A Maker of Properties
By Jocelyn Heath
The mask begins as a wet clotted strip thick across your forehead. As it dries, it pulls on tiny pale hairs and your eyes water. The white glue becomes wetter. The mask covers all but your eyes and the base of your nose. The mask’s mouth is narrow; you can draw a breath, but not speak. There is no need to speak.
*
You starred in peer-run shows, but on the mainstage, you get no parts, no lines, never in more than the ensemble. Like a Greek chorus, your group moved and sang in unison. Only your costumes differed from one another. In Carnival, you ran around in orange polka-dotted clown pants and a pink wig, your face painted white with red lips and starred eyes. You wore a pink brocade gown with bell sleeves for Once Upon a Mattress, which made you feel lovely as you sang the three numbers you were in. But in the wings, you uncover the green face of a young hopeful.
*
You meet a boy at rehearsal. He is sandy blond and big-toothed and strong. He looks at you in the way you’ve waited for. You trade screen names.
*
Sandy in Grease, Maria in West Side Story, every Jane Austen heroine, Viola in Twelfth Night — to be an ingénue, the woman in the spotlight, the star, the beloved who finds romance and a joyful ending, to have any suffering ended by the final curtain, is to be fulfilled.
*
For now, the mask is new and silvered to a steel sheen: a mask for a futuristic Thebes, a theotechnocracy playing out in an agora piled with ruined TVs. You play one of the bound-up women, buckled into denim, soon to be driven mad by the vengeful Dionysus: a classic tragedy. It will be your last role.
*
In our Thebes, martial law prevailed. Our costumes, denim and buckled, covered neck to ankle. Nets gathered our hair and the steel painted masks enclosed our faces. In the opening, we marched in slow step, red banner held high. Every arm lifted to full reach. Every silvered face held level. The low moan of the music gave us the beat of our step. We, the controlled feminine, caught and held the audience’s first gaze.
*
Little yellow faces in a glowing IM box: click what you feel is the best match. Eyes and smile dark like holes in those paper-plate cutouts you tied on as a child — to turn into a lion or monster or glittered fairy queen — made instead of pixels. You debate the basic smile for a minute, but think he’ll prefer the made-up red lips and mascara. It looks coy, and is coded “kissing.” It’s not exactly what you feel, but you have just 16 choices, and you fear choosing the wrong one.
*
The mask is you and not you at once. Exhale before putting on or removing the mask: it has a life that you join when you wear it. Care for the mask. In between performances, place it back in the black storage box. Don’t toss it in the dressing room or hang it from the costume rack; if ill-treated, it won’t serve you in performance. Get to know your mask — spend the first rehearsal walking and breathing, looking and walking, until you move as a single being.
*
Long ago, on the firelit stages of ancient Greece, the mask did make the character. Multiple characters per player, and because only men performed, they moved from masculine to feminine with just the swap of a face covering. No masks survive, so we rely on images of the performers handling them offstage, existing in a space between self and role. We can only guess at the harsh materials that scraped their ancient skins pink — linen, leather, plaster, wood. Eyeholes goggling wide enough to see from the amphitheater heights. Voice and body, amplified.
*
You meet him in the hallway for the date. He lifts you up and spins you both around. In the window, you see flashes of your face: shock, which you think he sees, and fear, which you hope he doesn’t. When he sets you down again, you find a smile to give.
*
In “The Winged Man,” a one-act play, your teenage character stumbled upon a mythical winged man dying in a cavern in the woods. Moved by his beauty, unwilling to sacrifice his magical lineage, she kisses him (onstage) and sleeps with him (offstage), impregnating herself with his ethereal progeny. Your character got an anointing of the sort you’d dreamed of years before: special, and known for it. You embraced the romance of the role, even with the solid slap you got from the actress playing your mom.
The end of the play had you lifting your winged baby skyward and letting him fly away to his people. On the night you performed, something went awry and the baby whizzed off up its towline only to thud against the theater wall. You barely stayed in character as the enchantment broke.
*
Ten years you’ve stood under a proscenium arch wearing the “mask” of character. This time, you wear one of hard plaster, eyes and mouth fixed in the way of the comedy-tragedy pair you’ve got on at least one t-shirt and two pairs of earrings. What was commonplace in ancient times is a novelty now. The face, as you learned from day one, is the actor’s tool — why cover it? Voice and body alone won’t do. You’ve learned big expression, visible even to the furthest audience member. You’ve learned control — to not break character. You’ve learned you’re no longer sure where the performance ends and the person begins. This plaster mask complicates things further.
*
Your first fear: you’ll never be an ingénue.
Your second fear: you are in love not with the idea but the women, ingénues. Their pinked mouths, sweeping curls, cocked hips and bowed waists. It feels truer than anything. But you are sure you cannot both be and want them.
Deny this fear. Play the part until you become it.
*
The edges get rough early in the life of the mask. That you pick at it like you do at scabs and cuticles will only make the gauze bits emerge sooner from the mask’s white interior. No matter how smoothed the inside gets, the itch of plaster never fully disappears.
*
The ancient players did not make their own masks. That work fell to the skeupoios, or the “maker of properties”. He provided all the small touches that turned a stage into a world as realized as it could be without the benefit of modern scenery flats. A basket, an urn, a chariot on which to wheel in the pile of corpses that littered the final act of the typical Greek tragedy — any of these might be the responsibility of the skeupoios to find or build. But this role is best known for mask-making.
Did he mold the mask on the actor’s face, shaving leather scraps off and off until the piece fit snug? Did the masks take shape over time, built of pieces gathered from the agora? We don’t know how he chose the features for each character or how he made the chorus’ masks perfectly uniform without machinery to guide him. We can only know the skeupoios by the properties he made.
*
Maybe this began when you played a romantic lead: Hero, in “Much Ado About Nothing”. You wore a borrowed pink lace dress to show the character nearly pure but tainted by accusation. The company was not allowed to use the theater, so the staircase in the atrium became the stage. You curled your hair and grew your smile to reach the back of the house. Your Claudio tucked back your veil and put his arms around your waist. Being adored in front of so many felt right.
*
The mask is yours alone but it can’t be made alone. Someone else must lay the strips and mind their thickness, run a fingertip across your cheek to smooth a wrinkle, make sure to cover all. Though you check the progress in a mirror, this work is not your art. You are three: maker, mask, masked. But you don’t quite trust your skeuopoios — you and he fell together as a matter of course. You’re both trying your best. The mask will never feel quite right.
*
Dionysus, patron god of the theater, also bestows his favor on fertility, wine, revelry, “ritual madness,” and ecstasy. Groups of wild female followers, the maenads, wander with him, drinking in his wine and reckless abandon, filling themselves on flesh at every opportunity. They live on chance and frenzy, never in control of their destinations. Maenads killed Orpheus, who, after the loss of Eurydice, shunned women in favor of male lovers and his poetry. To differ, to be ascetic, to live anything but the fullest life seemed fatal.
*
He says you are different online than when you meet. More fun. Happier. He’s right. You can choose whatever look you think he’ll want. Online, you can smile often and through anything. But you are tiring of the performance, and of him. You look again through the set of yellow faces, and nothing quite fits. You’ve begun to understand why this cannot work, but you keep looking through the faces, certain you’ll find the one that will help you make it work. This performance must also just be. This, too, will be your last role.
*
At the end of our staging of The Bacchae, the women of Thebes, driven mad by Dionysus as punishment for their leader’s heresy, tear back onto the stage like wolves wild from a kill. Unmasked, half-costumed, splattered to grotesque with blood and groveling at the god’s feet, hardly
women at all. Our skin stuck to itself and crusted over from the mix of ketchup, jam, and corn syrup we smeared all over ourselves offstage. We snarled our hair and stuck it full of pins and fake ivy as though we’d chased our prey through deep woods. My face once more freed to the burning lights, I gaped at the heat of exposure.
*
The hardware will fall off the mask first. Little gold jangles hot-glued to the forehead and chin break off — first a ring, then two, and then the tiny beveled plate holding them on. The elastic strap will stretch and fray until you cut it free.
You’ll keep the mask on your bookshelf for a while, packing it into a box to not be forgotten for each successive move. Eventually, you’ll stop taking it out of the box. Someday, you’ll leave it behind.
Jocelyn Heath (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in English at Norfolk State University. Her poem “Orbital” won the 2014 Alison Joseph Poetry Award from Crab Orchard Review. Her creative writing has also appeared in The Atlantic, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, Flyway, Fourth River, and elsewhere. Her book reviews have appeared at Lambda Literary, Grist, Tinderbox, Southeast Review, and The Lit Pub. She is an Assistant Editor for Smartish Pace.