Nightmare trip gives rise to 1woman show
Laura Jane Bailey processes husband’s health crisis, recovery in ‘The Paris Effect’
Two years ago, San Carlos actor Laura Jane Bailey and her husband, Robert Young, were supposed to be “a middleaged couple running through Paris together.” Then the trip, a longtime dream for her, turned into a medical nightmare. Suddenly her husband was paralyzed. Then he needed a ventilator and a medically induced coma.
For a long time, Bailey struggled to convey the magnitude of what she felt over those two months alone overseas and the years of recovery. Then she started writing a solo show. The result, “The Paris Effect,” livestreams on Saturday, Aug. 1, on Twitch via the Streaming Theatre, the coronavirusera creation of actor Kevin Kemp.
The Chronicle spoke with Bailey about this harrowing episode in her life, why she needed theater to fully tell her story and what it’s like to perform a show about a health crisis in the middle of a global health crisis.
Q: You first went to Paris when you were about 20. What did it mean to bring your husband there decades later?
A: My real first trip to Paris was with my brother, and it was actually when he said, “Let’s go to Paris and get drunk.” I felt so glamorous, just being there. I wasn’t. I was a kid from the Midwest, backpack and everything. But I knew, “Oh, God, there is something really special here.” So I wanted to share that with my husband, with Bob. I wanted to show him the city — and this horrible thing happened.
Q: How did he get sick?
A: He was bitten by a mosquito either here or in London — we’re not really sure of the timeline — and he developed West Nile fever. That kicked off a Guillain-Barré episode, which is like MS (multiple sclerosis), but you can recover from it. The sheaths of his nerves were eaten away. He was paralyzed from his feet to his neck ... (in just) a couple of days. Then he developed encephalitis, and we were stuck at this hospital for two months, and he was between life and death for the entire time we were there.
Q: When did you first realize something was wrong?
A: He was really frustrating me, actually, because he didn’t feel well. We ended up at the post office one day, and he was signing his name for a charge, and he couldn’t sign his name. He couldn’t hold the pen.
Q: You were by yourself for two months in another country while you worked to book a medical flight back home. How did you get through each day?
A: Right? I spent from 2 in the afternoon till 10 p.m. at night at the hospital, in the ICU room. They let me do that. I listened to a lot of KQED, because I could get that on the computer: “Oh that’s right, the Bay Area, that’s what’s happening in real life!” I listened to Cubs baseball games. I sat and waited and watched him and waited.
There were just so many medical issues that I thought, “This is it. This is
how he’s going to go, and he’s going to die in France, with just me around, not his family, not his loved ones, not the people who need to be here.” So I was desperate to get him back to the United States.
There’s still some physical issues with his feet and his hips. He uses a walker. But everything else is all Bob. I’m blessed and thrilled and can’t believe it. So I think that’s why I want to share this story. Even when you think there’s no hope, there actually is a little bit of hope. Q: What has the recovery been like for you? A: It’s been difficult at the beginning. But then suddenly it stopped being difficult. We’re still the same two people in this marriage. We just had these other things that were added on.
Last March, Capital Stage (in Sacramento) called me and said, “We’ve got a role for you.” It was “The Roommate.” It’s a part that I had been literally chasing, and it was with Jamie Jones, who’s a very good friend of mine. I love being onstage with her more than anybody else.
I came to Bob: “I don’t know what to do about this. If I say no, I think I’m saying no to the rest of my career” — not that he has that much power, but I think that’s me personally letting go of it. He said, “Well, you can’t do that.” So we got caregivers, and I did the show, and I moved over to Sacramento for five days out of the week and came back on two days. Q: When did you know you needed to make this story into its own solo show? A: When we came home and people would ask me, “Oh my God, what was going on?” I could give facts, of course — “This thing happened. Then this thing happened.” — but I couldn’t quite convey the loneliness and the fear and those feelings of doom. So I started writing about it, and realizing, “Who’s going to want to go see a show about doom?”
But I also found a way to talk about the idea of passions, and where those come from, and when we give them up. Can we go back to our passions? Can we share our passion? So that’s really where that first trip to Paris comes from.
Q: And now Paris is a character in “The Paris Effect.”
A: She is very sophisticated. She looks a whole lot like Catherine Deneuve. She ages along with whoever her lover is at the time.
When I first met her, I was 20, so she was around 20. Then when we came back, I was in my 50s, so she was this very glamorous — she looked like a movie star. She dresses like those Parisian women, in those incredibly perfectly fit pants, the blouse that’s just laying on her, the hair that’s so great and thick and tossable. The thing about her, though: She’s very seductive, but she’s also a predator. There’s also this very evil part of her.
Q: What’s it been like preparing to perform this show now that the whole world is also in a health emergency?
A: I was very concerned about that: Do I talk about something other than COVID? Is this going to trigger people, or are they going to tune out because it’s too close?
The feedback I get is, “Actually this is a pretty good way to talk about COVID.” Now people really understand what it means to be put on a ventilator, and it’s not something to be done lightly. You actually need to make that decision. And not knowing what the virus is, or what the medical emergency is, and sitting, waiting. I got to sit with him every day, and we know now, with the COVID patients, you’re not able to. Reading about that is very hard for me. I cannot imagine how I would have done that.