The Humbling Read Online Free PDF

attempt to do, once I am on the stage there is that sly voice all the time—'There is no teacup.' Jerry, it's over: I can no longer make a play real for people. I can no longer make a role real for myself."
    After Jerry had left, Axler went into his study and found his copy of
Long Day's Journey into Night.
He tried to read it but the effort was unbearable. He didn't get beyond page 4—he put Vincent Daniels's card there as a bookmark. At the Kennedy Center it was as though he'd never acted before and now it was as though he'd never read a play before—as though he'd never read
this
play before. The sentences unfolded without meaning. He could not keep straight who was speaking the lines. Sitting there amid his books, he tried to remember plays in which there is a character who commits suicide. Hedda in
Hedda Gabler,
Julie in
Miss Julie,
Phaedra in
Hippolytus,
Jocasta in
Oedipus the King,
almost everyone in
Antigone,
Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman,
Joe Keller in
All My Sons,
Don Parritt in
The Iceman Cometh,
Simon Stimson in
Our
Town,
Ophelia in
Hamlet,
Othello in
Othello,
Cassius and Brutus in
Julius Caesar,
Goneril in
King Lear,
Antony, Cleopatra, Enobarbus, and Charmian in
Antony and Cleopatra,
the grandfather in
Awake and Sing!,
Ivanov in
Ivanov,
Konstantin in
The Seagull.
And this astonishing list was only of plays in which he had at one time performed. There were more, many more. What was remarkable was the frequency with which suicide enters into drama, as though it were a formula fundamental to the drama, not necessarily supported by the action as dictated by the workings of the genre itself. Deirdre in
Deirdre of the Sorrows,
Hedvig in
The Wild Duck,
Rebecca West in
Rosmersholm,
Christine and Orin in
Mourning Becomes Electra,
both Romeo and Juliet, Sophocles' Ajax. Suicide is a subject dramatists have been contemplating with awe since the fifth century B.C. , beguiled by the human beings who are capable of generating emotions that can inspire this most extraordinary act. He should set himself the task of rereading these plays. Yes, everything gruesome must be squarely faced. Nobody should be able to say that he did not think it through.
    ***
    J ERRY HAD BROUGHT a manila envelope containing a handful of mail addressed to him in care of the Oppenheim Agency. There was a time when a dozen letters from fans would come to him that way every couple of weeks. Now these few were all that had arrived at Jerry's during the past half year. He sat in the living room idly tearing the envelopes open, reading each letter's first few lines and then balling the page up and throwing it onto the floor. They were all requests for autographed photos—all but one, which took him by surprise and which he read in its entirety.
    "I don't know if you'll remember me," the letter began. "I was a patient at Hammerton. I had dinner with you several times. We were in art therapy together. Maybe you won't remember me. I have just finished watching a late-night movie on TV and to my amazement you were in it. You were playing a hardened criminal. It was so startling to see you on the screen, especially in such a menacing role. How different from the man I met! I remember telling you my story. I remember how you listened to me meal after meal. I couldn't stop talking. I was in agony. I thought my life was over. I wanted it to be over. You may not know it but your listening to my
story the way you did contributed to my getting through back then. Not that it's been easy. Not that it is now. Not that it ever will be. The monster I was married to has done ineradicable damage to my family. The disaster was worse than I knew when I was hospitalized. Terrible things had been going on for a long time without my knowing anything about them. Tragic things involving my little girl. I remember asking you if you would kill him for me. I told you I would pay. I thought because you were so big you could do it. Mercifully you didn't tell me that I