How to be an Other Woman at the Gate

Based on a short story from Lorrie Moore’s collection, Self Help, Natalie Abrahami’s production is atmospheric, inventive and full of the language of film and fantasy.

The original story was written as a set of wry instructions and Abrahami retains that device. The ‘you’ of the narrative is Charlene, a twentysomething New Yorker working in an unsatisfying job as a secretary who falls for a man who does not reveal he is married until the requisite number of dates has taken place (“four movies, three concerts, and two-and-a-half museums”) and they are lying in bed together.


Though initially excited by the idea of having an affair, Charlene realises that in becoming a mistress she has, in a sense, become someone else, someone other than herself, a stock character: the Other Woman. The journey of her relationship is a deeply familiar one: erotic and illicit but ultimately unsatisfying. She’s left dancing on her own on New Year’s Eve and is constantly haunted by the presence of the unseen wife, the skier and list-maker of the bed-side photo. Charlene reaches the point where she is seeing her, the wife, the other other woman, everywhere she goes.

By having four actresses play the character of Charlene the production emphasises the distance inherent in Moore’s second person prose. Charlene is both an individual and an everywoman, an archetype. This is heightened by the fact that the performers are all dressed in the black-skirt-and-white-shirt combo of retail assistants, glossy and anonymous, the uniform of transaction; one by one they take Charlene’s expensive beige raincoat and slide their arms into the sleeves, getting a feel of this new skin, grown women playing dress-up. The man, the lover, remains equally familiar yet also absent, a construction, plucked from the pages of a magazine or from the cinema screen, with his scarf draped over his shoulders and his eyes permanently shaded by his trilby. Again the four actresses take turns to play him with Cath Whitefield making the most convincing transition, capturing the stance and manner of this cut-out lover.

Where the production really excels is in its evocation of a particular mid-80s atmosphere. Samal Blak’s simple but versatile set is all black and chrome with an array of high-heeled shoes dotted around the stage that alternatively stand in for lamps, telephones and ashtrays. The lighting is low and smoky and the chosen music (as ever at the Gate) is spot on. The soundtrack is a smooth succession of synth and sax, Sade and Sheena Easton; the choreography meanwhile veers from the slinky and erotic to the comic, the New Year’s Eve nightclub scene a strong example of the latter.

While Abrahami’s production is stylish, well-crafted and filled with little moments of charm and wit, it sometimes dilutes the crispness of the source story and there is always a slight underlying sense that it is wearing a coat that it’s not quite comfortable in.

Reviewed for musicOMH

Speaking In Tongues

There were so many moments of Natalie Abrahami's production of Anne Washburn’s The Internationalist at the Gate that I loved, that I can't quite understand why I didn't enjoy the whole thing more than I did.

For a start, the whole concept was intriguing – an American businessman, Lowell, arrives in unnamed foreign country where he doesn't speak the lingo and doesn't quite understand what's going on around him, and, because the remainder of the cast spend a good proportion of the play conversing in a made up European language, by extension neither do the audience.

The air of dislocation and jet-legged befuddlement created by the production was spot on. And I loved the inter-scene snippets of 1940s music and the neatly choreographed dream/sex sequences that complimented rather than distracted from the material. I also liked its gradual shift from quirky romance to something more sinister and vaguely nightmare-like. I suppose my main problems were with the play itself; I just felt that there were too many narrative avenues that never really went anywhere. And I was never quite sure whether my sympathies were meant to lie with Lowell – the American abroad – or with Sara, the sweet filing clerk at his firm who collects him from the airport. Abrahami certainly seems to be slanting the production towards the latter, but the play doesn’t really allow us to get to know her. There were some vague references to her being mental ill but these were rather brushed aside.

My other problem was that, once Washburn’s premise has been established – once we grasp that this is a language of her own creation onto which any number of possible meanings can be projected – the production loses a little of its impetus. I liked so much about it, there were some quite enchanting moments, but the moments never really knitted together for me.

I stayed on for the post-show talk with the Gate’s artistic directors Carrie Cracknell and Natalie Abrahami and the cast, where they discussed the unique difficulties of staging play where half the dialogue is basically nonsense (I’m sure the Whingers would have an appropriate comment to add at this point, but I shall leave it alone). They revealed that they had christened Washburn’s language Muffle – their abbreviation of Made Up Foreign Language – and Gary Shelford, one of the cast, explained how, no matter how thoroughly you rehearse the lines the brain occasionally injects an English word into the tide of gibberish and he ended up blurting “tumble drier” at an inopportune point on press night.