acting classes did not happen in real life until I could afford them myself many years later. They repeatedly happened in my daydreams, though. For years, I imagined I would leave everything behind and join a group of itinerant actors or maybe a circus. I traveled across South America in my dreams, living a life full of poetry, art, and music. Far from people who would laugh at my passions. My teenage despair was probably why I felt so connected to the woman from Talk To Me Like the Rain, And Let Me Listen by Tennessee Williams. The play became one of my favorite stories.
I have never seen an adaptation of it in a theater to this day, but I read it and played it in my head countless times. Two unnamed characters, a man and a woman, talk. Both seem to share the misery of those who no longer expect much from life. The man constantly asks the woman to talk to him and let him listen too. The woman then tells us this beautiful and detailed story of what her life would be like if she moved alone to a small hotel on the coast. I used to "listen" to her story and think about myself creating a safe place, a secret life inside my head, just like she did. In her fantasies, she leaves the man, her own anxiety and fears behind and finds a secure, calm, and quiet place where she can read and wait in peace for the day of her death. In mine, I created a safe place, full of art, far from the ordinary life in my hometown, where I could fully express myself without the fear of being laughed at.
I reread this script many times throughout my life. The drama, the passion, and the resentment of my teen years faded away as the years passed by. But the story still fascinates me. It amazes me how the audience can perceive the despair through the woman's "positive speech." Paradoxically, every peaceful moment described reveals how sick and hopeless her reality is. I ended up taking acting classes when I was in college already; I never got to play this character, though. Yet Talk To Me Like the Rain, And Let Me Listen, is my favorite play. A play with a role I never played, a play I never saw in a theater. Still, a play that always talks to my heart.
Ane C.
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