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Automat

Written by Merrie Greenfield, actress and co-author of The (edward) Hopper Project , playing January 15-February 21 at the Storefront Theater.

The assignment for a circa 2007 Write Club meeting had the writers randomly drawing envelopes. Inside each envelope was a postcard-sized picture of a different Edward Hopper painting. Out of this assignment grew the concept for The (edward) Hopper Project.

I drew “Automat.” I got butterflies.

Edward Hopper, Automat (1927)

I recognized the image. I’ve since figured out it’s the cover of a book I own, a small collection of Dorothy Parker stories. I both loved the painting and hated it. I loved its simplicity, its quiet beauty, the story it suggested. I hated it because I related to it. It seemed a reminder to moments from my past, and moments sure to happen in my future. It wasn’t so much a painting as a somewhat cruel mirror for regrets and fears.

I avoided the female subject almost altogether in my first crack at it. I wrote about two guys, driving from a shoot-out, drenched in blood. Driving to New Jersey, they discussed the female decoy. They related how she didn’t flinch when the guns popped and the criminal was plugged. She just walked across the street to the Automat and calmly drank a cup of joe.

Interesting concept. And the scene never worked. I wound up scrapping it in disgust.

One critic said the subject of “Automat” has her thoughts “turned inward.” Another poetically described the subject “gazing at her coffee cup as if it were the last thing in the world she could hold onto.” I pictured her looking there in part to avoid looking anywhere else. The moments which brought her there could be extreme, life-shattering, miniscule or mundane. This could be where she comes before each graveyard shift. This could be her first time at the place, trying to avoid looking around because it’s so dark and late (or early). And everyone knows you never make eye contact in the city at that hour, out alone.

It’s a painting succinctly suggesting one of the biggest problems with city living: feeling positively isolated while surrounded by people. The subject may be alone, but she’s alone in one of the biggest cities in the country. Behind nearby walls sit hundreds of people, thousands like her…maybe some even sit in the same room. Alone in the city is a peaceful or unsettling thing, depending on the circumstances.

The idea of someone feeling all alone with scores of people in her life seems more daunting than someone who has nobody. It’s harder to explain.

Just before I rewrote the scene, someone very close to me revealed she was leaving her husband after years. I was surprised, although I’d remembered afterwards how stressed she’d seemed at her wedding. Her decision caught her unawares. She found herself looking ahead to her future with a perfectly nice guy she’d known since high school, and she dreaded it. He just wasn’t the right man. The same goes for Verbena. She doesn’t leave George for someone else.  She has no idea what she’s running to, actually. She leaves because she knows he’s just not the one. (This is the one thing I don’t mind confirming for the audience.) Someone like Betty can’t understand this.

While some may consider the scene melodramatic, it’s uncanny how many times the scenario has played out with other people in my life since I wrote it, to varying degrees. It’s a situation in which a lot of blame is assigned, but when it comes right down to it, it’s nobody’s fault. For some people, much like Betty, an absence of blame is impossible.

It’s also a warning. These characters frustrate me because they can’t quite figure out how to connect with each other, or they refuse to do so. With a couple of small choices, tiny statements, it wouldn’t be so damned difficult. Maybe they’d end up in the same place, but along a much easier path. Instead, they fumble around, blindly. It’s a struggle for me, to figure out when to let someone in, when to put my pride aside, when to stop punishing myself or someone else, when to refuse someone entry into my heart or mind, when to let someone go. It may seem a simple thing to others, but it’s a mystery, personally. I still fumble with the best of them. I’m learning.