All of this is true as much as anything can be true.

It’s the closest thing to autobiography as I will ever get. 

The ghosts are real. The rest. Well.

 

Imagine you are in a theatre.

It’s opening night of a brand-new play written by me.

There’s about 130 seats in the place, red cushions, except for one in the far house-right corner that is purple. Every audience has at least one ghost. And that seat is reserved for them.

 

Listen.

I don’t enjoy telling people real things about me.

I tell them just enough to think that they are very special.

To hear my secrets.

Secret is: I don’t have secrets. Everyone just assumes I do.

Hire a private eye and prove me wrong.

 

Imagine you are waiting for the show to begin.

There is no big red curtain that will lift up in a dramatic flourish. You can see the set already, a fully rendered fictional version of my apartment where I wrote the play you’re about to see. Even the books on the shelf are real and the notations I put in their margins. The yogurt stain on the green couch. The used bowls with dried spaghetti in the sink. The sink that actually works!

You and I are both a little bit disappointed that this seems to be a realistic play. American theatre is obsessed with realism. Americans love to see a fridge light up on stage when its door is opened. An oven actually bake a pie. A sink that works.

I’ve never understood it.

But I’m a sellout.

Imagine you are holding the show program and trying to appear very interested in the director’s note as you spot your ex enter the theatre and sit two rows ahead of you.

You try to focus and read the character list. But it’s the kind of reading, the kind of focus that flows in and out of your brain like battery acid, bursting attention fragments into every part of your body so you are suddenly very aware and very self-conscious of the little hairs on the tops of your toes or the way the skin on your arm flattens and expands while pressed against your ribcage while trying to keep yourself so small, always small.

 

You tuck your feet under the seat. Or, sorry. I’m projecting onto you, aren’t I? I always did that, you told me as much. Let’s try that again.

If I were you, I’d be tucking my feet under my seat and pulling my arms in so as not to take up space because that is who I am.

That’s what I do. But I wish better for you.

In the program you are finally able to focus on the cast list:

 

Hattie played by Hennie Carlo
and introducing
The ghost of the movie star Luke Ford
as Lou

 

Let’s go back.

This is how it actually begins: The famous actor Luke Ford dies three days before he is set to start rehearsals for the play you’re here to see.

This is how it ends: Tap tap-tap tappity tap.

 

The famous Hollywood actor Luke Ford had never done a play before. In fact, he spoke very often and very clearly on his debilitating stage fright. But he had garnered a reputation, you see, for extreme choices, for theatrically leaning melodrama in his acting style, for not taking things seriously.

Theatre is where film actors go when they want to be taken seriously.

So Luke was cast in a play without having to audition. A sleepy little new play at this tiny theatre in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, a little relationship drama that wouldn’t demand much of him or the audience or designers or anyone, really.

It was my play.

I have no interest in sleepy plays.

(I had originally wanted
to write an impossible play,
one with puppets and ghosts
and big monsters that bring 
our deepest fears into a stark reality.
A cast of 20.
Dances.
A live fucking band.)

Or, at least, two of those things.

But after many years of rejection, I wrote this sleepy play in a drunken and spiteful stupor over one night. I don’t even remember emailing it to theatres around town.

But here we are, six months later. A world premiere on the horizon, and a dead leading man.

The famous actor Luke Ford, who had just picked up an iced coffee from Priscilla’s Coffee in Burbank, was walking across the street to meet with the theatre producer for a private tour of the building, if only partially so that he could scope out cubby holes in which to hide when his stage fright became overwhelming.

The real story is that, as he was walking across the street, the theatre’s new marquee, which had been recently rebranded and redesigned, fell and crushed his body into the sidewalk, where a dark brown stain still exists in the cement, where his frontal lobe was squashed through his skull.

But that is too ridiculous to put in a story. The critique would be that it is too “on the nose.” Too convenient. Even though this death is particularly inconvenient for everyone involved.

 

So fine. I won’t tell you the real story. Forget I said anything.

You can choose:
a) he was hit by a car
b) he had a heart attack
c) he overdosed

It doesn’t really matter anyway.

 

So Luke dies and we have a meeting. I assume we will be canceling this stupid production of this stupid play I don’t remember writing, and I show up just a little bit tipsy, ready for the sad sads and the apologies and that strange relief in my belly that people won’t be coming to this play and feeling like they know me, like this is it, this is all of me.

The meeting instead goes like this:

(Curtain up on a rehearsal room, wood floors with the shape and size of the stage taped out in green gaff tape, one wall covered in mirrors, a small standing piano in the far right corner, three folding tables with stacks of scripts and pencils, bottles of water, highlighters, printed postcards for the show that have already been updated with a banner:
INTRODUCING THE GHOST OF LUKE FORD!)

“We’re very excited to have Luke Ford’s ghost in this production. Accessibility for ghosts will be a challenge! But we are up for it!” says the producer.

“I think this is really going to elevate the play’s themes,” says the director.

“Will we be seeing the ghost?” asks the costume designer. “I’ll have to take some new measurements.”

A cold wind suddenly blows through the room. I think, for a moment, that I can see something move in the corner of my eye.

“I have some thoughts for the bookshelves,” says the scenic designer. “If there is something high up that Luke can reach as a ghost but Hennie can’t as a live person, that could be really something.”

“What the fuck are we talking about?” I say.

“Will I be able to hear Luke’s ghost?” says Hennie. “How will we communicate?”

“You can just say Luke, not ‘Luke’s ghost’,” says the producer. “He is still Luke.”

“He’s also here. You can speak to him,” says the director.

“He’s HERE?” I ask.

“Luke, I’d really love to work with you privately,” says Hennie. “Run lines. Talk about our characters. We’re supposed to be lovers so—being really connected, that’s important to me, you know?”

“Let’s be clear,” I say. “They are not lovers. They fuck each other a couple times and then it falls apart because they are idiots.”

“They make love,” says Hennie. “They are lovers.”

“Lovers is an ugly word.”

“What an awful thing to say,” says Hennie.

(She’s tearing up. She’s actually starting to cry. Crying on cue is listed under special skills on her resume and normally, maybe, I’d admire this willingness to look like a moron, but not when she’s playing me, or some avatar, some side-stepped copy of a clone, some knock-off, bargain-price version of me. The me I wrote into the play, which apparently doesn’t even matter now because)

“The play really belongs to this team now,” says the director. “I encourage you to let Hennie use whatever word that most connects her to her character.”

I scrunch in my chair and let the world spin.

“Luke, do you have any words for the room?” says the director.

There’s a stillness. Then a tap, tap, tap on the table.

The director nods, knowingly. A little “hmmm uhhmmm” from the producer.

Another: tap tap-tap tappity tap.

Hennie’s crying grows in intensity. “What a beautiful thing,” she says. “I’m really looking forward to our collaboration.”

“I want it on the record,” I say, “that I never really wanted Luke in this role in the first place and the fact that we are moving forward with him as a ghost when no one can see him or hear MY lines is just insane. It’s nonsense. I feel like I’m screaming into the void here.”

“Luke has a very complex approach to performance,” says the director. “He utilizes Viewpoints, Chekhov’s Circles of Attention, Biomechanics but most importantly—”

There’s a tapping on the table.

“Yes yes, I’m getting to that,” says the director.

“You guys are really fucking with me,” I say. “You don’t know what he’s saying.”

“You need to settle down,” says the producer, to me. “You’re so withholding, as a person. I wish you’d find more emotional truth, like with your characters.”

“What I’m saying,” says the director, “is Luke uses a sense of play to really imagine himself AS his characters. That’s the difference. It is an expression of just being, rather than having to layer on all this extra, distracting stuff on top of the trueness of the characters.”

I stopped taking him seriously the moment he said Viewpoints but the rest of the room is nodding.

“Maybe you could learn a lot from Luke,” says the costume designer, who giggles as if someone just tickled her.

“This is such bullshit,” I say, but not loud enough for anyone to hear. At least no one that is still alive.

I feel something cold brush the back of my neck and my whole body shivers.

If this were a play, if you were watching this rather than reading or listening or whatever, I would turn to you, step into a spotlight

(and the rest of the room would dim behind me as I speak to you. Because this would be a soliloquy, the only way for interiority in a character in a play, though really my interiority is pretty fucked up right now, let me tell you)

 

ME

And so I do tell you. I don’t really remember writing this play.
But I know where it came from.
The lovers in the play, they were not lovers. 
They were more than that.
I think so, at least.
Not husband or wife, and boyfriend or girlfriend is so juvenile.
Partners sounds like a law firm.
Anyway.
They existed together. And then they didn’t.
And it was largely my fault.
Me, being one-half of the lovers.
Remember this is all true and not true.
And this is a secret I tell everyone.
That exposure freaks me the fuck out.
Love expects some kind of that.
Disrobing.
It is sometimes the same thing, or one begets the other.
I never use the word beget, let me just say that right now.
It’s a symptom of this fucking style of direct address,
where I want my language to level up.
Fuck this soliloquy.
What I am saying is I hate that this is the play
the world chooses is good enough.
Is the one that says something about who I am.
When all it is is the very very worst parts of me.
How I fall in love with the characters in my plays
more than anyone outside of them.
And how much I really really liked the feeling of
Luke’s cold dead fingers
on my neck.
Because really, he isn’t there.
But also there.
And how satisfying to be touched
by something you can’t even see.
At least not yet.
And then there’s a shift

(as the lights come back up on the room)

And the director announces we’re going to get started now, since Luke’s presence seems particularly strong and since this ghost stuff is new territory, well, we better just see how far we can get, shouldn’t we?

 

Montages don’t really exist in theatre, or when they do, they are especially stupid, but luckily this isn’t a play so I can just tell you that over the next several rehearsals we use a series of communication tools to rehearse with Luke.

A Ouija board where Luke can spell out his lines.

A ghost box that picks up his voice in varying degrees on radio frequencies. 

A static meter that screams in a high-pitched series of beeps every time Luke manipulates the air around it.

 

I do rewrites. I try to cut back on Luke’s lines, give them to Hennie.

Hennie and Luke often disappear to the main stage to run lines.

I stumble on them once because the director had asked me to bring my new pages to them, and when I stumble into the wings I see Hennie and Luke (or Hennie, let’s just say I see Hennie and get a feeling that Luke is there too) in a compromising position.

Hennie, lying on her back, chin up to the stage lights overhead, eyes closed, a breeze of some kind rustling her hair, and there I can just make out the outline of a hand, definitely, I’d assume Luke’s hand, gliding over her body, a button or two on her shirt or pants or whatever popping open in a cartoonish way, as all sex is ridiculous no matter how you swing it, and she’s moaning all happily and it’s just, it’s just such an actor thing to do, right?

I don’t interrupt them because I’m not heartless, just cold, I’m just the tiniest bit chilly as a person, so I tell the director I couldn’t find them.

A sense of play. Right. Whatever.

 

On the seventh day of rehearsal, we use sensory deprivation to commune with Luke for the breakup scene in the play.

“This will help Luke figure out how to appear to us, physically,” says the director.

Blindfolds, headphones, these real plush chairs that make us feel like we’re floating. We stare into the black void for quite a while. I assume someone is trying to speak to him, to encourage him to show up, to not have stage fright here. This is a safe space, and all that shit.

He’s gradual about it, but eventually I see him, out of focus at first, but even then I can tell he is shirtless. I can see the tattoo of a giant tree on his back, bare branches reaching up and around his collar bone, poking at the invisible line between chest and neck, curling down like the tree is cradling his rib cage.

Imagine being a ghost and you can manifest as literally anything and you show up as yourself, without a shirt.

Luke is looking at me, right in my eyes, which in normal times wouldn’t even rattle me. I make it a habit, if I run into celebrities around town, to lock their gaze and stare them down until they stop smiling, until they scurry away. I once made Ashton Kutcher tear up a bit near the bathrooms at Paty’s Diner.

 

Listen.

Luke is probably not looking at me because he’s looking at everyone—that’s the trick of theatre. Imagine you’re on stage, and the lights are in your face, you can’t see shit, but you have to pretend like you’re looking straight into the eyes of the audience, have to pretend that you love them, that you’re speaking straight to them and them only.

That’s how love works, isn’t it. You just never know if the audience is watching until it is too late.

I didn’t want Luke in this play but he’s reciting my lines to me and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable. Misty. I start to cry, alright?

No one else knows this because of the sensory deprivation. I’m not Hennie. This isn’t my style.

I’m not sure if Luke knows.

And if this were a play, I might step into the spotlight

(and I’m already in a dark void 
so not much needs to change really)

 

ME

And I look at you.
And maybe you think I’m looking, like, right at you.
And maybe you think I’m a little bit in love with you.
But I’m not.
I don’t know what that even means.
But when Luke is looking directly at me, speaking my words
being all broken in his way
in his character’s way
not his way, I don’t care about his way.
I never wanted him in this play in the first place.
But.
Staring into the eyes of your character who is telling you
all the ways he is broken
and that you made him this way
because maybe you’re broken in that way too
and maybe you wrote him broken because there’s no other way
for this kind of seeing
for this way of falling in love with yourself
which is a way of falling
in Love
that nobody talks about
because it is so close to hating yourself.
And hating yourself takes up so much more,
what is it?
Space.

(And then there has to be a silence here
as you stare.
and then another.
I need a silence.
Stop looking at me.)

The day after the sensory deprivation session, Hennie gets in her car and speeds around Malibu Canyon Road, trying to fly off the side of the mountain.

She only manages to lose control enough to run into the walls of the tunnel and block up the whole road for a good four hours while crews clean up the mess.

“I wanted to become a ghost too,” Hennie says later at rehearsal, her head and right arm bandaged. “To be closer to Luke. To match him in his process.”

 

It’s a few days before opening night.

Hell week.

That’s what we call it. Twelve hour+ days for tech and running the show.

I’m back at my apartment, exhausted. The show is not good. I know this. Everyone knows this.

My apartment looks the same as it did when I wrote the play.

It looks just like the set. I feel as if I have never left the theatre.

The books. The yogurt stain. The bowls of dried spaghetti in the sink.

This is a moment set up for self-reflection. Something something, autobiography. Something something, no imagination.

But fuck that.

So I get in the car and drive in a direction.

 

It’s maybe twenty minutes into the drive when I feel the cold ghost fingers on the back of my neck. I can feel Luke’s cold ghost breath on my cheek. The cold fucking ghost heart that is just my heart too.

Luke’s hands are on mine and he steers me to his house in the Hollywood Hills. More modest than I’d imagined. Old, Victorian, like you might see any haunted house in any movie.

He points me to where he’d hidden a key for himself, for the particularly drunken nights where he was dumped off, pockets as empty as his head. Which had happened more than he cared to admit. A key tucked inside a hole in the tree in his yard, a tree with sprawling bare branches that lean over me as if to smell my breath, for alcohol maybe, or something else, something else rotting, deeper down, wherever the roots of a person are.

 

Listen.

I knew all this. He was telling me all this somehow.

It’s embarrassing. He was saying. Come upstairs.

I don’t turn on any lights. I walk carefully, hand on the banister, a thin layer of dust puffing up into the air in front of me, and I think I almost see him. The dust clinging to an outline of him.

I know the play isn’t good. He is saying. It’s my fault. I’m not a theatre actor. And I’m a ghost.

“No, it’s my fault,” I say. “I left stuff out. I just don’t know what.”

I get to his bedroom. It’s sad, the bedroom of a dead person. Even a dead person I never really liked.

I woke up here one night. He’s saying. And there was this guy standing at the foot of my bed. Naked. Eating a fudgesicle. I don’t like to talk about it.

“Then why are you,” I say.

Because I can’t seem to manifest myself. He is saying. And I think it has to do with that. Like. I think he thought he was invisible. And I think I have to do the same. But like, in reverse.

 

I don’t know why I do this.

Because I don’t do stuff like this.

But I take off all my clothes.

And I stand at the edge of the bed. And I stare at the empty spot where he should be.

And I try to believe I am invisible.

 

And it is like I’m standing on a stage and being stared at by an audience I can’t see through all the stage lights.

And then the lights start to dim and the audience becomes clear.

And I’m more naked than I’ve ever been.

And he is there. A full ghost manifestation. The transparent sketch of what was Luke Ford. But he looks like Lou, the character in my play. In our play.

“Is it working?” he says.

I nod. And I lay down on top of the comforter.

And I fight the urge to cover myself up.

 

I’m going to stop there.

You pervert.

 

Imagine you are in a theatre.

It’s opening night of a brand-new play written by me.

You are still trying to pretend that you didn’t see your ex sitting two rows ahead of you.

The lights go down and the play begins. You hold your breath—and so do I—but I do because I don’t know if he can do it again. Luke Ford has stage fright. And this one performance might be all he’s got before he disappears.

To return to his natural state of translucence, of evaporation, of the traceless.

It takes a terrible amount of energy to resist it.

 

But there is Hennie as Hattie, her bandages mostly off, a few bruises hiding beneath layers of makeup.

And there is Luke as Lou, fully present, just barely transparent. You can see the bookshelves through his skin and there’s something poetic about that. There’s a meaning there that wasn’t intentional.

You certainly hadn’t anticipated any kind of meaning.

Sorry. I’m projecting again.

I hadn’t anticipated anything.

I enjoy the show because I know that this might be his last performance and I want to remember it. I glance up to the house right corner of the theatre where that purple chair is, the one reserved for general admission ghosts, and I wish I’d sat there, holding the hand of whatever ghost managed to show up on time

(because what is time to dead things anyway? People and creatures and lovers, even, if you want to use that word. And the lights start to go down on the stage and just focus on me and that empty chair)

 

ME

As I stand up, ready to say something.
To someone. To everyone.
To you.
The Thing I had left out of the play.
The Thing I didn’t, I couldn’t have the lovers say.
I really hate that word.
Because it’s doomed.
Lovers are star-crossed, are found out,
are dead by the end of the story.
The Thing I couldn’t have them say on stage
would have made you laugh.
The things people say in person,
curled together on a yogurt-stained couch,
have been overused on stage.
On stage they have no meaning anymore.
And I’m not good enough to know how to rewrite your words
and make them better.
To have you say things like—

“How you holding up?”

(A transition of sorts. A melting away of a dream as I realize I’m standing in the middle of the lobby at intermission, right in the center like I’m about to make an announcement, but no one is looking at me, only you.)

I’d seen you looking at the program earlier, before the show, focusing so hard.

To not look at me.

But you came here, didn’t you, Lou?

“Surviving,” I say. Just barely.

I ask you what you think of the show.

You say, “Well Hattie, I never expected you to write realism.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Lou,” I say.

I think I feel cold fingers gentle on the back of my neck. The way Luke had held them there that night, swirling along my skin in circles. The way you used to.

“Hattie,” you say.

“I hope you don’t mind,” I say.

“I almost forgot that I know the ending,” you say.

“Lou,” I say.

I hear rapping on the wall near us and I turn to look, but it’s just some guy waiting in line to pee, leaning on the wall, impatient fingers counting out the seconds toward relief.

Listen.

Tap tap-tap tappity tap.

© 2023 Chelsea Sutton