The Emerald Light in the Air (2 page)

“Let's all get down on our hands and knees,” I told the cast.

Down we went. Right away I noticed that Mary Victoria Frost and several faeries appeared to be acting like house cats; these girls arched their backs, projected feline butts into the air, and hissed. Sheila Tannenbaum—who, in act two, scene one, repeats the famous line “Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me”—was doing a nice job as a submissive pup, rolling over and sticking out her tongue to lick Billy Valentine, slithering past on his belly. Lion roared and Bottom brayed like an ass, and Sarah Goldwasser, our Titania, responded by rubbing herself against Sam; it was clear that these two had a flirtation in the works. That's something I like to see. Sex makes any show better. “Oink, oink,” I said to Mary Victoria Frost.

I love the theater. I really do. And I adored my cast. They adored one another, too; these boys and girls were becoming—as the days became weeks and the play took its shape—uninhibitedly smitten with one another. It was mid-May, and summer's first warmth was in the air. The basement felt stuffy and hot, thanks to the overheating furnace in the corner.

“We're not out of the woods yet,” I announced at the beginning of our third week. “Those of you who haven't got off book, you're holding the rest of us up. Demetrius, time your entrances so you don't keep Helena waiting downstage. Titania, less kissing and more teasing when you're giving it up to Bottom in act four. Make him work for it.”

“Reg?” peeped a voice from the crowd. It was Sarah Goldwasser, the prima donna.

“Yes, Sarah?”

“When will we get out of this gross basement and start rehearsing on the green?”

“Any day now. Roger and Emil are building the platforms in the trees, and they have to dig the hole for Puck. Once Puck's crater is finished, we'll move the show outdoors.”

“Crater?” This from Martin Epps.

“That's right. In our
Midsummer Night's Dream
, the demons won't merely buzz around like woodland pixies; they'll come right up from the earth to grab us and pull us down to Hell. At any rate, Martin, I don't think your hole will be much of a problem after one or two on-site rehearsals. You'll see,” I assured the blind boy.

It was one of those moments when a person (myself, in this instance) says something wholly untoward, and then, becoming aware of the faux pas and its implications, rushes blindly forward—there is no other way to describe this adequately, except as a king of verbal blindness—exclaiming additional horrors. “What I meant is … the rest of us will … watch you crawling … covered with dirt and sticks … You can picture it … I don't mean literally…”

“That's okay, Mr. Barry,” said Martin Epps.

“Call me Reg,” I reminded him, by way of apology. Then, addressing the room at large, attempting to regain authority: “All right. Let me have all the young lovers over in the corner. Lovers, don't touch the boiler.”

Possibly—I should say probably—it was risky of me to attempt simulated sex with undergraduates.

“What do you think, gang? Is this something you feel you can comfortably do in front of an audience?”

Together we sat—Mary Victoria Frost, Sheila Tannenbaum, Billy Valentine, and I—in a cozy circle on the floor. Billy, I noticed, had his eye on Mary; he leaned back beside her, and you could tell he was angling to spy an opening in her blouse and glimpse a breast. Mary spoke: “How dark will it be?”

“Fairly. By act three, the sun will be setting. With any luck, it'll be a humid night and the fireflies will be out.”

“It's going to be beautiful!” exclaimed Sheila.

I concurred, “That's right, Sheila. When you make love, you're doing God's work on Earth.”

After that, we sat for a time. The atmosphere became pleasantly uncomfortable. This sensation of a pervasive, shared emotional discomfort may have been helped along by the presence nearby of the foul-smelling oil furnace, hissing and burning, making the air in our little corner feel sickeningly, suffocatingly warm. Finally Billy broke the tension with a homophobic joke. “Reg, will I have to make out with you?”

“In a manner of speaking, Billy. Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena will trade back and forth in a kind of blind, revolving embrace. Erotic possibility, signifying not immorality but immortality, is the real pleasure for unmarried lovers. So we're going to get it on.”

“Like in my dormitory,” laughed Valentine.

Later, we all stretched out on the floor and began mapping positions. It was clear that the kids were—how shall I put this?—experienced in some ways and inexperienced in others. Sheila Tannenbaum chuckled when touched; there was little that was pretty about this rangy girl, yet she was coy and therefore sexy. Billy Valentine was not sexy. It annoyed me to watch him grope Mary Victoria Frost. He had no moves, and she, as far as I could tell, didn't care. I signaled everyone to switch partners, and Mary wrapped her legs around me. I read this as permission to cradle her in my lap. She weighed practically nothing. Was she one of those girls who exist on breakfast cereal and amphetamines? I stuck my face in her hair and breathed in her smells of bath oil and nicotine. Oh, my heart. I laid my head on Mary's shoulder and watched Billy Valentine straddle Sheila. He appeared to be mauling the girl's throat—what was he doing, administering a “sleeper” hold?—until Sheila made an athletic move with her legs, scissoring Billy and bringing him hard to the floor.
Thump
. Quickly, I leaned over and tugged Sheila toward me, in this way getting two girls and scoring a sexual victory over a boy young enough to be my son.

Billy Valentine sat to the side with his legs crossed and his head down. I had the feeling, watching him, that I was seeing him in an unguarded moment, and in a posture and attitude that expressed an essential state of his being. I was witnessing, it occurred to me, something like pure sadness; and I would've bet money that Billy was the child of divorced, probably alcoholic parents. I cuddled the girls and, in a moment of, I suppose, empathy, told him, “You know, Billy, my mother and father got drunk and argued all the time. The truth is, they were terrible to each other. I thought I'd never get over all that, and I guess maybe I never have.”

For an instant, Billy looked as if he might laugh. But he didn't laugh. He gazed at me with these big, round eyes that seemed to grow larger and more rounded; and his whole countenance changed, which is to say that, in some way that had more to do with a feeling than an actual look, his expression softened, and he lowered his head.

“Places for act two, scene one!” I called out to Danielle and the cast. “We're going to run the play from Puck's line to the faerie, ‘Thou speak'st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night.' Puck, you're downstage left, crawling out of your hole.”

“Thou speak'st aright. I am that merry. Wanderer of the night,” intoned my sightless Puck.

“Wait a minute, Martin. Do the line again, this time as if you hate life. Say this line as if you're alone in the world and you despise yourself.”

“Thou speak'st aright; I am that”—here he paused for an especially long time, as if thinking about a hard problem—“merry wanderer of the night.”

“Listen to me. Puck is not some frolicking clown. He's Hobgoblin! Beelzebub! Lucifer! Satan, the enemy of love! Puck is a wretched, willfully destructive creature. Let's do a quick exercise. Repeat after me: I am a wretched, willfully destructive creature.”

“I am a wretched, willfully destructive. Creature.”

“Everything I do creates pain.”

“Everything I. Do creates pain.”

“No one loves me.”

“No. One loves me.”

“I'm fucked up.”

“I'm fucked…”

He was sniffling. His voice cracked. Were there tears? I could not see the young actor's eyes because they were hidden behind dark lenses. I leaned close to my Puck, in order to growl in his ear, “I wear the number of the beast.”

“Huh?” he whimpered.

I smacked the blind kid on the shoulder. “Let's run this play, Martin, I mean Puck. When we get to the section where you chase the young lovers through the forest, go ahead and swat our legs with your cane.”

And to the cast, the Royals and rude Mechanicals, the devils and imps and lost children, I proclaimed, “This show needs to
move
, people. It's a comedy!”

Or is it? Students of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
will undoubtedly be familiar with the trend, in recent years, to emphasize horror in the drama: faeries played as ghouls, Oberon as a molester; Bottom's transformation depicted as a grotesque, literally asinine mutilation. There is a reactionary aspect to this movement away from traditional fun and games; construing the
Dream
as a hellish sexual nightmare rather than as an innocuous garden party is a way of making the play interestingly “modern” in the post–world war, post-Holocaust, thermonuclear and psychoanalytic era.

“Make it ugly,” I instructed my cast in the final week before the show. It was a Sunday afternoon, our first—and only, thanks to storms blowing in—outdoor run-through. The day was overcast and unseasonably chilly, with winds from the north smelling like rain. Crows perched on tree branches and the faeries' wooden platforms, three plywood decks connected by swaying footbridges, everything balanced precariously in the high, heavy oak limbs that reached out to shade Puck's deep hole, dug “center stage” at the southernmost edge of the Barry College green, our theater.

“Up in the trees, faeries, let's go,” I called. Girls took turns climbing. A few had trouble getting up. Sarah Goldwasser, the regal Titania, marched over and said, “Reg, will you tell Oberon to stop grabbing my nipples in our fight scene?”

“I think it's kind of good for the scene, Sarah.”

“He does it too hard. My nipples don't like it that hard,” she said, and huffed off toward her bower.

“Here comes the rain,” a boy's voice beside me exclaimed.

“I'd appreciate it if you would concentrate on your acting and not worry about the weather, Billy.”

“How are we supposed to do any acting when the entire stage is nothing but a hole in the ground?”

The boy had a point. And I had an answer. “The circular patterns sketched by our movements around the pit will illustrate mankind's proximity to the abyss, and this in turn will be a dramaturgical reminder of the themes of revolution and renewal in English morris dancing, which, you'll recall from the first week of rehearsal, Billy, is an acknowledged folk source for Shakespeare's May Day comedies.”

I wish I could say I was pleased with this impromptu oration. Purely technical observations concerning the larger implications of stagecraft are best left in the classroom, having, out here in the field, as it were, more of a confusing than a clarifying effect. Billy looked despairing. Clearly I had been right, during that sex-scene rehearsal the week before, in supposing him to be the child of an unhappy home. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, in as fatherly a voice as I could concoct on short notice, “I know it's a mighty big hole, Billy. We'll all have to be careful not to fall in and break our legs. Sometimes in the theater, as in life, we do our best work when mainly concerned with not making fools of ourselves.”

“That's typical for a man to say, isn't it?” declared a woman's voice. I became immediately tense. The speaker was Carol, who had snuck up from behind and was standing with her arms crossed before her chest, the posture expressing her confrontational mode, surely an indication that she had been drinking.

“Hello, Carol.”

“Don't bother being polite, Reg,” Carol said. “It doesn't look good on you.” She was weaving slightly, actually swaying in place, much in the manner of an actor impersonating a drunk, I thought. Here was an example of a dramatic cliché's analogue in reality.

“We're about to begin rehearsal, Carol. I suppose you've come to take a few last-minute costume measurements?”

“Fuck you.”

“Let's not have one of our scenes, Carol, not out here in front of the boy, please?”

“Look who's talking. If it isn't the protector of youth himself.” She addressed Billy, “I'll bet you're fond of your teacher, aren't you?”

“I guess.”

“You
guess
?” She seemed very unsteady on her feet. Her voice sounded hysterical and mean. “It's going to rain! Have you ever fucked in the rain? Your teacher likes to fuck in the rain!”

“Jesus, Carol.”

“He likes to fuck in the rain and he likes it on top of his desk and in cars and in other people's houses!”

By now people had accumulated, a circle of actors and actresses, a few passersby, no faculty or fellow academic deans, I hoped, everyone gathered to relish the spectacle of Carol crying, “I was going to have a baby! This man wouldn't let me have our baby!”

Billy, I noticed, wore a surprisingly composed (though somewhat glassed-over) expression, as if he were accustomed to violent exhibitionism in adults. He looked as though nothing could be more natural to him than a drunken woman's fury.

“I'm sorry, son,” I said to the boy when Carol eventually ceased yelling. I had the uneasy feeling that I was in some way giving an expert rendering of Billy's real father, a man who must've been lacking—if our episode on the college lawn could be used as an indicator—backbone.

“It's cool,” sighed Billy.

Then the rain came. The first drops were followed by wind and a great, rolling thunderclap. Tree branches swayed, and faeries scampered down from their platforms; then forked lightning struck nearby and the sky was instantly, ghostly white. Cast and crew began racing off in different directions. It was one of those thoroughly drenching gales that mark the beginning of summer—there was no point trying to stay dry. I reached out and took Carol by the arm, to comfort her and steady her. Rainwater soaked her hair and matted it in clumps. “Let's go indoors and get you wrapped in a warm towel,” I shouted over the thunder; and she tugged her arm away and staggered to the edge of Puck's hole. She gave me one of her powerful, inimitable, disgusted looks, then leaned over, braced herself with her hands on her knees, and vomited into the pit. It happened quickly and was over before Billy or I could respond in a helpful way. A couple of heaves and Carol spat out the last. She looked terrible, like a witch in the Scottish play, I thought, or one of those modern descendants of crones on heaths, the living dead who climb from graves in horror movies. She was intensely drunk, of course. To Billy—she was looking mostly at the boy, though presumably Carol was thinking of me, or maybe neither Billy nor me—she said, “Look at you. You make me sick. You're like your father. He does whatever he wants with people. He's a shit. There's no love in this family.”