payment page
Summary
Chapter 13
Lara and Albert stand in the wings before a performance of Our Town, feeling nervous. The week Our Town opens, rehearsals for Fool for Love also begin. Lara feels confident in her portrayal of Emily but is much less sure of herself as Mae. It’s also becoming more and more clear that Albert is losing his ability to act because of his alcoholism; he’s forgetting lines and making mistakes. This comes to a head one night when Albert becomes gravely ill during the third act of the play. In a scene where they walk together, Albert leans heavily on her for support as they move into the audience. She helped him sit down, but it’s too late; after delivering his final lines, blood pours from his mouth. A doctor in the audience rushes to help, and an ambulance is called. In the present, Lara explains that Albert had a ruptured vein in his esophagus, which was the source of the blood. He survived the hemorrhage but continued to drink, which quickly killed him. Nell asks about Albert’s understudy, Lee, who presumably would need to fill in in his absence. Joe explains that when Lee was told he had to step in, he refused. This leaves Joe to take over the role himself. Lara then recalls visiting Albert in the hospital the next day, where she meets Albert’s second wife, Elyse Adler. Elyse explains that his third wife is also there. Elyse has come to help get Albert transferred to a better hospital in Chicago, as she doesn’t trust the standard of care in Michigan. In the present, Emily looks up Albert’s death and finds that he died on July 28, 1988, at the age of 56. Lara, surprised, realizes she didn’t know he passed away just weeks after she last saw him, and that they were the same age. Nell tartly reminds her that she’s actually 57.
Chapter 14
Lara asks Joe why he hadn’t had the assistant director fill in for Albert, and Joe admits that he enjoyed being on stage with her. He likes being the Stage Manager, the lead part of Our Town, not because he enjoys the attention but because he gets to be close to her. Nell makes a joke about Lara dating every major main character in the play, which Lara doesn’t like. However, she continues her story, recalling how she and Duke packed up Albert’s belongings after his collapse. While Duke doesn’t take the task seriously, Lara feels upset and like an intruder, especially when they find Albert’s freezer full of vodka. She feels guilty for not intervening sooner.
Duke’s own alcoholism is developing rapidly. In Fool for Love, Duke is playing the part of Eddie, who is a heavy drinker. He persuades the director, Cody, that he should be allowed to drink real alcohol onstage for authenticity, and that Lara should have to as well. Later, back in 2020, Lara attends an outdoor movie night at the nearby farm of their neighbors the Otts, where they are drinking beer and watching a Peter Duke movie called The Promised Man. Her daughters are already engrossed in the film. Lara has already seen it, and it was so heartbreakingly sad—and Duke so good—that she never wanted to see it again. Lara thinks about Duke’s character in the film, who is trapped by poor decisions and turns to drugs after battling alcoholism. She wonders if she could have changed the real Duke’s fate by refusing to drink onstage. She has to look away from the screen because it’s too sad to see his face.
Analysis: Chapters 13 & 14
This section primarily explores Lara’s relationship with herself and how it affects her view of others. During Chapters 13 and 14, Lara also thinks carefully about how she’s been influenced by those who came before her, and how those influences are later reflected in her own behaviors. Lara’s flashbacks begin here with the simultaneous opening of Our Town and rehearsals for Fool for Love. Lara feels comfortable playing Emily in Our Town, especially as she’s done it twice before, but struggles to connect with Mae in Fool for Love. In many ways, the adult Emily and Lara are very similar; Emily is a character in a play-about-a-play, who moves through Our Town both chronologically and as a spirit who can look backward through time. Because of the structure of Our Town, Emily can comment on her life and reflect on it onstage, in much the same way Lara does as she tells the story of her time at Tom Lake to her daughters.
By contrast, Mae is a woman on the edge, and Lara doesn’t want to acknowledge the similarities between herself and this other protagonist. In Fool for Love, Mae is in an incestuous relationship with her half-brother Eddie and is trying to free herself from the negative cycles of abuse, denial, and proximity to suicide that she keeps falling into when she’s with him. She’s suspicious that he is having an affair, but Fool for Love never actually resolves the conflict; the characters of Mae and Eddie just drift apart. This contrast highlights the duality in Lara’s life when she’s a young actress between two plays at Tom Lake. On one hand, she feels a sense of ease and stability (Emily) and, on the other, there’s a nagging undercurrent of disruption (Mae). While Our Town is first being performed, Lara still loves Tom Lake, feels comfortable in her community in Michigan, and has high hopes for her romantic future with Duke. However, her discomfort with the character of Mae parallels the emotional tension she experiences offstage as they begin to rehearse the second play. This is particularly true when she notices Albert’s increasing struggles with alcohol and begins to feel suspicious of Duke’s addiction problems and his commitment issues. Albert’s deterioration is subtle enough to dismiss at first, but it culminates in a dramatic onstage incident where Albert is soaked by the blood pouring from his mouth. Albert’s public collapse is also the beginning of the end of Lara’s relationship with Duke. It’s a moment of grim foreshadowing for how Duke’s own demons will eventually destroy his professional and personal relationships.
Though Lara ultimately complies with Duke’s idea that the actors should drink alcohol while rehearsing and performing Fool for Love, it is a moment where she sacrifices her own values in an attempt to maintain the fragile dynamics of their relationship. Duke’s insistence on drinking real alcohol during their scenes in Fool for Love is supposed to be a reflection of how seriously he takes authenticity onstage. However, Lara suspects that it reveals his growing reliance on alcohol. His behavior, like Albert Long’s, becomes increasingly erratic. In hindsight, Lara views her actions with regret, wondering if she could have done more to prevent Duke’s downward spiral. This is tied up with her feelings of disgust and discomfort with his mental illness-linked behaviors. She’s alarmed by his obsessive journaling and tendency to hyperfocus, and mentally associates these behaviors with his alcoholism. Her guilt—whether warranted or not—is another manifestation of Lara’s tendency to take moral responsibility for the actions of people she loves.
The lingering question of what could have been with Duke—whether Lara could have changed his fate—also speaks to this theme. As Lara watches The Promised Man, she thinks about the incredibly strong emotional reaction she and Joe had when they first saw the film years ago. At the time, she and Joe wondered if it was only so affecting because they knew him, but agreed it wasn’t; Duke is just extremely talented. In 2020, watching Duke’s character turn to drugs and alcohol after making poor decisions makes her reflect mournfully about her own role in his early career. The parallels between his on-screen role and his personal struggles hit Lara all over again, leading her to wonder whether her choices pushed Duke into his final negative spiral. Despite this, she recognizes that such thoughts are a form of self-aggrandizement, acknowledging that her influence over Duke was limited and that she couldn’t have saved him. When she admits to herself that no summer romance could have changed Duke’s life, she’s undergoing the sobering realization that people, no matter how deeply connected, ultimately face their personal struggles alone.
