Wrangling Men for Alia Shawkat

In a daylong theatrical marathon at BAM, the “Arrested Development” star acted out a single spat—with a hundred different men.

Just before the New York première of “The Second Woman,” a twenty-four-hour-long play starring Alia Shawkat, of “Arrested Development,” Celine Abdallah was backstage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, whispering into a walkie-talkie that was labelled with her job for the evening: “Man Wrangler.” In the play, Shawkat would enact the same spat a hundred times with a hundred different men. The men were amateurs. It was up to Abdallah to corral them.

The show’s creators, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, first staged the piece in Sydney, in 2017. They reached out to Shawkat by phone, explaining that they wanted a local performer for the American production; she agreed immediately. (“I’m into these weird, masochistic projects,” she said. “This is much more of an anthropological study than an acting performance.”) The marathon experiment in intimacy would be Shawkat’s stage début. She would be allowed a fifteen-minute break every two hours, or approximately every ten men. Her plan: “Pee. Maybe poop. Maybe have a cigarette. Drink water. Pee again. Touch up.” Meanwhile, Abdallah would be in the wings, keeping the men-in-waiting out of Shawkat’s way.

There had been a rudimentary rehearsal a few days earlier, with actors whom Shawkat called “test dummies.” But she would be meeting her scene partners for the first time during the performance. As the men arrived backstage, holding their scripts, Abdallah gave them their marching orders: each would improvise a response to Shawkat’s opening line (“How are you?”), each would carry onstage two containers of plain rice noodles, and each would choose whether his final line would be “I love you” or “I never loved you.” Abdallah refused to answer any questions about the set, and she deliberately withheld a key detail: where the men’s scripts say “Virginia throws food on the table,” Shawkat’s reads “Virginia throws food at Marty.”

The audience was solemn when the curtain went up, at 5 P.M., but, after a few iterations of the scene (Man No. 1, an engineer, poured the contents of Shawkat’s glass into his own; Man No. 4, a sculptor, answered Shawkat’s opening question by declaring, “My therapy has been working great!”), minor distinctions began to take on significance: a slammed door or an ad-libbed toast was enough to elicit gasps. The script is laced with double meanings—depending on the man, “You’re hysterical” can be a compliment or a cruel dismissal—but Breckon and Randall had kept the text spare, wary of guys devising elaborate backstories.

By 1 A.M., Abdallah had ceded her man-wrangling responsibilities to another crew member, and the crowd seemed fully invested. Backstage, Man No. 44, a bartender, whose call time was 4:15 A.M., explained that he had volunteered out of admiration for Shawkat. “I’m the mirror for her reflected glory,” he said. When he read the script, it felt familiar. “Gender dynamics, power dynamics—this is huge for us right now.” He was unfazed by the noodle ambush.

Breckon and Randall had created the show before the #MeToo movement took off. “The male participants have shifted their game lately,” Randall said, adding that guys had been asking a lot of questions about the appropriate way to interact with their female scene partner. (Breckon speculated that New York might be more “woke” than Australia.)

At sunrise, word spread backstage that Shawkat was getting a second wind. “That actually makes me nervous,” Man No. 51, a bespectacled fellow in tweed, said. Flipping through the script, he questioned the choice of plain rice noodles. “It’s not the most romantic meal if you’re trying to fix this relationship,” he said. Pizza, he suggested, would have been a better choice.

Pizza is more romantic?” Man No. 53 scoffed.

“He should really be cooking for her,” No. 51 replied. “Just make some pasta, come on!”

No. 53 nodded. “What’s the piece trying to say about masculinity?” he asked. “Are we really fucking it up?”

When No. 51 went on, fifteen hours into the show, he answered Shawkat’s “How are you?” honestly: “I’m a little tired. I’m a little nervous.”

“Well, I’m one of those things,” she said. The audience, a portion of which had been there from the start, laughed.

With less than an hour remaining, Shawkat got punchy. She kicked off her heels, knocked over chairs, and, at around 4:45 P.M., ripped off Man No. 92’s shirt. (This was Christopher Abbott, of “Girls,” one of a handful of professionals to make a cameo.)

Her final scene partner turned out to be one of the test dummies who’d rehearsed with her earlier. “How are you?” she asked.

“I’m better now,” he said. “How are you?”

Shawkat smiled blearily. “Better, too.” ♦