The girls in the crowd were silent too, holding their jaws rigid and their eyes still. Only boys could be
wankers
and
tossers
and
jerks
: boys were exponents of this solitary function by default, a common fact which softened the shaming, and prevented any indicted
boy from being truly alienated or destroyed. For the girls, however, this territory remained inexplicably taboo. Four months
ago they would have simply frowned, taken on a pinched and nauseated look perhaps, and shaken their heads very faintly, to
forever banish the topic from their lunchtime circle on the
dusty grass. Now they were uneasy: they heard the Head of Acting
speak the word out loud and were suddenly fearful, lest such a flat and prudish denial of the act was somehow—in the eyes
of a man they all sought to impress—
wrong
. Somehow in the short summer between high school and the world beyond, a cosmic dial had turned: self-knowledge was now a
quality that lent a girl a kind of husky darkness, a careless self-sufficiency, an appeal that was worldly and yearning and
jaded all at once. The girls sat stiff and tense on the gymnasium floor and tried to look as casual and as solemn as they
could.
This was the Head of Acting’s method: to make sacred everything these students might regard profane, and then challenge any
one of them to blanch, or laugh. It worked. The students looked up at him, all of them without the usual proud mechanisms
that would make them need to cry,
Everybody masturbates but me
.
“Good,” the Head of Acting said softly. “Now everybody get up and form a circle.”
In their haste to leap up and obey him they were clumsy and flat-footed and gauche. They scrabbled to unknot themselves and
form a ring. The Head of Acting watched them fumble, and he smiled.
“What do you think, Martin?” the Head of Acting said, tapping his fountain pen against his cheek. “I thought Number 12 was
very teachable.”
“Willing,” said the Head of Movement. “Eager without being impatient. I’d say definitely a Maybe.”
“Too many on Maybe,” said the Head of Voice, spinning the whiteboard so the others could see. “We need to start making some
definite decisions or we’ll be here all night.”
“It’s because there are more and more Maybes each year,” said the Head of Acting irritably. “The kids are losing something.
Twenty years ago, kids were soft and supple and compliant. Now they’re like planks of wood. Everywhere you look you see fucking
Maybes.”
He threw himself back into his swivel chair, and the suspension caught him, buoying him back up again so he bobbed crossly
for a moment until the momentum died.
At the top of the whiteboard the Head of Improvisation had written Ambition, Teachability, Sociability, Talent in her cramped
sideways hand. The words tapered as they advanced across the board, so Ambition was written much larger than the rest, and
Talent narrowed to a spearhead against the raised silver lip of the frame. The Head of Acting tilted his head back and regarded
the petering list down the length of his nose. Sociability was new. It had been Collegiality for a number of years, and Courage
for many years before that. It had been Courage when he had first started teaching. The changes marked a devolution, the Head
of Acting thought.
“Teachability,” he said aloud. “For the boys, it means their potential to be taught about themselves, about their own bodies.
For the girls, it means their potential to forget, to be able to forget everything they’ve been taught about themselves and
about their bodies.”
“Oh, come on,” the Head of Improvisation said. “You act as if the boys and girls are utterly different species.”
“I’m just aware that there are differences.”
“I don’t think the differences are that huge. How about this boy—Number 12. How are this boy’s chances and choices any different
from any of the girls’?”
She was cross with the Head of Acting tonight, cross with the pointed sulky air of profound disappointment that was his by
rights, as Director of the Institute and possessor of the casting vote. He was sulking majestically, like a spoiled king.
“Well,” the Head of Acting said, “he’s not concerned about his beauty, for one thing. He’s not concerned that every role he
takes will flatter him, that every photograph will be backlit and soft focused, forever. He’s willing to be ugly for the sake
of his art.”
“Which is all very convenient,” the Head of Improvisation snapped, “because all the unbeautiful roles, all the character roles,
are written for men anyway.”
From across the table the Head of Movement watched them bicker, and wondered at his own stance. He thought he saw a surly
vein of misogyny in the older man, swollen over the years into a bluish pucker at his temple that never quite disappeared,
and he thought he saw an exposed nerve in the woman, some hypersensitivity, some indecent raw form of hysteria that made him
want to wince and look away. The Head of Movement often felt like this: marooned between two points of view, suspended. He
sighed.
“Let’s not intellectualize this too much,” the Head of Improvisation said at last, repenting. “What’s important is that the
boy is humble and receptive enough to be able to try different things, to stretch himself and grow, as an actor.”
“Humility,” the Head of Acting said. “That’s what it should say then, up there. If that’s what we’re looking for.”
The others were silent. The Head of Movement rubbed his face with his hands.
“All right. This isn’t helping,” the Head of Voice said. “We agree Number 12 is teachable. What else?”
They observed the photograph of Number 12, affixed to his application form with a paper clip. He looked slightly wistful,
wide eyed with long pale lashes and blond hair.
“My note on Number 12 was Vulnerable,” said the Head of Improvisation.
“I saw that too,” said the Head of Acting. “I wrote down Virginal.”
“Nice,” said the Head of Improvisation. “We can work with that.”
They were being deliberately polite with each other now. They’ll accept him in a moment, the Head of Movement thought. They’ll
accept the boy and it will be simply for show: as a show of deference on his part, as a show of graciousness on hers.
“I’d be prepared to make him a Yes,” said the Head of Acting. “Martin?”
The Head of Movement shrugged. When he was younger this used to excite him, selecting the choicest students from the pool
like a gourmand at a spice market, rolling the possibilities around on his tongue, full of hope and ambition for the year
ahead. This year as he pawed through the application forms he felt bleak and even a little ashamed of himself, as if he was
selling a product he knew to be without use or value. He had been teaching for too long.
He nodded finally. “Yes for me,” he said.
“All in favor?” said the Head of Acting, turning to include the others.
They all raised their pens gravely. The Head of Voice nodded a curt satisfied little nod and pulled the whiteboard toward
her. She uncapped her pen and wrote Stanley’s name in large square letters at the top of Yes.
Stanley clutched his Yes letter as he waited in the Green Room to be called upon. The other hopefuls sat around him, perched
upon armchairs or stacked wooden forms, or on the swivel chairs that were fixed at intervals in front of the cracked and dusty
mirror. Stanley caught sight of himself and realized how frightened he was, stiff in his pressed shirt with a new haircut
and long bloodless hands. His gaze slid to the left and he
made unexpected eye contact with the boy sitting next to him. They
both looked away quickly, ashamed at having been caught observing themselves in such a private way.
Stanley swung his ankles against the crossbar of his stool and looked about him. There was an even split between boys and
girls. The final class of twenty always comprised ten of each, so neither the boys nor the girls really regarded the other
as a rival: each sex was competing in parallel, vying only against their own. As a result the girls were cautious and deceitful
with each other but bright and flirtatious with the boys; the boys, in turn, laughed loudly and publicly when they were addressed
but in the meantime they sat apart from each other and watched the girls form their swift bonds of togetherness and false
sympathy with something between bewilderment and scorn.
Stanley was watching the girls now. Even as rivals they were pressing together, sowing shallow seeds of friendship and community:
“I know it won’t happen,” they said, “but I hope we
all
get in. I hope we all do. Wouldn’t it be amazing, if the tutors came out and said, Let’s take them all?” The girls said,
“Even if some of us don’t get in, we’ll stay in touch,” and some of them said, “I don’t have a chance, really. Not against
you guys. I cried in the first audition when you did that piece about the hope chest. You’re so much better than me it’s not
even funny.” The girls said, “Underneath it all I just want to be liked by everyone, liked and even loved.” One girl was massaging
another’s shoulders. She ground the heels of her hands into the shoulder blades of her rival, her adversary, a girl whom she
had only lately met, and in a low voice she said, “You’ll be awesome. You were awesome at the first audition. You’ll get in,
no problem.”
Later Stanley would arrive at the opinion that girls were naturally more duplicitous, more artful, better at falsely sheathing
their true selves; boys’ personalities simply shone through the clearer. It was that female art of multitasking, he would
conclude, that witchy capacity that girls possessed, that allowed
them to retain dual and triple threads of attention at once.
Girls could distinguish constantly and consciously between themselves and the performance of themselves, between the form
and the substance. This double-handed knack, this perpetual duality, meant that any one girl was both an advertisement and
a product at any one time. Girls were always acting. Girls could reinvent themselves, he later thought, with a sour twist
to his mouth and his free hand flattening the hair on his crown, and boys could not.
Which would be harder for the tutors, he wondered now, choosing between the girls or choosing between the boys? Did they have
a different set of criteria for each, a different benchmark that took into consideration this fundamental difference between
these unitary blunted boys and these many-headed Hydras, the girls? He realized with a kind of underwater flinch that all
the girls in the room were beautiful, all of them glossy and svelte like variations on a theme. The boys, by contrast, were
mostly odd and ordinary, not yet grown into their faces and their shoulders and their hands, some of them greasy and brash,
some of them thin and spotted and hoarse. Looking around, it seemed to Stanley as if the boys were here to audition for ten
different character parts in a play, and the girls were all auditioning for a single role. He got up and moved away.
The room was a mess: costume racks, painted flats, trunks, scaffolds and ladders, swollen cardboard boxes, paint cans, shrouded
furniture. On the auditorium wall there were shelves and shelves of faceless polystyrene heads wearing helmets and bonnets
and crowns, and in the corner a rusted suit of armor standing with his pelvis forward and his hands upon his hips.
Every five or ten minutes another number was called. The caller was a sharp gray woman who struck each name off her clipboard
with relish, and watched them between strikes with pity and mild curiosity, as if they were gladiators dressed up to die.
“Number 5,” she called now.
Number 5 jumped to his feet and trotted nervously out of the room. The others watched him go.
“What if this is part of the test?” said Number 14 once the door had shut. “What if they’re videoing us now and watching us
on live feed just to see how we bond?”
“What if there isn’t even an audition at all?” said Number 61. “We just get taken out of the room one by one once they’ve
watched us for long enough, and then they tell us to go home.”
“Like rats,” said Number 14, as if in summary. They fell silent.
A few of the boys were pacing around the room, trying to stamp out their nervousness and peering at the framed photographs
on the wall just for something to do. The photographs showed the class groups that had passed through the Institute, year
by year, becoming sharper and more focused as the technology advanced, so the most recent groups shone wetly with a crispness
and a brightness that the older classes did not possess. Stanley looked at the faces of all these people who had been opened
up, awakened, broken and prevented from forming a crust, and wondered how many of them had now surrendered and become ordinary.
In the photographs they looked hard and confident, bright in their theater makeup and their pinned-up costumes, and flushed
with the thrill of opening night. He followed the photographs along the length of the wall and saw soldiers, monks, orphans,
pirates, housewives, gods, samurai, and a group of silent watchmen in stern feathered masks that for some reason made him
shiver.
“Number 33, you’re up,” came the call.
When they all had first arrived, the Head of Acting swept in, distracted and tilting his face oddly as if he was used to wearing
bifocals.
“One of the questions we are going to ask you today,” he said briskly, “is why you want to attend this Institute, and why
you
want to become an actor. I am telling you this in advance so you can think hard about your answer. Let me say that all
I am looking for is a truthful answer to this question. I do not want you to tell me that the theater fills you with a noble
and holy passion just because you think that is the answer with which you can win. I want you to tell me the truth.
“Let me explain what I mean,” said the Head of Acting, still looking at them down the length of his long nose. “I auditioned
for a place at this Institute nearly forty years ago. When I arrived for my audition and waited in this Green Room like you
are all waiting here now, I was not filled with a noble and holy passion for the theater. I only knew that drama school sounded
like more fun than university, and I thought it would probably mean less work. I was wrong about the work,” he added, and
smiled faintly.