The screen fades to a still image of a woman draped in butter-yellow fabric, accordion sleeves spread like wings, superimposed over black-and-white photographs of an audience. She’s on a stage that we don’t see; the impression is one of transmutability. Stage actors, real ones, shred the mirage of separate spaces. There is no stage and audience, just communion of story and spirit. Disappearance is an act of transcendence for the most admired and adroit performers.
But this sort of disappearance is in fact a shared chimera. Because actors are there, in the physical space of theatre, their bodies a resolute actuality. And what their bodies hold are not just an inner expanse of fiction, but the fabric and props that ignite our perception of character, that make believe their existence. There’s no fantasy without trickery, and what is theatre if not a magician’s box of subterfuge? Put your hand in and pull out the dresses that will concoct the story of our protagonist, who in the case of Opening Night’s play-within-a-movie is Virginia, who is also Myrtle Gordon, who is also Gena Rowlands. What unifies these separate people, who are all the same body in transfiguration, is costume and its many meanings.
When you think of John Cassavetes and his wife Gena Rowlands you may not immediately think of fashion, but why not? For a master of great acuity like Cassavetes and an actor of startling creative praxis like Rowlands, every element is in concert, even clothes. Yes, Cassavetes’ movies move in the fluid of cinéma vérité, and yes, his actors and crew bring their own possessions and practicalities into frame, but there is still a craft worker there at the center; a man with a sharp sense of wonder at the possibility of the moving figure, and a man with a sharp sense of wonder at the capabilities of his wife.
And his wife—who it seems wrong to relegate to just his wife, given her undeniable individual magnitude, but in this context of her husband’s utter admiration she is his wife in the most complimentary of manners—is decidedly fashionable. Not that she thought so herself; when asked by W Magazine’s Merle Ginsberg about her glamor, Rowlands responded, “Oh, honey, glamor was never my game.” But the lens of history—Cassavetes’ lens—would disagree. In the aforementioned title intro to Opening Night, Myrtle Gordon is glamor personified. Her dress, seen also in the movie’s striking poster, mimics the spotlight she stands in, refractory yellows painting the moment, a moment in time not just for Myrtle, but for the theatre world she occupies. A world and woman in mutual decay.
Opening Night is unlike other Cassavetes films in terms of construction and curation. While it has the improvisational spirit of his masterwork A Woman Under the Influence (1974), the frenetic and in-the-moment energy of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and the manifestation of the art life in Shadows (1959), it is self-reflective in a way that they are not and stylized more like the theatre it evokes than the familiar everyday. Characters lament the state of the world, the significance (or lack thereof) of their theatre careers, and how their aging bodies grow less desirable by the day. Scenes stand in contrast to these nuclear perspectives, taking place mostly indoors, often in rooms more sprawling and stage-like than the uncomfortable smaller spaces typical in Cassavetes’ domestic dramas. The New Haven hotel apartment Myrtle occupies is a twin of the set where she performs. Her living room on set is comfortably domestic save its curtains and carpet, so ripely red they stain the eye. The same red is in her off-stage apartment: the bedspread in the left corner, the bar and chairs to the right, the long curtains that cover an entire wall. When Myrtle stands there in her cavernous enclave she looks and feels more like an actor than an off-the-clock woman. Personas blended and bled, and so too their adornments.
‘Tis the Cassavetes way. All of his films, by his own admission, are less vehicles of meticulous story and script than they are collective reflections of the people in his life, those he’s gathered together to excavate something they intrinsically share. “One reason I became a director and started making my own films was that I wanted to keep my family together,” Cassavetes said in a 1978 interview. “It was not so much that I wanted to make films, as I wanted to make films around the people with whom I wanted to spend my life.”
So what is Opening Night if not, arguably, the clearest distillation of this art-life blend in his filmography? Not just a gathering of actors he likes—Rowlands, of course, but also friend Ben Gazzara as the play’s director Manny Victor, his mother Katherine as one spiritual medium, Rowlands’ mother Lady Rowlands as another, and himself as Myrtle’s onstage partner and offstage ex-lover Maurice Aarons—but also a meditation on his fears around the abrasion of his own significance, and how the value of film (and stage) lessens as the sexual appeal of its creators diminishes and the glamor fades, leaving behind dry bones.
Myrtle’s apartment is not only her home but the stage where she renders personal dramas. She moves about it in the same stark black drapery she was just wearing onstage—different garment, same effect. A blot of ink in a river of blood. But there is a marked before and after this time, a great tear down the center of her life that will unravel at the seams her sanity, her career, the stories her body can tell.
*
The film opens in the middle of previews for The Second Woman, the play in which Myrtle stars. The scene introduces us to Virginia (her character) and Marty (Maurice’s), a couple seemingly in love, in the context we’re first provided, with evidence of underlying tensions in their shared vocabulary, the way their movement entwines. Virginia is, presumably, a housewife and Marty is a photographer and in their home are two large portraits of his, one of a girl and one of an older woman.
“I tell you, I do love older people. Look at this dame…” Marty says, gesturing at the older woman’s photograph. “You know why I love older people? ‘Cause they know everything. But they don’t show that they know everything. I can stand here, I can look at this woman, this old lady, and I can count every wrinkle on her face. And for every wrinkle, there’s a pain. And for every pain, there’s a year. And for every year, there’s a person, there’s a death, there’s a history, and there’s a kindness. Now, you look at this kid over here. She’s not kind, see?”
If ever a sample plate of theme was served to an audience, it’s here, in this meta moment, Maurice-as-Marty intoning words that should comfort Myrtle about the gentleness of age, the intelligence and confidence it contains, but what instead she comes to refute, even deny. Aging, to Myrtle, is a confrontation. (Maybe it is to John and Gena, too, but here they are contending with it.)
After the preview, Myrtle is led to her car outside, a sea of fans swarming her despite pouring rain, a clear indicator of her fame. One girl pokes through, a young fan named Nancy in a navy bucket hat and matching raincoat, consumed with emotion to be in the presence of her hero. Myrtle pauses and takes a good look at her, displaying a tenderness notable in such an instance—meetings of stars and fans, especially fans of the rabidly emotive variety, can be contentious and uncomfortable, but Myrtle is intrigued. It’s as if, in some alchemic way, she is looking in a mirror. What’s so different between fan and actor? Both appreciate the same thing—they are an inversion.
Myrtle signs Nancy’s notebook as the girl repeats over and over, “I love you, I love you.” They hug before Nancy is pushed along by security, then latches herself to the outside of Myrtle’s car, pressing at the window and blowing kisses, unable to let go. Myrtle rolls down the window and tells her, “Come see me tomorrow,” to which Nancy nods. As the car speeds off, another strikes her as she stands in the middle of the road, killing her immediately.
This is our inciting incident, what will come to inform all that happens to Myrtle thereafter. Nancy’s death not only unspools her nerves, but invites a haunting. Throughout Opening Night, Myrtle is visited by the girl again and again. Moments that begin with benign subconscious curiosity, the girl as a ghostly reminder of Myrtle’s dissipating youth, grow increasingly vengeful. Nancy starts to take on the energy of Myrtle’s presentation, same coiffed blonde hair, black sweaters and skirts, matching lipstick the color of salmon belly. By the end, Nancy is as much doppelgänger demon as ghost, taunting Myrtle with the beauty she’ll exist within forever, having died at 17—preserved in the youthful encasement Myrtle longs for.
The moment also invites our eyes to the costume of it all. Myrtle’s offstage ensembles take on the quality of funeral garb. The death occurs with Myrtle already in black—a cape coat exposing a long-sleeved dress, skirt above the knees, legs piano keys through fabric as she moves about the frame, as if mourning not only Nancy but a part of herself, too; the 17-year-old she referenced in an opening voiceover, the words accompanying that yellow-dressed visage over an audience: “When I was 17 I could do anything. It was so easy. My emotions were so close to the surface. I am finding it harder and harder to stay in touch.”
But the funeral attire—which is eventually worn to Nancy’s real shiva, which Myrtle disrupts in curious vanity before she’s dismissed by the family—is just one side of it. The other is that Myrtle’s stage wear as Virginia also becomes indistinguishable with her day-to-day. Brown blouse, pink skirt, navy peacoat worn in rehearsal and on the street. Red bleeding at the seams everywhere she goes, only to later reunite in monochrome satin at curtain close. We are left with the illusion of a collapse of psyche. Who is Myrtle? Who is Virginia? And where is Gena within them both?
*
A quick internet search of Gena Rowlands will turn up hundreds of photos of the star in a revolving door of glorious sunglasses. Big, ornate, colorful sheaths that reveal a cool confidence, a star in her unbothered element. Whether young or old, behind the scenes or on a red carpet, Rowlands was rarely without her frames, often oversized, in a variety of attention-pulling colors: magenta, amber, blue, purple. For a woman so seemingly glamor-adverse, she had her trademark style marker, one that left a legacy for any indebted and in love with the lack-of-fuss legend.
Naturally, given Cassavetes’ habit of merging reality with filmstrip, Rowlands’ frames are in her screen persona, too, perhaps most notably in Minnie and Moskowitz, a 1971 movie written and directed by Cassavetes, where Rowlands stars opposite Seymour Cassel. In it, her character Minnie is rarely without her octagonal sunglasses: stark-black lenses that give her a bug-like stare. It’s a quirky look for a quirky script, Cassavetes’ only pure romantic comedy, where Rowlands plays a lighter sort of woman than usual.
But Rowlands’ sunglass proclivity shows up in Opening Night, too; this time less flighty but still related to character, placement, aura. Here, they are brown-lensed with turtle rims, worn at first outdoors but slowly making their way inside. In one scene, as Myrtle has lunch with a concerned Manny shortly after a violent encounter with Nancy’s ghost, and after clawing at her own eyes, the sunglasses cover her scars. When she dips them and reveals the cuts, Manny’s worry levels up, though he remains, as always, delicately calm; because of Myrtle’s woes, he tends to treat her like a child, with the quiet tenderness—and humorous tension-letting—of a father. Only occasionally does he raise his voice at her.
The sunglasses are again a fusion of personas, a camouflage for actress and actress-as-actress. Rowlands wearing them on red carpets, in interviews: a thin divide between the reality of the mind and the surreal chasm of flashing bulbs and promotion as performance. Myrtle wearing them as a shield from what she won’t inhabit; the rejection of where she is in this moment, what her director sees in her. And how she might play to her strengths, if only she could play at all.
*
“My life is getting boring. I’m getting somber,” Manny Victor says to his wife Dorothy (Zohra Lampert) after tending to the early stages of Myrtle’s curdling emotions. “My own tricks bore me. There’s no humor anymore, and all the glamor’s dead. You notice that? I can’t even stand how they come to rehearsal. They come to rehearsal dressed in terrible clothes.”
The two are in their own apartment, ornate and earth-toned, damask and striped and floral patterns on the sofas, the walls, the curtains. They are a different kind of people, happier in the soft hues of their love. They have a togetherness Myrtle lacks; her solitariness aids her breakdown. Love means a unification of spirit, a lavish net to catch you when you’re fit to slip. Without it, the fall is glass on concrete, shards splintered into irreparable blots. They can go home, turn off, talk and joke about their respective days. Myrtle is forever lost in the wilderness of Myrtle.
Manny can lament on the loss of glamor because he got to—gets to—live in it enough to feel its slow let. He is a middle-aged man with a successful career; he remembers the roaring days of American theatre, a pinnacle of sophistication in the 1950s and ‘60s golden era, when Lorraine Hansberry, Arthur Miller, and William Inge brought their tempestuous linguistic pizzazz and poetry to the floodlights of the Great White Way. He witnessed the slow shift into the political theatre and experimental forms workshopped off-Broadway, made glossy for the real deal, when Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Tennessee Williams’ The Night of the Iguana brought stars like Arthur Hill and Bette Davis into focus. The sumptuousness of a Broadway once as glamorous and audience-alluring as Hollywood was slowly stripped away to hyper-realism, experimentalist styles that mirrored a broader cultural disillusionment. Prestige gave way to disinterest, but Manny remembers the dream.
So too does Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell), playwright for The Second Woman. A few decades older than her star, Sarah’s presence feels like mockery to Myrtle, who resents playing a role so menopausal. But she’s also a silk-drawn relic of the theatre world she came up in, always dressed in eleganza: peacock-feather hats with face netting, fur coats that shine, dripping diamond earrings, dresses with tiered ruffles at the neck and pinned pink flowers. In contrast to Myrtle, she is a gravity bomb of old-Broadway, flashing her austerity like a snake might raise its rattle.
But in Sarah’s affection for Myrtle—or, more likely, her desire to keep Myrtle’s personal theatrics from undoing her reputation—she takes her to her personal spiritualist to exorcise Nancy. The spiritualist, Vivian (Katherine Cassavetes), also has the air of a sophisticated yesteryear. She is notably wearing the same red of the stage—and of Myrtle’s apartment, and of a dressing room carpet where she’ll later lay her head in drunken stupor—a contrast to Myrtle’s simple brown dress; another fusion of disparate elements come together for an exhale.
Myrtle explains to Vivian that she believes Nancy’s ghost is something she manifested, a way of accessing parts of herself she was struggling to summon in her performance. “I’ll do anything to make my character more authentic,” Myrtle says. “I always have.” But before the exorcism can get underway, Myrtle gets cold feet, seeming to suddenly view this whole mystic enterprise as something quite silly, likening Nancy to an imaginary friend, nothing to take too seriously—an excuse, perhaps, for the more likely truth: that Nancy’s presence is a way for Myrtle to cling to some younger part of herself, aiding the self-sabotage that brings a sense of drama to her personal life that is otherwise absent. That’s another trick of age—the theatrics of youth dissolve into a more placated sense of calm. For those who thrive on friction, the quiet of age is a grave.
Myrtle and Sarah leave Vivian’s, but later that night Myrtle lets herself into Sarah’s apartment and proceeds to ram her face repeatedly into the doorframe. An act that appears to knock at least a tiny semblance of sense into Myrtle; that there is a physical cost to clinging to this behavior far worse than any wrinkle or other notable sign of age. Now more desperate, Myrtle again turns to Sarah for help vanquishing Nancy, and this time Sarah introduces her to a psychic, Melva Drake (Lady Rowlands). In Melva’s apartment, Nancy appears once more, taunting her about all the ways in which the value of her youth, beauty, and sex make her superior. The two engage in a bloody fist fight before Myrtle—desperately motivated this time—knocks Nancy down and appears to “kill” her, finally accepting that conquering this spirit is the only way to move forward.
It is a showy affair, a kick-down that would typically signify a marked shift in character. Instead, with renewed confidence, it initiates a different shade of self-destruction. Myrtle heads to Maurice’s house and attempts to seduce him, to get him to join her in upending the play on opening night just for the hell of it. He rejects her while wearing a red shirt. “It’s because I know you,” he growls, the mirror of a line his character says to Virginia in The Second Woman. He knows she’s only manipulating him for her own whims—that she wants to bring him down with her. He’s just collateral for her ongoing fall. “Love moves at a hell of a rate of speed, doesn’t it?” Myrtle snaps back with her own knowing spite.
Again, that collapse: where do Myrtle and Maurice begin and Virginia and Marty end? Where do Gena and John?
*
A 1958 interview with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands with the critic Jesse Zinder contains the following excerpt:
The bell rang and Gena went to the door to get a package. She ran into the bedroom with it and came out a minute later wearing a blinding-red chemise dress whose shapeless, baggy, droopy lines hid the attractive curves of her body as completely as any burlap bag ever covered a bushel of potatoes.
John’s mouth hung wide open. In all fairness it should be said that Gena did more for that dress than it ever did for her. “I adore them,” she gurgled, “isn’t it simply divine!” John grunted and Gena took that for approval.
“This ought to dispel the canard once and for all,” he whispered, “that women dress for men. There’s no man alive that wouldn’t laugh his head off to see an otherwise pretty girl stumbling down the street in that silken potato sack.” Gena looked at him coolly, and said, “No man knows anything about style.”
“Nor about women, either,” said John out of his long experience. “Best rule is, love ‘em—don’t try to understand ‘em.”
The “blinding-red chemise dress” feels a cousin to the monochrome red ensemble Myrtle wears at the end of Opening Night. After Maurice’s rejection, she disappears and shows up drunk off her rocker for the inductive performance. Her appearance, disheveled and ruined, seems sure to seal The Second Woman’s, and Myrtle Gordon’s, fate. A faded actress come undone, ushering out whatever prestige still exists in the theatre world. A decay settled with a decayed persona assisting the rot.
But then something curious happens. Manny sends Myrtle to the stage anyway. She’s supposed to be a mess in the opening act; the audience will love it, he assures the show’s frantic stagehands, writer, and investors. She disastrously but effectively stumbles through the beginning legs of the performance, in her black funeral garb again, as if announcing her death.
But at intermission she seemingly sobers up, finds her footing. She joins Maurice onstage and is Virginia at once, but also Myrtle, as she kicks down the fourth wall of story and submerges herself in the audience. Their laughter becomes permission to go increasingly off-book. Maurice balks at first, stumbles confusedly through his lines, but begins to feed off the same chaotic energy as their antics are communally approved. Soon, they are in a rambunctious tête-à-tête for all to observe—stage audience, home audience—and it feels, in a sense, that Manny as Maurice and Myrtle as Virginia dim while John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands emerge. Not that they’re there as only themselves, but rather that each is all three people: character, actor, creator. A great enmeshing that is as much a revelation about Cassavetes and Rowlands and their marriage as it is an obfuscation. We can never really know them, but the phantom entwining of these separate selves is, in a way, their truest form.
He’s in brown, she’s in red, the power roles flipped and Myrtle finally in charge. No man knows anything about style or women, but to love them is to release the attempt to understand. An ode made actionable here, in this fertile moment: Cassavetes using these characters to share his art life intentions with an audience-within-an-audience-within-a-legacy. Man in awe of wife, releasing the scene to her, as they release the scene to us.
It feels an intentional rejection of the characters’ obsession with youth and the glamorous yesterday, and an embrace of the pared-down, raw-character energy that the husband-wife pair would bring to cinema, too. Not that they weren’t already doing so; Opening Night was their sixth collaboration together but the self-distributed film was mostly ignored upon its limited release. It was only decades later that it became so of note, as it was only decades later that Cassavetes’ genius would become less a suggestion than a dedicated fact. Two disruptors tearing down the walls of an establishment to forge a different kind of accepted entertainment, free from the bars of script, transmutable to those changed by it. A shedding of costume.
And they did it on a stage in a simple brown suit and red dress—how they often appeared in real life. No sunglasses this time, but still how Gena as Gena often looked; a simple, soft, confident elegance that says it all, no need for doilies and diamonds and peacock-feathered hats. Rowlands the star in a monochrome primary color, Cassavetes receding in her shadow, just where he liked it. A knowing wink.
The glamor may be dead, but the humor lives on.