by William Bell
And I now had something to offer—late—to Ms. Pelletier. Stage managing a production counted as a Big Project.
CHAPTER THREE
I HAD A VAGUE IDEA of what a stage manager’s duties were, but I was still shocked—and a little scared—when I looked them up. The responsibilities were huge. Once the audience settled down and the production began, I would be in control—of everything, from the house lights to the props, from the music to the prompt book to the curtain calls. The more we rehearsed and I learned on the job, the more it looked to me as if the actors and the director got the glory while the stage manager worked like a drone behind the scenes and remained faceless—which was fine by me. As the day of the performance approached, I felt less and less clumsy as I moved about with my clipboard and cue sheets, and I began to like it.
Emile had turned out to be too artistic to operate the control panel. He hated to take the cues I communicated to him through a headset and mike. He said I was giving him orders.
“That’s what the panel guy does,” Alba explained patiently to him. “Jake gives you the cue, and you flip the switch or turn the dial.”
“I’m an artist,” he protested. “I won’t be instructed by a carpenter.”
“I could put the cues in the form of polite written requests,” I said, “but it might take too long.”
He humphed and stomped off. The next day Vanni turned up. Alba had collared her. “How could I refuse?” Vanni told me. “I owe it to the Muses.”
I figured she was there for the same reason I was—to be near Alba—but I kept my mouth shut. I was glad she had replaced Emile. I knew I could rely on her.
One of my unanticipated responsibilities was to write the synopsis of the play for the program. Most of the students at York had studied The Taming of the Shrew in grade ten, but Alba asked me to assume that they had forgotten it all—which was probably close to the truth.
The afternoon of the show came on quickly. We assembled an hour before curtain. Vanni and I checked and double-checked our cues, even though we’d been over it time and time again. The furniture was in place. Alba and Chad were in makeup. Vanni and I sat by the control panel and drank takeout coffee from the Blue Note in the dim light of the tiny lamps.
“I’ve never been so nervous in my life,” I said.
She smiled. “Relax. You’re the stage manager. If anything goes wrong, it will be totally, entirely and completely your fault. What’s to worry about?”
AN EXCERPT FROM SHAKESPEARE’S
TAMING OF THE SHREW
SYNOPSIS
Baptista Minola, a wealthy citizen of Padua, Italy, has two daughters whom he is anxious to marry off. Bianca is pretty, with a sweet and gentle personality, and several influential men in town have asked for her hand. But Baptista has made it known far and wide that he will not allow Bianca to marry until he has found a husband for her older sister, Katherina.
Although Baptista is prepared to provide a huge dowry, including money and land, to the man who takes Katherina off his hands, there is no one interested. Katherina is renowned for her nasty disposition, temper tantrums and acid tongue. It looks as if Katherina will never attract a man and therefore Bianca will never marry.
Then, from Verona, comes a man called Petruchio …
The scene you are about to see is the first meeting between the scalding Katherina and the equally determined Petruchio.
Let the fireworks begin …
“Of course I can hear you, you flamin’ eejit.” Vanni’s voice shot through my earpiece. “I heard you last time you checked and the ten times before that.”
“Okay, okay,” I said.
“Calm down,” she advised. “Everything will be grand.”
“Okay.”
Once again I peeked around the curtain, my stomach fluttering. Students flooded noisily into the auditorium, filling the rear seats first, except for the last row, which was reserved for teachers. I checked my watch. Ten minutes until liftoff.
I saw Chad, costumed and made up and unusually jittery, standing behind Vanni at the control panel. She would signal to him when I gave the word for him to come onstage. He kept looking around, as if he didn’t know where he was. Chad was normally very cool under pressure; he had sailed through dress rehearsal the day before without a hint of tension.
I spoke into my mike. “What’s with Chad?”
“You don’t want to know,” Vanni replied.
“I don’t—What’s that supposed to mean? We go on in a couple of minutes!”
“He and Alba had a big fight.” Vanni was whispering into her mike. “It seems she caught him with Snowy earlier today.”
“Caught him?”
“Use your imagination.”
“Great. Fantastic.”
I had suspected that Alba had fired Snowy because she was distracting Chad, as she had at our first production meeting, and now my suspicions were confirmed.
Instant and Daneale were sitting in a corner of the backstage area, their music on a stand in front of them. I held up one hand with my fingers splayed. Five minutes. Daneale nodded. Instant was adjusting the reed on his mouthpiece. They would play a five-minute intro and repeat it at the end of the performance. I left them and took up my position, lowering myself onto a stool in the wings from where I could view the house and the stage at the same time. I clutched my clipboard to my chest.
“Is Alba in place?” I asked. “I can’t see her.”
“She’s right here. Relax.”
“Relax. Right. Why didn’t I think of that?”
I could see the teachers in the back row behind approximately seven hundred kids. Among them were Call-Me-Saul, Pelletier, Locheed and Lewis. Lewis had already graded Instant’s musical score and given it an A+. Today he would evaluate his and Daneale’s performances.
Okay, I told myself, here we go. Clearing my throat, I issued my first direction.
“Cue music,” I said.
A second later, the mellow tones of Instant’s saxophone filled the house and the audience fell silent. Daneale sang beautifully, using her voice as an instrument, for there were no words, and Instant’s saxophone traded phrases with her in a playful flow of jazzy sound. A few stragglers rushed down the aisles and plopped into seats. I kept my eyes on my watch.
“Petruchio, position, please,” I said. “Cue house lights.” The illumination in the auditorium ebbed slowly away until, two minutes later, I gave the next direction. “Cue curtain.” As the curtain rose, the music faded. “Cue stage lights.”
The stage lights came up to reveal Chad sitting at a table in the centre of a living room. He was wearing a loose white shirt with lace-on sleeves under a leather doublet, purple hose and grey “slops”—bloomer-like short pants. He sat casually, his long, athletic legs extended and crossed at the ankles. He kept silent for a few moments to let the anticipation build.
I felt movement at my side. It was Alba, who would enter from her mark a few feet from me. She was excellent in the part of Katherina. I wasn’t the only one to think she was a huge talent, able to make you believe she was the misunderstood shrew. I said nothing to her, not just because my eyes darted in a triangular path from Chad to my notes to the audience and back, but because Alba hated anyone to speak to her in the ten minutes or so before she went on. She used the time to centre herself and to focus. But I couldn’t resist stealing a glance her way. Her long, forest green hooped gown trailed the floor. Her velvet, scoop-necked, tightly laced bodice with a froth of white lace against her skin was enough to make any male stop breathing. But her normally serene pre-performance face, though heavily made up, looked as if a thundercloud had parked itself on her brow.
Petruchio/Chad began his short soliloquy. “I’ll attend Katherina here, And woo her with some spirit when she comes …”
Alba knew her cue and didn’t need a signal from me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her raise her skirt off the floor in preparation for her entrance.
“But here she comes
,” said Petruchio/Chad. Alba/Katherina was, according to her own directions, supposed to enter the room nonchalantly, as if she couldn’t care less that a man who said he wanted to marry her was waiting to meet her for the first time. Instead, she stomped into the room, aiming herself at Chad like a torpedo. There was more energy in her entrance than there ever had been in rehearsals, and Vanni’s words popped into my mind. Alba had found Chad with Snowy.
“Oh oh,” I said.
“That’s not in our notes,” came Vanni’s voice in my earpiece.
“Good morrow, Kate—for that’s your name I hear,” Petruchio/Chad said. Katherina/Alba launched herself into the scene with the fury of a tornado, giving a snappy reply, every word bristling with anger. Shakespeare’s witty verbal fencing between the dominant, overconfident suitor and the shrewish woman sparkled back and forth. Katherina/Alba called him a piece of furniture, a stool. “Come, sit on me,” he shot back, and pulled her onto his lap. She struggled to free herself; he hung on tight, mocking her. The audience laughed. Katherina/Alba called him an ass, and the play-by-play continued.
If you knew the actors, and if you were aware of the fact that Alba had discovered Chad and Snowy making out, you could see the personal war between the wronged woman and the guilty man going on like violent background music behind Shakespeare’s lines. Chad was desperately trying to get back into Alba’s good books as Petruchio was fighting to dominate Katherina verbally and physically.
The scene went on, the energy snapping and popping like high-tension wires in a hurricane. The audience roared at a dirty joke. Katherina/Alba finally freed herself and jumped from Petruchio/Chad’s lap. She turned to leave. Petruchio/Chad grabbed her, spun her around and urged, “Good Kate, I am a gentleman—”
Katherina/Alba snapped, “That I’ll try! ”—in other words, “We’ll see about that!”
And she clouted him.
The script called for a smack, and in rehearsal Chad and Alba had practised the slap over and over to get it perfect, so that it was noisy and dramatic but didn’t sting. But today Alba hauled back and delivered a blow that knocked Chad off his feet, and he toppled over, sprawling with his purple-clad legs in the air. Alba stood over him, fists clenched, chest heaving. Chad struggled to his knees, shook his head, cringing, waiting for another punch. A trickle of blood ran from one nostril.
But he stayed in character. “I swear I’ll cuff you if you strike again.”
Watch it, Alba. He means it, I thought. She seemed to read his mind, and took a step back.
Petruchio/Chad hauled himself to his feet. More one-liners zinged back and forth between them, the volume increasing with each verbal shot as Alba and Chad followed their own agenda as well as Shakespeare’s. Petruchio/Chad stalked Katherina/Alba, hands out to clutch her as she backed away. The script instructed him to lay hold of her. But when he drew close, Katherina/Alba screamed, “I care not!” and tried to ward him off with a roundhouse punch.
Chad ducked the blow and grabbed her, pinning her arms, his face inches from hers. “In sooth, you ’scape not so,” he said triumphantly.
She wrenched her torso one way, then another, to free herself. “I chafe you if I tarry,” she hollered. “Let me go! ”
And, ignoring the script, she spat in his face. The gob hit him on the forehead and dribbled into one eye. He blinked.
“No, not a whit,” he replied, spit running down one side of his face and blood down the other. “I find you passing gentle.”
The audience was hugely enjoying all this. They were right into what they thought was simply a superbly acted, funny, farcical scene. Even the teachers were laughing, although Panofsky had a horrified look on his face and Locheed seemed a little troubled. I could imagine him saying to himself, I don’t remember that in the play.
The frantic, angry dialogue continued to flash back and forth at high volume as the two characters traded barbs and wrestled, Katherina/Alba fighting to free herself, Petruchio/Chad obviously terrified to let her loose. But the script demanded her release, so he complied—then dashed around to the other side of the table, keeping it between himself and the raging blonde banshee opposite.
They shouted their lines across the table, Katherina/Alba circling first in one direction, then another, as Petruchio/Chad retreated. She picked up a chair and hurled it at him. He ducked to the side just in time, and the chair clattered across the boards and into the wings. Then Katherina/Alba feinted left. Petruchio/Chad responded; she darted right, caught him and whacked him on the chops. His head snapped back. Half-blind from the sting, he grabbed her arm. “And will you, nill you,” he shouted, “I will marry you! ” Then he gave her a mighty shove, sending her tumbling onto her backside and sliding backwards across the floor. She tipped over. Her head thumped the boards and her hooped gown flew up over her face, revealing very un-Elizabethan blue denims and white canvas shoes.
Katherina/Alba scrambled to her feet. Petruchio/Chad kept talking, backing away as she relentlessly crept toward him like a mountain lion stalking a rabbit.
He shouted, “For I am he am born to tame you, Kate, and bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate conformable—”
Alba screamed her reply. “Like hell you will, you two-timing son of a bitch!”
“Cue curtain! Cue curtain!” I hollered, and the curtain began to descend, but not fast enough to hide a pair of purple legs rushing into the wings with a forest green blur in hot pursuit. The scene was supposed to end with Petruchio saying, “But here comes your father,” but this was good enough.
The audience roared, jumped to their feet, applauded thunderously. I hopped off my stool and ran backstage in time to see Chad dashing for the stage door.
“Wait!” I yelled uselessly. “Your curtain calls!”
“He’d better keep going if he knows what’s good for him!” I heard from behind me. I turned and saw Alba—her clothing rumpled, her hair a tangled mess, her eyes on fire—struggling to free her gown, which had snagged on the edge of Vanni’s control panel.
Out in the auditorium, the crowd continued with their applause. “Somebody has to make a curtain call,” I told Alba. “Chad’s gone. You have to go out there.”
Alba’s professional bearing slowly returned. She lifted her chin, picked up her skirt and glided to the front of the stage, taking up her mark at the curtain.
“Cue curtain,” I said into my mike.
The curtain rose. Alba took her bows, then stepped back.
“Cue curtain,” I repeated.
The curtain fell. Alba turned on her heel and disappeared backstage.
“Cue music,” I said, and through the auditorium speakers, Daneale’s voice and Instant’s saxophone began to mellow the crowd. After the last bar was played, I said, “Stand down. That’s it, everybody.”
“Didjever see the like?” Vanni said when I dropped into a chair beside her.
“A truly unique experience,” I sighed.
“It’s a good thing the scene was short. Otherwise Alba would have beaten him up, right there in front of the audience.” Vanni laughed. “It sounded hilarious. It must have been fun to watch—from the audience, I mean.”
“They seemed to enjoy it,” I replied, trying unsuccessfully to hold down the thought that Alba and Chad were no longer together, that maybe this was my chance. Should I go and find her right away? I wondered. Console her? No, better to let her cool off and see her tomorrow. Maybe she’d realize she had picked the wrong guy. Maybe—
My phone vibrated in my pocket. Somebody has a great sense of timing, I thought as I checked the screen. I didn’t recognize the number.
“Hello?”
“Jake.”
It was my mother, and the way she said my name—with a ton of fear jammed into that one syllable—told me immediately that my life was about to change.
“I’m at the hospital,” she cried. “It’s your dad. His heart. You’d better come quick.”
CHAPTER FOUR
I SAT IN THE BACK SEAT OF A
TAXI, terrified, staring at the driver’s blue turban, trying not to think. But it’s amazing the crazy things that go through your mind sometimes. I’m not religious, but as the car wove through traffic I muttered the same prayer over and over. And the father I whispered my desperate words to wasn’t the one Up There, but the one I imagined lying on a gurney, knocked over by a heart attack. “Please, Dad,” I chanted, “don’t die.”
I was still mumbling when the taxi slowed for the hospital access road, turned in and pulled up at the Emergency entrance. Two ambulances idled by the doors, their exhausts sending white plumes toward the sun. I yanked out my wallet and handed a ten to the cabbie. “Keep the change,” I said.
He turned and smiled sympathetically. He had a black beard and turned-up moustache. “It’s good to pray,” he said. “It will help.”
I dashed through the sliding doors and scanned the Emergency waiting room for my mother. There were a lot of people sitting around on the institutional plastic chairs, sniffling, holding damaged limbs, flipping through magazines, fretting. Then I saw her, perched on the edge of a couch below a window. She was wearing her slouch-around-the-house outfit—mauve tights that made me think briefly of Petruchio/Chad; one of my dad’s tartan shirts, baggy on her slender frame; powder blue slippers with satin bows; her hair piled up on her head. Her appearance reminded me it was Wednesday, when she closed the salon after 11 a.m. and spent the afternoon relaxing.
“Mom, what’s going on?” I said. “Is—” I couldn’t complete the sentence.
“Oh, Jake!” She began to cry. I sat down beside her and put my arm around her. In a few minutes she calmed down a bit and blew her nose. “He’s in there,” she said, pointing with a shaking hand toward double doors.
“What happened?”
“The microwave broke,” she wailed, swept away by another gale of sobs.
