Tags
#ReadingForParity, A Lifetime Burning, Cusi Cram, Female Playwrights, Parity Play Reading Project, Women Writers
A Lifetime Burning is about two sisters, Tess and Emma.
Let me stop there for a moment before continuing with the plot just to acknowledge how exciting it is to read a play in which the primary relationship is between two sisters. There are numerous plays that deal with romantic relations and even a handful of ‘buddy stories’ but most of the time, if the central relationship in a show is familial, it tends to explore a parent/child dynamic. Those stories are important too but how thrilling to see two sisters- fascinating, complex, impassioned women who are, for all intents and purposes, each others’ equals- at the heart of a play. In fact, 75% of the characters in A Lifetime Burning are women (wonderfully written women that any actress would be lucky to portray) as was the director of the play’s initial 2009 production at Primary Stages, Pam MacKinnon.
All this to say, while most press and publishers seem to describe A Lifetime Burning as being about a bipolar woman who writes a false memoir, an equally valid description would be that it’s about two “discordant” sisters’ journeys towards the fragile beginnings of harmony and mutual understanding, “enduring” together. One of these sisters, Tess, is a suburban mother in the midst of a messy divorce and the other, Emma, does write a false memoir while in a manic phase, but there is so much more to both women than that. An important component of the play, that keeps the sisters from falling into traditional gender stereotypes, is their lively, quirky use of language.
One of the first things I noticed about A Lifetime Burning, was the riveting, vividness of the dialogue, which drew me into the world of the play so fully that, while reading on the subway, I almost missed my stop; I didn’t want to tear my eyes away and break the rhythm for a signal second.
The play asks difficult, sociological questions about art, integrity and love but there is just enough cheeky, sarcastic wit in the character’s lines to keep things from getting too theoretical or maudlin. Possibly my favorite excerpt from the play is the following exchange, which goes from philosophical to cynical to hilarious in just a few lines:
Tess. Why are truth and beauty so elusive?
Emma. ‘Cause they don’t matter anymore.
Tess. THAT makes me want to string somebody up by the BALLS and make them ACCOUNTABLE.
The writing also manages to connect simple, tangible things to large, abstract concepts in fluid, easy shifts. After confiding in her sister about a traumatic loss, Emma says, “people lose things, keys, ambitions, their minds.” That line, to me, is the most poignant line in the show, heart-wrenching in its deceptive simplicity.
Fittingly for a piece with such well-crafted dialogue, there is a clear love of words and storytelling embedded throughout the material. From the very first scene, characters are arguing over word choice (do they want an “explanation” or an “explication”) and referring to their own lives as stories that they are attempting to frame in narratives. By the end of the play, Emma openly admits she was trying to rewrite her life story, or at least give herself a happy ending-something she couldn’t even imagine.
But in this play, the happy ending doesn’t involve a prince or a white knight rescuing a manic pixie dream girl. Even if Emma couldn’t see it, Cusi Cram has envisioned something far more rare, and yet ironically, far more real for the two sisters- an ending in which characters face their own vulnerabilities, an ending in which a pair of sisters come together, an ending in which two women learn how to start supporting each other.
Click here for more information on #ReadingForParity: My Parity Play-Reading Project