Theatah II: Leda and the Swan Take a Dive

I ran afoul of my first husband when we were both college students in New Orleans – I was major-shopping and he was finishing up his communications studies at Loyola in New Orleans, where he was involved in black box theater. One semester, in fact, he directed a local doctor’s original script of Leda and the Swan for a premiere performance. Bob had an enthusiastic little cadre of students serving as his actors and crew, but his great coup, the edge that would elevate his production to a serious status, was the acquisition of a professional actor. Stefan (that was his stage name, real name Mike) had been in a television commercial and seemed delighted to be given the lead role in Leda.

Rehearsals began and continued apace; I’m not sure at exactly what point the terrible suspicion set in, but about three weeks from opening we could no longer ignore the fact that Stefan couldn’t, wouldn’t, and wasn’t going to learn his lines. He had a head like a sieve. He carried his script around religiously – every time we saw him across campus he waved it at us, but for all the good it did him he could have been using it to swat flies. He managed to remember his lines from about the first three pages -- the length of a commercial, maybe -- and after that he was like an amnesia victim. A look so completely blank would come over his face that I doubted he’d be able to give his name, rank and serial number under torture.

For a while Bob seemed certain that he could, by sheer power of persuasion and force of personality, deposit the unlearned lines in Stefan’s brain. There were many long, desperate talks, the gist of which was Bob saying intensely, “Don’t let me down, pal,” and Stefan replying, “I won’t. I’ll get it.”

But he never did. Two days before opening Bob finally accepted that he now had a limited number of choices, including (a) canceling the opening until another actor could be found and rehearsed; (b) killing Stefan and dumping his body in the Mississippi in the dead of night, then posing as a conscientious objector and running away to Canada, or (c) doing something desperately inventive. Bob chose (c).

One of the student actors was hurriedly pressed into service as a dramatic device. She wore a white drape and stood on a high, small platform under a white spot, behind a podium holding a copy of the script. Her job was to be cued by Stefan when he drew a blank, and feed him his lines. Sort of a prompter ex machina. Bob christened her, in capitals, The Reader.

Since Stefan only remembered three pages out of a 40-page script, the Reader had her work cut out for her. The first eight or twelve times that Stefan used the Reader were actually kind of fascinating in a hideous way and totally upstaged the play itself. Sometimes when memory failed to serve, he’d just look kind of constipated; but other times he would go so far as to open his mouth before a look of utter blankness passed over his features as if he had just been struck by lightning. Whichever the case, he would then turn ponderously toward The Reader and make a majestic, unfolding “ta-da!” gesture toward her with his arm, indicating that he was in need of a line. She in turn would jump as if bitten, and give him a horrified, unbelieving stare before looking down and reading his line in a flat monotone. She continued to watch in disbelief as Stefan reached into his acting repertoire to select a reaction. Sometimes he repeated the line with dramatic inflection; sometimes he paraphrased it; other times he just looked around meaningfully at the audience and nodded as if to say, “Well, there you go.”

Momentarily entertaining as it was, this added interplay increased the play’s length to about four painful hours and removed any traces of pacing and meaning it might once have had. But far be it from Bob to admit defeat. Opening night came as inexorably as death. A good-sized audience sprinkled itself around the edges of the little theater. The author had a place of honor.

The play opened with Stefan walking around the perimeter of the stage space, delivering the few lines he had actually memorized, which included asking the actors, scattered in the audience, their character names. I realized that Bob was much more shaken than he had ever appeared, when Stefan asked him his name. Bob abandoned his character like it was Dry Gulch and replied with his full, real name as if he were answering the census.

The play, dragging the albatross of The Reader, staggered on. The soul and meaning of “chutzpah” became real to me when the lights went up and after some polite applause, Bob thanked the audience for attending, introduced the author, and then looked around happily: “So! I’d like to know if you thought our innovation of The Reader gave added impact to the play.” And don’t you know, some of them did.

Curtain.

Revenge of the Theatah I: A Dramatic Fall From Grace

When Haley and her best friend Robin came to me for help finding a dramatic scene for their high school speech tournament, I was flattered. Flattered, and totally confident in my ability to find the dynamite, unique power skit that would rocket them to first place.

But the pages of my various actors’ guides flipped and flipped without yield. I was at the point of admitting to them that I couldn’t produce a winner, when inspiration suddenly shone like the lights over Broadway: the Tennessee Williams one-act Hello from Bertha. Hadn’t that scene impressed my professors in Intro to Acting? True, most (if not all) of the success was due to the classmate who played Bertha (an aging prostitute in the last stages of syphilis) to my Goldie (a sister-in-trade with the unpleasant job of telling Bertha she is being turned out of the whorehouse because she can no longer earn her keep). This classmate was an amateur actress so gifted she could have earned a Tony nomination playing a wad of gum. If it worked for us, I thought, surely Haley and Robin could do as well – or better.

Yes, you’ve already spotted the fatal flaw in my thinking – namely that just because I might have a natural affinity for playing a disease-ridden raddled old whore, there was absolutely no reason to imagine that two fresh-faced sixteen-year-olds could pull it off. But at the time it seemed like a saving inspiration. I brought photocopies of the script to the girls with rash assurances of sure success.

It seemed to go well at first. Racking coughs and heartbroken moans issued from behind Haley’s door as they threw themselves into rehearsal. I delivered snack trays, suggestions of bits of business I had used, and mini-lectures about Tennessee Williams during their breaks.

Two days before the tournament one of the teachers who was going to accompany them as a judge bowed out, which jeopardized the whole delegation from our high school. I found myself volunteered for the job. No worries, the speech club president would come over and tell me how it was done. I was a little leery at first, but then agreed. Prostitute, stage mother, tournament judge: what role couldn’t I play if I put my mind to it?

We left for Gainesville in the dark hours of Saturday morning and arrived at the hosting high school in time for coffee and pastries in the cafeteria. I had a full judging schedule and Haley and Robin would perform their scene about six times during the day. The three of us nibbled cardboard-tasting cheese danishes and felt like favored handmaidens of Thalia, shining jewel-like among the other participants, who, poor leaden things, didn’t suspect that Bertha and Goldie would soon climb over their untalented bodies to take first place in Dramatics. We heard the call for the first round of presentations and parted smiling. That was the last good moment of the day.

Their first round was praised by one of the judges but panned by the others on the panel. Haley and Robin were a little puzzled but decided it was a fluke. It turned out to be an unfortunately consistent fluke. Each subsequent performance brought uniformly not poor, but rotten ratings. That was bad enough, but the girls were terribly embarrassed to see that one judge had written: “Don’t dress the part!”

Haley and Robin discussed spending the rest of the day in a supply closet, but decided the show had to go on. They became increasingly rattled. Robin forgot her character’s name, Goldie, at one point, and said to the ailing, confused Bertha/Haley: “It’s me, Bertha ---aaaaaaa?” trying to slide into a questioning inflection without anyone noticing.

In the next performance Haley simply dropped about four pages of script out of her consciousness, responding to Robin/Goldie’s query, “What was the name of that guy you knew?” with “Don’t tell ME to calm down!” Long pause. Robin adlibbed: “I . . . didn’t.” They batted miscellaneous lines back and forth until they found a section they both recognized, and lurched miserably through the rest of the scene.

Desperation set in. Having nothing to lose, the girls contemplated a more arresting introduction to their scene:

“Chicago.
1935.
A burnin’ summer night in the whorehouse.
Your crotch itchin’ like wildfire.
You reach for the cream.
There . . . is . . . NONE.
Hello. . . from Bertha.”

But somehow they knew it wouldn’t help. Like Bertha at the scene’s end, Haley and Robin accepted their fate.

I was not much better off, trying desperately to keep up with my simple, no-sweat fill-in judging job. I ran around the echoing high school, whipping into one classroom after another and plastering what I hoped was an interested look on my face, and listening to yet another speech on foreign policy or dramatic monologue about incest or losing the farm. I’d mark my assessment form, throw out some words of encouragement, and hurl myself out of the room toward the next session.

At one point in the early afternoon I was desperate for a break but already late for my next session. I flew into a bathroom cubicle intending to transform myself into a human tornado that would do everything I’d been needing to do since late morning in 30 seconds or less – sort of like Superman in the phone booth: pulling off my glasses, undoing clothes, finding makeup and hairbrush. I would enter mild-mannered, uncombed and stressed, but emerge refreshed and re-energized. Instead I popped my slacks button, dropped and shattered my compact, and flung my eyeglasses into the toilet where they slid quickly out of sight.

It is truly amazing how far a person can insert an arm into a toilet. For several panicky seconds I was sure I was really stuck and the fire department would have to rescue me. But the thought of the ensuing newspaper articles gave me desperate strength and I wrenched it free. I lathered and rinsed my arm furiously, and galloped off, late and ten times more disheveled than before, to the U.S. Senate competition.

It was a crestfallen little group that convened in the late afternoon. We huddled in a back corner of the auditorium watching the other students receive first, second, third place awards. Bertha and Goldie would have welcomed a fatal case of syphilis at this point, judging by the looks on their faces, and I didn’t feel much better. Was there an award for most disasters occurring to one family in an eight-hour period? How about Worst Choice of Scene by a Clueless But Well-Intentioned Mother? Or maybe the Porcelain Heart -- I was pretty sure I had hurt myself setting some world record with that toilet.

“Never mind, it’s just been a rotten day,” Haley consoled me. “Here, have a candy.”

It was a sour apple hard candy and tasted startling and great as it worked its way to the back of my mouth and superglued itself to my right rear crown. I took them both out of my mouth with a sense of horrible inevitability.

We did eventually reach home, and life went on. After recovering from a miserable flulike disease probably caused by unnatural communion with a public commode, I had the tooth repaired; sewed the button back on my pants; bought a new compact; and replaced my glasses (lying about how I lost the originals, though I bet it happens more than people admit). I also noticed that Haley and Robin seemed somehow older and more worldly-wise. Or maybe they just weren’t asking me for advice as much as they used to.

The Theatah! The Dahnse! Act 1: I Love Theater, But Does It Love Me?

To take my mind off seemingly endless memorizations, whether deponent verbs in Latin or the 200+ musical terms, composers, instruments, and forms I get tested on this coming Thursday, I’m going to turn to theater -- or theatre, depending on which you prefer, though the latter seems to be taking hold on this side of the pond -- and introduce a couple of reminiscences.

I like to imagine what I’d choose to study given another two or three lifetimes; linguistics and anthropology are big contenders, as well as music; and I also feel definitely drawn to the world of theater. The electric excitement of live theater is compelling and whether it’s Shakespeare (my favorite) or Ibsen or Shepard, that moment when the house lights dim has to be one of the best in life. I love to read biographies of great actors (Mom recently sent me Ellen Terry’s biography and a wonderful book on Sarah Bernhard, full of illustrations); and I have a really serious thing for Stage Horror Stories – those moments when the unexpected occurs in full view of an audience. When we mortals have mishaps or missteps, though they may loom large in our consciousness there are usually not that many witnesses; but onstage there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and a house full of captivated onlookers. My most recent favorite is Hugh Jackman’s hilarious story of wetting himself onstage during his run as Gaston in Beauty in the Beast.

For one brief shining moment my interest wasn’t entirely confined to reading and watching. Back in the late 80’s I needed an elective to finish out my B.A. and I chose Introduction to Acting. Normally I would have thought myself the last person to feel comfortable onstage, but as I stood up there, looking out at the house of the tiny, elegant Annie Russell Theater at Rollins, I could imagine finding it more thrilling than terrifying. So we students, acting experience ranging from zero to considerable amateur, led by then-Director Joe Nassif and Assistant Director Dr. J., prepared and executed a series of scenes from the canon. I did Desdemona’s handkerchief scene from Othello and took a turn (in my slip) as Maggie from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; but my moment in the sun was as Goldie in Tennessee Williams’ Hello From Bertha – an obscure little one-act I hadn’t even heard of before. My exultation at the professors’ praise for this performance was a bit of hubris that invited retribution to visit itself on the next generation -- sort of like in the Oresteia but tawdry and sad instead of magnificent and moving. Tune in next time for Stage Horror Story I.