by Mindy Klasky
Each of Ambrose’s calls was a revelation. Each reminded me that I was well-served to be rid of Dean, personally and professionally. Each told me, in no uncertain terms, that losing my so-called then-boyfriend was the best thing that ever could have happened to me.
And if Ryan occasionally got a little moody about what we were doing to his play? That was nothing compared to Dean’s legal transgressions. Nothing compared to the way that Dean had lied and cheated for the entire three and a half years I’d known him.
On the nights that Ryan needed his distance, Teel manifested, sometimes as Anana, but more often in another guise. One night she was a doorman, complete with gold braid and epaulets. Another, she was a theater usher, with a plush red jacket. Yet another, she was a rumpled taxi driver, chomping on a cigar.
She stayed just long enough to ask me if I’d decided on my last two wishes. Only once did she drag me to the Garden; I was so tired, I barely remembered to fake seeing the plants. Instead, I regularly pleaded fatigue and creative exhaustion, and Teel generally took mercy on me, treating me to only a few rhapsodic recitations about the perfect, gender-indeterminate virtues of Jaze, virtues that could be explored much more completely and to far greater magical satisfaction once I finally finished my wishes and passed on the lantern to one more lucky soul.
During those nights when I slept alone, I rolled possibilities around in my mind, trying again and again to figure out what to ask Teel for, what to desire. And more often than not, I paced in front of my windows, resisting the urge to fling myself across my living room, to throw open my apartment door, to hurl myself across the hall and pound on Dani’s door and force Ryan to talk to me. I wanted to beg him to tell me everything that he was thinking, so I could listen to exactly what he was feeling.
I restrained myself, though. He needed his space. He needed his independence.
We needed balance.
I’d known I was plowing a difficult field when I set my heart on a playwright I worked with. Now, I had to find a way to make things come together. I had to find a way to balance my personal and professional lives. I had to find a way to love Ryan, while still remaining true to Hal and the Mercer.
CHAPTER 13
IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT.
Well, late afternoon, really, but I was tired of checking my watch to see if we could finally end rehearsal. With two weeks to go before we opened for previews, my patience was wearing thin with everyone and everything.
Desperate for a break from the Mercer, Ryan and I had promised to help Dani with a seed bombing as soon as it was dark enough to cover our guerilla tracks. Both of us felt guilty that she’d been forced to make so many of the grenades by herself. Ryan was particularly disappointed—the nicotiana and portulaca flowers in the midspring mix were some of his favorites. Rehearsals, though, had consumed every waking moment of the past week.
The dream sequence that formed the climax of the play was kicking our collective ass. The scene required three-dozen quick entrances and exits; actors needed to dash around backstage so that they could appear and reappear through various windows and doors on the fog-shrouded set. The rapid transitions were hampered by a massive wall that formed the major design element for the second act—it represented all of the barriers that Fanta faced when she went to the city, when she contemplated returning to her home. Kira had done her best to mark the backstage entrances with reflective tape, but the actors continued to have trouble hitting their marks—and not hitting their knees, elbows, and foreheads—on time.
“I don’t know,” Hal said to Ryan and me after the thirteenth consecutive attempt at running the scene cleanly. “Do you think we should reblock the whole thing?”
“We can’t,” Ryan said resolutely. “There’s a specific sequence. A flow.”
“Not when they’re running into walls,” Hal said reasonably. “Then there isn’t any flow at all. What if Lehana makes all of her entrances upstage? Forget about the single line she says downstage left—just deliver it from the window there.”
“That would completely ruin the balance.” Ryan was shaking his head before the words were fully out of Hal’s mouth. He held up his hands defensively. “I’m really not trying to be difficult! But you know these are the crucial stage directions for the entire play. The movement is modeled after a traditional village dance. It represents the heart and soul of Fanta, of all the women in her position. We can’t give up on it just because it’s difficult for actors to handle.”
My boss turned to me, his raised eyebrows asking for my opinion. I knew that he wanted me to comment on Ryan’s obsessive interest in blocking. Many, maybe even most, contemporary playwrights ignored stage directions altogether, content to let directors and actors develop the physical manifestation of a play through rehearsal. For Ryan, though, the blocking was paramount; we’d had more debates about where actors stood than about any other aspect of However Long.
Hal cleared his throat impatiently. This was the part of my job that I hated the most—I always felt trapped. After all, Hal knew what he was doing. He’d been directing for years, well before the first time I’d ever conceived of living my life in theater. He didn’t need me to tell him whether the blocking was any good.
And yet that was one of the key things I’d learned in graduate school. Directors wanted reassurance. Dramaturgs gave it, over and over again, in a hundred and one different ways. The only thing no one had taught us in classes was how to take a diplomatic stand against the playwright when you planned on sleeping with the guy at the end of the day.
Oh. They did teach us that. In a course called “Ethics.” I cleared my throat. “I think the actors need to practice some more. This is the first day they’ve worked with the wall in place.”
“They haven’t come close to getting it right,” Hal pointed out.
“We’ve still got some time,” I soothed. “If they don’t get it by the weekend, then we can think about changing things.”
Hal looked at me for several heartbeats. I was pretty sure he’d figured out by now what was going on between Ryan and me. He wasn’t a stupid man, after all. He made his living drawing out the most subtle nuances of human emotion onstage. Sighing, he glanced at his script, at the diagram that he’d slipped between his pages to outline his master plan for the climactic scene. “All right, Kira,” he called out to the waiting stage manager. “Let’s get everything reset. I want to try it one more time. From the top.”
The actors moaned their dissatisfaction, but Ryan relaxed beside me. We’d won this round. That was, he had won the round. I’d merely been his accomplice.
Anxious to wrap up the stressful rehearsal, I glanced at my watch. The sooner we could finish working this scene, the sooner Ryan and I could escape, could get back to the Bentley and the Gray Guerillas and an easy relationship without conflict.
The Grays would be gathering in Dani’s apartment about now. They were probably already sharing premission snacks, whole-wheat chips with a selection of organic dips. I pretended not to notice Ryan’s frustrated grimace as the actors shuffled to their spots.
Kira made short work of resetting the windows and doors, of returning props to their appropriate places. “All right, everyone,” she called out, her voice a perfect mask of efficient good humor. “Let’s go from, ‘I haven’t slept in three nights.’”
Obediently, Fanta took her mark at center stage. Her voice echoed off the back wall of the theater as she proclaimed, “I haven’t slept in three nights.”
“That’s Jamaican,” Ryan muttered under his breath. “Not Burkinabe.”
I brushed my hand over his, intending to convey sympathy. “She’s meeting with the dialect coach tomorrow,” I whispered. “I’ll make sure they go over this scene.”
“A lot of good that’ll do.” He stretched his legs out like a bored teenager, leaning his head against the back of his chair. In case neither Hal nor I recognized his level of frustration, he glanced ostentatiously at his watch.
I
gritted my teeth. I understood the way he felt. I really did. The rehearsal was boring and repetitive. The scene was important—the crux of the entire show—but it remained tantalizingly out of reach. Our Fanta was struggling, doing her best, but the performance we needed seemed beyond her ability. If she got the emotion right, she flubbed her lines. If she nailed the lines, her accent was off. If she scored a perfect ten on delivery, she messed up the blocking.
But I was confident that we would get to where we wanted to be. I’d worked on dozens of plays. I’d seen each of them pass through this gawky stage of adolescence. I’d seen most of them emerge as fully molded, beautiful adults. I had faith.
Ryan, alas, didn’t have that level of experience. His nervousness had begun to rub off on the cast; he’d even made Hal question the validity of some of the company’s more obscure interpretations of lines. Nevertheless, every time that tempers were completely frayed, every time that everyone was ready to walk away from the entire production, Ryan managed to step back. He managed to take a deep breath. He managed to find new words, new concepts, new ways of explaining to me, to Hal, to the entire cast, about what he’d seen in Africa. He talked about how he’d been changed, and what Burkina Faso meant to him. He talked about why he wrote Fanta’s story. And the poetry of his words always brought us back, always reminded us that what we were doing was beautiful, meaningful, important.
Even if it was damned hard.
Throughout it all, I struggled to remain neutral, effectively invisible. I offered subtle reassurance to everyone when they came to me with questions. And I told myself over and over again that However Long would emerge from this crucible, fully annealed. It had to.
But not that evening. Lehana appeared downstage, delivering one line of her dream rhapsody. Then, she darted upstage, just hitting her mark for her next line. I caught my breath, waiting for her to dash stage right.
Crash! Boom! Bang.
“Crap!” Lehana shouted.
Kira sprang onto the stage, her first-aid kit already open. “What happened?”
“I tripped over the damn pots and pans.” Lehana shook her wrist, irritably pushing away Kira’s nursing. “Can’t they be kept in the wings?”
“Not if we’re going to get them onstage in time for Fanta’s last line,” Kira replied grimly.
Hal pretended not to hear Lehana swearing as he ordered, “Let’s try it again, people.”
Kira reset the props and ushered all of the actors to their appropriate corners. This time, though, Teel was the one who fell; she tripped over a doorsill as she delivered her very first line. I caught the faintest flash of her tattoo as she reached out to break her fall; I suspected that she used some magic to keep from suffering any lasting bodily harm. Half the cast gathered around, lifting her to her feet, dusting her off, making sure that all of her apparently elderly bones had survived the impact unbroken.
Hal stood up and walked to the front of the theater. “All right, people. Let’s call it a day. I want each of you to review your blocking tonight. Think of it as choreography. This is a dance we’re building, a ballet of the mind.”
“This is impossible,” Fanta mumbled. I think she got the accent right, but neither Hal nor Ryan was inclined to praise her for the sentiment.
Instead, our fearless director gave a pointed nod to Kira, who called out, “Okay, everyone. Back here at ten o’clock tomorrow.” She started to collect the props, carefully ignoring the grumbling actors who cleared the stage.
Hal sighed and smoothed his hand over his beard as he turned to Ryan. “They’ll get it. Sleeping on it is probably just the thing they need. We have to break, anyway, if you and I are going to get uptown on time.”
“Uptown?” Ryan asked, darting a glance at me. His desire to escape the Mercer was clearly legible on his face.
“To the studio. It’s up near Rockefeller Center.”
“What studio?”
“What’s his name, Ronald Barton? Your Popcorn King?”
Ryan laughed in disbelief. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“We’re going to be guests on the Pantry Channel? He called a week ago, said you’d already agreed to it. That was the only reason I agreed to go.”
“The. Pantry. Channel.” Ryan could have been talking about the Spanish Inquisition.
Hal grimaced. “I take it he never talked to you?”
Ryan shook his head. I could feel him shutting down. His shoulders slumped. He twitched away from my concerned hand, leaning against the far armrest of his chair. He sighed, as if the world were coming to an end. His frustration was obviously about more than missing the guerilla activity we’d planned for the evening. He was clearly questioning the wisdom of our ever accepting the Popcorn King’s filthy lucre.
“Um, what’s the Pantry Channel?” I asked, trying to buy a minute to work out some semblance of a solution.
Hal shrugged. “Some local cable thing. A bunch of people who couldn’t sell their shows to the Food Network. Every Wednesday night, they host a news show about local food trends, and tonight features the Popcorn King. He’s going to hand over the second check to Ryan, right there, live and on air. He said something about our testing new popcorn flavors, too.”
“I can’t do it,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, right.” Hal shrugged on his leather jacket. “Maybe we can just pretend to eat the popcorn.”
“I’m not kidding. I can’t go.” Ryan’s voice ratcheted higher. He looked miserable. Miserable, but absolutely determined. My heart went out to him. He was trying to balance so much—making However Long into the best play it could be, juggling meetings with the Popcorn King, keeping his long-standing obligation to the Grays, building…whatever he was building with me.
Hal didn’t have quite the same perspective. His laser eyes locked on Ryan. “Look, I’m pissed off about being manipulated, too. But this is actually a great opportunity for us. The Pantry Channel might only have a few thousand viewers, but those are people who’ve probably never even heard of the Mercer before.”
Ryan appealed to me, looking as if I were a teacher who could write him a hall pass. Knowing he was going to be unhappy with me, I shoved honest regret into my voice as I said, “Hal’s right. I know we were looking forward to the Grays. I know you promised Dani, but she does have lots of other people to help her.”
I glanced at my boss, who gave me a satisfied nod. I was making the argument he wanted me to make, even if he didn’t know anything about the Grays or Dani or any other details from my non-Mercer life with Ryan. “Look,” Hal said. “I’m going to pick up some promotional brochures from my office. We can grab a cab in what, five minutes?”
He didn’t wait for Ryan’s confirmation before he strode off. I couldn’t help but notice, though, that he did look back at me from the doorway. His hawk eyes watched to see if I continued to play my role properly. If I brought Ryan around. If I was the good dramaturg.
Instead of the good girlfriend.
“Ryan, we’re almost through here,” I cajoled. “We’ve only got two more weeks of rehearsal, and then your time will be your own again.”
“I’ve been here day and night for a month. We were looking forward to this break tonight—both of us.”
“Hey, I’m disappointed, too. But we’ll do the next seed bombing together. I promise.”
He pulled away from the hand that I put on his arm, the hand that I intended to be a symbol of comfort, of support. When he muttered a response, he sounded like a cross between a tortured artist and a spoiled five-year-old boy. “Do you really think that my appearance on some stupid local-access TV show is going to make a difference?”
“It can’t hurt. Like Hal said, we need every bit of advertising we can get.”
“Sure. Just like we need those idiotic T-shirts. Just like we need to slap that goddamn logo all over the set.” He scrambled in his pocket for his cell phone. Flipping it open with enough force that I worried the device would snap in two, he snarled to
an imaginary caller, “Pop off!”
“Ryan,” I soothed. “You knew that staging your play would be a collaborative process.”
“But I never expected you to drink the Kool-Aid, too! I never thought that you would sell out to the Popcorn King.”
His words were so sharp I felt like I’d been slapped. Tears leaped to my eyes. “We didn’t sell out, Ryan. The Mercer needed the funding.”
“Not we, Becca. You. You, personally. Why exactly are the Mercer’s finances so rocky? Why did you feel so responsible that you had to line up a sponsor no matter what, no matter who? That couldn’t have had anything to do with the fact that your boyfriend emptied the coffers, could it?”
“That is not fair, Ryan! This doesn’t have anything to do with Dean. You went to those funding meetings with me. You know how hard it was to get a commitment from anyone. We were lucky to get the Popcorn King. You know how hard I tried to find someone else.”
“About as hard as you tried to get Hal to stick with my blocking this afternoon.”
“Is that what this is all about?”
“This is about the mincemeat all of you are making out of my play. You’re gutting it!”
“I can’t help it if you wrote an impossible script!” The words were out of my mouth before I thought them through. Once they were free, though, I had to continue. “There’s nothing wrong with our actors, Ryan. Your dream sequence just can’t be done. No one could ever stage it the way you’ve written it. No one could ever make it work.”
“It’s not that complicated!” He leaped onto the stage with a speed I might have found admirable, under other circumstances. “Fanta stands here!” He darted upstage. “She moves here!” He ducked behind the wall. “She moves here!”
The crash was louder than anything I’d heard all afternoon. My well-trained ears immediately identified the clatter of crockery scattering, followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the floor. My heart leaped into my throat as I scrambled backstage.
