A Conversation between Eliana Theologides Rodriguez and Alicia Theologides Rodriguez

Eliana: So let’s dive in. What’s your favorite quote from Derangements?

Alicia: There are so many amazing quotes. But one that’s really sticking with me is from Roxanne’s monologue.

“You just never know what people are going to do. That’s the thing. It makes you watchful. Then you see yourself being watchful and think oh, I’m being so paranoid. Then you let your guard down, and they get you again!”

I love how the play sets us up to think Roxanne is crazy. She thinks the waiter’s coming onto her, she thinks a routine gynecological check-up has sexual undertones, and she thinks the random guy standing outside the restaurant is a sex pervert. And then, holy shit, he is!! 

E: It makes me think of how often women who address sexual harassment are assumed to be delusional. It’s like when your coworker is sexually harassing you, and you finally call him on it, and he says, “That was never my intention! I’m not even attracted to you!” and suddenly, you’re the crazy one. And then you’re in the audience of Nadja’s play, watching Roxanne and thinking, “This woman is crazy!” I guess you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself call another woman crazy.

A: Yes, and Roxanne’s hypervigilance is a source of embarrassment for Anne Marie at first. It’s interesting how, at the beginning of the play, it seems that Anne Marie and Roxanne are not actually very close friends. In the first line, Anne Marie says, “I’m at dinner with a friend I haven’t seen in a while.” And then the scene starts, and very quickly, we (and Anne Marie) realize that something is off with Roxanne. The line where Anne Marie teases that Roxanne can never tell when someone likes her suggests that Roxanne’s paranoia is perhaps a new facet of her personality–or at least something Anne Marie wasn’t aware of. Which begs the question, why has Roxanne developed this off-putting and socially crippling paranoia?

E: I sort of felt like something had happened to Roxanne since she last saw Anne Marie. Maybe not one singular event, but an accumulation of experiences that made her increasingly watchful. In the monologue you quoted, she also says, “You say something nice to the bank teller and then he tells you all about his wife who’s a narcissist and turning his son against him. You hold the door and someone grabs your ass.” She’s trying to protect herself from further traumatization by interpreting danger before it can surprise her. But of course, “…then you’re mean to an old man for no reason. And you’ll never see the old man again.” Heartbreaking!

And Anne Marie’s trauma response is the total opposite. When Roxanne calls Anne Marie the night after they get flashed, Anne Marie tells her to “just forget about it,” and hangs up. She wants to believe that the incident wasn’t a big deal, but her subsequent derangement (!) proves otherwise. 

A: Yes, and all the absurdity that ensues feels like an expressionistic representation of how trauma warps your world. Not only is it disorienting, but it brings up every other trauma and microtrauma that’s living in your psyche. Anne Marie states that all the women in her family are crazy, so this traumatic event could be the catalyst for those underlying genetic disorders to suddenly manifest in unmanageable ways. Anne Marie thinks she can keep her head down and muscle through this. But then she can’t focus at her job, she’s making weird mistakes, she can’t remember her friends’ names. 

E: It also makes me wonder whether the women in Anne Marie’s family are legitimately crazy or whether they’re just responding to a crazy world. Like when Aunt Colleen tells Anne Marie that her mother’s gone insane because she thinks every picture is AI-generated, including a picture of her own niece. Anne Marie’s mother’s paranoia about AI mirrors Roxanne’s paranoia about sexual predation. But the thing is… there is so much AI these days! And there is so much sexual predation! Is it better to be naive or paranoid?

Anne Marie rejects paranoia, but paranoia doesn’t reject her. She becomes unrelentingly vigilant about the ways in which she’s losing her mind. I love how Nadja turns the character’s psychological decline into an almost immersive experience for the audience. We watch Anne Marie question,

“What year is it?”

“Is that my mom?”

“Have I seen that guy before?”

But the whole time, we’re also like,

“What year is it?”

“Is that her mom?”
“Have WE seen that guy before?”

We’re grasping for reality just as much as the characters are.

A: Speaking of the flasher, I thought his monologue was brilliant and disturbing. I liked how he describes his actions in a TED Talk manner, which makes him appear composed and introspective, directly contrasting the previous scene where he comes off as deranged and maniacal. He’s articulating very human feelings of wishing you could reveal your true self and be unconditionally loved for it, and that’s a feeling we can accept on its face, but it’s disturbing in context. It reveals that the psychology of a predator can be articulated in a relatable way, and out of context, could seem rational and reasonable, which makes you realize the plight of a victim in proving that they were harmed by someone like this.

E: It’s so disturbing to learn that someone who preyed on you has a family, a philosophy, an internality. Like, if you have all those things, how could you have done this to me? It was particularly unsettling to realize that there were moments in the flasher’s monologue where I related to him. I’ve also wondered when to fight my nature and when to surrender to it, and whether my self-acceptance comes at the cost of my social acceptance. We’d all like to believe that the psychology of a predator is entirely alien to our own. But in doing so, are we absolving ourselves of… “the work”?

I’m also reflecting on the fact that I thought Roxanne was delusional for a good portion of the play. Really, this guy is the delusional one!!! He’s obsessed with his own dick, convinced it emits a “godly light” and that when people see it, their faces are illuminated in an “almost religious way”. He’s mistaking a look of horror for a look of awe. The weird thing is, he’s right that his dick emits a light, and that light functions like a portal. But the portal is not to a godly world. It’s to a world that is uncanny, uncertain, scary, and senseless.

A: And, importantly, there’s nowhere they can really turn except to each other. For example, both women seek help from medical professionals and experience medical sexism. Their symptoms are written off as pregnancy or being clinically evil. This further confuses them because they feel like their physical sensations are incongruent with their material reality, which heightens their stress, confusion, and worsens their state.

E: Yes! Instead of saving them, the medical system only makes them worse. The professionals who are supposed to heal the characters’ trauma only compound it. And suddenly, everything makes even less sense than it did before.

But I really feel like the senselessness is the heart of the play. As you let the absurdity of Nadja’s world wash over you, you realize that you’ve lived in this world, or perhaps are currently living in it, or perhaps it lives in you. We’ve all experienced events that have fractured our realities, and we’ve all been failed by the very systems meant to protect us from those fracturings. Ultimately, the most stabilizing thing Anne Marie and Roxanne can reach for is a shared understanding, which is what they have in each other. And a shared understanding is exactly what Nadja offers us.

A: And that’s why she’s our honorary third sister.

E: Yes. And speaking of sisters, would you like to close us out with some sisterly advice, passed down from our mother, and her mother before her?

A: “Do not go into the woods to see the unaffiliated woman. She is super grouchy and super, super armed.”