The comic Jacqueline Novak wears the same outfit each time she performs her solo show, “Get on Your Knees”: a loose gray T-shirt, jeans, and a broken-in pair of white-and-gray sneakers. The clothes allow her a kind of anonymity and neutrality, as well as comfort. “Get on Your Knees” is part standup act, part coming-of-age story, and part philosophy lecture. It is also an athletic feat, so she often wears a sports bra, a practical choice that nonetheless warranted extensive consideration before a performance one evening in the summer of 2021. Novak had dedicated the previous four years to the show, but she was still tinkering, refining, and annotating each creative decision she made, particularly as she anticipated taping the show for a Netflix special. “I love sports bras,” she said in front of a mirror in the greenroom at the Cherry Lane Theatre, in the West Village, where she was doing a ten-week run. “But there’s this belief, inherently, that I’m not supposed to be wearing a sports bra. Do you know what I mean? It’s too athletic.”
Novak, who is prone to self-narration, doubled back: “But then I’m, like, why do I feel the audience is owed a separation of my breasts?” Novak is forty-one, but she has a girlish face and a long-standing interest in elaborate skin-care rituals that, to an audience member, might make her look like the high-school version of herself she explores in the performance.
“Get on Your Knees” is a ninety-minute show about fellatio, a description that might make people assume that Novak is yet another raunch comic. In fact, much of the performance is about how insufficient the language around sex can be. “I think the word ‘erection’ is a bit architectural for what’s happening there,” she says at one point. “I don’t think anyone should go in that building. It’s not up to code.”
“For Jacqueline, the show is about taking a very mundane, crude act and whipping it into a cosmic frenzy,” the comic John Early, who directed the live version of the show, said. Fred Armisen, the comic and actor, said, “It feels somehow good-spirited—there’s nothing mean in it. I really could bring my mom without having to explain anything.” Novak’s own parents have seen the show dozens of times.
Novak’s longtime boyfriend, the comic Chris Laker, said, “No one’s ever asked me if it’s uncomfortable for me.” Laker, whose personality is a mellow counterweight to Novak’s kinetic disposition, has a dry affect. “If they did, I would just be, like, ‘Whatever.’ ”
Most comics build hour-long sets piecemeal, workshopping jokes in shorter appearances, earning more stage time, and eventually stitching their best bits together. Novak, though, wrote “Get on Your Knees” as a complete set, in 2017. Then she sent out a call to her Instagram followers, asking if any of them would let her stage it for them. At a party in Brooklyn, she performed for a room of strangers. Laker warmed the crowd up, and she did the show on a small wooden platform that had been constructed by the hosts. Bigger venues in Los Angeles and New York followed, and by the time of the 2021 Cherry Lane run the show had attracted attention from such celebrities as Lucas Hedges, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Emma Stone. The pop-music producer Mark Ronson boasted on Instagram about having seen it five times, and Sally Field visited Novak backstage after a performance.
Novak has described herself as a P. T. Barnum figure who enjoys managing every aspect of her travelling show. In the early days, she hired a publicity firm to help promote it, but eventually took on those duties herself. For most of her runs, she has been in charge of coördinating her performances, with the help of an intern turned assistant. On tour, Novak constructed the merchandise stand herself, stocking it with “Get on Your Knees” T-shirts and sweatshirts. With the help of a friend, she even coded a contactless digital program for the show, “instead of paying someone three thousand dollars to do it,” she said.
“I’m texting with her, and she’s, like, ‘I’m buying digital billboards in Detroit!’ ” Kate Berlant, who hosts the popular podcast “Poog” with Novak, said. “I’m, like, ‘You’re insane.’ ” When Novak noticed that a new restaurant was opening on the same block as the Cherry Lane, she tried to arrange a joint opening-night event. She got no response.
“This is becoming true of everything now: I want the details. Even with Netflix,” she told me after she finished postproduction for the special, which will air later this month. She had insisted on joining video editors and sound engineers to audit their work and participate in their processes. She had also asked to review the closed captioning. Caitlin Hotchkiss, a Netflix development executive, said that in her six years at the company she had never fielded such a request. “I’m not the artist who is, like, I just show up and do the thing,” Novak said.
At Netflix, specials are pumped out rapidly; the postproduction process can be executed in less than a month. (Novak’s took five months.) She told me recently, “I always anticipate friction, because when you feel like you’re being a bad client or student . . . And then people are amenable. And I go, Right, I gotta remember that. Natasha really helped me a lot with that.” She was referring to the actress Natasha Lyonne, who directed the “Get on Your Knees” special. (Lyonne had never met Novak before seeing the show during an early run at Dynasty Typewriter, in Los Angeles, but she immediately asked who would eventually direct the special.) Novak went on, “She was looking out for my creative interests in that way, when I might have been feeling the pressure of being a good student.”
Lyonne, who describes the show as “a Swiss clock,” said, “We would talk about it—should it be one hour? Because that’s what the algorithm prefers.” Novak insisted that the show retain its ninety-minute length. Advisers and collaborators often reminded Novak and Lyonne that they were working on a comedy special, not a movie. “It’s in the fuckin’ word: ‘special,’ ” Lyonne said. At one point, Novak made her own edits at home on iMovie, experimenting with different types of shots. “I would see people be, like, ‘Why is this detail necessary?’ ” Lyonne said. “If you just give her a chance to explain it, it’s very hard to not be seduced.”
In the years between signing the Netflix contract and releasing “Get On Your Knees,” Novak has endlessly workshopped the show. The taping was delayed several times, in part because of the pandemic but also because Novak wanted, she said, to “get on the road to have it in my bones to perform.”
She started stitching together audio from every performance, broken down by joke, in an effort to determine which was the best version. This level of exactitude isn’t unusual for her. For Novak, even hunting for deals online can take the form of a spiritual quest with high personal stakes. “Ten per cent is joyless,” she told me. “Ten per cent off is only meaningful in bulk. Don’t talk to me unless it’s twenty. You know when it’s, like, ‘up to twenty-five per cent off’? The ‘up to’ is the biggest insult. One item is twenty-five per cent off and the rest is three per cent off. It’s devastating.”
I first began corresponding with Novak in the spring of 2020, during the depths of lockdown, just after she had cancelled a tour for “Get on Your Knees.” Our initial call took several attempts to schedule, though neither of us had much going on. Planning our second call, a few months afterward, was even more difficult. Novak takes a fine-tooth comb to every social interaction, a habit that makes for brilliant comedy but exasperating real-life exchanges. At one point, she confessed over e-mail, “im being a little obsessive about being full of energy when we speak.”
By the time we spoke, we’d had so many interactions that I felt we had developed a form of intimacy. “Waking up in the morning, I was almost, like, I don’t know how to be profiled,” she said on the phone to me one afternoon. “There is no constitution there. I’m dissolute, or something. I was waiting for myself to come into focus enough.”
Backstage at the Cherry Lane in 2021, Novak applied a light layer of makeup and flat-ironed her hair, which is naturally curly. She and her assistant reviewed the guest list. Every night, Novak pored over the list of ticket holders to see who might show up. “My awareness of who’s in the audience has a profound effect on my internal experience,” she told me. “I found out this guy from my high school came last night.”
Much of the show centers on Novak’s fraught quest to successfully perform a blow job in high school. She tells the audience about how her field-hockey teammates encouraged the endeavor. At one performance, three women who had played on the team sat in the second row. This added a new layer of prospective humiliation for Novak. “Even though I reference things that are my own life and literal, I’m, like, ‘How crass if someone from my town or my high school treats it as if I’m just talking about my life. Excuse you? This is art,’ ” she said. “Of course, it’s not their job to be exactly what I think they should be.”
Shame is the root of most comedy, but Novak prefers to grapple with shame’s more free-spirited and familiar cousin: embarrassment. Her mother, Naomi Novak, told me that one of her daughter’s first words was “embarrassing.” “It’s so ’barrassin’,” she would say. In “How to Weep in Public,” a memoir-slash-self-help book that Novak published in 2016, she wrote, “Even as a newborn in the hospital, I tended to turn away and bury my face.”
Novak has two older siblings, and she developed an early analytical streak by observing them at home, in Westchester County, New York. Her mother recalls watching Novak’s nursery-school class through a window and noting that her daughter was completely silent; when she got home, however, she recounted every detail she’d seen. One day, Novak’s teachers called Naomi in to discuss a conversation they’d overheard. A boy had asked Novak, “Does your mother have a penis?” She’d replied in the same blunt but lyrical way that she talks about sex in “Get on Your Knees”: “No, she has a vagina. But hers has feathers.”
Naomi’s father was a rabbi, and Novak’s paternal grandparents came from Christian families. The clan delights in mashing up the customs of both cultures. “We’re a family of analyzers,” her father, Greg, said.
As the baby of the family, Novak sought out attention in a “wholesome way,” her brother, Jeff, said—by performing. In second grade, she played Gavroche, the swaggering young boy from “Les Misérables.” (A clip of the performance later aired on an episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”) By the time she was a teen-ager, though, Novak’s theatrical streak had receded, giving way to a more scholarly and self-conscious nature.
Around this time, Novak’s father read “Think and Grow Rich,” the 1937 book by Napoleon Hill and Rosa Lee Beeland, which has been characterized as “the granddaddy of all motivational literature.” The book inspired Greg to quit his corporate job to begin his own freelance marketing business. In the process, he accrued a small library of self-help tools, including a collection of Tony Robbins tapes. He often played the tapes in the car, and found an unlikely audience for them in his teen-age daughter. More recently, Novak helped her father start a podcast about Hegel, called “The Cunning of Geist.”
In “Get on Your Knees,” Novak describes the scene in which her field-hockey teammates urged her to get her first blow job out of the way. One night, she recalls, they offered her a beer and escorted her to her boyfriend’s house. “Sounds like peer pressure, the kind they warned us about. I didn’t experience it as such,” she says. “I experienced their pressure as support, because I was a young Tony Robbins reader. I knew that if you tell people your goals you become more likely to achieve them.”
When Novak arrived at Georgetown, in 2000, she decided that she would no longer sit on the sidelines. As a freshman, she became part of an improv troupe whose alumni include Mike Birbiglia, Nick Kroll, and John Mulaney. (Birbiglia is an executive producer of the Netflix special.)
Novak hated the self-consciousness she experienced when performing. Her creative-writing courses, meanwhile, gave her a sense of belonging, which was worse—she was repulsed by the ease she felt in that setting. Novak describes her time doing improv as a form of masochism. She remembers telling Mulaney, “ ‘You know how this is coming so easily to you that it’s not even funny? You know what you’re fucking doing, and you know you’ve got it. All you have to do now is be humble.’
“I was almost, like, ‘You’re a coward! You do what comes naturally!’ ” she told me. “It was this feeling of, like, my road is going to be longer.”
After college, Novak moved to New York, where she performed standup in small clubs while doing copywriting for advertising agencies. She had struggled with periods of depression for much of her life, and her advertising job exacerbated the condition. One evening, Novak went to bed early to get a good night’s sleep, only to wake up twenty-eight hours later, having missed an entire workday.
She was fired from the advertising agency and moved back into her childhood bedroom in the suburbs to live out what she now frequently refers to as her “depression years.” For Novak, a self-described former hypersomniac, this period informs many decisions that she makes today. She guards her physical and emotional energy fiercely, and experiments with new products and rituals to help her outrun the looming spectre of depression. She sometimes follows a very low-carb diet to regulate her blood sugar and her mood. She uses a machine called a “vitality swing” to quell her restless-leg syndrome. She’s tried a mountain of supplements, along with THC gummies, past-life-regression therapy, astral projection, energy-healing workshops, a Kundalini-yoga DVD called “Dancing the Chakras,” and a drink that involves blending frozen blueberries with an entire lemon, including the rind. She is particular about the physical exercises she does; she demands that her workouts have a guiding principle or philosophy. “I need a bigger idea behind what I’m doing,” she told me.
For a brief period in the summer of 2022, depression caught up with Novak again. “The black dog’s got me,” she announced to Berlant on an unusually sombre episode of their podcast, using an expression favored by Winston Churchill. (Novak once threw an event called a “depression carnival” and made a papier-mâché black dog for it.) Novak went on to say that, in her desperation, she had even attempted to sign up for one of the podcast’s sponsors—the virtual-therapy service Better Help. She and Berlant joked about the questions on the intake form. “This is the most perfectly integrated, authentic ad,” Novak said.
During the following week’s episode, the black dog was still present. Novak suspected that it had some connection to her glucose levels: “It has brought me to: O.K., it’s the blueberries. They spike my glucose. They send me high and then bring me low.” Berlant, concerned, asked, “But then what do you have, then? Fish oil, and . . . ?” Near the end of the episode, Novak began to cry. “It’s not the depression—I don’t care about that,” she said. “I’m literally humiliated by the fact that I’m someone who tries to be off bread, because it’s so ugly.”
Many of Novak’s best-loved early jokes were about food. In her appearances on late-night shows, she did a more generic form of comedy, with setups and punch lines, performing a kind of brash puncturing of delicate femininity. “I love nachos, but I am done getting them in a restaurant with a group of women as a shared appetizer,” she said during a set on “The Late Late Show with James Corden.” “The moment that the nachos arrive at the table, the women are always surprised by the size of the plate. . . . And I get sucked into this farce. I start acting like I don’t know how to handle the nachos.”
In 2014, Novak released a comedy album called “Quality Notions,” on which she explored some of the material that would later become “Get on Your Knees.” She then wrote “How to Weep in Public,” a humorous guide featuring “feeble offerings on depression from one who knows.” In the book, she encouraged fellow-depressives to let themselves fall as deeply into the hole as they can go. “While most books on depression try to help you win the war, this one is merely a cigarette in the trenches,” she wrote.
Ultimately, it was antidepressants that pulled Novak out of her post-college depressive fog. She moved back to the city and began doing standup in New York’s flourishing alternative-comedy scene, growing close with Berlant and Early. Armisen caught a Novak set at a benefit show and immediately began to consider her as a future opener. “She was talking about pizza, and how easy it is to eat pizza,” he told me. “She says things like it’s an observation she’s just sharing with you personally. It felt a little bit like she must have just thought of this right before she went onstage.”
But Novak struggled to break through. “Pretty much everybody who was doing comedy at that time has seen Jacqueline do little five- or ten-minute sets, and knows she’s brilliant, but, when you’re performing in little bars, you’re doing sets for mostly drunk people who are not there in good faith,” Early said. “I’ve kind of watched Jacqueline spin her notions on deaf ears for so many years.” Novak’s boyfriend, Laker, said of the time, “I would be the one who would always be, like, ‘I gotta go out tonight! I gotta be around!’ She didn’t care about that stuff.”
In 2017, Novak had an epiphany. The key to success wasn’t slowly working your way up, grasping for small opportunities. Instead, she decided to channel her energies into one exceptional piece of work. She told Laker about this fairly abstract plan while walking near their apartment, on the Upper West Side. He told me, “She had that realization of: You’ve gotta make one great thing and concentrate on that.”
She revisited some essays she’d written in a memoir class in high school. “Because I was self-identifying as this writer in high school, I was always metabolizing my own experience,” Novak told me. She remembers having an acute awareness that her experiences might be chronicled one day. “Am I living enough?” she would ask herself. “Which is the most embarrassing thing,” she said. “You’re supposed to be running through the streams barefoot, not having nostalgia for it as it’s happening.”
In college, Novak spent a summer in St. Petersburg, Russia, participating in a creative-writing seminar. There, she bonded with Liz Phang, now a television writer, over the experience of visiting Peter the Great’s cabinet of curiosities, which was filled with gruesome objects he’d collected in the eighteenth century. Phang remembers Novak impersonating fetuses with birth defects stored in jars, wrapping her arms around her torso as if to fit in a jar. “She was thinking of what it was to be the fetus,” Phang said.
At the time, Novak was working on an essay about having sex with someone who disgusted her. “She was diving into discomfort in writing in a way that I hadn’t seen before from a peer,” Phang said. “It was never maudlin or overdramatic.” Back at Georgetown, Novak continued to write about sex in her creative-writing classes. For one paper, she focussed on the first time she learned about blow jobs, in high school. “Georgetown was very preppy, and I was almost, like . . . Well, fuck you. I’m not afraid, you cornballs,” she said.
That essay became the germ of “Get on Your Knees,” which was originally titled “How Embarrassing for Her.” Novak used crafty strategies to draw attention to the show. She knew that Early had a fan base, and that if he was in the room people would show up. She presented versions of the show where he’d sit onstage with her and, as a bit, offer notes and feedback at the end of the performance. Eventually, this transformed into a more formal director-performer relationship.
One element of “Get on Your Knees” that was a constant challenge for Novak and Early was the tone. It was the #MeToo era, with its accompanying outrage at the Trump Administration, and they recognized how easily the show could slip into a mode of moral slam-dunking. They wanted to avoid imbuing the act with any kind of trauma narrative that rang false. “I think Jacqueline would be mortified if anyone in the audience thought she was trying to teach them a lesson, and I would be mortified by that, too,” Early said. “We were both scared that audiences would be hungry for . . . the sort of show where they could pat themselves on the back and be, like, ‘Yasss, queen.’ ”
At one point in the narrative, Novak recalls being unable to perform oral sex. She offers her boyfriend her virginity as a consolation prize. The central moment of the show arrives when Novak is finally, after an eternity of hand-wringing and failure, on the brink of her first blow job. She’d been reading “Lolita,” and as she kneeled, paralyzed before her boyfriend’s pelvic region, she thought, as she tells the audience, “What if I imagine that I’m just a character in a short story written by Vladimir Nabokov? Then no matter how badly this attempt at a blow job goes, in Nabokov’s deft pen, would the prose not sparkle?” She went on, “This was not dissociation, no, this was me with an idea, this was transcendence of the ego. There’s a difference!”
In 2019, Novak booked her first run at the Cherry Lane, and welcomed scouts from major streaming platforms to watch. A Netflix rep sat in the front row during one show, which rattled her. “I guess it wasn’t undeniable that day,” she said. Netflix passed. She and her agent decided that, instead of giving up, they would invite Netflix’s vice-president of comedy, Robbie Praw, to a performance at Largo, in Los Angeles. “Everyone in the comedy world was buzzing about this show she was doing,” Praw wrote me in an e-mail. “It was clearly a singular, important work.” He offered her a deal, as did HBO. She went with Netflix.
Novak was emboldened by the success. But she noticed that people were praising her for finally “finding her voice,” which didn’t sit quite right with her. “I finally found my confidence, and the way to trick you into liking it,” she said.
Novak and Laker moved to Los Angeles in 2019, having decided that their time in New York was a “rough draft,” she said. That year, she and Berlant frequently visited L.A.’s Korean spas together, and discussed what they were putting into their bodies or on their skin. Both women had long considered podcasting to be a humiliating comedy cliché. “I always said when we first started this, ‘My greatest fear is to be known for a podcast,’ ” Berlant told me. But one day, while in a salt cave at a spa, Novak and Berlant made plans for a show that felt fresh enough to pursue. “Poog” would offer a novel perspective on wellness—not as an all-encompassing pursuit or as an object of ridicule but as a pastime.
“It’s the fantasy that some improvement lies around the corner with the next product, device, morning routine, or dietary adjustment,” Novak explained to me a few months before the podcast débuted, in November, 2020. “We joke about how we love a scam. Bring on the snake oil. Please, I want to believe!” “Poog”—a play on the name of Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness empire, Goop—was conceived as “an indulging of that compulsion without any attempt to pretend that it’s a value.” It was also an opportunity for Berlant to establish a weekly cadence of conversation with her friend. “I joke that I wanted to do a podcast with her so I could force her to talk to me for an hour every week, because she really can be quite an elusive character,” Berlant told me. “We’ll talk about a plan, and I’m, like, Promise me you’ll go there! I’m always having this panic to nail her down, to force her to be available to me.”
Just before the pandemic, Novak and Berlant shopped “Poog” around to various platforms, including Will Ferrell’s new podcast venture, Big Money Players Network. “The title alone made me laugh outloud,” Ferrell wrote me in an e-mail. Novak and Berlant signed with Ferrell’s company.
Descriptions of “Poog” episodes can read like nonsense: “The symbolism of high-SPF sunscreen, cartoonish inchworms, and self-hating magicians are discussed. . . . Long foam bendable whatevers. The promise of science. Fiberwig. The Prestige is recapitulated and its stars scrutinized.”
“Our producers were, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ” Berlant told me. But “Poog” took off quickly, earning the loyalty of so-called Poog Hags as well as of performers like Amy Schumer and Miranda July. “ ‘Poog’ has a very specific audience,” Hans Sahni, the head of content at Big Money Players Network, said. “It doesn’t need to be everyone’s favorite show, but it needs to be someone’s favorite—not just one podcast in the rotation.”
July, who didn’t know Novak or Berlant well, e-mailed them during the pandemic to see if they’d be interested in having an unrecorded weekly Zoom conversation with her. They agreed. “It was a really high level of thought,” July said, describing their calls. “As we squirmed, questioning our lives . . . we were looking at things through a Jungian lens, applying different books we were recommending to each other. It was not a completely myopic shit-talk cryfest.”
One frequent topic of conversation on “Poog” is the experience of dining in restaurants. Anyone who is close with Novak likes to say that a restaurant dinner is the pinnacle of the Novak social experience. It’s an existentially fraught endeavor that brings together all flavors of humiliation and opportunities for analysis. There are painful encounters with servers; allergens lurking in every dish; and the ever-present possibility of not getting enough food. Early said that his main goal while working with Novak on “Get on Your Knees” was to make the show feel like a dinner-length conversation.
Novak and I met for dinner one evening after a show, at an Italian restaurant in the Flatiron district that she’d selected, looking up its menu in advance. Carbs were fair game that night, but Novak has a tree-nut allergy, which is a constant hazard for her. She’d been to the restaurant once before and had declined to eat the meatballs, because she was wary of how she might react to pine nuts. To prepare for this dinner, she’d conducted an experiment at home by eating a small amount of pine nuts, EpiPen in hand. She was fine.
“So you can have pine nuts?” our waiter asked.
She nodded. “Another allergen I haven’t tested in a long time—and I’m so embarrassed to be this person—is clams. It’s the only other thing I can’t have,” she told him. After a prolonged back-and-forth about the shareability of various dishes, Novak allowed the waiter to pick a selection of his favorites. He seemed enraptured by the show that Novak was putting on for him, which she cushioned with dashes of self-awareness and gestures of sympathy. It was sweltering, and she took note of his uniform. “I hate that you have to wear a long-sleeved shirt,” she told him.
It is nearly impossible to keep Novak on topic. (Because of this, I chose to glean most biographical information about her from her family members and her book, instead of asking her directly.) A comment I made about a recent “Poog” episode set off a firestorm of tangents—about the fitness mogul Tracy Anderson, the untimely death of a Kundalini-yoga figurehead known as Guru Jagat, the fantasy of bringing a pet to a restaurant, chia seeds, a cocktail she’d had with her cousin the musician Jack Antonoff that she hadn’t realized contained pistachios, the idea of daddy longlegs being more upsetting than rats.
“I have six things to tell you about the last five minutes,” Novak said. “I was also thinking about how I want to know about your life. Is that irritating?”
A waiter strolled by. “I almost get scared when they come,” she said.
The conversation turned to Novak’s Netflix taping, a subject she had been wrestling with and keeping at bay since she signed the contract. She was thinking about why she got into comedy, and what she hoped to accomplish. She had been performing—almost to the point of compulsion—her show in both traditional theatrical venues and standup clubs, but couldn’t figure out which was better. A theatre like the Cherry Lane felt perhaps “too precious” to her. “It’s almost too much of a natural fit for a creative-writing major like myself,” she said.
“There’s a reason I went into the comedy world, and it’s because it’s a lowbrow world,” she went on. “Which expectation am I more excited to upset?”
She considered for a moment. “I actually think the comedy side is more exciting to upset,” she said. “To me, going into the theatre and being unexpectedly vulgar is not that exciting. Going into the scary, adversarial world of standup and being extra vulgar, and, like, pretentious . . . that’s exciting.”
One night in June, I visited the back patio of the Ludlow Hotel, where Novak had invited people to celebrate the taping of “Get on Your Knees,” the first installment of which had taken place earlier that evening, at Town Hall. The space was dense with supporters, Drew Barrymore and Natasha Lyonne among them. Laker stood to one side, calmly surveying the crowd. After a long, hushed conversation with the actress Brie Larson, Novak walked across the patio, looking a bit dazed. I told her that I had a question I’d been wondering about for months. What made her feel ready to film the special, after years of fiddling? Pressure from Netflix? Financial stakes? Workshopping the show so intensely that she got tired of it? Finally achieving perfection?
Novak turned to metaphor. “If I’m not being vigilant with my thinking, I would slip into the mind-set that taping the special is like the fucking balance beam at the Olympics,” she said. “Training for this specific thing, for years, and then there’s this big fuckin’ day where it all better come together and crystallize. That is an extraordinary amount of pressure.” On “Poog,” she’d been referring to the taping as her “wedding,” because of how much preparation it demanded. That mind-set, she knew on some level, was foolish.
“All of these fantasies of tacking my mind down and working in this way of funnelling everything toward the best version . . . I had to completely fucking let go of,” she said.
There’s a line that appeared early in some performances of “Get on Your Knees” about the humiliation of the human body. “I look forward to discarding the form, the flesh . . . its many indignities, needs, wants,” Novak says. Still, she could not ignore the needs and wants of the human form as she prepared to film. She spent much of the next day shopping for a new pair of jeans, because the ones she’d been wearing for years had finally deteriorated beyond usability. When she arrived at Town Hall for the second night of taping, she’d bought so many pairs that she had to transport them in a rolling suitcase. Finally, she let Lyonne select a pair of distressed Levi’s 501s.
During the performance, the new jeans made themselves known. Pacing around the stage, riffing on the idea of ghosts, Novak kept fiddling with the waistband, absent-mindedly tucking her T-shirt into it.
“I am what many would arguably call a heterosexual woman,” she told the crowd. Suddenly, a voice came over the sound system. Lyonne was on the lookout for possible continuity issues. “Novak, untuck your shirt, please?” she pleaded. Novak obliged. “There she is! Sorry, go on,” Lyonne said.
Out of rhythm, Novak asked where to start from. “From wherever you want, baby,” Lyonne responded.
“From the top?” Novak smiled devilishly, and the crowd cackled. Suddenly, the performance, which had been chiselled and molded and tended to for many years, took on an element of improvisation.
“All right, let me think. O.K.,” she said. The crowd laughed. “Guys, thank you. You looked like you were worried for me. I appreciate it, but . . . I got this.” The room began to whoop and cheer in unison.
Novak remained off-script. “I had this big realization about the theatre today,” she said. “It’s a bunch of people, all facing one direction. And I’m facing the other direction.” ♦
