Screen Play

by Chris Coppernoll

  “Dear Lord, we love You for the work You’ve called us to, and the talents You’ve given every member of this team. Help us tonight to make use of these gifts and to bring glory to Your name. Amen.”

  We broke, and Harriet said, “Helen Payne never did nothing like that.”

  Immediately, the backstage lights dimmed.

  “Shhh …” Tabby silenced the cast.

  The reality that I’d walk onstage in mere minutes fell upon me like a sticky web of fear and heat. I heard Tabby whisper into her headset microphone, “We just finished cast prayer, and we’re running one minute behind.”

  Avril said, “Break a leg,” and disappeared stage right for her entrance. A man’s voice came over the house PA.

  “Ladies and gentleman. For tonight’s performance of Apartment 19, the part of Audrey Bradford will be played by Miss Harper Gray.”

  An audible groan of disappointment rose from the Carney Theatre, jeers of dissatisfaction from the balcony, booing from the lower seats.

  A rush of fear rippled through my body, making me sick to my stomach. A tear flooded my eye, and a sudden, overpowering grip of panic seized my nervous system. My adrenaline pulsed, my breathing constricted. I couldn’t remember a single word in the script! Phyllis took a tissue from her pocket and dabbed my eye with it, careful to not smear Laura’s makeup.

  I closed my eyes and repeated to myself over and over again, “Get a grip, get a grip.” I heard the whirring sound of the rotor opening the stage curtain. The full lights came up, and I realized Avril had already stepped onstage. She was no longer my friend, but Roxy Dupree, my other roommate. Audrey Bradford’s roommate.

  I closed my eyes. Fix this, fix this. Please, fix this! Prickly sweat rolled down my back, and I worried about what my costumes would look like after an hour of sweating like this onstage.

  When my eyes opened again, I was staring into the face of a concerned Tabby Walker, the woman who told Ben Hughes there were twenty other actors who could walk in off the street and nail the role I was about to play. She took hold of me by the shoulders and looked me in the eyes.

  “Harper, get a grip,” she said sharply, but without anger. “You are going to succeed tonight. Listen to me. I can’t do it, but you can. You are a great actress. You’re going to go out there tonight and make this role your own. So let out what God has put inside you.”

  Tabby stepped behind me. She laid her hands on my shoulders and literally pushed me toward the wings at stage left.

  The stage went dark at the end of the first scene, and in pitch blackness, the grips rolled out the props and scenery for Scene 2. Backdrop number one rose high into the ceiling, coming to rest against the railing of the catwalk. Tabby poked me gently in the back with her finger, and I stepped onstage in costume.

  Anyone could ask God for a favor in a prayer circle, but only a real God could answer back. I took my mark at the fireplace, the set decor obscure in near, total darkness. The audience couldn’t see me.

  Transform me, Lord. Make me into another person.

  Isn’t that what He’d done all year? The spotlights and ceiling cans flooded me from above and behind. I could feel their heat on my body. The eyes of the audience were watching me now.

  I was onstage. I had to do something.

  In front of me, I saw that the mantelpiece was dusty. I was sure the grips had wiped it down prior to opening night, but stored backstage, it had gotten dusty all over again. A cleaning rag and green feather duster were lying on the stage to the right of me, so I reached down and picked up the cloth, running it through the crevices, stripping off dust particles and watching them somersault through the beams of the bright stage lights.

  Why is it things can never stay clean? There was a knock on the door. What was her name? I could scarcely remember that woman who had called an hour before wanting to see me with some excuse. She would probably try to sell me something, or ask for a handout. They always do. She’d already interrupted my cleaning. I walked to the door of my apartment, opened it, and that woman, Roxy Dupree, or some such thing, stepped in—without even being so much as asked!

  Avril delivered her first line, and I found that place of inspiration and muse. I uttered my line, surprised to hear the inflection coming out on pitch, strong and round. She spoke again and I knew what I would say next. No pallor tinted my face or voice. The rehearsals, the acting, and the instincts all kicked in. I could feel how to move onstage, stepping into the apartment as comfortably as if it were my own. I knew how to speak each line, the words snapped in rhythm as if they were taps on the soles of a dancer’s shoes.

  The story felt fresh and alive to me. One part of me acted, as another watched, aware that the audience was watching us too.

  I heard the words in my ears like I was somebody else. It was a dance, an unexpected ballet, and Avril was stepping up the intensity of her performance. Whatever she’d held back in scenes with Helen was surfacing now.

  Avril walked to the front of the stage and turned back to look at me, swallowed up by bright stage light behind her, eclipsed from my view.

  “Do you expect me to believe you?” Roxy asked, her brown hairdo piled high on her head.

  “Oh, Roxy,” Audrey pleaded with her, moving closer to the center of the stage. “I expect you to trust me.”

  The night flew by in a blur, an exquisite silver blur, a dream where everything is lovely, and rings with perfect meaning. When the dream was finally over, the lights went dark onstage, and I left the window where Audrey lay dead, killed by her own knife, and wiggled out onto a safety mat on the backstage floor. One of the grips met me with a small flashlight and escorted me over to the wings. I heard applause. Then I saw Tabby. I looked past her and saw the audience for the first time. They were on their feet. Ben appeared behind me, wrapped his arms around me, squeezing the life out of me.

  “I knew you could do it,” he shouted in my ear over the raucous noise in the Carney. I nodded like I knew what he meant, or even knew what I was doing. Tabby rushed forward.

  “You’re on, get onstage,” she said, moving the headset mic away from her lips, shooing me forward.

  I walked out from the beyond the curtains, my fellow actors waiting at center stage, clapping their hands, their faces owning a secret to which I was still ignorant. Avril held a bouquet of yellow roses. When I stepped into view, the flashbulbs went off. The houselights were full up, and I could see everyone standing in front of their seats.

  Harriet and Marshall made a place for me in the middle, where I joined them, waving to the crowds. A lady in the front row stepped up to the stage and presented me with a bouquet of red roses. I knelt and said “Thank you,” my voice drowned out by the clamor.

  Harriet and Avril took my hands and raised them as we all bowed to the audience. I felt like we were the privileged few. We all bowed again.

  Still in a daze, I followed Avril back to the wings. She threaded her arm through mine, the nerves returning, shouting as she’d done in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.

  “That was amazing!” she said.

  Tabby and Ben were standing backstage clapping their hands as though they were simply spectators. The cast hugged, and Harriet leaned in, whispered to me.

  “I knew you could do it,” she said.

  The actors didn’t want to scatter after our performance, so I opened the door of my dressing room and switched on the bright overhead lights and the stereo.

  “Everybody, come in here,” I called to them, and the small room filled with actors in their costumes, stage grips, our producers, Phyllis, Tabby, and Ben.

  “What just happened out there?” I asked them. “Did you feel what I felt?”

  Ben spoke. “That was one of the most incredible productions I’ve ever seen,” he said. “You all took a play that hasn’t been performed in thirty years, and o
pened it two nights ago—to rave reviews I might add. Tonight, this same cast—with one notable exception,” Ben said, gesturing toward me, “reinvented Mouldain’s classic drama as a modern theater piece.”

  The cast exploded in good cheer.

  “There were times I literally didn’t know what was going to happen next,” he continued. “Avril, you were electrifying out there. Roxy never stood up for herself like that before. Every cast member brought their performance to new heights tonight, but Harper …” Ben looked at me, temporarily speechless, or perhaps holding the moment for effect. “The old Apartment 19 was black and white. You brought Technicolor to the stage. The tension was palpable. When the audience realized the rumors were true and they weren’t going to see Helen, they didn’t want to like you. That only made their reaction to Audrey Bradford that much more uncontrollable. They were beside themselves, but by the end of the first act, they loved it. Now we just have to hire a new understudy for you.”

  “Yeah, they came here expecting a comfortable ride in a classic Cadillac,” Tabby said. ”You gave them a spin at one-twenty in a brand-new Ferrari.”

  ~ Sixteen ~

  The Little Play that Could

  By Eric Starns

  New York Times/Theatre

  Three nights ago director Ben Hughes demonstrated that Broadway can reinvent itself by dipping into the musty files of long-forgotten playwrights and plucking out a cherry. Mouldain’s Apartment 19 premiered Sunday evening in triumph, mostly due to Helen Payne, whose spot-on performance only reinforced her status as Queen Diva of The Great White Way.

  But alas, this is Broadway, and dreams go up like Roman candles, dazzling us one minute, only to fall back to earth the next. Fortunately for those who love theater, Ben Hughes has a full bag of fireworks and a pocketful of matchsticks with which to light them. Hughes must have known his bench was deep with talent to allow a legend like Helen Payne to pack up and walk away, leaving not shoes to fill, but footprints carved deep in the Carney’s historic stage. For Payne’s replacement, Hughes tapped unknown actress Harper Gray, but the Carney Theatre doesn’t care who impersonates Mouldain’s eccentric psychopath. It knows but one word this season: revival. From its multi-million-dollar renovation, to the resuscitation of Mouldain’s masterpiece, to the stunned reactions of theatergoers blessed enough to possess one of the show’s limited thirty thousand golden tickets. New York theater has a new neighbor in Apartment 19. Unpredictable, stunning, and shockingly good, Ben Hughes’s new production is breathtaking in the razor sharp risks it takes both onstage and off. It satisfies an audience’s appetite for remarkable theater while leaving you hungry for what exists nowhere else.

  Harper Gray doesn’t steal the show, as Helen Payne did in her brief turn as the nut job Audrey Bradford. Instead, she draws electricity out of thin air like a lightning rod, then directs it back into audiences, shocking old emotions they’ve long since forgotten and zapping new ones they never knew they had.

  After a wonderfully long night, I rewarded myself with the luxury of sleeping in on Thursday morning. I awoke just after 9 a.m. to a quiet apartment following my first two performances of Apartment 19, good reviews from New York theater critics, and a late dinner with Avril and Ben.

  There were no sounds of coffee brewing coming from the kitchen or of shower water hitting tile in the bathroom. I felt content to just lie in bed and dream.

  The sun flickered through the curtains, reflecting off passing buses. A spurt of nervous energy before my Tuesday-night debut resulted in an extra-tidy bedroom. One more sign that things were falling into place.

  As I lay in bed, it dawned on me I’d missed the Wednesday night service at Fellowship Community Church. I thought about Luke and whether or not he’d returned from his arctic pizza delivery, and wondered if it was dangerous to fly over miles of ice and snow in a small plane.

  I thought of James and his boys, and said a small prayer, remembering something my dad once told me—that people are usually happy in their careers or in their home life, but seldom is a person successful at both. James had both and lost one. I wondered if he felt like God had suddenly realized He’d dealt him too many blessing cards and decided to take one back.

  Finally, my thoughts turned to finances. My modest share of Avril’s three-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment was six hundred dollars. In one overpriced week of living on the island of Manhattan, I’d managed to shell out almost three hundred dollars in food, trains, and taxis. Asking Ben for an advance on my first week’s salary would be humbling but critical if I intended to keep feeding and sheltering myself.

  By ten o’clock, I’d showered and brewed a full pot of coffee. Avril finally came out from her dark chamber of sleep looking seriously drowsy. She passed me on her way to the bathroom, and a moment later I heard the shower come on.

  I carried the cordless phone into the sunny living room and dialed Katie’s cell. While the signal searched for connection, I studied her lilac-colored card, noting all the ways there were to stay connected with her and David. Two cell phone numbers, a church Web site, a daily blog, Twitter, and their IM addresses. She answered on the second ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey Katie, it’s Harper. I just wanted to call to say I was sorry I missed seeing you and David at church last night. Something’s come up.”

  “No worries. People always think we keep attendance at church, but that’s not the case, Harper,” she said. “I’ve been praying for you this week.”

  I pulled my feet up underneath me in the chair, slouching into its warm cushions. “I think God may have answered your prayers.”

  “Why? Has something happened?”

  “Yes. I’d really love to catch up with you. Is that offer to have lunch still open?”

  We set a lunch date for the next day.

  After my call to Katie, I went back into the kitchen to grab a peach yogurt from the fridge, along with a napkin and spoon. Tearing off the orange-yellow foil, I tasted the tart, creamy breakfast and tossed the lid in the trash.

  I arranged my coffee and yogurt on the desk and scooted the chair underneath me. The shades in the front windows were open, casting sunbeams on my bare feet. The LoveSetMatch.com homepage greeted me, this time featuring a photo of a different happily matched real-life couple. They wore casual clothes and seemed to be on perpetual vacation, their faces beaming with smiles of utter bliss.

  I clicked through to my personal page to discover that LoveSetMatch had added yet another new feature. A signal, a tiny orange and red flame that glowed beside the names of matches whenever one was online. The little flame flickered beside Luke’s name.

  I wanted to share my good mood with someone, so I fired off an instant message.

  Hey, are you online?

  Luke didn’t answer. I waited for a minute, imagining a whistling teakettle, a doorbell, or the call of nature had pulled him away from his screen. Nothing.

  I refreshed my screen, and when the page finished uploading, Luke’s flame was gone. The moment didn’t warrant disappointment, but that is exactly what I felt. The little flame was there one second, and gone the next, and with it too my chance to say “hello.” I returned to my personal page. The tab bar read:

  New Messages (1)

  I clicked. It was a new message from James.

  Dear Harper,

  I appreciate your prayers. They mean a lot to me. Despite our family’s loss, I remain thankful that my architectural firm is doing well. I enjoy my work, and I’m grateful for my boys each and every day.

  We live in a house overlooking the ocean, and for me, few things in life are as peaceful as living near water. You’ll have to tell me more about your acting and the theatrical world. I know nothing about entertainment, having only stepped onstage once in college, and even then it was only to keep up the back end of a horse costume. So pleas
e, don’t ask for career advice. BTW—you didn’t mention whether you’re dating. Is that too personal a question? Keep in touch!

  –James.

  I hit the Reply button and opened a new message window.

  James,

  I’m still adjusting to this brave new world of communicating with people online. It takes some getting used to, no? I’m glad to hear business is good, and an architect’s home on the coast sounds absolutely breathtaking. I love the ocean, and have found few things that are as restorative.

  Life for an actress in New York? Hmm, it’s memorizing lines, wearing funny costumes, and pretending to be someone else. And, I’m finding lately it’s also an area God chooses to bless me through. This presents its own special stresses, needs, and feelings of inadequacy. Maybe that’s a pressure not limited to theater people.

  Thanks for your messages, I enjoy them. As for dating, I seem to know less about it the more time that passes. Keep me in your prayers, and I’ll keep your family in mine. God is our architect, our Designer, and I have to trust that He’s building something out of so much rubble. Although, it’s not always easy being a project under construction! : )

  –Harper

  I signed off LoveSetMatch and noticed I’d brought Katie’s card with me from the living room. Two cell phone numbers, a church Web site, a daily blog, Twitter. I typed in the address for David and Katie’s ministry blog. A blurred image of the church’s front door served as the site’s background, and in the foreground were photos of Fellowship’s worship services, a young women’s Bible study with Katie teaching, and a group photo of ten or so people eating Chinese food at a long table, waving to the camera.

  I could almost hear Katie’s voice narrating as I read the bio page. It was obvious she’d written it. The page told the story of how she and David had come from Oklahoma City to the Big Apple, drawn by the belief that God wanted them to plant a church. She shared their heartache of a miscarriage, something she hadn’t mentioned in person, and yet here was their deeply personal story posted online for all the world to read.