The Fourth Wall

by Barbara Paul

  The stage and backstage areas were swarming with people, writing things in notebooks, taking pictures. Leo Gunn was poking at a broken chair with the toe of his sneaker. Carla Banner was there, popeyed and open-mouthed. First she’d walk from stage right across the front of the apron to stage left, where she’d stand gawking for a few moments. Then she’d make her way back across the apron to stage right and gawk from that angle for a while. Then she’d repeat the whole process. Carla was feeling stupid and helpless, the way a big shock often leaves you.

  “What I don’t understand,” I said to Leo Gunn, “is how all this could have been done without anyone hearing it. The regular watchman was on duty, wasn’t he? And somebody was in the box office during the day.”

  Leo nodded toward the wings. “There’s the watchman.” An older man I hadn’t noticed before was sitting on a wooden chair; he was thin and trembly, and his face had an off-color cast to it. “He was chloroformed,” said Leo. “The people up front heard nothing, never looked into the auditorium. The doors were closed.”

  The doors at the entrance to each aisle separated the seating area from the lobby; they were specially built to deaden sound. Deaden it—but shut it out completely? I didn’t think so.

  Sergeant Piperson came over to where we were standing. Leo and I looked at him expectantly, wondering what he had to say.

  “I paid for your drinks.” That was what he had to say.

  “Huh?” said Leo.

  I must have looked blank, for the Sergeant went on to explain, “Last Saturday, at the bar. You walked out without paying for your drinks.”

  I slumped against Leo. “All right, Sergeant. I owe you for two drinks. I am grateful. Now will you tell me why we’re standing here talking about my bar bill? What about this set?”

  Sergeant Piperson grinned. “He went too far this time. Nobody can do a job this big without leaving a calling card of some kind. We’ll get him now.”

  “Sure you will,” said Leo, deadpan.

  The watchman suddenly began to moan. “I feel sick.”

  “You’re lucky you’re alive,” Sergeant Piperson told him bluntly. “Most people don’t know chloroform can be lethal. Be thankful you got a safe dose.”

  The old man moaned again, and Carla Banner went over to help him. She half-walked, half-carried him to the men’s room, where we could hear him throwing up.

  Piperson turned back to Leo and me.

  “We’ve already picked up a couple of things that might give us a lead, and we’re just getting started. Whoever this guy is, he’s told us something we didn’t know before.”

  “What’s that?” asked Leo.

  The Sergeant looked directly at me. “This nut isn’t carrying on a personal vendetta against Sylvia Markey or Ian Cavanaugh. They were targets only because they were acting in Foxfire, It’s you he’s after, Abby. Somebody’s out to close your play.”

  A television camera crew had been waiting outside the theater, so I had the dubious pleasure of seeing myself on the late news. Wooden-faced, I answered questions into the mike stuck under my nose. No, I had no idea who had destroyed the set, or why. Yes, the play would close temporarily until a new set could be built. No, I didn’t know what steps the police were planning to take—see Sergeant Piperson.

  Piperson’s announcement that I was this madman’s target left me more confused than ever. If he’d attacked Sylvia Markey and Ian Cavanaugh simply because they were in my play, why had he gone after Loren Keith as well? Loren had nothing to do with Foxfire; our designer was a man who’d been in Paris for the last two months working on sets for a ballet company. Did that mean Loren’s blinding was coincidental after all? It looked that way, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it.

  “Stay tuned for the CBS Late Movie,” the well-informed newscaster told me. “Tonight it’s The Life of Emily Zola.” Starring Paul Muni as Emily?

  By the next day the police had worked out what had happened. The theater building showed no sign of forced entry, so the vandal—hereafter known as He—must have hidden somewhere after the performance and spent the night in the theater. The night watchman was alone after about midnight, which was the time Gene Ramsay’s guard left. He might have planned to wreak his havoc during the night hours; but the theater district is well patrolled at night, and He may have decided it was too risky with the police checking in every hour or so.

  The night watchman went off duty at six, when his relief took over. The box office didn’t open until ten, so that meant He had four hours to do his damage with only one frail old man to take care of. That way if any especially loud crash leaked through the auditorium doors, there’d be no one in the box office to hear it.

  Here the police began to speculate. Anyone planning such extensive damage needed equipment—a knife for slashing, an ax for smashing, paint for throwing, tools of some sort for ripping out the wiring. And the chloroform. All this would make a sizable bundle, something one couldn’t just leave with the coat check girl to be picked up later. So the police theorized that after chloroforming the watchman, He took the watchman’s keys and unlocked the loading doors at the back of the theater. Then He could have driven a station wagon or a pickup to the loading area and moved his gear inside. This would have been in broad daylight; but to anyone who saw him, He probably looked like any workman doing his job. Police were now searching for witnesses.

  Who the hell was this vicious set wrecker? The police said there were three possibilities:

  1. He was someone connected with Foxfire, someone who had a legitimate reason for being in the Martin Beck Theatre. This would include the cast, the backstage crew, the front-of-house crew, the producer, the director, the assistant director, and the playwright.

  2. He was someone who’d come into the theater as a member of the audience.

  3. He had come into the theater the previous day in the guise of a workman or delivery man and had just stayed.

  And a sort of side category: He might be She.

  The police were inclined to dismiss possibility number three. There are a lot of places to hide in a theater, the police said, but not that many. There were just too many people all over the place for too many hours for him to remain successfully concealed during the evening performance. Coming into the theater as a member of either the company or the audience and hiding after the performance was much more probable. If a member of the company, He would have had to check himself out on the doorkeeper’s list but not actually leave. Tricky, but possible.

  So there were all sorts of leads for the police to follow. A check on any deliveries made to the theater the preceding day. Possible witnesses to a workman unloading something at the back of the theater. What brand of paint was used, how much of it was required for the amount of mess that was made, where it was bought. Did the ax blows indicate a right-handed or left-handed person. It looked as if Sergeant Piperson had been right about one thing—it was impossible to do that big a job without leaving some sort of calling card.

  I was now the subject of the same kind of intense investigation earlier given Sylvia Markey and Ian Cavanaugh. There was no doubt in Sergeant Piperson’s mind that killing the play had been the prime object all along. Who would be hurt most if Foxfire closed? Not Gene Ramsay; he had two other plays running and was in no danger of starving. Not John Reddick; a play he’d directed last season had only recently closed and he’d just started work on a new one. An investigation of the play’s financial backers had turned up nothing of interest. The actors would be hurt to a certain extent; New York always has a thousand times as many actors as it has roles for them to act. The crew people could find new jobs more easily than the actors, but eventually they would all move on to other things. So in the end it came back to me. A big hunk of my life was in Foxfire, bigger than anyone else’s. And there’d be no weekly check for groceries until I had a new play in production.

  The cliché speaks of someone’s life being an open book; well, mine certainly was now. Sergeant
Piperson did a job on me, all right—he didn’t leave me a single secret. He dug up things I hadn’t thought about in years, people I’d known, plays I’d worked on, organizations I’d belonged to. At first his suspicions were directed toward my ex-husband, even though I hadn’t seen the man for ten years. But it turned out that on the day the set was wrecked he’d been in a clinic in Phoenix getting a hair transplant. Next Sergeant Piperson zoomed in on a man I’d lived with for six years, but he had been attending a workshop-seminar at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. Piperson obviously wanted to uncover a sexual motive; I hoped he wasn’t too disappointed.

  But it wasn’t just the police. Newspaper and television reporters nearly drove me mad; eventually I just locked myself in and didn’t go out at all. I knew interest would wane before too long; Foxfire’s problems would soon be replaced by some new sensation. But for a few days there during Christmas week I felt like screaming. The other Foxfire people were being harassed too; we were all curiosities, something to gossip about. Nobody was talking much, except Carla Banner, the most-quoted member of the company. Carla hadn’t yet learned that you don’t have to answer a question simply because somebody asks it.

  In realistic theater there is a convention known as the fourth wall. It is a tacit agreement between playwright and audience that what the audience is looking at on the stage is the room of a house from which one wall has been removed. Those within the three-walled room go about their business, revealing the intimacies of their private lives to the unseen but all-seeing audience. It is a convention first brought into prominence by Ibsen’s parlor dramas, but it also gave rise to the term “peephole theater” because of its spying aspect. It works only for plays in which all the action takes place within a confined area—there’s no fourth wall convention in Shakespeare, for instance. But in a larger sense the fourth wall works as a metaphor for all theater: we are observers of other people’s lives.

  I mention this convention now because I couldn’t shake the feeling that a fourth wall had been torn away from my life, leaving me exposed and vulnerable. I don’t mean the police and the curiosity seekers; they were annoying as hell, but in the long run that’s all they were—an annoyance. No, I mean the man who was doing this to me, who sat out there in the safe, darkened auditorium enjoying my discomfort at his leisure. The man who was out to destroy my work—the surest way there is of destroying me. There’s no way of saying this without sounding paranoid; I’m sorry.

  I was scared. Wrecking the set would put Foxfire out of action for a while, but it wouldn’t kill the play. There was more to come, and we all knew it.

  11

  During my hiding-from-the-world period Sergeant Piperson showed me the consideration of coming to my place instead of insisting I show up at the precinct station. The first time he just stood in the middle of the living room and gawked. He asked all the usual questions: Have you read all these books? Did you take a course in speed reading? How can you ever find what you want?

  Not all of them, no, easily. “I’ve spent twenty years building up this library, and I know where things are pretty well.”

  “Do you collect first editions?”

  “No. That’s a whole different ball game.”

  The Sergeant pulled a copy of John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge from the shelf and riffled through the pages. “Is this a good play?”

  “It’s a terrible play. One of the poorest to come out of the Elizabethan period.”

  “Then why keep it?”

  “I have a special interest in revenge plays,” I said. “The ethics bother me. Revenge plays offer a rather underhanded kind of wish fulfillment to an audience. You can ‘get even’ vicariously, and with impunity. Yet some of the greatest plays ever written are revenge plays.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Like Hamlet. Or the Oresteia.”

  Piperson put the book back and said, “Well, I was always curious about the places writers work.”

  “Oh, I don’t work in here. This is the living room.” I took him upstairs and showed him my workroom.

  The brownstone I called home had been divided into two roomy apartments. The first two floors belonged to a married couple who had something to do with advertising and who gave elaborate parties every few months. The top two floors belonged to me—the top floor-and-a-half, I should say. The fourth floor had been the attic and was partially converted into one huge room that I used as a workroom. My library was all over the place, wherever I could find room to put up shelves.

  In the workroom Sergeant Piperson took in the three worktables, the piles of papers, the typewriter, the filing cabinets, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. He picked up one of my notebooks and hefted it a couple of times, as if weighing the contents. “Well.” He cleared his throat. “If we ever have a serious paper shortage, I’ll know who to blame.” I looked at him in surprise; it was the first time I’d ever heard him try to make a joke.

  We went back down to the living room and Sergeant Piperson opened some file folders he’d brought with him. “I’ll bet in all these books you don’t have a single chemistry text.”

  I didn’t understand. “Why should I have a chemistry text?”

  He laughed—a little smugly, I thought. “Not exactly your favorite subject, was it? In college, I mean. You flunked it twice. Got a C the third time.”

  I shook my head. “Mistake somewhere. I never studied chemistry.”

  “Oh, come on, nobody expects you to know everything. I’ve got your transcript right here. You flunked chemistry.”

  I was irritated by his unconcealed pleasure in thinking I’d failed a subject. “No, I didn’t flunk chemistry. I probably would have if I’d ever taken a course—does that satisfy you? I’m telling you there’s a mistake in the record. Or you were sent the wrong transcript.”

  “Your maiden name’s Coghill, isn’t it? That’s what it says here. How many Abigail Coghills can there be?”

  “Let me see.” I studied the photocopy he handed me. “This is the transcript of someone named Abigail Dana Coghill—that’s not my middle name. She lists a home address in Madison, Wisconsin. I’ve never been to Wisconsin. Oh, and look—she graduated only two years ago. She’d be about twenty-four now—yes, here’s her date of birth. You’ve got the wrong transcript.” I handed it back to him.

  Now it was his turn to be irritated. “Somebody’s always screwing up. It’s little things like this that slow down an investigation.”

  Frankly I didn’t have too much faith in an investigation in which the man in charge hadn’t even noticed he’d been sent the wrong transcript. “What do you want a transcript for anyway?”

  “Background” was all he would say.

  We talked about my younger days for a while, but what the Sergeant really wanted to know about was professional rivalries. “Any writers you’re feuding with?”

  “No.”

  “Critics, reviewers?”

  “Almost all of them. But that’s par for the course.”

  “Give me some names.”

  “Why? I’ve not even met most of them. I misled you—I’m not really feuding with anybody. I don’t hate critics the way actors do, but they are an irritating bunch. Even when they write favorable reviews, they don’t always know what they’re talking about.”

  “Have you ever told them so?”

  “Good heavens, no! Do you think I’m suicidal? A critic who’s mad at you can kill you in print.”

  “Is any one of them mad at you now?”

  “No, Foxfire got generally good reviews.”

  Piperson switched to earlier plays I’d worked on, either as writer or director. He wanted the name of everyone who might bear a grudge against me—actors I’d turned down for parts, other actors I might have clashed with during rehearsals, directors I’d disagreed with, designers whose ideas I’d rejected, stagehands I’d fired—

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” I protested. “What kind of power do you think I have? The playwright�
��s opinion is solicited during casting and rehearsal, but that opinion is ignored as often as not. Ultimately all decisions are made by the people who control the money. And I’ve never fired a stagehand in my life—that’s the stage manager’s bailiwick.”

  But Sergeant Piperson insisted, so I spent the next few hours going over the past fifteen years or so, remembering quarrels, artistic differences, blatant personality conflicts. Not the most cheerful way to spend an afternoon.

  New Year’s was approaching, and I was getting fidgety from being cooped up so long. I knew I was getting cabin fever when I found myself reading the TV listings in the Times.

  My self-imposed confinement ended when a friend called with news that he’d gotten hold of two opening-night tickets to a British production of Hamlet that had created quite a stir in London the year before. It was opening in New York on New Year’s Eve in order to qualify for that year’s Tony Awards.

  A theater story: A distinguished and world-renowned British actor was playing Hamlet. One night, to his dismay, his codpiece came undone. Not wearing anything underneath, the actor quickly turned his back to the audience and made the necessary repairs. Fortunately the stage was dimly lighted, and the other actors on stage managed to keep their composure. The audience never caught on that anything unusual had happened.

  So far so good. But the next night in the very first scene—in which the guards and Horatio are awaiting the appearance of the Ghost—everything went swimmingly until they reached the line, “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?” At which point everybody on stage broke, and the audience sat there bewildered at the sight of the actors in this serious scene all laughing hysterically.

  So on New Year’s Eve I ventured forth, feeling very brave, and was relieved to find the only newspaper and television people in sight were the reviewers at the theater. I was excited about spending an evening with my favorite play, especially a production as talked about as this one.