Longing for a child and waiting for a moment

Responding to Rat Tails (WIP) by Jeremy McClain

Jeremy McClain / Rat Tails (WIP)

Monday 24 June, 13:38

At the train station, I send a pitch for this: Rat Tails (WIP), written and performed by theatremaker and actor Jeremy McClain, best known for his role in the television show Pose. Rat Tails is a dramedy, I read, set in an NHS waiting room as Jasper (McClain), a gay biracial man from America’s south, reflects on his heritage and his childhood. He and his husband are awaiting the arrival of their baby. I return to my emails. This familiar anxiety was once new, expecting. I touch my stomach; feel it lurch again. Like many in the city I work in, but do not live in, I’ve come to wait for August each year. Wait for its exhaustion, its thrill. I struggle to find another word for ‘waiting’ and fear that doing so will see this text drag and clench itself, ungiving. The anxiety is likely shared by Jasper, a little neurotic. He is a perfectionist, probably - clean-cut, nervous, keen to correct the intergenerational wrongs that can no longer be corrected. And yet, still, he waits. 

Monday 8 July, 19:29

In the airport, returning from a week away. With delays, I am hot and bothered. I return to my emails and see that deadlines are starting to fill the days and weeks ahead. July and August are always busier than usual. Awaited payment will come in August and September. By then, I will be anxious with the quiet of my inbox - sounding a lack of work and a consequential lack of payment - rather than each jaw-tight notification. Jasper will also speak too much about work. The character is a model agent, I read. I wonder if he clings too much to his career and too little to a sense of self. I think of the arts, of working within them. I am expecting a lot from Rat Tails, and of the arts.

Sunday 20 July, 11:00

In the waiting room, at the hospital. The one I’ve come to is a mobile unit because the NHS is like this now - temporary and detachable. Later, in the play, Jasper will likely say something about the NHS. He thinks it’s great! Or maybe he doesn’t! It will be funny and the audience will all give a wry, knowing laugh. He is American - poor, from the south - and his husband is British aristocracy.

Friday 2 August, 15:50

Black tank top and right raised hand; I assume Jasper is shaving his already shaved head. I see the shapes and fill in the rest, refusing to wait. It is on my phone and on a handful of Southbridge posters, although the street is so thick with people that it is difficult to see: black tank top, right raised hand, shaved head, razer. I look again, reminding myself of the show and its one-man cast. It’s not a razer; it is braided hair - a rat tail - held together by a black cross. 

Like Rat Tails, the text I write is a work-in-progress, divided: written before and after the show; existing in a notes app and Google Doc. I realise I may never see the finalised version of Rat Tails, the work-not-in-progress may never exist. Funding is difficult - it is called a crisis in this city and this country - and art and artists can only wait so long. I’m uncertain how this work-in-progress will progress, lines repeated or staging rearranged. 

On this Glasgow to Edinburgh train, Langston Hughes’ Tired takes some time to load on Genius.com. It is funny to find a poem there. 

I am so tired of waiting,

Aren't you,

For the world to become good

And beautiful and kind?

Edinburgh this year seems tired already. A well-practised routine, waiting for the festival season to become good / and beautiful and kind. I am already tired. The bin strikes will start soon.

17:04

At the Studio in Fruitmarket: a QR code on a poster, leading to a PDF containing several grained grey childhood photographs; yellow and white plastic chairs; glossy magazines on coffee tables. The audience waits together. Muffled chatter swells and sinks and there is nothing new in my inbox. Someone sips an iced coffee and someone else brings out a library book - bright green, electric blue - and there is still nothing new in the inbox. Regardless, we are all waiting for this show together. The city needs this kind of unity, to make it all worth it.

18:43

He wears a black suit jacket and a white tank top. I only expected the black tank top from the poster. I like the pigeons in the background, whirring against the window, and the suppressed ding heard from Waverley Station signifying an arriving train, orange-lettered boards telling of the coming and going. Here, the lighting - fluorescent, I think - is bright and demands our best, muted behaviour. 

McClain has grace that is raised through honesty, wonderfully radical in its occasional unpleasantness. Jasper and his husband are expecting a baby, in that Jasper is currently preparing a semen deposit to conceive this baby. McClain takes turns with the audience, as if speaking to us, telling us about the abuse in his family, the bullying in his school days as a queer, working class kid; I try to nod and respond, because Jasper needs the reassurance so badly. The waiting causes him distress, breeding new anxieties; I think of Edinburgh, this city in perpetual preparation and never quite settled with itself. Never quite shiny enough, with all this history, so burdensome. McClain is striking. He pitches Jasper’s voice high and cutting.  

Jasper is frantic - he sits, then stands, sits again, leaps to stride. Waiting is not still and yet that passive possibility is there. Theatre in the round, the audience face each other while we watch; we fidget, welcome Jasper’s hurried pacing. The unease of waiting becomes communal and strange. There may be hope here. All of us are waiting for a resolution, but there isn’t one, not really. 

Call it fairytale music, although it may be Disney. Washes in, washes out, a handful of times - sung and unsung notes of what could be: a family, friends, a career, access to the NHS (in America, he says, they just let them die). The subversion is sad but beautiful - how dare he dream of more, wait upon it, refuse to wait any longer, and take it for himself. 

Saturday 3 August, 00:42

After two more Fringe shows, it is time for the bus home. This is Edinburgh during festival season, but the trains to Glasgow do not run past midnight. Rat Tails stays, sweetly defiant, as my thoughts pool once again in a Google Doc. Return to Hughes, seeking more. The last four lines of the same poem:

Let us take a knife

And cut the world in two -

And see what worms are eating

At the rind.

McClain takes a knife; Jasper is no longer waiting. He cuts the world, with Jasper’s husband, then with us. It reveals racism and classism, abuse and neglect. The rind of this city is not the same as that of Rat Tails, not exactly, but it is too similar. Because it is too tiring waiting for another email (more work, please) in this city that demands our tiredness, especially if we are not of this city and its white wealth tradition. But edits for a city are insurmountable on a Google Doc and Rat Tails is beautiful, thank god for this festival and all it brings. When the play ends, it is the end of McClain’s waiting, but the bus is delayed and I remain.

Rat Tails (WIP), at Fruitmarket - Studio, Aug 1-18, 17:00.