DOLLHOUSE

A teeny peek behind a teeny scene of the TV series The Testaments, launching April 8 .... This gets meta.

Last fall, when my memoir, Book of Lives, came out, my friend and fellow adventurer Faye Souter from Canmore, Alberta (Canada) made me a bowlful of tiny little copies of it. People thought they were candies, though nobody actually ate them.

Then, a bit later, I was on the set of The Testaments — we were shooting my weird cameo scene — and I brought some tiny memoirs to hand out to team members. After my bizarre performance — not in the first episode though, wait for it — I was given a tour of some of the built sets, including the Aunt Lydia School (every high-schooler’s nightmare, as long as it’s a girl’s school with lots of sewing; yes, revenge on my Home Ec teacher, in a twisted sort of way).

I was also shown the set of Agnes’s house. The first episode of the series is called “Dollhouse.” Inside Agnes’s house there is indeed a dollhouse; it’s a replica of the actual house. Inside the dollhouse — which is in my novel, and, as described, children do indeed act out some of their less socially-approved emotions through their dollhouses. We won’t go into the more harrowing acts visited upon Barbies (haircuts, permanent marker tattoos).

In the dollhouse within the house, there is an armchair. “Put my little Book of Lives in the armchair,” said Steve Stark of Toluca Films, one of the executive producers of The Testaments. So I did, and he took this picture.

So: a dollhouse within a house that is itself a dollhouse — cf. Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House — and in the dollhouse, an armchair, and in the armchair, a book, and inside the book, the story of how The Testaments came to be written. A dollhouse containing the tale of itself. Now you know something that’s not in any of the movie magazines, though plenty else is; see for instance https://moviedelic.com/where-hulu-the-testaments-filmed/ .

Maybe Faye will make me a miniature one of these books — it’s the TV tie-in for the series. That’s Agnes (Chase Infiniti) with Daisy (Lucy Halliday) eyeballing her, and Aunt Lydia (Ann Dowd) doing some menacing lurking in the background.

And speaking of plays, here’s the original Mr. Plays himself, playing with a couple of mini-books. (Thanks to Lu-Anne Walter). Or maybe he’s just been looking himself up in the Index, as one does.

Are all novels doll’s houses really? Miniature worlds within which the author acts as Fate? Are they puppet shows, as Thackeray would have it in Vanity Fair: “As the manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him…”

And: in our age of politics as performance: Is child’s play the thing/ In which to catch the conscience of the not-a-king? Don’t say “What conscience.” It’s not nice. But neither are the not-a-kings who run Gilead.