by Sarah Willis
“All right. We’ll take that. I’d like Helen back too. Thanks, Victor. Nate?”
“I’ll pass.”
Will looks at Nate. Nate looks right back at him. Nate’s eyes are a steel gray, and Will wonders why he never noticed that before. “Nothing?”
“Nope, Will, not a thing.”
Will knows when to quit. “All right, who’s next? Chip?”
Chip stands up and sticks his hands in his pockets. “Well, Will, my dream is to be just like you.”
There are a few laughs. Will doesn’t know what to say.
“Got you there, huh, pardner?” Chip says, rubbing his hands together. Will recognizes that motion and knows he’s being teased. He can feel anger lurking in the background, but how can he be angry with someone who says he wants to be just like him? Chip goes on, now waving his arms around, and once again Will recognizes the imitation and thinks Chip’s not doing him justice. “You know. Be a well-respected actor and director, with a lovely wife.” He winks at Myra. “Throw great parties. Offer your friends plenty of beer and booze! Hey, and just to be nice, I’ll throw in an extra dream. To own a Harley. And I will. Hey! I Will. You Tarzan, I Will. Get it?” Everyone moans. Chip bows and plops down on the blanket.
Will finds he is actually flattered, even though Chip’s obviously drunk. “Frank, you willing to give this a try now?”
“Not particularly. But …” Frank takes a deep breath and looks around the circle. “I have ambitions to act in movies, but you all know that. To play this game fairly, I’m supposed to share a secret dream, and then we will all be better actors. Well, then. I despise my father, and always have. He’s a foolish man and has lost more money than I’ll ever see in my life. He gambles, bets the horses. He lost our house, our car, my mother’s life insurance after she died. And I hate horses. Stupid animals, running around in circles.” He pauses, then resumes, his voice low now, not talking so much to the actors as to himself. Will notes this, how people do this when they are being honest—tell themselves, as much as the person they are talking to. It can be used in Of Mice and Men, he’s sure of it.
“My father,” Frank continues, “is a failure. My dream? I wish I could love him all the same. But I can’t.” Frank looks up. “There. Now you can’t blame the demise of the theatre on me, Will. I did my bit for God and country. Happy?”
Will is, but he knows better than to say so. “No, not happy, but grateful. Thank you, Frank.” There are plenty of wide eyes around this circle, Will notes. He wonders if they will think differently about Frank now. Oddly, Will doesn’t. He still thinks the man is an egotistical asshole, but a sad egotistical asshole. Still, the first person who comes up behind Frank and whinnies like a horse is out of this company for good.
“Myra’s turn,” Ben says. “How about you Myra?”
“Playing Curley’s Wife?” Myra says. To Will, it sounds like she’s asking herself if this is what she wants.
“Is that all?” Ben says.
“Not by a long shot, but if you think I’m going to spill all my beans in front of a bunch of guys, you’re nuts. We need more women here. I’m outnumbered.”
If there were women here, you wouldn’t be playing Curley’s Wife, Will thinks.
“Well then, my turn,” Will says. “Unless you want to try now, Nate? Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance.” Will would like to know Nate’s secret dream. Will has imagined himself all sorts of people, kings, fairies, and fools, and believes he could imagine himself being black, but he’d like to hear what Nate has to say. Would he say, if he were honest, that he wishes to have been born white?
Nate is a quiet enigma in this circle of men whom Will considers his friends. Perhaps he has never been much of a friend to any of them; he has never asked these questions of them in friendship, only now, as a lesson in acting. Will’s suddenly ashamed. Nate hasn’t answered him, and in the quiet Will knows that each man here has trusted him, but Nate doesn’t. And Nate may be the smart one. Will wants a drink. A cigarette. Jimmy to make a joke. Something to take away the edge. He does want Nate to answer, but in this moment of honesty, Will knows he wants Nate to answer him as much as a sign of forgiveness as to hear what Nate might say. The exercise has worked, and Will is miserable.
“No, Will,” Nate says. “You go on, though.”
Will had all sorts of things planned to say. Dreams of beginning his own theatre, of winning awards, even making a movie, but it all seems gaudy now. He’d like to say something simple and true. “I’d like to see Beth act someday, on the stage of The Mill Street Theatre, a well-respected, well-supported resident theatre. That would make me happy.”
“Tell her,” Myra says, not too loudly, but Will hears her. He nods.
Will pulls back into being a director, not sure of where any other path might lead him. “Now, we should discuss how this exercise has worked to make us aware of how difficult …”
“I think enough has been said,” Frank says, and gets up and walks off.
“I’m not doing nothing without another beer,” Jimmy McGovern says, heading to the house.
“Bring me one,” Chip and Greg shout.
“What do you think I am?” Jimmy shouts back. “A waitress?”
Chip and Greg get up. Lars follows them. Shakes follows Lars. “Be right back,” someone says.
“I have to use the facilities,” Norton says.
“I better check on Mac,” Myra says.
Nate stands up and heads to the barn. Will is left sitting in silence with Victor Peters, who is gazing up at the sky, and a bunch of empty blankets. Will waits, but he waits alone.
Will enters the house, thinking he’ll talk to Beth about the exercise, tell her what he said. She’s asleep on the couch. What are you dreaming? he wonders. She says she wants to act, but he knows he’s influenced her. Who would she be, if he weren’t her father? Has he suppressed some great talent of her own? Maybe she could have been a math wizard, or a great piano player, if she didn’t spend so much time watching rehearsals. Has he pressed her into a mold that doesn’t fit? She’s not a very good actress yet. Too dramatic. But that’s her youth, isn’t it? She can learn. He has a lot to offer her. Not for the first time he regrets starting so late in life to have a family. What had he been doing that was so damn important? But he knows. He was living as only he knew how, with a passion that has not ebbed but is fractured, grown dowdy almost, in a world of movies and TV. He wonders if in the future the sum of live theatre will be Broadway shows, while resident theatre is something antique, old-fashioned, a curiosity. Does Beth even want to act on the stage, or is it only movies she’s dreaming of? It’s her choice, he tells himself. Her choice.
Will bends down to give his daughter a kiss on the forehead and thinks he smells the faint odor of whiskey. Is it her breath, or his, reflected against her skin? He doesn’t want to know the answer, so he kisses her forehead and moves away.
When he goes back outside, several of the actors are sitting on blankets, and Jimmy’s telling a story about a man who built an ark, just like Noah, on the top of a mountain. Ben passes Will an empty glass, then a bottle. There is something sad about this handful of actors sitting on his lawn getting drunk. Is this what we are? Will wonders. Just what we appear to be? What happened to the men and women he has seen on the stage, regal even when playing the most despondent of men? What must they look like to anyone else? Dressing up, wearing makeup. Pretending. Yet it’s the pretending he wants back. The gilded vision. The ornamentation of hued lights, the power of a great line. Even the empty space of the rehearsal hall with taped lines on the floor representing walls would be better than this: what is all too real. He shakes his head, trying to clear out the funk he’s in. It’s been a long day. He deserves a drink or two.
Hours later, on his way into the barn to sleep on his narrow, uncomfortable bed, Will passes Nate reading by flashlight.
“Sorry,” Will says. He’s a bit drunk, and it’s all he can manage.
Nate nod
s. “Well, that’s nice. I appreciate it. Been waiting a while to hear it. Not from you, but it’ll do, for now.”
Will’s not sure what the man means, but he’s too tired to figure it out. “Sleep tight, Nate.”
“You too, Will.”
That should be no problem. He’s exhausted. But tomorrow’s another day.
Wednesday
Will has finally gotten everyone into the barn after breakfast. He wanted to get started earlier, but the actors are moving slowly due to several nasty hangovers. All in black, Chip Stark looks like a dead undertaker. Greg Henry’s eyes are so heavy-lidded, his thick eyelashes block his vision. And Jimmy McGovern woke with a face so flushed it looks like a third-degree sunburn. Frank Tucker won’t meet anyone’s glance, while Nate Johnson appears downright smug. Will himself is not feeling all that well.
“Okay, listen up. I appreciate your commitment to physical and mental labor for the sake of art, but I can see you need a break, so I’ve decided that we’ll start today with just a line reading. Refresh ourselves with the script. No dramatics. We need to get rid of what we did in Pittsburgh. Toss it out. Start blank. Create it all over again. It was too easy before. We, and I am including myself in this, just slipped into what works. It’s my fault. I cast the show. I picked you because you fit the part. Throw all that away. Forget how you played it before, and remember nothing in this play comes easy to these characters. It shouldn’t come easy to us.”
“Is that what you want?” Frank Tucker asks. “A hopeless struggle for a better tomorrow that exceeds our grips?”
“Jesus, Frank,” Jimmy McGovern says. “Shut up.”
“Well, it bears some thought …”
“I understand your worry, Frank,” Will says, “but let’s give this a shot, please. How else are we to know, if we don’t try?” He rubs his hands together, but then remembers Chip Stark’s imitation, and it takes the pleasure away. He wonders if he’ll ever be comfortable with his own gestures again.
“Okay, grab your scripts, and let’s pull these bunks into a circle. Beth, you and Mac can listen, but keep quiet.” Outside, the sky is turning black. The air has that tangy feel of a summer storm. Looking up, Will notices a few holes in the roof.
That morning Will gave Myra his prompt script, the text taped to yellow legal paper, with illegible notations scribbled in the margins. She highlighted all of Curley’s Wife’s lines and had almost wept while doing that simple action. She had no idea how badly she missed it. It’s amazing how easy it is to fool your heart, she thinks. Right now, sitting in this circle with the other actors, script in hand, Myra has a tight feeling in her stomach; this used to be her life: Upstage right. Cross left. Pause, then center stage. It’s more amazing that she still cares, that the desire to act isn’t dead and buried after all these years. It gives her hope, looking at Will, that what is lost can be reclaimed. She can remember once loving him very much.
Myra doesn’t believe Curley’s Wife loves Curley. She makes plans to leave him less than a year after they are married. Marrying a man not out of love but out of the need to be loved is what drives Curley’s Wife. Myra will have to explore those feelings.
But first she must name the woman. She has no name. She is a possession; she is always referred to as “Curley’s Wife,” or by Curley as “my wife.” It bothers Myra that this woman has no name, that she dies without a name. Myra will discover her name. It feels very important to her.
The first scene is between George and Lennie, at the creek, where they talk about their dreams of owning a farm of their own. Myra listens as Lars Lyman speaks George’s lines with a quiet intensity that is riveting. Ben reads Lennie’s lines with a simplicity that astounds her. Myra performed in straight drama only a few times and always liked musicals better. But she can do this. She believes she can do this very well, just given the chance.
Scene 2 takes place the next morning, when George and Lennie arrive at the ranch. The ranch hands have already gone out to the fields. Candy, an old man who has lost his hand in an accident, greets George and Lennie and informs them about everyone living at the ranch, including Curley’s new wife, who already “got the eye,” meaning she’s a flirt. Myra’s chin goes up. Curley’s Wife is not a flirt. She’s just lonely. Men simply don’t understand.
Myra looks around the barn, wanting to catch the eye of another woman, to share a knowing look of Men are so dense, but she is the only woman here. But then she notices Beth and realizes she may be the only woman, but not the only female. Myra has watched Beth grow breasts, her hips curve, her legs get shaved, all with a kind of amusement, but right now something feels wrong. Myra wants to get up and drag her daughter out of here and send her back to Pittsburgh to stay with a friend. She knows it sounds silly, but her instinct tells her she’s right.
Suddenly there is silence. The actors are staring at her. Myra looks down at her script. No yellow marks on this page. She turns the page. There! She speaks her line, hears her next cue, and says the next line, all the while blushing, embarrassed, devastated at this lapse. But it’s a short scene. Only a few lines and it’s over, and the actors have gone on. Myra is left shaking, unsure of what happened. What was she thinking to make her lose her place? It almost comes back to her but is lost in a deafening crack of thunder. Soon rain drums on the roof of the barn, and water begins leaking through at least a dozen holes, a few of them directly onto the actors, including Myra. After moving the crates over to the one dry corner of the barn, the reading resumes, but the thunder and drone of rain continue, and everyone has to shout. It sounds like a room full of angry people. Myra sits with her arms wrapped around her chest, still shaking from embarrassment. Her T-shirt is wet; a damp chill runs down her spine. While still reading his lines, Ben Walton gets up and goes over to a bunk and picks up a dry blanket. He drapes it over Myra’s shoulder without missing a beat. She nods at him. It is one of the new blankets she has just bought. It doesn’t smell of anything familiar.
Mac watches the actors speak, the way they become someone else, their faces falling off and new ones taking their place. He doesn’t get theatre. People do bad things in plays. Mac had seen his own dad get stabbed to death onstage. Why would anyone want to see that? He’d been relieved to see his dad come out onstage for the curtain call, but a little nervous when he came home that night. And now Jimmy McGovern, who took him fishing, is acting like a mean person, talking about shooting an old dog. Mac knows it’s acting, but, boy, he wants Jimmy McGovern to wink at him, grin—something. Beth told Mac that if you crossed your eyes for too long, they got stuck that way. He’s worried the actors could get stuck this way, they could forget who they really are.
The funny thing is that even though he doesn’t like the theatre stuff, he stays right in the barn and watches, when he could be somewhere else. He wants to keep his eyes on things. If someone gets stuck in their role, he wants to see it happen. He doesn’t like surprises.
They break for lunch, which takes a whole hour because there is such a lot of fussing to fix a simple meal. The kitchen is too small, that’s the problem, Will thinks. There has to be some way to set up a food station where people can get at the food easily. The paper plates, though, those were a good idea. Saves time. But it’s costing more money than he planned on, and now the barn roof needs to be repaired. They all took shop in college. They should be able to patch a few leaks. Still, he’ll have to talk to Myra tonight about money.
Before anyone can wander off, Will raises his voice and announces, “Let’s do it one more time, without the rain.” The rain has stopped. Will crosses his fingers and heads to the barn; the rest follow—which reminds him of his very first role, back in sixth grade. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. He loved that role. He wonders if there’s some way to adapt the play, make it an adult production. Something to think about.
The second reading goes better than the first. Myra hits her cues and brings some softness to Curley’s Wife that Melinda was missing. (He won’t think about her blowing h
er lines this morning. He just won’t.) And Nate puts some backbone into the part of Crooks that wasn’t there last year. Even Victor Peters stays awake for the entire two hours. What more could he want?
“Okay,” Will says. “That’s it! Call it a day! Tomorrow we’ll go back to living the play. We’ll fix the barn roof in character. Now have a good evening!” For just a moment, he has forgotten that they are staying here and expects them all to just get in cars and drive off. Instead, they head to his house and form a line for the bathroom. Will walks through the tall soggy grass in the back field to the sad, small hole that was supposed to be an outhouse. The shovel stands in a pile of wet dirt like a lone soldier. By the time he gets there, he’s lost the urge.
Dinner—hot dogs, potato salad, and beer, which Beth’s not allowed to drink, so she sneaks a chug of gin from the bottle someone has left next to the toaster—is loud. Everyone has something to say, although no one’s left to listen. Frank Tucker combs back his hair with his fingertips, tilts up his chin to catch the sunlight as if it were a spotlight, and goes on about “the necessity to document the vision of Steinbeck’s ranch,” while Victor Peters, whom Beth can’t stop staring at now that she’s noticed how big his ears are, is asking Nate Johnson if black people believe in the space program. Nate shrugs and turns to Will to ask if he can sleep in the house tonight, until the front room of the barn is completely animal-proof. Her dad nods, but he’s actually nodding at Frank Tucker’s comment. Jimmy McGovern is arguing with Chip Stark about how to fix the barn roof, and Lars Lyman agrees with Jimmy. It’s decided that Jimmy McGovern and Greg Henry will be the ones to climb up on the roof, and her dad will go with them into town tomorrow morning to get the supplies and buy some wood to make a big table and benches. Thousands of things they need get suggested, but by that time the conversation has split up again, and words like hose, coffee, extension cords, sticky fly tape, bug spray, flashlights (more), and rodent traps collide and explode into oblivion. Watching all this, Beth feels dizzy. Maybe she should go get stoned. No one’s paying any attention to her anyway.
