Actor

by Parnell Hall

  Goobie snapped his fingers, pointed to a spot on the stage. “Now, Captain,” he said.

  Kirk shuffled out, head down, clutching his prompt script to his chest, giving the impression of a dog about to be whipped.

  “Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise,” Goobie said. “I know you are only trying to do your job, to be a good prompter. But you have not. You have failed in your job.” Goobie turned, pointed his finger straight at me. “You have offended this actor. You have prompted him at the wrong time. You have prompted him when he didn’t want to be prompted. You have prompted him when he actually knew the line. This is not tolerable to this actor. Therefore you cannot prompt him. You are hereby relieved of your duties. You are off the show. Turn in your prompt script.”

  Captain Kirk looked as if he was about to cry. He was obviously overwhelmed. He blinked twice, dumbly, and gawked.

  Goobie snapped his fingers and held out his hand. “The script.”

  Behind the thick-lensed glasses Captain Kirk’s eyes brimmed with tears. But the snap of the fingers spurred him into action. Without a word he thrust the prompt script into Goobie’s hand, turned and ran from the stage.

  It was a public humiliation of the first order.

  No, not of Captain Kirk.

  Of me.

  In front of Herbie, the tech crew and all my fellow actors, I’d been made to look like a total, selfish, insensitive fool. And it had been done deliberately Goobie Wheatly had publicly humiliated Captain Kirk in order to publicly humiliate me. As a manipulative act of cruelty it was almost unparalleled.

  But, oh, how it worked.

  I’d never felt quite the way I felt just then.

  I felt terrible for Captain Kirk, of course. But for my own part, I felt humiliated and ashamed. After all, I had requested his dismissal—but not like that. Not in those terms. It was Goobie Wheatly who had taken it, twisted it, made it as ugly as possible. Which of course made me furious. And all the more furious in knowing that in what he said, for all his exaggerations, there was still at least a grain of truth. So it was like it was my fault but it wasn’t really, but I was being made to feel it was. Though it wasn’t, for god’s sake, I mean, if Herbie were on the ball he’d have known it was important and seen that I got a competent prompter in the first place. But Herbie wasn’t on the ball, he was too busy running around with my leading lady, which left me to deal with an incompetent prompter and a sadistic stage manager, so of course this was the result.

  So, all in all, it would be hard to imagine my feeling any more humiliated, ashamed, angry, exasperated, frustrated and helpless than I felt at that very moment.

  9.

  “MY ROOMMATE’S GOT NICE TITS.”

  “What?”

  “Pretty nice, anyway. Not big, but firm. Supple.”

  “Stanley.”

  “I’m sorry. She’s not really my roommate. My dressing-room partner.”

  “Damn it, Stanley.”

  I’d called Alice for moral support. After the Captain Kirk incident I sure needed it. Before I hit her with that depressing tidbit, I thought I’d fill her in on some of my other adventures in the scant twenty-four hours since I’d arrived at the Playhouse of the Damned.

  Nellie/Louka’s breasts seemed as good a place to start as any. That was the sort of thing that the longer I waited to tell her the worse it would be, and if I waited until she found out herself I would have elevated myself to Chump/Moron Husband of the Month. So I explained the dressing-room situation.

  Or at least tried to.

  “I don’t understand,” Alice said. “Why aren’t you in the star’s dressing room?”

  “Don’t start with me, Alice.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a TV star playing Sergius. They put him in it.”

  “Oh really? Who is it?”

  “No one you’ve heard of. He’s not really a star, just a guy on TV.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Avery Allington.”

  “Avery Allington? Sounds familiar. What’s he in?”

  “A show that got cancelled. He’s a nobody, Alice.”

  “What was the show?”

  “I have no idea. It’s a show that got cancelled after six episodes. He wasn’t the star of it and I’m sure you never heard of him.”

  “Oh. All right. But the name’s familiar. Maybe it’s just one of those names that sounds like you’ve heard of him.”

  “Alice, I don’t want to talk about Avery Allington.”

  “Wanna talk about the girl in your dressing room?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Couldn’t you ask to change rooms?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I got enough problems. The show opens tomorrow and there’s no time for that crap.”

  “How long could it take?”

  “I don’t want to do it.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “If I asked Herbie to change rooms, he’d think I was ticked off because I didn’t get the star’s dressing room.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Maybe a little, but not enough to make a stink about it.”

  “Think you might if you didn’t have breasts in your dressing room?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Right. Couldn’t you ask her to keep her shirt on?”

  “I’d rather be shot dead. Alice, I’m the oldest actor here. By a wide margin. I don’t intend to remind everybody of it by being such a total old fogy as to object to an actress changing in my dressing room. That humiliation I would like to avoid.”

  “That humiliation?”

  I sighed. “Yeah. That’s kind of why I called.”

  “Oh?”

  I told her about the Captain Kirk incident. She was, as I’d expected, totally sympathetic.

  “That’s terrible,” she said. “But if the director’s an old buddy of yours, why did he let this happen?”

  “I’m afraid Herbie’s not really on top of things.”

  “Why not?”

  “He has a thing for one of the actresses in the play.”

  “The one in your dressing room?”

  “No. The other one.”

  “There’s only two?”

  “There’s three. The other young one.”

  “How young?”

  “I’m not good at people’s ages.”

  “Nice try. Closer to twenty, thirty or forty?”

  “Probably twenty.”

  “Jesus Christ. I thought he was married.”

  “He is.”

  “Wonderful. What is he running up there, a playpen for middle-aged men?”

  “Alice.”

  “Maybe I should get a baby-sitter and come up there.”

  “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”

  “I mean for Tommie.”

  “I know what you meant. Alice, you don’t have to come rushing up here because my roommate’s got tits,”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, as I recall, you like them.”

  “Alice.”

  “Then you tell me the director—who is just your age—is running around with one of the actresses, and what am I to think?”

  “What about, I’m glad that’s not my husband?”

  “You’ve only been there one day.”

  “Alice.”

  “And you’re sharing a room with the Playmate of the Month.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “That’s not the point. I know how you get.”

  “I’m too busy to get anything. I’m working practically round the clock. I barely have time for this phone call.”

  “I’m glad you took time. You certainly made my day. So what are you going to do about the kid?”

  “Kid?”

  “Yeah. The prompter. The one you got fired.”

  “I didn’t get him fired, Alice. Jesus, I—”

  “Hey, hey. Don’t be so defensive.”

  “Well, why not, f
or Christ’s sake? I just got finished telling you I’m upset because everyone thinks I got him kicked off the show. And here you’re saying I got him kicked off the show.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course you didn’t. I’m just using that as shorthand to refer to him ’cause I didn’t know his name.”

  “Kirk. Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Oh. Right. Well, what about him? If you’re so upset, can’t you do something? Can’t you get him back on the show?”

  That was too much. “I don’t want him back on the show!” I cried in complete exasperation.

  There was a long pause.

  Alice exhaled. “Jesus Christ,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay. Listen, all kidding aside, how are you?”

  “All kidding aside?”

  “Yeah.”

  I sighed. “Alice, it’s a fucking nightmare.”

  10.

  THERE IS AN ADAGE IN the theater—bad dress rehearsal, good performance. By that standard, Arms and the Man was going to be an absolute smash.

  Of course, with me plugging into the show on twenty-four hours’ notice, there were bound to be holes, but even so. Even if I had been flawless, it would have been a bomb. Because, in point of fact, my fellow actors weren’t so hot, either.

  The dress rehearsal was the first time I’d ever had a chance to notice. In the line-through they were just feeding me cues. And in the tech rehearsal I’d been too preoccupied with my own lines and with the fate of Captain Kirk.

  But in the dress ...

  Oh, boy.

  Not that I saw them right away. First we had to get through Act One. No picnic there. Though it was my most rehearsed scene in the show, it was also my longest. And I still didn’t have all my lines. Captain Kirk was gone but had not been replaced, which meant I was now being prompted by Mr. Warmth himself.

  I dreaded the experience, but I shouldn’t have. As I said before, Goobie Wheatly might be a prick, but the guy was one hell of a stage manager. And he wasn’t about to screw up his job on purpose just to make me look bad. He was a man who took pride in his work and did every aspect of his job like a pro. He prompted only when needed, anticipated when that was and never made me have to say “line.”

  I so disliked the man by this time that I sensed an underlying hostility in this. Goobie was being scrupulously careful to do his job flawlessly, so if there was any screw-up in the lines it would be entirely my fault. Be that as it may, his prompting was smooth as silk.

  The rest of the show fucked up right and left.

  It began with Nellie missing her entrance at the beginning of Act One. Raina and Catherine, left onstage with egg on their faces, attempted a few feeble ad-libs to try to stall till she appeared. But when she didn’t, and when Margie-poo, so help me, tried a line as ridiculous as, “I hope my noble Sergius will bring me the head of a vanquished Serb and lay it at my feet,” Herbie stood up in the audience and bellowed, “Where the hell is Louka?” and the whole thing ground to a halt.

  Which is not entirely kosher. You’re supposed to keep going in a dress rehearsal if you can. But once things got as ugly as having decapitated Serbs bandied about, there was no help for it. The show was stopped, a search was instituted and my dressing-room partner eventually proved to have been in the ladies where, she claimed, she did not hear Goobie Wheatly call “places.” (A contention, by the way, which Goobie Wheatly strenuously denied, since making sure all the actors knew places had been called was his responsibility.)

  At any rate, by the time all that got sorted out we had to start the show again, which had to be a bit of an embarrassment for Herbie, particularly since we had an audience of sorts. This consisted of whatever apprentices were still awake, of which there seemed to be about eight or ten, including, I noted with regret, the ousted Captain Kirk; Amanda Feinstein, Herbie’s partner and co-producer, and what she thought of her investment now I hated to guess; a few well-dressed men and women sitting with Amanda, obviously money people of some type or other, being made to feel part of the in-crowd by getting to see the theater in its rawest, purest form, and what a bad idea that was; and last, but not least, Herbie’s wife, who must have arranged a baby-sitter for the kids so she could sit in on the dress, and I bet old Herbie had to be thrilled about that.

  Anyway, that audience got to see the curtain go up twice, because once Nellie was in place we treated it like a flag on the play and cranked it back and kicked it off again.

  Did I mention the scene that preceded her entrance? No, I guess I just mentioned her entrance as the first fuck-up. Well, in the tech, her entrance came after cutting a couple of pages of dialogue. In the dress, I got to hear ’em. They were not good. The woman playing Catherine was not at all convincing as Raina’s mother. Oddly enough, she did not project as an older woman, she came off as a younger woman attempting to play an older woman. That may not make any sense, but that’s what I saw. To me the whole scene rang false. It wasn’t very funny or particularly interesting. In fact, as far as I was concerned, the only highlight was Nellie missing her entrance.

  The second time she made it, but things didn’t improve. That section of the play seemed dull. Everything seemed slightly off. Timing, cues, characters, you name it. Plus the fact that there was a small audience there and they weren’t reacting at all. At any rate, the whole thing just seemed bland.

  You think I brightened things up? The whole first act I didn’t get a laugh. I got through the goddamn scene, which was quite an accomplishment in itself, only requiring two prompts, in both cases administered expertly and unobtrusively by the otherwise malevolent Goobie Wheatly. With his help I got through, but it was a real relief at the end of the act when I finished my monologue and was able to lie down and pretend to go to sleep.

  Not much, though, because Raina and Catherine came back in, played a rather unconvincing scene of finding me there asleep, and delivered a couple of lines, at the end of which the curtain came down to dead silence, followed after a few beats by an obligatory and at best perfunctory smattering of applause.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t really in Act Two.

  Unfortunately, I got to watch it.

  In my humble opinion it stunk.

  In Act Two, Raina’s father Major Petkoff and fiancé Sergius Saranoff return from the wars, which are now over, and recount an amusing tale a Swiss soldier told them during the prisoner exchange. It seems in escaping Sergius’s cavalry charge, he climbed a balcony and took shelter in a young woman’s bedroom. She and her mother took pity on him, let him stay the night and sent him off the next morning disguised in a coat belonging to the master of the house.

  This is of course supposed to be funny. And it might have been, if the reactions and looks Raina and Catherine gave each other while Sergius was relating that story weren’t so broad and theatrical that they seemed to be straight out of vaudeville. As it was, I cringed, and I couldn’t help thinking, good god, did Herbie direct them to do that? I mean, that sure wasn’t the way we did the show twenty years ago.

  But that was nothing compared to Avery Allington.

  Act Two is really Sergius Saranoff’s act. First he expresses his undying devotion for Raina, who declares that she thinks they have found the “higher love.” Next he asks Louka if she knows what the higher love is, and when she says no, says, “A very fatiguing thing to keep up for any amount of time,” and proceeds to make a pass at her. This is of course hilarious any way you play it, and one reason why the part of Sergius Saranoff cannot miss.

  Unless you’re Avery Allington.

  I was sitting in the wings and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Avery Allington’s performance was too big for the American stage. He exaggerated everything—every line, every gesture. And I thought the women’s reactions were broad. They were positively subtle compared to this. But nothing Avery Allington did was the least bit real. It was all huge, monstrous caricature.

  Yes, he got la
ughs. I have to admit it. But they weren’t genuine laughs. What he got was nervous laughter, people laughing because they thought they were supposed to. Believe me, I’ve been in the theater before and I know the difference. The man was bad, and the people watching could tell.

  Yes. I must admit to observing this with a certain amount of satisfaction.

  I watched while Avery came on to my dressing-room partner, Nellie. She flirted with him but teased him, saying Margie-poo was interested in someone else also. No, not Herbie—I mean, within the context of the play. And in the play, Louka tells Sergius that Raina is interested in another man, but won’t let on it’s me. That leads up to my entrance at the end of the act, when I show up to return Major Petkoff’s coat, which, as Sergius had related in his story, the women had loaned me to escape. Before I can do that I am spotted by Sergius and Major Petkoff who are delighted to see me, because they need advice on drawing up the orders to send their regiments home. While this is going on, Raina enters, sees me and exclaims, “Oh! The chocolate cream soldier!” which is what she called me when she fed me chocolate creams in Act One. She covers this slip in a scene that would have been funny in any other production of the play, though in this one it just lay there. The act ends with me being persuaded to stay.

  Setting up Act Three.

  I hate to describe Act Three, but, unfortunately, it’s important. I will try to be succinct.

  The act opens with all of us onstage. I am drafting orders for Sergius to sign to send the regiments home. There is a bit of byplay about Major Petkoff not being able to find his old coat, and Catherine telling him it’s right in the closet where he left it. The servant Nicola is sent to look and sure enough the coat is there, since I’ve just returned it.

  Eventually the orders are finished, and everyone exits, leaving me to play a scene with Raina. This is the scene I mentioned before, the one that went well in rehearsal with me on the book.

  With me off the book, oh boy, did it bomb. I blew four or five lines, I forget which, and even with Goobie Wheatly’s skillful prompting the scene just died. The thing was, for the scene to work, I have to be casual, cool and on top of it, and it’s hard to do that when you haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re saying. Anyway, the best that can be said of it was we got through it, and somehow managed to convey the important plot point that Raina had sent me her picture, inscribed “to her Chocolate Cream Soldier.” She had slipped it in the pocket of the coat her father was now wearing, and since I hadn’t found it, it must still be there.