Collection Connections: 'Mona Acts Out' by Mischa Berlinski

Mona Acts Out begins on Thanksgiving Day, in New York City. Mona Zahid is an actor with The Disorder’d Rabble, a Shakespeare company defined by the vision of its founding director, Milton Katz. Several of the company’s current and former members recently spoke to the New York Times about Milton, disclosing decades of sexual harassment and violence. As of the novel’s opening, Mona hasn’t seen Milton in at least a year.

In the midst of the Thanksgiving dinner preparations, Mona leaves the apartment with her beagle, Barney, and doesn’t come back. She lands first with Vanessa, a former Rabble actress and one of the women who spoke out about Milton. A Friendsgiving party is in full swing at Vanessa’s apartment, where Mona drinks too much, stays the night, and – after a wee-hours heart-to-heart with Vanessa – leaves to speak to Milton.

The reader’s first introduction to Mona and her point of view is as a fence-sitter in the battle over Milton’s reputation:

Mona is constructed here as an anti-hero, prioritizing her loyalty to Milton over the accounts of other women in the company and, as we later learn, her own experiences. Mona’s Byronic construction is further emphasized through her fractious relationship with her in-laws; her disconnection from her husband Phil; her addiction to prescription painkillers. She’s a reluctant Thanksgiving hostess and a disrespectful guest. Her grief at her sister’s passing manifests in self-destructive behaviors. She refuses to accept her niece Rachel’s account of her experiences with Milton. While the reader spends most of their time in Mona’s head, I certainly did so with a degree of critical distance – a position supported by the occasional jumps to Barney’s point of view, who provides a comic and refreshing additional perspective.

Throughout, Mona prepares to play Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. Berlinski offers the reader some parallels of characterization: they share ambition, grief, vanity, and a capacity for captivating the room. But Berlinski hints that Mona will not end as Cleopatra does from the very beginning, through the book’s epigraph:

The Winter’s Tale ends with qualified reconciliation. In the speech from which Berlinski’s epigraph is taken, Paulina sets herself apart from the familial celebrations and reunions of the final scene, encouraging Leontes and his restored family to “Go together,” while she exiles herself to mourning for her husband. Leontes interrupts – “O, peace, Paulina!” – and proceeds to marry her to Camillo, completing the play’s restorative ending (5.3.170). With Hermione seemingly back from the dead, Perdita returned to him, and the future of his kingdom secured by her marriage, Leontes gets everything he wants at the end of The Winter’s Tale.

This is a pattern in several of Shakespeare’s plays, each of which centers the patriarch and his role tying up loose ends. Cymbeline ends with the restoration of the line of succession; the reconciliation of Cymbeline, Imogen, and Posthumous; and accords between Britain and Rome. Pericles closes with the miraculous reunion of Pericles, Thaisa, and their daughter Marina. In Measure for Measure, the Duke marries everyone off, with the implication that he is restoring what should have been and rectifying wrongs. His proposal to Isabella at the end of that final scene makes explicit the same problem that complicates these endings: despite the feeling of catharsis and completion, there are unresolved issues sitting underneath each. The Duke is perhaps the most overt example, but the pattern repeats itself across this group of plays. These men – all kings or dukes – hold the power to bring about the ending they desire.

There is a magical quality to Mona’s ending that makes it both narratively effective and patriarchally inflected. Having been on her transformative adventure – a la Pericles or Prospero – Mona returns home, with Milton and his housekeeper Karolina in tow, to find her in-laws, son, and niece waiting with open arms. Her husband comes back with Vanessa and her son, and suddenly all the key players, including two women with good reasons to be wary of Milton, are preparing a meal together and playing their parts as a loving and happy royal court – excuse me – family. Mona takes her place as monarch/hostess and, Berlinski tells us “[a]ll of the guests obeyed [her] orders” (299). Suddenly, as if by magic, their real and potent grievances melt away while frozen cranberry sauce turns “from gray to red” (299).

Mona speaks Paulina’s line in this last scene: “Go together, you precious winners all; your exultation partake to everyone.” This, combined with Phil’s observation that Mona “work[s] miracles” suggests Mona as a Paulina. But what, exactly, is Mona’s miracle? And, if she is Paulina, who is the Hermione of this scene: the wrongéd one who returns to bring about the necessary reunion and reconciliation? The obvious candidate is Milton himself, resurrected from his reclusive pit of self-pity and brought out into the light, to drink beer provided by the young woman he once assaulted and silently pass plates to the woman he coerced into a relationship, enabled by the magic – the miracles! – of yet another woman he behaved inappropriately with.

But there is another way to read Mona in this scene. Despite her persistent, if fraught, association with Cleopatra throughout the novel, Mona Zahid’s ending is Leontes’, not Cleopatra’s. Berlinski puts her into the patriarchal position of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy: she receives restoration and proffers reconciliation, even as big questions remain about what happens after the curtain falls. Mona’s ending prompted me to reconsider this character and her choices through the lens of masculinity, and I invite readers to consider this question: to what extent do Mona’s actions read differently if we imagine her as a patriarchal storyteller?