Jessie Elders and her boyfriend Lex are having dinner in a restaurant at the beginning of what must become a good weekend together. Lex is telling Jessie about the essay he has written but Jessie is not interested in his intellectual conversation. She doesn’t feel well. She studies literature, but she thinks her teachers are fake poets. She goes to the toilet and she smokes a lot. She tells Lex she stopped acting in a amateurgroup, not because she was not good enough but it was all fake too. She doesn’t like the idea to go to a friend of Lex later in the evening. All his friends are the same boring people. When Lex says she looks pale, she opens her purse to look for her little mirror. She puts the content of her purse on the table, including a little book. Lex is interested and askes with it is about. Jessie doesn’t really want to tell hem but finally says hat it is and old Russian story about a pelgrim who wants to understand life better, goes to a monastery, gets a prayer to say and then sees God. Lex is not thrilled. He hates it when people try to see something that is not real, nor does he like all that crab about predicting the future. I was thinking about the theme of my blog, when I heard Lex say that. I would like to discover something new in our world, but maybe this is not something that can be discovered, but only lived. Anyway, at the end of this scene Jessie faints.
In the second part Walter Elders, the brother of Jessie, is telling the audience about their family while he is undressing. Their father is invisible and their mother is a nervous wrack after the death of their older brother Jonathan, who took care of the upbringing of Jessie and Walter, together with Billy, another brother who lives far away. He is in his underpants in the bathroom shaving himself when his mother Joyce comes in. He doesn’t like that but she stays there, smoking a cigarette and asking him what to do about Jessie because she even doesn’t ate her chickensoup. Walter says that Lex has not a good influence on her, but the mother doesn’t agree. She askes him what kind of book she is reading. It did belong to Jonathan, Walter says and it is about a Russian peasant trying to find happiness. Joyce askes Walter to talk to Jessie who stays in her bedroom all day.
A great scene between Walter and Jessie follows. Jessie is laying on the couch and her lips are saying a praying, while Walter is blaming her for doing nothing at all. He himself is going to Paris to play an important role in a movie. He understands her spiritual interest. When he was a child, he also felt that way, but he thinks she doesn’t help herself to look for some kind of spiritual extasy. He is really angry with her and at the end Jessie is in tears and he is sorry but they don’t come together.
In the last part Walter pretends he is Billy, while phoning to his sister and trying to help her. Jessie says to Billy that Walter is crazy, saying all kinds of contradictional things to her. Then Walter makes a mistake and Jessie knows she is not talking to Billy, but their conversation continues and finally Walter is telling her that she has to do what Billy once told them when they were children: to do their things for the fatt lady and that everybody has his or her one fat lady.
It was a great job that Sanne den Hartogh and Maria Kraakman of the Dutch theatergroup Oostpool did, just the two of them. They seemed to be very content with their roles. In the beginning of the second part Sanne says, while he is undressing, that he is not anymore the guy Lex but now the brother of Jessie. Maria Kraakman plays a wonderful unhappy and nervous Jessie, who is trying to find some believe to hold on to, but the next moment she plays a fantastic desparate mother Joyce. In this sad story there is also a lot of humor, for instance when Walter speaks to Jessie about her love in their youth for Jesus and the moment when Jessie did not like him anymore because he kicked all kinds of people out of the temple.
The theme about middleclass emptiness reminded me of Revolutionary road, but the text was inspired by the works of J. D. Salinger, who died in the beginning of 2010. Allthough the play was situated in the fifties, the conversation can take place now and is very modern. Casper Vandeputte won a drama price in the end of last year for another text. I guess it won’t be the last text of this talented man.
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