REAL LIFE–STORIES FROM THE REAL WORLD
Carmela Rago’s new show would be great on the radio. Not that Rago–a waif of a woman–doesn’t have considerable stage presence, an admirable way with space, and even a nice ironic nod and wink.
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Rago’s tightly woven, tense monologue is actually undercut by her presence. The monologue itself is a desperate, nervous cry for assistance carefully wrapped in propriety. But with her delicate beauty and graceful pose, Rago belies the darkness of her own words. The character seeks neither pity nor sympathy, but still the performer’s ease with the materials–the confidence the character shouldn’t have–is unsettling, creating an ambivalence about how we’re to feel.
Rago’s character–perhaps partly autobiographical, partly invented–is a woman whose needs are in conflict with her desires. Her needs are a job, survival, security–all frighteningly basic, ordinary. Her desires are beauty, ease, the strange idyllic comfort of art. On the surface, this seems capricious, even flaky–a privilege and nothing more. But in Rago’s telling what seems a job interview becomes a self-indictment, then a confession, finally a plea. By the end desire and need are wholly entangled, the line so blurred it’s hard to tell if it’s there at all.
This is a woman with no alimony because her pride would forbid it, her ideals wouldn’t allow it. She didn’t marry for money anyway. “I didn’t handle the departure properly,” she says, balancing her fragile smile. “I didn’t ask for money. I didn’t ask for a means to maintain the relationship to which I had become accustomed.” That relationship, however, isn’t merely to her husband. It’s to the world–to her own sense of self, her connections and projections. The “relationship” has less to do with love, even with wealth, than with the loss of a certain basic privilege and convenience.
