“Oh, by the way, Greta,” he said, “I picked up a copy of The Village Times for you. There’s a thumbnail review of our Measure for Measure, though it mentions no names, darn it. It’s around here somewhere.…”
But I was already hurrying on. Oh, it was logical enough to have Martin playing Mrs. Macbeth in a production styled to Shakespeare’s own times (though pedantically over-authentic, I’d have thought) and it really did answer all my questions, even why Miss Nefer could sink herself wholly in Elizabeth tonight if she wanted to. But it meant that I must be missing so much of what was going on right around me, in spite of spending 24 hours a day in the dressing room, or at most in the small adjoining john or in the wings of the stage just outside the dressing room door, that it scared me. Siddy telling everybody, “Macbeth tonight in Elizabethan costume, boys and girls,” sure, that I could have missed—though you’d have thought he’d have asked my help on the costumes.
But Martin getting up in Mrs. Mack. Why, someone must have held the part on him twenty-eight times, cueing him, while he got the lines. And there must have been at least a couple of run-through rehearsals to make sure he had all the business and stage movements down pat, and Sid and Martin would have been doing their big scenes every backstage minute they could spare with Sid yelling, “Witling! Think’st that’s a wifely buss?” and Martin would have been droning his lines last time he scrubbed and mopped.…
Greta, they’re hiding things from you, I told myself.
Maybe there was a 25th hour nobody had told me about yet when they did all the things they didn’t tell me about.
Maybe they were things they didn’t dare tell me because of my top-storey weakness.
I felt a cold draft and shivered and I realized I was at the door to the stage.
I should explain that our stage is rather an unusual one, in that it can face two ways, with the drops and set pieces and lighting all capable of being switched around completely. To your left, as you look out the dressing-room door, is an open-air theater, or rather an open-air place for the audience—a large upward-sloping glade walled by thick tall trees and with benches for over two thousand people. On that side the stage kind of merges into the grass and can be made to look part of it by a green groundcloth.
To your right is a big roofed auditorium with the same number of seats.
The whole thing grew out of the free summer Shakespeare performances in Central Park that they started back in the 1950’s.
The Janus-stage idea is that in nice weather you can have the audience outdoors, but if it rains or there’s a cold snap, or if you want to play all winter without a single break, as we’ve been doing, then you can put your audience in the auditorium. In that case, a big accordion-pleated wall shuts off the out of doors and keeps the wind from blowing your backdrop, which is on that side, of course, when the auditorium’s in use.
Tonight the stage was set up to face the outdoors, although that draft felt mighty chilly.
I hesitated, as I always do at the door to the stage—though it wasn’t the actual stage lying just ahead of me, but only backstage, the wings. You see, I always have to fight the feeling that if I go out the dressing room door, go out just eight steps, the world will change while I’m out there and I’ll never be able to get back. It won’t be New York City any more, but Chicago or Mars or Algiers or Atlanta, Georgia, or Atlantis or Hell and I’ll never be able to get back to that lovely warm womb with all the jolly boys and girls and all the costumes smelling like autumn leaves.
Or, especially when there’s a cold breeze blowing, I’m afraid that I’ll change, that I’ll grow wrinkled and old in eight footsteps, or shrink down to the witless blob of a baby, or forget altogether who I am—
—or, it occurred to me for the first time now, remember who I am. Which might be even worse.
Maybe that’s what I’m afraid of.
I took a step back. I noticed something new just beside the door: a high-legged, short-keyboard piano. Then I saw that the legs were those of a table. The piano was just a box with yellowed keys. Spinet? Harpsichord?
“Five minutes, everybody,” Martin quietly called out behind me.
I took hold of myself. Greta, I told myself—also for the first time, you know that some day you’re really going to have to face this thing, and not just for a quick dip out and back either. Better get in some practice.
I stepped through the door.
* * * *
Beau and Doc were already out there, made up and in costume for Ross and King Duncan. They were discreetly peering past the wings at the gathering audience. Or at the place where the audience ought to be gathering, at any rate—sometimes the movies and girlie shows and brainheavy beatnik bruhahas outdraw us altogether. Their costumes were the same kooky colorful ones as the others’. Doc had a mock-ermine robe and a huge gilt papier-mache crown. Beau was carrying a ragged black robe and hood over his left arm—he doubles the First Witch.
As I came up behind them, making no noise in my black sneakers, I heard Beau say, “I see some rude fellows from the City approaching. I was hoping we wouldn’t get any of those. How should they scent us out?”
Brother, I thought, where do you expect them to come from if not the City? Central Park is bounded on three sides by Manhattan Island and on the fourth by the Eighth Avenue Subway. And Brooklyn and Bronx boys have got pretty sharp scenters. And what’s it get you insulting the woiking and non-woiking people of the woild’s greatest metropolis? Be grateful for any audience you get, boy.
But I suppose Beau Lassiter considers anybody from north of Vicksburg a “rude fellow” and is always waiting for the day when the entire audience will arrive in carriage and democrat wagons.
Doc replied, holding down his white beard and heavy on the mongrel Russo-German accent he miraculously manages to suppress on stage except when “Vot does it matter? Ve don’t convinze zem, ve don’t convinze nobody. Nichevo.”
Maybe, I thought, Doc shares my doubts about making Macbeth plausible in rainbow pants.
Still unobserved by them, I looked between their shoulders and got the first of my shocks.
It wasn’t night at all, but afternoon. A dark cold lowering afternoon, admittedly. But afternoon all the same.
Sure, between shows I sometimes forget whether it’s day or night, living inside like I do. But getting matinees and evening performances mixed is something else again.
It also seemed to me, although Beau was leaning in now and I couldn’t see so well, that the glade was smaller than it should be, the trees closer to us and more irregular, and I couldn’t see the benches. That was Shock Two.
Beau said anxiously, glancing at his wrist, “I wonder what’s holding up the Queen?”
Although I was busy keeping up nerve-pressure against the shocks, I managed to think. So he knows about Siddy’s stupid Queen Elizabeth prologue too. But of course he would. It’s only me they keep in the dark. If he’s so smart he ought to remember that Miss Nefer is always the last person on stage, even when she opens the play.
And then I thought I heard, through the trees, the distant drumming of horses’ hoofs and the sound of a horn.
* * * *
Now they do have horseback riding in Central Park and you can hear auto horns there, but the hoofbeats don’t drum that wild way. And there aren’t so many riding together. And no auto horn I ever heard gave out with that sweet yet imperious ta-ta-ta-TA.
I must have squeaked or something, because Beau and Doc turned around quickly, blocking my view, their expressions half angry, half anxious.
I turned too and ran for the dressing room,