Entertainment
In ‘Mona Acts Out,’ #MeToo Shakes Up a Downtown Theater
Mischa Berlinski’s shrewd comic novel finds a veteran actress reconnecting with her deposed mentor while facing the challenge of playing Cleopatra.
MONA ACTS OUT, by Mischa Berlinski
If not for the opiates in her system, or the weed she vaped to boost the pills’ effect, Mona Zahid might have handled Thanksgiving Day better — not ducking into the bedroom of her Manhattan apartment to hide from her quarreling relatives while dinner cooks, or emerging only to grab her affable beagle, Barney, and head for the front door. But in Mischa Berlinski’s novel “Mona Acts Out,” she is, fundamentally, very, very stoned.
So when, on her way through the building’s lobby, she finds a postcard in her mailbox from Milton Katz, the famous Shakespearean stage director who for two decades shepherded her acting career, its piteous message grabs hold of her fuzzy mind.
“I am dying, Egypt, dying,”he scrawls, repurposing a line from “Antony and Cleopatra,” and even though she well knows the charismatic Milton’s habits of shameless self-dramatization and precision-calibrated emotional manipulation, she worries that he speaks the truth. Ever since a #MeToo article in The New York Times got him expelled from his own legendary East Village company, the Disorder’d Rabble — the name is borrowed from “King Lear” — he has lived in disgraced exile.
Mona, who was one of his leading ladies and remains at least a semi-loyalist, hasn’t seen him in nearly a year. Her imminent turn as Cleopatra for the Rabble, without him at the helm, is only stoking her anxiety. His postcard suggests he knows it.
She must go to him immediately, she decides, and she will walk. That means an hourslong odyssey from Morningside Heights to Brooklyn Heights, but again, she is quite high — and trying to avoid her Trump-voting father-in-law, who is on the wrong side of the Shakespeare authorship question, as well as her doctor husband, with whom she is in a holiday snit.
And so the plot is set in motion in Berlinski’s book, which takes inspiration from a 2017 article in The Times by Jessica Bennett, about nine women accusing the veteran playwright and artistic director Israel Horovitz of sexual misconduct.
