“I am told, and so she said. I heard later. According to her passport. It was reported. Apparently. I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”
1974: Grace is booked on the last flight out, but Charlotte won’t come. Grace hugs her tightly, and says goodby for the last time. As Grace gets on the plane, Charlotte is detained and taken to the National Stadium for “interrogation.” She is led into the stadium and we see a flash of Charlotte and Marin at Tivoli Garden, and then they are gone. Days later, the violence ends. Grace returns. Charlotte’s body — shot in the back — is found at the American Embassy. Grace receives Charlotte’s personal effects. The emerald ring is not among them. Grace tells Gerardo that she is leaving everything to Quintana’s rebel party. 1975: Grace goes to Buffalo to meet Marin, who is surly and unemotional, until Grace mentions Tivoli. Back in Boca Grande, Grace’s speech ends with her calling out Antonio and bringing Quintana onstage to huge applauses. Weeks later, as Grace sits alone in her room, dying of cancer, she receives some lost mail, including a package that Charlotte mailed on the day she died. It’s the emerald ring. Grace looks at us. “I have not been the witness I wanted to be.”
COMMON PRAYER
The Limited Series
COMMON PRAYER The Limited Series
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“Fevers relapse here. Bacteria proliferate. Termites eat the presidential palace, rust eats my Oldsmobile… Everything here changes and nothing appears to.”
1973: A bomb explodes in San Francisco. 1974: A beautiful turista arrives in Boca Grande, a tiny country perpetually on the verge of revolution. 1975: An American ex-pat — the most powerful person in Boca Grande — presents a slide show: a framing device that will guide us through the epic, multi-layered and emotional journey of Charlotte Douglas (the turista), Grace Strasser-Mendana (the ex-pat), and the people of Boca Grande. This story is obviously woven across multiple timelines. In the premiere, Grace takes us from the Ministry of Defense, where her brother-in-law, Victor “runs the country;" to the American Embassy Christmas party, where bureaucrats and ruling families schmooze as they manipulate (and Charlotte goes home with Victor). Grace then takes us through her affluent — but tragically lonely — childhood; her study of anthropology; and her marriage to Edgar Strasser-Mendana, a wealthy farmer and member of Boca Grande’s ruling family. In 1974, Grace shares this story with Charlotte over dinner. Charlotte thinks the story is romantic, but Grace is more pragmatic. Grace’s son Gerardo is born in 1944. In 1959, when the President of Boca Grande, Edgar’s brother Luis, is assassinated, Edgar inherits his office. In 1970, when Edgar dies (of natural causes), Victor inherits his office, but Grace inherits his land and his wealth, i.e., his power. Grace’s in-laws are not happy about this situation. Grace doesn’t care. and back to the streets of San Francisco, where before Charlotte came to Boca Grande, her teenage daughter, Marin, was one of the revolutionists who set off a pipe bomb in the lobby of the TransAmerica building.
“Give me the molecular structure of the protein that defined Charlotte Douglas.”
1972: After the bombing in San Francisco, Marin and her friends hijack a commercial airliner. It is shocking how violent and ruthless they all are, including Marin. 1974: Back at dinner, Charlotte tells Grace about an idyllic trip they took to Copenhagen when Marin was a sweet little 7-year-old. The contrast between who Marin is vs. how Charlotte thinks of her, is stark. Grace tells her audience more about Charlotte, who grew up on a ranch in Hollister, CA. In flashback we see that she isn’t much of a student, but she goes to Berkeley and falls for her English professor, Warren Bogart. She drops out of college and they move to New York, get married and have a daughter, Marin. Warren — an alcoholic narcissist — is erratic and abusive. When Marin is 4, Charlotte leaves Warren. 1974: the developing relationship between Grace and Charlotte is interwoven with Charlotte’s backstory. The two women, so different in so many ways, also share many commonalities — most notably, their outsider status in Boca Grande. But Charlotte’s contradictions, and her penchant for fantasy and denial, are what really intrigue Grace. They hide something darker, as does the story of how Charlotte’s current husband, Leonard, acquired the emerald on Charlotte’s finger, or the way she casually kills a chicken with her bare hands, even her reason for coming to Boca Grande in the first place. Back in 1972, the FBI arrives at Charlotte’s house in San Francisco. Marin is a fugitive.
“All that Marin had removed from the room was every picture, every snapshot, every clipping or class photograph, which contained her own image.”
1972: Marin Bogart has disappeared. She is now wanted by the FBI for hijacking a plane as well as for the bombing, With Leonard on a business trip, Charlotte has to deal with the interrogations and phone taps on her own. Grief-stricken and anxious, she drifts into fantasy and denial. That turns out to be an effective defense against an FBI interrogation. 1974: Grace’s son, Gerardo meets Charlotte. Sparks fly. 1972: The revolutionists release an audio tape. The voice on the tape is obviously Marin’s, but Charlotte won’t admit it. When Leonard returns from Europe, he’s more concerned about where the revolutionists got their guns than he is about the whereabouts of his stepdaughter or the mental health of his wife. And with Marin in the news, Warren Bogart is back in the picture. Given her fragile mental and emotional state, this is the last thing Charlotte needs.
“I know why Charlotte liked talking to the FBI: the agents would let her talk about Marin. Their devotion to Marin seemed total.”
1972: The FBI raid the bombers' hideout and find weapons and Marin’s retainer. Warren arrives in San Francisco, establishing himself as one of the most hateful characters in recent memory. He’s a loudmouth and a freeloader, but he’s good-looking, has a rapier wit, and his Svengali-like hold on Charlotte is as undeniable as it is baffling. He even pisses off the FBI. Making matters worse, Leonard finds him amusing. 1974: In a parallel situation, Charlotte finds herself at a party with her former lover, Victor and her current lover, Gerardo. For her, the awkwardness is crippling. 1972: Charlotte tries everything to avoid Warren, including trying to get pregnant with Leonard, and fleeing to Hollister to visit her brother, but Warren keeps turning up like a bad penny. Inevitably, Charlotte leaves Leonard and goes to New Orleans with Warren.
“Sometimes those months in the South seemed so shattered that she suspected the Ochsner Clinic of having administered electroshock while she was under anesthesia for delivery. This suspicion was unfounded.”
1973: As soon as they land in New Orleans, Warren becomes abusive. His friend, Porter tells Charlotte that Warren is dying. 1975: Ironically, Grace tells her audience that she is dying of cancer. 1973: Warren, Charlotte and a rotating collection of co-eds take a drunken and debauched road trip through the South: cheap motels, whiskey, fast food, passionate (and weird) sex, Warren wrestles with motel managers, Charlotte drives glumly while Warren sleeps in the back — a sad grifters' lifestyle. 1975: Grace reveals to her audience that she met Warren in New Orleans (while Charlotte was in Boca Grande) 1974: In a tense stand-off Grace tells Warren that she knows about his fateful last night with Warren in The South. At a country club in Alabama, Warren gets into yet another drunken fistfight. As Charlotte finally decides to leave, we see that she is pregnant.
“I told Charlotte all along that I was hearing the harmonic tremor but Charlotte paid no attention. Charlotte appeared to have used up all her attention.”
1974: Based on phone taps, Victor now believes that Charlotte is working for the CIA. Grace senses the "harmonic tremor" of impending revolución: Army trucks on la avenida, sentries with carbines on rooftops. Charlotte volunteers to help distribute cholera vaccines. Grace thinks it’s a waste of time. She’s right, until she isn't. Then the army confiscates the vaccine and Charlotte is almost shot in the back. A Times headline reads “New Lease on Democracy in Boca Grande?” The sense of danger in the city is palpable. Cars and buildings start exploding. Gerardo takes Charlotte to a deserted island city where he and Victor’s younger brother, Antonio are stockpiling weapons. Antonio shows up with a sketchy operator named Bebe Chicago and — just upset Charlotte — they use machine guns to destroy the stolen vaccine. That evening, Grace sees how shaken Charlotte is. She realizes that she now loves Charlotte more than her own child. She tells Gerardo to get Charlotte out of the country when the time comes.
“I think I loved Charlotte in that moment as a parent loves the child who has just fallen from a bicycle, met a pervert, lost a prize, come up in any way against the hardness of the world.”
1974: Charlotte — now volunteering at the Women’s Birth Control Clinic — is fortunate to be in the bathroom when the clinic is bombed. She isn’t physically injured, but the shock causes her to reveal her most secret pain. She tells Grace that after she left Warren she went to New Orleans to have the baby, a girl. 1973: The baby is born with such profound birth defects that the doctors don’t expect her to live more than a day. After several days, Charlotte leaves the hospital — against medical advice — and takes the baby to Mérida, Mexico. She fantasizes that the child might somehow survive, but after a week the baby dies. The mortician puts red shoes on the dead baby’s feet. 1974: in Boca Grande, the revolution is really heating up. Gerardo, Antonio and Bebe Chicago conspire to provide money and weapons to the rebels and their leader, Quintana. Leonard arrives in Boca Grande and tries in vain to get Charlotte to leave. He also inadvertently reveals to Grace, a deep dark secret about her late husband, Edgar. The government takes over the radio station. The TV station will be next. The last flights will be leaving the airport soon…