From Leslie Ann Sheppard, Eclipsed Cast Member (Bessie)
Oh, Bessie!
Several months ago, I was explaining a dream I had had to a friend: in the dream my teeth were falling out. I was covering my mouth with my hands trying to spit out blood and swallow saliva without expelling or choking on the cracking enamel. But the harder I tried, the faster my pearly whites disintegrated. It was awful! After I recounted the tale to my friend, she told me that she had heard that having your teeth fall out in a dream meant that you’re experiencing some kind of loss of control in your life. Granted, neither of us is an expert at interpreting dreams, but I remember thinking, “Of all the ways my subconscious could have manifested my feelings of floundering, it picked teeth??” Why not the classic I’m-late-for-the-most-important-meeting-of-my-life dream? Or the I’m-standing-in-front-of-a-giant-audience-in-my-really-embarrassing-underwear dream? Why teeth?? Like I said, neither of us had the answer to that. Although bearing that in mind, I wasn’t surprised when I thought about the rapidly-becoming-toothless dream during rehearsals for Eclipsed.
How do you learn to play a character who is from a different culture and country, who is living through a vicious civil war as an army “wife,” and who is also pregnant? In addition, I have never experienced any of these things first-hand. There have been so many wonderful and terrifying resources made available to the Northlight team that I have been able to understand, in an intellectual sense, what the world of the play is and the given circumstances of the characters. That is all well and good and an essential place to start any rehearsal process, but as I’m continuing to get further glimpses of who Bessie “is,” I am comprehending more and more, in a guttural sense, that each of these five Liberian women lived and breathed and loved and fought through the horrific conflicts in more ways that I can imagine. And in that, what has been the most gripping to me is realizing that in a lot of ways, Bessie and I are very similar in how we try to control the little things in our lives when the giant events are out of our hands.
I was thinking about Bessie railing about her unwanted pregnancy throughout most of the play, “No, I no alright, I no want it. I gonna hate it…It making me fat…I no feel good…I hate dis…I can’t do nothing.” When Bessie is speaking to Helena a couple of lines stood out to me, “I no wanna be no moda. You [Helena] say you go’ take care of it [the baby]. You better. And you know you go’ take care of it if it got a face like dat ugly fada of it.” Then suddenly I thought, “If this baby, that she already doesn’t want, looks like the father, it will always remind her of the man who continues to rape her.” What if some of her fussing about wigs and clothes and gifts and getting Helena’s attention is to outweigh her fear of birthing a constant reminder of the shadow of war and violence she must live under? Oh, and there’s also a war going on…
I remember how frantic I was in my dream to salvage what was left of my jaw and how paranoid I was to make sure no one could see inexplicably disgusting decay. The difference is that I had the power to wake myself up and go back to my, comparatively, comfortable and safe life. Bessie does not have the “wake-up” option, but her desire, her need, the need of each woman in this play, to salvage what joy she can is very real. I understand a little bit more of that now because of cracking enamel.
