GROTOWSKI’S MINIATURE MEN by Michael Buckley
Long before she married, before her boys and their chests full of voice and energy, before her row of perfect tomato plants along the backyard fence, Mae was an actress.
One summer in 1973 she had studied with Grotowski. On the first day of the seminar actors from all over the world gathered in the Polish forest, one of the most ancient stretches of trees in Europe. The great man put them in groups, told them to strip nude, and got them singing. They sang until their throats were abraded; then they listened as Grotowski lectured them on their role in the theater.
“You are both spectator and actor,” he said. “Never allow yourself to be only one!” The man chopped and caressed the air as he talked, walking back and forth, so serious, dressed only in a pair of briefs, his beard, and glasses.
After the other actors walked to their rental cars Mae and Grotowski lingered, and to her amazement, he started a conversation with her. Coldness fell through the trees as the great man lectured her on human sacrifice, cannibalism, and the art of the permanent orgasm. At last he asked her to gather her clothes – don’t put them on – and come to his van.
Her father would’ve called it a Volkswagen POS, piece of shit, but to Mae it was revelatory: Filled with sheaves of scrawled-on paper, small, frantic paintings, jumbles of pack-ratted rubber bands, paper clips, and used staples. They sat close together – they had to, there was very little space – and she felt heat radiating off of his body like waves of hallucination off of a desert highway. She had never felt like this before, and she held her breath and concentrated on the suction of the seat leather against her bare thighs.
After a moment he turned to her with something in his hand. Mae looked closely: It was a tiny male figure, phallus and all, made out of paper clips.
“Tell me the truth,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Very . . . Intricate,” she said.
Grotowski went on to show her men made of staples, men made of rubber bands, and men made of cheese.
But that’s not how she tells it.
Say at a party, and after a couple glasses of very cold wine, she ends up talking to another woman in a corner of a larger conversation. Her husband is in the backyard; her boys are shouting at each other mid-game along the side of the house.
“Have you heard of Grotowski?” she asks and does not wait to hear the answer. “I was in the forest with him. He took me into his van. He ruined me forever.”
Michael Buckley is the author of the short story collection Miniature Men (World Parade Books, 2011). His story “The Meticulous Grove of Black and Green,” that first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, was featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Buckley is a frequent contributor to Alaska Quarterly Review.