Fates and Furies

After a two-week residency in Osaka, the longest he’s ever been away from Mathilde, Lotto can’t wait to be back in her arms. Pushed by an overeager male passenger, Lotto tumbles down the stairs, hurting himself badly in the fall.

At first, the prospect of leisure and more time to focus on making a family with Mathilde doesn’t seem so bad to Lotto, as he recuperates. However, now creatively empty and trapped at home, Lotto soon falls further in letting himself go and subsists on a diet of alcohol and binge-watching documentaries. Mathilde tries to pull her husband out of his slump by getting him a Shiba Inu puppy that Lotto names God. And yet the puppy “could not bridge the distance between [Lotto’s] hermit life as a broken man and the life he longed to live again in the city” (110).

Even after the casts come off, Lotto struggles to find himself again. Mathilde surprises him with a city trip for his fortieth birthday, to see an opera about Nero. Inspired to write his own opera, Lotto has his heart set on tracking down Leo Sen, an obscure Nova Scotian up-and-coming composer, to be Lotto’s collaborator on the opera.

When Lotto and Leo get in touch, they agree to work together for three weeks at a remote New England artist’s colony. The two enter an intense bubble of artistic creation that borders on the verge of an emotional love affair. Mathilde feels as if she’s been abandoned when Lotto forgoes a promised break to come home for Thanksgiving and extends his stay at the colony for an additional two weeks.

The unspoken connection that Lotto and Leo share is broken after Leo plays Lotto the aria that has consumed him for days on end. Having put his heart and soul into the piece, Leo shatters when Lotto can’t hide his displeased reaction quickly enough. The piece is not in harmony with what Lotto had in mind; it is too beautiful, and Lotto wanted something uglier. Leo runs away. Rather than go after him, Lotto returns home to his wife and visiting family for Christmas. While in the pool, Lotto imagines a short news article that he has “drowned.” Everything between Lotto and Mathilde remains left unsaid.

Despite having nearly completed the writing portion of the opera, Lotto shelves the project. Mathilde reads it anyway while he is out one day, despite his refusal to show it to her.

The play is a hybrid of Sophocles’ Antigone and the ancient Greek myth of Sybil. Sybil was granted immortality by the Gods, but not eternal youth; Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus Rex, hangs herself in anguish over the persecution she faces for carrying out the gods’ will in burying her traitor brother.

Lotto’s play, entitled The Antigonad, alleges that Sophocles’ Antigone (known as “Go” in Lotto’s play) was saved by the gods, but secludes herself deep in a cave away from civilization for thousands of years. Antigone, like Sybil, shrivels up in old age and wishes revenge on the gods. In three acts she evolves from insane loneliness to falling in love with Ros, a mine worker, who tries to help her escape in the final act. He fails. The play ends with Go curled up in the darkness, more alone than ever before.

Mathilde puts the play back in its file folder and goes about her day.