All's Well

In All’s Well, the world of theater is a metaphor for the ways individuals construct their identities and attempt to control their life narratives. The novel systematically blurs the distinction between stagecraft and lived experience, suggesting that when reality becomes unbearable, art offers a seductive but dangerous means of enacting wish fulfillment and revenge. Through Miranda, the narrative explores how the lines between director, actor, and authentic self can collapse, and this can distort perception, erode authenticity, and lead to personal disintegration.

Miranda’s fixation on staging Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well reflects her desire to superimpose a neat, redemptive arc onto her own disordered life. The play’s plot, with its miraculous cure and forced reconciliation, is a fantasy script of Miranda’s longing to be healed, loved, and reunited with Paul, her ex-husband. Her personal history is also entwined with the play since she was starring in the lead role as Helen when Paul saw her in the play and fell in love with her. This was before the accident that ruined her career, so the play represents a past in which she was beautiful, powerful, and full of potential, and she desperately wants to reclaim this. Staging it despite her students’ disdain is Miranda’s way of exerting control over her suffering and an attempt to redirect her own narrative toward triumph. 

However, her students’ preference for Macbeth, which is a play about ambition aided by supernatural beings and followed by the protagonist’s moral collapse, more closely mirrors Miranda’s actual trajectory. While All’s Well That Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” its conclusion falls into the realm of comedy with its promise of restoration, and Miranda clings to this promise of a happy ending. Even so, her own story turns toward tragedy’s embrace of disorder. The choice of production becomes a battleground for narrative control, blurring the line between Miranda’s role as a director of a play and her desire to direct her own fate.

As Miranda gains supernatural power, her role as director extends beyond the theater and into her everyday life. The power to move pain from her body to someone else’s transforms her from a victim of circumstance to a perpetrator of suffering. As the novel progresses, her reality becomes increasingly theatrical and surreal, culminating in a collapse of the boundary between her life and the stage.

Awad also embeds theatricality into the novel’s structure and tone. For instance, the three mysterious men who help Miranda quote Shakespeare, appear and disappear like apparitions, and orchestrate a surreal performance in a bar where one of them sings “Get Happy” onstage while Miranda is paralyzed by his pain. This theatricality culminates in the black box theater, where Miranda’s psychological unraveling is staged as a series of dreamlike vignettes. These sequences are presented as distorted stagecraft, emphasizing the extent to which Miranda can no longer distinguish between performance and reality.

The novel’s most direct blurring of performance and reality occurs through Briana’s transformation. Initially a poor actress, she becomes compelling after Miranda magically afflicts her with physical suffering. Briana’s real pain makes her performance of the ailing King authentic, suggesting that art and reality have become interchangeable. Through these events, Awad presents performance as a tool that can shape reality but can also distort the ability to recognize truth.