The Rehearsal is an HBO documentary series in which the comedian Nathan Fielder guides strangers through an overwhelming domestic problem. The first episode opens with a man on a trivia team who wants to confess he lied for a decade about having a masters degree. Fielder has him practise the admission on an actor cast to look – and sound – like the team member he’s most intimidated by. To make it even more realistic, it all happens in a replica of the bar he plans to meet her in.
Every possible outcome of their discussion is imagined and accounted for. In times of unknown global turbulence, people have tended to surrender to the madness of ectoplasm, seances or, 100 years later, QAnon. But in allowing people to rehearse their own lives, Fielder guides vulnerable souls to emotional breakthrough via the pursuit of order. Using his blank presence he is, like a psychiatrist, their “tabula rasa” – a clean slate on to which these people can project.
Fielder is the latest in a long line of iconic Jewish comedians in the US – Lenny Bruce, Larry David, Woody Allen – whose awkward, deadpan style contrasts with British humour, which can often be more class-based.
I am old enough to have been a screenwriter in the US at the dawn of reality TV, when writers were striking, and so the networks came up with documentary soaps to fill schedules. I am old enough that my last boyfriend was young enough to be my son, if I’d had him at a confronting age. Alone in the living room when I was upstairs putting my daughter to bed, he used to laugh at Nathan Fielder in a way that sounded like he was being hurt and the laughs were falling out of the wounds. I don’t laugh at The Rehearsal the way young people do. I cry at strangers working so hard to make things go right. When I fretted over the age gap predicament, I’d soothe myself with the Lorrie Moore line: “Life is sad, here is someone”.
Borrowing from Fielder’s methodology, for more than a year, my ex and I sent each other house listings – “rehearsing”. I went to have my fertility measured, “rehearsing”. The doctor – a replacement doctor because the other doctor was called away mid-sonogram – (actors are often replaced on The Rehearsal) said “Wow! Check out those ovaries!”
I rehearsed, in my head, going through menopause with my ex. I rehearsed introducing him to my elderly parents, long before I finally did. “Please explain before we meet,” said my mother, when I told her what I was doing, “that I wasn’t always a withered rectangle”.
When my ex finally meets her on a family holiday, he says it is not so bad because in the rehearsal in his head she was so old that she was actually already dead, propped up at the dinner table, with him required to be polite and pretend he hadn’t noticed.
He got my kid bonding with her little cousin by initiating a discussion about crabs. And then, inevitably, he made my father watch Nathan Fielder. My father did the laugh I remember from childhood, where his whole face goes red and he clutches at his chest, and his wife and children are very frightened.
Our relationship is great, until I have to have an abdominal operation, waking to intense pain that lasts a week. Over a month, I have to try to walk. I have to try to eat food again because the nausea is overwhelming. I get sepsis and go back to hospital. The same summer a close friend stops speaking to me, but won’t explain what I’ve done. I guess the reasons, and she says my guesses are wrong, but won’t elaborate and eventually stops returning my messages. I’m on my 10th round of antibiotics of the year.
I don’t tell my boyfriend I think of suicide a lot that summer, knowing it isn’t actually available to me as a “choose your own adventure”. It’s just something that is advertised on the wall of my subconscious, like signs I’ve seen in restaurants that say “choking victim”. Within the rounds of antibiotics, anaesthesia, swelling, he knows only that I am not really myself.
He is very beautiful. He may not stay that way. I hope he does. There is, however, one core thing that makes it possible for me to end it: I decide and cannot un-decide it. All of the troubled souls of The Rehearsal – and of Fielder’s previous show, Nathan For You – are trying their absolute best, even if they humiliate themselves and become laughable as a consequence. I think my boyfriend is wonderful and funny, but I do not think he is trying his very best.
After we break up, I go alone for a weekend to somewhere with autumn sun and a straight ladder from the rocks into the ocean. Because I am without him, I don’t have to arrange my body at flattering angles or consider which foods not to order at dinner if I hope to have sex. There is nothing to try my best for any more.
In The Rehearsal, a child actor called Remy, who is playing Fielder’s son as a six-year-old, becomes crushingly attached to him in real life and, while his single mom looks on, calls Nathan “Daddy” off screen. It’s sad. It may have all gone too far. What was real and what was what you wanted to be real? You turn it over in your brain as if it were Torah study, which The Rehearsal often feels like: the endless search for the “right” answer. In the rehearsal there is humanity and gentleness. And people trying their absolute best. It’s just that none of it can be solved. And so it isn’t.
