THIS AMERICAN WIFE

WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY MICHAEL BRESLIN AND PATRICK FOLEY

DRAMATURGY BY CAT RODRÍGUEZ AND ARIEL SIBERT

ABOUT

On screens across the world, women call themselves “Real Housewives” while they scream, sob, and scam their way to the top. Meanwhile, spiraling in shame in their bedrooms, Michael and Patrick clandestinely binge on the gaudy lives and savvy strategies of these expert performance artists. A raucous multimedia theatre work, This American Wife tracks Michael and Patrick’s obsessions with intimacy, queerness, and the deep desire to see and be seen.

PRODUCTIONS

New York Theater Workshop’s Next Door Series (July 26-August 11, 2018)






Yale Cabaret (October 2017)

NYTW Next Door TEAM

Producers: JEN HOGUET & CAITLIN CROMBLEHOLME
Dramaturgs: CATHERINE MARÍA RODRÍGUEZ & ARIEL SIBERT
Set Designer: STEPHANIE OSIN COHEN
Costume Designer: COLE MCCARTY
Lighting Designer: KRISTA SMITH
Sound Designer: MICHAEL COSTAGLIOLA
Projection Designer: WLADIMIRO A. WOYNO R.
Technical Director: KEVIN BELCHER
Production Stage Manager: ABBIE BETTS*
Assistant Producer: NICOLE KRAMER

Dramaturgs’ Notes

”Humiliation has its rewards.” - Wayne Koestenbaum

The body of a Real Housewife is an apparatus, an assembly of parts—hair, lips, dress, falsies, mic pack, cell phone, winestem, camera, restaurant, brand, identity. This body is maintained and degraded, intoxicated and cleansed, in seasons and cycles, systems of supply and supplication. 

What we call her living is an act at once of total submission and spectacular self-control. Hers is a body conditioned by routines of flattery and abuse, by backhanded compliments like “I hope I look that good at her age; I wonder how she does it.” That is to say, hers is a body. 

Like, how do you do it? All our flesh is humiliated flesh, whether stretched and starched or flabby and excessive. All acts of self-creation also acts of denigration, darkening something else so the teeth appear whiter. 

A Real Housewife is a person known for her knownness, and so the notion of her having a “true” self, a reality, is as unknowable to me as the place between my shoulder blades. 

A photographer once wrote something like, “Reality is not life itself.” A physicist, Heisenberg, wrote something similar. Perhaps the phenomenon we endlessly discuss is not so much fakeness as an excess of reality. I wrote that. 

To see yourself on television is to have your existence confirmed. I’m trying not to say, “martyr,” trying not to say, “eternal life,” trying not to say, “apotheosis” or “humiliation,” because it’s in between. The promise exists for all of us, engridded as we are in every screen.
The self needs a medium. Who cares who you are when you’re alone anymore?

—Ariel Sibert, Dramaturg

It begins with a binge. Or a meme. Or a looping clip, clip, clip. Attractions accumulate. Addiction materializes. We’re possessed.

By Housewives.

Thanks to cocktails, cunning, and cameras, we watch the women of the OC, New York, ATL, Jersey, Beverly Hills, Potomac, and Dallas (RIP, DC and MIA) cartwheeling and dealing in business relations, sexual relations, and clapback compilations. And we begin to love even the most loathsome who capture our attention.

It’s fun to go behind the gates from within the cellblocks of our own homes, to watch the shenanigans inside their chateaus or outside this country and feel at once a part of and apart from it all: like one of the girls, belonging by judging—but, as an outside observer, objectively better than their clique.

It’s easy to join the dogpile in bitch seshes; it feels good. We rattle off tired old binaries. We denounce them as media whores (are we wannabe virgins?). We call them thirsty old maids (as we swipe and double tap for connection). We cast ourselves as judge and jury to indict reality TV careers with the most basic of blows: she’s fake (we’re just keeping it real tho).

It's ego-boosting to pick the Housewives apart, to clock them for phoniness, from their crocodile tears to their fake tans and forced smiles, to their hot thot bods (whether they had the luxury of time to work for them or the money to have work done). It’s self-satisfying to intellectualize them as and so reduce them to simple, working parts.

But as a fame-ish (in certain circles) Frenchie once said, “A negative judgment gives you more satisfaction than praise, provided it smacks of jealousy.” And also: “All societies end up wearing masks.”

Any fakery or staginess proves there’s brains and brazen behind the blonde. And artistry, too. 

Artists create because of consumption—not only out of a compulsion to share what obsesses them but from their own need, precisely because they're possessed. Not mere sisters of Narcissus, the Housewives impart their self-possessedness and lead our gaze into theirs. They sell us their wines and other wares, cameos, likenesses, and likeabilities. Pieces of work and works in progress, the Housewives are totally a total art work. Even as a clip. Or a meme. Or a binge.

—Catherine María Rodríguez, Dramaturg