Stages Read online

  The workshop was already in progress onstage. Quietly David took a seat. The teacher running things, whose name was Samuels, was working with Kathy Lowenthal. Kathy was short and plain, with a round chin from which, on occasion, a single coarse hair would protrude. But she had large, very expressive eyes, and full lips. In the right role she could radiate a kind of womanly beauty that came more from the heart than the appearance.

  “I want you to think of the funniest thing you ever saw,” Samuels was saying, “and then I want you to laugh at it, just as if you were seeing it all over again.”

  To David this Samuels character looked a little seedy and down on his luck; he appeared to be straining to get his point across, like an unconvincing salesman. Which teachers often are, David reminded himself, let alone this guy, who was pushing his limited contact with Broadway from door to door. As Samuels walked around Kathy, adjusting her gestures, David noticed that he had a limp, which was so pronounced that it had to mean a wooden leg or at the very least a brace. That explained why he was running acting workshops on the college circuit. There weren’t many roles for cripples.

  In order to concentrate on the comic moment, Kathy had shut her eyes. Her face seemed to fizz like seltzer, and then her head rolled back and her mouth fell open and a great guffaw came out of her. David smiled. Titters broke out in the seats around him. He recognized Mike Lange’s laugh, which was always nervous, and Melanie Chisolm’s laugh, which always sounded like a snide remark, and Paula Rubin’s laugh, which was abraded by cigarettes, and Lauren Holland’s laugh—which went up and down David’s spine like a padded hammer on a xylophone.

  During their sophomore year, David had been with Kathy for six months. He had slept with Melanie three times, and with Paula once. But he had never taken Lauren to bed, and he knew he never would. She was taller than he by three inches. Her eyes were more watchful than his, and they were intensely blue. Her thick brown hair fell almost to her waist. On her pale face there was always a thin smile. The most striking and unsettling thing about her was her voice: Lauren had a voice with grains of gold in it that sparkled against a texture as hard and gray and cold as that of slate. It was the voice of a soul deep in a crystal cave, and onstage, it carried, to say the least.

  Lauren’s only physical flaw was a separation between two of her front teeth. She needed braces, David had thought. But wearing braces wouldn’t hold her back. Lauren could pull off playing Amanda Wingfield with a retainer. It would just seem part of the play, like Laura’s clubfoot.

  Switching off the hilarity with a wave of his hand, Samuels said to Kathy, “Okay, now I want you to remember one of the unhappiest moments of your life. I want you to show us pain as openly as you just did with pleasure.”

  As if to forestall a hiccup, Kathy gulped and collected herself. Then she looked to her left, giving her audience the impression that her unhappy memories were all grouped together over there in the corner.

  A cold mist seemed to drift over her. Suddenly she choked. And then she burst into tears.

  As Kathy stood there sobbing and trembling, the student actors nearly froze in their seats.

  Behind his eyes, David felt a damp heat that he was afraid might embarrass him.

  Realizing that he was losing control of the situation, Samuels, his hands raised, fluttered awkwardly around Kathy in an attempt to calm her down.

  “O-okay, okay,” he stammered. “You started it. You can turn it off.”

  Kathy’s shoulders heaved. She clenched her fists. Her sobbing subsided.

  “Now that’s how you convince your audience,” Samuels said by way of apology.

  The remaining hour of the workshop was uninspiring and tepid, though. Like the others, David kept thinking about Kathy.

  Once she had said to him, “We’re very informal in my family. When I was home for spring break, my father and I were in the bathroom at the same time, and we were both naked. When he bent over to pick up the bath mat I gave him this big wet kiss, right in the middle of his back.”

  David and Kathy were both from Jewish families, but David came from a family buttoned up to the chin in guilt and shame, and capable of expressing affection only in portions of food. Had he tried to act out the bathroom scenario with his mother, she would, he imagined, have made a parachute of bed sheets and garter belts and leaped from the window of their seventeenth-story apartment to the safety of Sixth Avenue below.

  Yet it was Kathy’s unselfconscious openness that had damaged her as an undergraduate actress. Lacking David’s vanity and ambition, she gave too generously of herself in thankless roles. In December she had played to nearly empty houses as the lead in a turkey by the obscure European playwright Michel de Ghelderode. And the year before she had struggled through a nearly identical ordeal in a vehicle by the Italian poulterer Ugo Betti. Both of these disasters had been Mr. Cherry’s shows. He was the technical director, and he chose plays suitable for the murky lighting effects he liked to create, and to which he would sacrifice anyone’s talent.

  David’s memory of Kathy’s recent run in another of Mr. Cherry’s endless twilights, together with the exhibition of sheer misery that she’d put on today, so distracted him from the rest of the workshop that it all might as well have been television—and he liked to describe TV watching as the mind picking its teeth.

  Kathy had started him thinking about the odds again. Of making it as an actor once you left school. They would be graduating—he, Kathy, Melanie, Paula, Mike—in less than four months.

  What would happen to them if they didn’t make it? And the chances were maybe one in a hundred thousand that any of them would make it.

  What then? Vietnam? Law school? Running some little theater in Wisconsin, or selling tickets in New York, and living in a room with a bed and a toaster, like the women with dirty hair and seams in their stockings who showed you with their flashlights to your seats?

  Often David had to will himself not to think about the alternatives to success, about compromising. Up until now, he’d always been able to turn his thoughts to the role he’d be playing in the next major production. But at this point, there was just one major production left, Riddiford’s Lear.

  While the pathetic Samuels slogged along, David told himself that he’d be best off playing Kent. Like Kent, he was dedicated and determined. And a survivor.

  Riddiford himself was going to play Lear.

  It was an event for someone on the faculty to act in a show, let alone play the lead in it.

  David couldn’t help but wonder what Riddiford’s motivation was. This was partly out of a habit of thinking about motivations for the characters he played himself—and partly because he could see himself in Riddiford’s place: as the director, the one with the power. Power had always fascinated David.

  3

  When Melanie Chisolm’s father showed up for a parents’ weekend, Paula Rubin took one look at him and said, “When you see some people’s parents, you understand why they’re the way they are.” With his shock of white hair, Melanie’s father looked to be about eighty, but he was not bent, nor was he shrunken. He stood an imperious six feet tall, and he wore a black homburg hat that heightened him even more. His overcoat, which was also black, had a velvet collar. To complete his darkling tintype he carried a gold-headed ebony walking stick. Everything about the man was formal and reserved. He was, in his manner and appearance, a model of an eminent Victorian.

  To Paula, he explained a lot about Melanie. Why she dressed and made herself up and talked like a divorced woman of forty, for instance.

  An only child, Melanie had arrived late in her parents’ lives. Three years after she was born, her mother had died of pernicious anemia.

  Melanie had grown up as her father’s dinner companion. She’d sat at one end of the table, and he’d sat at the other. The table was twelve feet long, and it was surrounded by tall chairs with backs the same shape as windows in a cathedral. Sitting as a child at that table, while the maid came and went in a hus
h, Melanie would cast her eyes upward at the gessoed ceiling. The ceiling was painted with garlands and cherubs. Melanie would dream of cavorting naked with these happy creatures, all ringlets and big toes, in some giddy, cloud-upholstered place where there were no chairs that kneed you in the spine.

  As a high school girl Melanie found a substitute for that place in the dramatic club. She played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Wrapped in gossamer, she bounded across the stage night after night. She had emerged from the hard, dry cocoon of her childhood with wings on, but those wings were not just for flight. Melanie quickly learned to wrap them around her body so she could resist the adolescent cold and damp that all her friends felt.

  Oberon, who was sixteen and lanky, asked Melanie out. In the back of his car, he went fishing in her clothes with his hands.

  After five minutes of his explorations, Melanie, raising her head, said, “God, do you ever sweat.”

  The summer she graduated from high school Melanie’s father sent her on a trip to Europe. In Zurich she met a French ski instructor. He was twenty-six, and had a smile that breathed on Melanie’s heart.

  But of course he was French, and his recipe for involvement was high heat followed by a whisk.

  By mid-August Melanie knew she would be returning to the States, and to American men, with their bathing suits as bulky as her father’s Brooks Brothers boxer shorts. She thanked God that she’d been accepted by a college with a theater program.

  In her three and a half years at Blake University, Melanie had—as a sideline to her involvement with the theater—slept with six more men, two of them graduate students and one a professor of English. The professor was of course the sweatiest. He was married.

  Sleeping with David Whitman had been a big mistake, though. He seemed to want to sleep with women in order to prove something, which was a common enough urge among men, Melanie knew. But then he would lapse into this terrible postcoital depression, as if all the banging had worn away the crust of the earth, to reveal a vast, empty cavern beneath the bed. Acting wasn’t enough for David, and sex wasn’t enough, either. Melanie didn’t care to think about what it was that he wanted and needed, and couldn’t seem to get, because when she turned her mind in that direction she would feel a vague sense of vacuum from a place in her chest close to her heart.

  It was better for her head to ignore such sensations and just go on with the show.

  Melanie was happy that she and Paula would very likely be playing Goneril and Regan in this, the last show of their undergraduate careers. They might have been rivals, for they were the same height, about five-six, and they had essentially the same hair, a changeable auburn, and of course they were the same age. But something about Melanie always landed her the older parts, while Paula was given the younger roles.

  This would be the first time they’d be playing sisters instead of women a generation apart. They’d finally be recognizing onstage a comfortable kinship that had been there all along.

  Supposedly Riddiford was pressuring Morris from the English department to try out for the role of Gloucester.

  Morris was the professor Melanie had slept with.

  If she was to play Regan, she would be gouging out his eyes, every night for a week and a half.

  That, Melanie thought, was truly show biz.

  Eventually she and Paula and Kathy organized themselves unofficially into a League of Women Actors. The league’s mission was to promote a sense of civic responsibility—to making life as theatrical as possible.

  To this end, the members of the league carried on most of their conversations in stage whispers and scrambled their clothes closets until every outfit came out as a costume. Instead of idling away hours in the student union or the library, the three young women entertained themselves by creating dramatic moments, as they did the time Melanie insisted that they spy on one of the practices of the men’s swim team.

  That command performance took place on a Wednesday evening in the winter of their junior year.

  When the league entered the gym, most of the college’s students were still at dinner or already studying. But Melanie, her sharp eyes brimming with slyness, was leading her two friends along the darkened corridors with a penlight.

  “What if a janitor or somebody comes and sees us?” Paula said.

  “They all quit work at four-thirty,” Melanie replied. Ahead was a trophy case and a pair of doors with a light shining in the crack between them.

  They crept stealthily toward their goal.

  Melanie looked through the crack first,

  “Ah,” she said.

  “Lemme look,” said Paula.

  She took a peek. Her eyes widened and she covered her month.

  “Wanna see, Kath?” Melanie offered.

  Kathy poked her head under Paula’s shoulder.

  Then she said, “Oh, aren’t they cute?”

  “I told you,” Melanie said. “They always practice in the nude.”

  “What incredible bodies they have,” Paula said. “Look at the one with the curly blond hair.”

  “I am,” said Melanie. “Isn’t this too delicious? If they only knew. We’re committing sacrilege, you know. They’re so-o-o sensitive about their privates. They think their pubies are sacred.”

  Looking through the crack again, Paula said, “Ooh, that blond one, I just can’t imagine a guy being self-conscious about having one as big as—”

  “All American men are self-conscious about their bodies,” Melanie replied. “Just try to imagine an American man on a nude beach, like St. Tropez.”

  “God forbid,” Paula said. “I’m sure if some of the men I see at Jones Beach ever started walking around in the nude, I’d lose my appetite for Chilly-Willies.”

  “Nobody’s body is anything to be ashamed of, whether it’s good or bad,” Kathy insisted.

  “You can say that because you’re in the theater,” Melanie told her. “Actors don’t care if they’re in sequins or skin.”

  “What are you saying? That if you’re an actor you have to be an exhibitionist?” Paula asked.

  “No,” said Melanie. “What I’m saying is that if you’re an actor who’s any good, when you’re on stage you’ve got nothing to hide.”

  “You’re right,” Kathy agreed. “When I’m acting, it’s as if I’m talking about all my innermost hopes and dreams—in other people’s words.”

  “It’s different for me,” Paula said. “I can’t turn myself inside out emotionally like you can, Kath. I’m not sure who I am when I’m acting. Only that I’m somebody who is definitely not my mother.”

  Turning her attention back to the long and narrow peephole, Paula added, “If only my mother could see this. My mother…and David’s mother.”

  “They’d probably flip out,” Kathy said.

  “No…no, they wouldn’t,” Paula replied. “They’d do something like this.” She pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose and snorted as if her sinuses were blocked.

  “What’s that?” Melanie asked.

  “My mother doing a yoga exercise,” Paula replied. “To clear her mind of men’s bodies.”

  4

  Mike Lange hid behind the characters he played. Even as a child he had been aware of his homosexuality, and so concealment became second nature to him. His sexual interests he kept hidden close to his chest, like the little magazines with pictures of nude men that in his teens he would buy and bring home secreted under his shirt.

  Mike had a Nordic face and curly, reddish-blond hair. Although he was not overweight, there was an air of chubbiness about him, which, combined with an expression that made him look always on the verge of tears, martyred him in gym class until he entered high school.

  In high school Mike joined the dramatic club. Sheltered by that organization’s talkative girls, he blossomed.

  As a character in a drama, Mike was untouchable and invulnerable. His cheeks, which in other circumstances flushed so easily, were cool beneath the greasepaint. His vo
ice was always steady because it was never his own: he was a clipped British assent, he was a muddy-mouthed old man, he was Peter Lorre in Arsenic and Old Lace. But the real Mike Lange was neither seen nor heard. He was a hermit crab slipping unnoticed from shell to shell.

  He remained bottled up in high school showcases until the spring he turned sixteen.

  In May of that spring Mike went reluctantly with his father to a baseball game at Fenway Park. A business associate had given him two free seats, and Mike’s father, who was a workaholic, had no one but his son to go with.

  Mike watched the game the way he would have observed the activity of an anthill. After it was over, he and his father walked back to their car, which was some distance from the field, by a line of meters that bordered a park.

  The park was the Fens, an overgrown Frederick Law Olmsted project that rambled away from the traffic circle Mike and his father were crossing.

  As they stepped onto the sidewalk, Mike noticed two men talking animatedly. Both of them were elegantly dressed, in blazers and striped shirts, and one was wearing bright pink socks.

  Instinctively Mike knew what these two men were.

  “If she doesn’t get back from New Orleans soon,” he heard one of them say, “she’s going to turn into a real queen.”

  He thought he saw another man, who was partly concealed by a bush in the park, staring at him.

  At that moment he felt exactly the same way he had in New York, at thirteen, when his church group traveled there for a weekend and he saw, in a Times Square newsstand, a pocket-size magazine with a man on its cover, a man who was not even wearing a bathing suit, only a pale blue pouch held up by a string.

  His father had noticed nothing. Almost trembling as he got into the car, Mike promised himself that he would return to this place. He would make up some story and take the bus in.

  The following Saturday, he did.