Sarah lived a life that Myrtle gives two fucks about. We’ll never know exactly what her play is about because Myrtle’s screaming insistence that no woman has aged as devastatingly as her has drowned out the story - Sarah’s story.

Sarah exists in Opening Night mostly as a roadblock, something for Myrtle to climb over on her way to the truth. She’s not doing herself any favors: Sarah is self-serious and by the book, a theater lifer in the most insufferable sense, and her play is probably bad. She dresses elegantly but conspicuously, hanging back with the producer to gab but speaking up in rehearsals when Myrtle is being difficult. When Myrtle lashes out, Sarah loudly laments how she hates actresses, then goes off to the rest of her life where she gets to forget about Myrtle until the next day. The words are more important than the person. From afar, she is everything dishonest about the artform.

Myrtle’s first blowout with her feels deeply devastating: she accuses Sarah of writing a play void of hope. But Sarah’s response feels ego-driven, as though she cares less about the art than what Myrtle is saying about her. Never mind the fact that Myrtle’s blow is lethal precisely because it shows how she’s trying to engage with the script to no avail - foreshadowing what’s to come - the severity of which is entirely lost on Sarah. She only picks up half of the pain in Myrtle’s insult - the half that she feels hits her as a person - therefore keeping Myrtle at arm’s length while only taking her seriously enough to warrant complaining to Murray about her.

What feels particularly disturbing is Sarah’s attempt at helping Myrtle through her breakdown by taking her to her psychic. That Sarah has a psychic at all feels self-centered and desperate - the hidden truth here being that Sarah, herself, is a woman seeking answers. The idea that she feels a psychic will help Myrtle is one of the more covertly funny moments in the film - it’s the blind leading the blind, an awkward grasping at commonality from one aging woman to another. It’s an act that says Myrtle’s issue is the boogeyman, and should be treated with this much seriousness; and yet again, something in Sarah has kept a psychic in her life for possibly these exact moments - maybe she’s even felt some herself.

Which brings me to maybe the saddest moment in the film - the part that had me doing a complete 180 on Sarah: the brilliant, magnetic off-script climax of the play. Among the many memorable moments of this entire sequence, a less-obvious moment I can’t get out of my head is the close-up on Sarah’s face as she watches a blackout drunk Myrtle absolutely destroy her play and replace it with something more shocking: something the audience loved. The close-up on Sarah’s face reveals an entire lifetime of humanity, the pain of someone watching their life’s work being made a mockery of. Through her shame I felt my own, having dismissed this woman the entirety of the film until now, doing the same Myrtle did, never thinking much of the life she led and what decisions she had to make to be at peace with her own feminine mortality. In her face was everything Myrtle had felt, just 30 years after the fact. It was the untold story of a woman no less valid just because her play sucked and was better as improv. And in her face was the devastation at watching Myrtle succeed despite knowing nothing about Sarah at all - just as i knew nothing about Sarah prior to the moment we meet her in the film. Sarah leaves the theatre for fresh air, unable to watch her work be made a fool of, unable to stomach watching Myrtle flatten her out beneath her immense magnetism. There was no hope at common ground between the two of them; their lives were like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. The fact that Sarah goes back in to resume watching an endless, unpredictable flex of a final scene while the audience roars with approval, no less, proves in many ways she has been right all along. She’s not any better than Myrtle for having already lived through the same feelings - but she’s wiser in that she now knows how to make peace with them. She can ache, she can grieve, and yet she can return to what awaits her in the theater.