Take Care
There are times, many of them, in my life, when I’ve been occupying myself with the tense indulgence of thinking in abstracted big pictures — feeling the white noise crowding in, the hum of the ambient suffering and isolation and devaluation and trickle-up hoarding that delineate so much of American life two decades into a century that will eradicate every dream that the last one manufactured — and I’ll think, as usual, we could so easily be tender the way we want to, capacious the way we want to, if only we implemented the Piketty tax, if only we fucking banned assault weapons, if only we had federal rent control, if only we had visions of safety outside criminalization, if only we rejected this economy of surveillance and extraction, if only we had public ideas of care and ambition, if only we could plant so many more trees. I’ll be thinking about all of this, my body full of plenitude and yearning two hundred feet above the Earth’s surface and then short-tempered once I’m back in my living room in the late afternoon on a Tuesday, irritably shaking my toddler off my leg while I open the fridge to make something that I won’t remember, turning my phone over on the counter, my blood pressure rising because someone I love is complaining about something so tiny in one of our lucky, vanishing lives.
There is nothing more urgent than figuring out how to care for each other, in the big ways, in the contours of the conditions that bind us. But then, at the same time, it’s the microscopic everyday — our daily trudging, the way we speak to and listen to and see each other — that anchors us, that’s the proving ground for all of it, the irreducible unit measurement of whatever flux, renewal, discovery, and meaning is out there to be found. Will Arbery’s Corsicana works at this smallest level, though it illuminates the other ones. It’s a play about four people who are each doing their best to care for another person. There’s the stifled filmmaker and community college teacher Christopher, watching over his sister Ginny, who has Down syndrome; Ginny, who’s older than Christopher, and reminds him that they both have to act like the adults they are; Justice, a freethinking librarian who keeps an eye on the siblings as they wade through long days in their late mom’s drab ranch house, and persuades Lot, an outsider artist, to finally let his work be seen by others; Lot, through Justice, is then roped by Christopher into trying to help Ginny record a song. At first, it seems like Christopher and Justice are the caretakers in this foursome. And they are, but caretaking and caregiving are not synonyms here, necessarily. The web of care and taking and giving in Corsicana is complicated, recursive, and not quite as it seems.
A thread of gifts runs through the play’s fabric, though all of these offerings are different: tentative, glimmering, delayed, unasked-for, mundane, lasting, oceanic. It made me think about what I’ve offered people, how I’ve given and how I’ve taken care. It made me think about the difference between hoping someone might want something and wishing that they could become the kind of person who would have thought to want it on their own. What happens in the intimate carries the echoes of the systemic: an interplay between love and coercion, the mess and necessity of interdependence, the way help can shift into manipulation toward a materially constructed norm. It happens multiple times in the play: one character helps a second one realize their desires, and then later realizes they had projected those desires rather than perceived them. But maybe they were right to do this, and certainly they were human; maybe the dialectic that puts our unspoken instincts up against the perceptions of those who love us is the process by which we continue to become ourselves. It’s about an unforgiving land, Justice says, telling Christopher about a manuscript she’s written, which she’s about to shove into a tote bag. It’s about unrealized utopias. It’s about how failing is the point. It’s about surrender. It’s about small groups. It’s about community. Our gifts, I found myself thinking, are our interference; what people make of that interference, then, becomes the gift. I found myself trying to understand what in my life I had offered and accepted most freely, my hands completely open. How hard it can be to give and take care like that, even if the world could shrink down to a small town, to you and three other people. Maybe that would be the hardest thing of all.
I loved the symmetries of this play, the doubled narratives. Lot and Christopher, both accused of things they didn’t do, of the opposite of loving, both of them branded with the iron of unearned shame. Lot and Justice, both of them conduits, seers, visionaries. Christopher and Justice, both of them hoping to shape a person they love into someone who can live in the world more easily, or more acceptably. Christopher and Lot, both driven to create their art. Lot and Ginny, both doubted as people with autonomy and fullness. Ginny and Justice, both of whom want love. Actually, all the characters want that, in the way they want it. All of us do. It’s just that we don’t always know what register to work in. In Corsicana you can see the shafts of light that break through the dust around us, that can, if we let them, move our little particles from plane to plane. The play is about the everyday and about everything, its lines shifting suddenly into hyperdrive, the way Will does so well, between the absolutely ordinary moment and the dizzying kaleidoscope of the rest: the world is a boop on the nose, the router not working, a dream where the bodies of the dead are standing in circles, an iPad from your dead mother, a two-liter Sprite returned to HEB, the impossible and beautiful requirement to love someone every minute and the constant failure to actually do it and the opening of your life up to some shattering revelation and the offering of every work of your hands up to God or whoever will have it.
Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the essay collection Trick Mirror.
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