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SHATTERING |
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Not the New Haven you remember. Anthony Weiss '02 writes and teaches in New York. Int. library of the Yale Club of New York - Summer A trim, classical room. The walls are lined with books. On the ceiling, plaster putti frolic in pastoral scenes. A brass plaque commands, "Silence." The sounds of midtown Manhattan traffic drift in from outside. |
Alumni sit in rows of straight-backed chairs, balancing glasses of wine and plates of cheese and fruit. Green programs announce the evening's performance: Shattering, an original screenplay. The actors, led by Elizabeth Newman '02, author of Shattering, enter to polite applause. Newman, elegant in a simple black dress, explains that Shattering is a screenplay, and thus much of what would be shown must instead be described. She, as the narrator, will describe it. With that, she begins, and the audience is transported, as if by Metro-North train, to . . . Int. Greater New Haven, CT Artist Julian Pierce awakes to find himself upon the floor of his studio. His hand is bleeding, cut by shards of glass. Julian is a rising young sculptor. A Yale graduate, he still lives in New Haven -- not the prosaic, restaurant-ridden city Elis know, but an ominous, unsettled place where madness and deception lurk in the shadows. He works in the hermetic squalor of an abandoned warehouse by I-95. With the help of friend and fellow alumnus Fred Grove, Julian sneaks into the Yale-New Haven Hospital morgue to make anatomical sketches for his glass sculptures. While sketching in the morgue, Julian accidentally discovers the corpse of a beautiful young woman. She inspires a dream, which in turn inspires a new work: Ophelia, a woman drowning. One day, the somewhat livelier Annabelle Stevenson wanders into Julian's studio. She works for the Whitney Museum, and she has come to scout Julian's work for a new show. Lest anyone mistake Shattering for autobiography, Newman is not waiting for success to wander into her life. In the six months since she graduated from Boston University film school, Newman has written two full-length screenplays (including Shattering) and is setting up her own production company. She is currently looking to find backing for Shattering. She would like to direct the script herself, but she is pragmatic: "Sometimes people make the mistake of clinging too tightly to a script." If need be, she will sell it and move on. For Julian, alas, success is not so easy. As the green programs warn us: "Jagged is the edge between insight and insanity." A young woman identical to the one in the morgue is found murdered in New Haven, becoming a tabloid sensation. Annabelle reads one of the tabloid stories as she is walking through the tunnel of New Haven's Union Station, and she accuses Julian of inventing his dream. Only it doesn't make sense -- Julian had never seen the papers, didn't know of the murder. Newman reads the elaborate descriptions with gusto. Her expression brightens and darkens with each nuance. The audience listens, with rapt attention. As the screenplay comes to its final climax, her voice rises, intensifies. There is no dialogue now, only an orgy of imagery. The girl is before Julian, drowning. She is staring at him. He moves towards her, grabs her . . . The end of the script: Newman describes, crisply, the final image. The audience is silent for a moment, then breaks into applause. The actors stand, and Newman beams. Friends come forward to congratulate Newman and the actors. The rest of the audience drifts out the door and into the city. |
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