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.