The God with Two Faces

These are Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird—except it’s fifteen ways of watching Catch as Catch Can, sort of through the rearview mirror, after you’ve seen it once, maybe twice. It’s a play with many pairs, a thicket of perfectly crosshatched lines, and when I left the theater, I couldn’t get the picture of Janus, the Roman god with two faces, out of my head. It’s not just because he embodies the very doubling that the actors reify onstage. It’s that the human enigmas within his divine domain also very much belong to the characters—things like the passage of time, whether across generations or through the harsh hours of the early morning. Basically, when I looked back at the play, it was Janus who handed me my glasses. 

I. ROBERTA LAVECCHIA and THERESA PHELAN

Two millennia ago, the ancient Romans honored two-faced Janus, who alone of all the gods could see both forward and behind. With one face he might cast his gaze to the past and with the other glimpse the future. His divine sight encompassed grand sweeps of time, gathering regrets and promises alike, worries and whims as to share over a cup of tea. 

II. ROBERTA LAVECCHIA and LON LAVECCHIA

Beginnings are kinds of omens. Therefore let the start be sweet, that its course might follow in kind. So Ovid tells us, as Janus himself tells the poet. This is why the Romans gave gifts of dates and figs and honey on the first day of the first month, January, good wishes for a good year. Consider giving ginseng to bless the year ahead.

III. ROBBIE and TIM and DANIELA

If the start of a new year is a kind of threshold, so, too, is every doorway, with its two sides marking entrance and exit, exit and entrance. There Janus sits, the keeper of the keys, looking both east and west, abiding the comings and goings, a watchman presiding over long-awaited returns, hesitations on the porch, should I stay or should I go. 

IV. ROBERTA LAVECCHIA and THERESA PHELAN and DANIELA

It’s no coincidence that Janus also presides over birth. Our parents are with us as origins and omens alike, the seeds from which we spring, giving us shape—and a shape to fill.

V. LON LAVECCHIA and ROBBIE and TIM

Yet children, too, give shape to their parents. Molding the mold and sometimes, in wearing it, wearing it out. 

VI. ROBERTA LAVECCHIA and LON LAVECCHIA and THERESA PHELAN and DANIELA and TIM and ROBBIE

As a god of passing and passage, Janus is a god of transition and transformation: the moment when one becomes something other, right before your eyes. With every switch and switchback, a journey to undertake, arrivals and departures. These can be long, or they can be quick. 

VII. DANIELA and TIM

There is no coming home without finding the door and stepping through it. The old welcome mat has held up all these years, but the lock sometimes sticks.

VIII. THERESA PHELAN and TIM

Don’t forget that Janus is both at the same time—home and away from home. Yet there is no collapse between the two sides. The difference, the divide, remains. The boundary holds. You cross—and yet, then again, maybe you don’t.

IX. THERESA PHELAN and LON LAVECCHIA

With two faces, two mouths. Two mouths, so two voices. But which voice from which mouth? Upon whose face do the lips move?

X. THERESA PHELAN and TIM, LON LAVECCHIA and DANIELA, ROBERTA LAVECCHIA and ROBBIE

With Janus, always double. But not always twice the same. You say one thing and do another. This is said and done without hypocrisy. Somehow, both the saying and the doing are true.

XI. DANIELA and TIM

Let there be two truths, yet let them be at odds.

XII. ROBBIE LAVECCHIA and ROBERTA LAVECCHIA

Now let what is true depart from what is real, so that what is true is true just for one. Take care, here. For the fates of friendships, of families, of countries, stand or fall by these singular claims.

XIII. THERESA PHELAN, ROBERTA LAVECCHIA, LON LAVECCHIA

Let there be truth and, for every truth, a lie. Where there is duality, there lurks duplicity. Is one with two faces also two-faced?

XIV. DANIELA and ROBERTA

Or, for every truth, perhaps not a lie but a trial. In Seneca the Younger’s telling of Hercules, Megara describes her husband’s labors like this: “Non est ad astra mollis e terris via.” There is no soft road from the earth to the stars.

XV. TIM and ROBBIE

The road is hard and long, its hardships long-forgotten. We usually find Janus in mirrored profile, the better to appreciate his doubling: each face a foil. But he wasn’t always like this. Long ago, our ancestors called him Chaos, our primordial antecedent, from whom we were all begun, and by whose hand we shall be ended. This is what he says to Ovid, as though to an old friend, remembering by retelling. 

Ashley Chang is a writer and activist. At The Humane League, she works to end the abuse of animals raised for food. Her writing has appeared in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, Afterall, Global Performance Studies, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate from Yale School of Drama, and she previously served as dramaturg at Playwrights Horizons.