The Sign (double monodrama) / Semnul (monodramă dublă) - frament

 Specifications

 

Synopsis: A double loses her job at the age of 36 when the woman she is impersonating, a famous actress and the daughter of a former dictator, undergoes plastic surgery. A now-unemployed double delivers a monologue about identity, originality and imitation. The text is a combination of the double's confessions and excerpts from her recently written memoirs.

Time: after the peaceful fall of a dictatorship that was not very harsh, but in which the head of state and his family still needed doubles.

Space: an auditorium in a fictitious country, but similar to an Eastern-European one. The decor is vaguely reminiscent of stand-up shows or motivational speeches. A microphone on a stand, a spotlight and a chair on which sits a copy of the Double’s memoirs. The set doesn't necessarily have to be realistic, but neither science fiction.

Costume: the Double is dressed in a long or knee-length black dress.

ACT I

THE DOUBLE enters the stage, adjusts her microphone and looks up at the audience and the spotlight. She picks up her memoirs from the chair and starts reading, from page one. She seems to be nervous.

 

THE DOUBLE: (reading) ‘Note: This is not a manifesto.’ The no is underlined twice. ‘This is a... confession.’ Also underlined twice. (Clears her throat briefly.) ‘Chapter I. My person and I were born under the same zodiac element, two years apart, she being younger than me. We grew up in different parts of the country and enjoyed an eccentric adolescence in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Around the time she became famous, I became her double. Okay, it wasn't that simple.’ (Puts the book back on the chair. Pauses to look at the audience.)

        I almost didn't get this job because of a birthmark on my neck. (She touches the birthmark on her neck with the back of her hand.) I needed this job. Why? Because I hadn't found my calling yet. I don't know if being a double is a calling or just something that comes along. Maybe it's the kind of job that's never a calling. Or that doesn't require a calling? Yeah, you don't have a calling for it, you might say. But then, you ask yourself, why were you born looking identical to someone else? There has to be a connection, but is that the explanation?

        Important people need us. They can't do it alone. Sounds spoiled, but it seems they need protection, protection from someone less important. Depending on what determines a person's importance, I don't know exactly. It seems that in order for them to feel good and safe, they need, around them, a twin from a physical point of view. Perhaps this confirms the fact that they have an identity... and therein lies their sense of security. 

[...]

    I'm going to talk a bit about the trauma of the post-double condition. It's very different from childhood trauma and post-natal depression. Yes, by the way, I don't have children. But I've read about it.

Post double trauma is a trauma that feels like having your arms and legs cut off. Or maybe you're cutting them off yourself without even realising it because you feel disoriented. As I wrote here also: ‘I was inert. I was still, in someone else's skin. I no longer know how to externalise myself as myself, if I ever did. And if I did, I don't remember what it was like anyway.’

Yes, the trauma is about that inertia. About what it's like to always be in someone else's shoes, but with your own brain and your own history, and suddenly stop and be in your own shoes. Wearing clothes you don't like, drinking drinks too sweet for your taste, smiling when you don't feel like smiling, being 348 km away from home, putting on weight and losing weight on command, not taking breaks if you have a headache, suddenly you having to get a haircut! And let's not forget how many times you have to publicly support ideas that are not your own, in front of the masses already enthusiastic about whatever cliché and whatever nonsense you are about to say... because you, after all, are not you. It's paid hypocrisy. A luxury hypocrisy. And suddenly, when you least expect it, the whole circus stops.

 

She calms down. Gradually, her energy drops and becomes sad.

 

        You have your brain zipped into someone else's skin and one day the zipper cracks forever. And once it cracks, you don't know how to be yourself anymore. And it's like a handicap. Being a double for so many years leaves you crippled, whatever one might say. No matter how much some may protest. And no matter how rebellious you are at heart. You get used to the inertia, to the skin of another, and you're like a cripple when something happens – for instance, when your person has a cosmetic operation – and suddenly you're forced out of your inertia. It's more cruel to get out of inertia than inertia itself. (laughs ironically) And so I'm left with my brain and in my skin.

At the moment, there's nothing I can do. Or anything useful. I can't be an actress, because I only know one role. So that's why, now, I've written my memoirs. After all, it's fashionable.

Doubles are useless in society. Some more creative thinkers would compare them to artists. But we don't make art, we don't produce anything lasting, and our creativity – if it exists at all – is not appreciated by anyone. It's insipid, it's insubstantial, it's lost before it materialises. Perhaps if there were critics of doubles, the world would look different. Or maybe it would just have an extra quirk, which never hurts – I suppose.

I'd rather retire, it's just too soon. Our pensions are not small. For all the indifference and ignorance we get, the state has been compassionate towards us. Maybe it sees us as rarities (smiles) or invalids.

‘Now I think of my years as a double, of the time that has passed in a strange transparency, me belonging to someone else and feeling that nothing belongs to me. Of this lack of belonging and possession that was all I had. I think of the combination of unconsciousness and lucidity that seems to be exploding only now.

Her time and my time run differently. They were. Neither time could be turned back, but she had more power over hers. Maybe that's what's bothering me, actually.’

 

Lays the book on the chair and says nothing for a minute or two. Then looks at the audience.

        

        I don't want to talk only about my double side. I want to talk about my human side, too. My human side is only now starting to speak aloud. It's strange to get courage only at this age. It's weird not knowing what you want to do and not getting on in reality. It's like I'm twenty, looking forty. And with the weariness of both ages together. (laughs sadly) I feel much safer in my sleep.

[...]

Translated by Monica Visovan