How Not to Make a Wish

by Mindy Klasky

  At least my father wouldn’t be in the audience. Our theatrical change in schedule had caught him by surprise; he couldn’t get out of a charity benefit that he was hosting. Likewise, my high school debate coach was unaware of tonight’s chaos; he still had tickets for our originally scheduled debut. This would be my first opening night that either of them had missed, but I was actually relieved.

  I took a deep breath and completed my preshow responsibilities with the brisk efficiency that had always served me well at the dinner theater. I reminded the actors when they had half an hour left, then fifteen minutes. I peeked out from the theater’s wings to see some of the most prominent critics in the Twin Cities, some of the most vocal voters for our local Ivey Awards. I could see Bill pacing at the back of the theater, arms crossed over his chest, head freshly shaved. His black turtleneck made him look pale, cadaverous.

  “Do you think it’s too late to get out of Dodge?” John’s question was a whisper in my ear, and I realized that I’d subconsciously heard him come up behind me, felt his broad chest against my back.

  The last few days of chaos had solidified the trust between us. We’d worked side by side to salvage the show, to make it presentable to the public. We’d seen each other at our worst—tempers flaring; and at our best—cajoling our crew into delivering more than anyone had thought humanly possible. We’d stolen meals together whenever we could, trying to convince ourselves that fast-food grease was actual nourishment.

  Along the way, we’d shared more than a handful of kisses. The night before, we’d collapsed on a couch in the prop closet, sneaking a few hours of exhausted sleep before we attempted to work more of the impossible to meet Bill’s insane deadline. I’d let myself relax against John’s hard body, felt his arms fold around me with an ease, a simplicity, that I’d never known before, not with any other man.

  When I had awakened, he’d been propped up on his elbow, his expression inscrutable in the light that filtered in from the dressing room. I’d raised my hands to his face, traced the line of his mustache. He caught my fingertip lightly between his teeth, making me gasp in surprise. His palms ranged down my body, awakening more energy than I had dreamed possible in my exhausted, preshow frantic state. Only the arrival of the carpentry crew interrupted our idyllic interlude. John kissed me hard, to silence my giggles, and I nearly followed through on our original plan, carpenters be damned.

  Now I let myself lean against him, and I answered softly, “Maybe we’re just too close to the production. Maybe it’s better than we think it is.”

  He turned me around to face him. “Franklin, you are an optimist.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Or else I’m just ready to be committed.”

  He brushed a kiss across my lips. “That sounds like the stage manager I know and love.”

  I started at the last word, immediately told myself it was just part of a familiar phrase, a cliché. It didn’t mean anything. Couldn’t mean anything. I didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time to feel. I glanced at my watch. “I have to call five minutes.”

  John stepped aside, his face unreadable behind his mustache. “Break a leg,” he said.

  I started to answer but ran out of words. I settled for finding his hand, squeezing his fingers. Then I escaped to the dressing room for my final call before the show began. After notifying the actors, I darted up the ladder to the production booth. I could hear the expectant hum of the crowd below.

  Taking my seat, I looked around, making sure that I had my script ready, my headset at my fingertips. Even as I scanned the booth, I realized that something was strange, something was out of place. My nose twitched, and I squinted into the shadows in the corner.

  A large vase of roses loomed on the edge of my desk. In the shadows, their crimson petals were black. I fished the card out of the arrangement reflexively. I already knew what it would say. “I love you. I’m sorry. Can’t we try again?”

  That was the message Drew had left on the dozen roses he’d had delivered to my apartment on Sunday night, after I broke up with him. And the dozen that had waited for me in the lobby yesterday morning, on Monday. And now here.

  He was an actor. He had to be as broke as the rest of us. Now I was going to make him bankrupt, in addition to making him miserable. I gritted my teeth and wished that I had some way of reaching out to Teel, some way of forcing the genie to make all of this right, to correct the absolute and utter disaster I had made out of poor Drew’s life.

  Besides, if I still had that third wish, I could have used it to salvage our production. I could have harnessed Teel’s magic to redeem Romeo and Juliet, to transform the show into something boring and ordinary and successful. I could have saved my reputation and the reputation of every single person working on the show.

  But no. I’d squandered my last chance at magic. I deserved the disaster that was about to unfold.

  I cursed and settled my headset over my hair. It was time to sink or swim.

  “House lights to one half,” I said. My blood sang as the lights dimmed. The audience’s chatter faded away. “House lights out,” I said. “Projector cue one, ready. Projector cue one, go.”

  The first slide was projected on John’s velvet curtain. Our Prologue, one of our few male actors, pummeled the set with an iron pipe, and then he bellowed,

  “Two households, both alike in dignity,

  In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

  From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

  Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.”

  As the echoes of metal clanging on metal died down, the actor waved toward the supertitles that flashed above him, translating the Bard’s poetry into a poor excuse for a joke:

  “God-damn Verona-town, I say,

  Two fam’lies raise their old AK-

  Forty-sevens…”

  I couldn’t make myself read any more; I didn’t have time to watch the ridiculous words slipping from slide to slide. Instead, I listened to the murmur of the audience, their growing uncertainty as the stage remained pitch-black. I could hear the confusion, the polite mystification, as every single person wondered whether the stage manager—whether I—had forgotten to call a lighting cue.

  We’d handed out the flashlights, but no one seemed to understand what to do with them.

  Swearing, I contemplated using the public address system, the emergency microphones that were intended to let the audience know about fires, earthquakes, floods, and other disasters at least half as serious as an entire production proceeding in absolute darkness. But then, a single feeble light flickered across the stage. Another followed it a moment later, picking up the Prologue’s face. A few more chimed in, exploring the tangle of metal, the reflective sheen of puddled water.

  The audience had figured out what was going on. With the lighting, at least.

  I forced myself to settle back into my chair, to call the next dozen cues. I could sense the crowd’s confusion, though, as more and more women came on stage, posturing and beating the set with iron bars, swaggering like caricatures of warriors in extreme fighting contests. Which, of course, they were. Caricatures. Not warriors.

  It wasn’t until Jennifer entered and the other actors started calling her “Romeo” that I heard a collective sigh of relief. People were catching on. They were beginning to understand. Not that comprehension helped much when it came to building audience rapport. By then, the supertitle slides had flashed some of their most offensive contemporary language, n-words, and c-words, and m-compound-nouns leading to several surprised gasps.

  The actors seemed thrown by the audience’s reactions. Either that, or they were terrified they were going to slip off of John’s set. The plastic seemed much more slick than it had in rehearsal (although that was probably an optical illusion, created by the near darkness that enveloped the stage). I winced over at least three tumbles, grateful that I’d left extra Ace bandages in the dressing rooms.

  Somehow, we limped through the first act. We g
ot through the masquerade where the star-crossed lovers met, through the balcony scene, through a dozen more chances for every single actor to work out his or her frustrations against the iron set. Romeo and Juliet fled to the meddlesome Friar Laurence, and the priest agreed to perform his secret wedding.

  “House lights to half,” I called into my headset, and I was rewarded with seeing the audience for the first time since the show had begun.

  Or, rather, I was punished by the sight.

  I’d stage managed a few shows where the audience didn’t realize it was time for intermission. I’d witnessed that uneasy silence, when they didn’t know if they were supposed to clap, when they didn’t know whether they were supposed to react.

  But every other time that I’d worked on a…challenging show, I’d solved the problem by bringing up the house lights. Audiences wanted to work with actors. They wanted to like productions. They wanted to applaud for shows. Even when they weren’t certain that it was time to clap, they always obliged when the lights actually came on.

  But not for us. Not for Romeo and Juliet. Not for the titanic disaster that was capsizing in front of us.

  Not a single person applauded. Instead, they started talking to one another, murmuring, turning the pages of their programs as if they were certain that they had missed something, overlooked some note that explained how they had stumbled onto this bizarre postmodern comedy performed in an incomprehensible foreign language.

  I thought I was going to be sick.

  But I didn’t have that option. I took off my headset and made a quick round through the dressing rooms. The actors were silent. They knew the show was flopping.

  Drew sat in front of his mirror, a bandage in his hand as he assisted Stephanie Michaelson with wrapping her knee. She was leaning close to him, pursing her lips. Unkindly, I wondered if she was actually in any pain, or if she was just reveling in Drew’s attention.

  I couldn’t keep from glancing at her hands. No engagement ring. She must have removed it for the show; it didn’t exactly match Bill’s vision of Verona. Or maybe she’d given it back to Norman, after his little performance at Mephisto’s. Maybe she had moved on from my former fiancé to my former boyfriend.

  I tried to care, but I just wasn’t able to summon the emotion.

  In any case, as soon as Drew saw me, he forgot that Stephanie was alive. He sat up straighter, tracking my every movement with his eyes. I saw the eagerness that stretched his muscles, as if he were a hound scenting a rabbit in the underbrush.

  He wanted me to say something about the roses. I had the power to make everything all right for him. I could redeem even the disaster of our production. All I had to do was tell him that I loved him.

  Instead, I looked away and said, “Fifteen minutes, please.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his shoulders slump. His absolute despair made my eyes water, even as Stephanie leaned closer to him. She whispered something that I suspected was supposed to be encouragement.

  Steeling my heart, I climbed back into the production booth. I dug into my backpack to fortify myself with some snack, but I found that I’d depleted my supply during the past crazy couple of days. Without an edible morsel in sight, my food diary mocked me from the bottom of the bag.

  With my stomach grumbling, the second act didn’t get any better than the first. So many people had left at intermission that we had completely insufficient lighting for the second half of the show. I realized that I’d never set up a box for people to drop off their flashlights, so we probably lost a third of our stock. The supertitle projector jammed again. The plastic sheeting caught on a corner of the iron framework, sending a shower of noisome water into the first three rows of the audience. Stephanie’s costume split during curtain calls, baring her chest for the entire audience to see.

  Even with Stephanie’s overexposure, the curtain call was accompanied by only the most perfunctory of applause. I had to believe that most of that came from Bill Pomeroy himself. And maybe his aged mother, who was sitting in the center of the front row, shivering in her now-damp blazer.

  The cast was silent as they sponged off their makeup, as they peeled out of their costumes, as they returned to their anonymous street clothes. I heard one halfhearted suggestion that everyone go to Mephisto’s, but no one joined the chorus. The company trickled out in groups of two or three, their heads hung low.

  No one was greeted at the stage door. Even friends and family texted messages that they’d see people at home, that they had to run, that vague, undefined emergencies had come up.

  Bill Pomeroy was nowhere to be seen.

  Drew lingered as the rest of the cast trickled away. I tried to ignore him, making myself extraordinarily busy as I supervised the crew mopping up the set, as we rolled up the plastic sheeting, as we applied hair dryers to the bottom of the iron frames in an attempt to retard their further rusting.

  He finally gave up and slunk off, but not before I saw him slip a gold-wrapped package inside my backpack. Chocolate, my mind registered immediately, recognizing the classic lines of the box. Expensive chocolate. Expensive chocolate that no former boyfriend should be splurging on for me. My belly reminded me that it was empty, but I told it to hold on just a little longer.

  I was switching off the lights in the dressing room when John materialized out of the gloom. “Hey,” I said, swinging my backpack over my shoulder. “Where have you been?”

  “Talking to Bill.” He ran his hand across his face, smoothing down his mustache, leaving behind canyons of exhaustion.

  “Where is he? The cast expected him to come in and say something.”

  “He caught up with me after getting his mother into a cab.”

  I heard something beneath John’s words, a confusing mix of anger, and frustration, all the negative emotions that had been swirling backstage since the audience’s ominous silence. But now there was another emotion as well.

  Relief.

  “What?” I asked. “What did Bill tell you?”

  “He’s closing down the show.”

  “What?” I asked again. I couldn’t believe that I’d heard right.

  John sighed. “He’s going to announce that some flu bug got into the cast, that we don’t have enough understudies. He’s going to put the show ‘on hiatus’ until everyone has recovered.”

  The blossom of hope that had started to unfurl shriveled. “And after the ‘hiatus’?”

  John shook his head. “There won’t be any ‘after.’ The Landmark’ll stay dark for two months. If they’re lucky, they’ll manage to launch the next show a few weeks early. Try to recoup some costs there.”

  I imagined the media flurry, the cyclone of theater gossip as news of our colossal failure spread. I thought about the pots of money that the Landmark would have to burn, the tickets they’d have to refund—at least to season subscribers who hadn’t had a choice about what horrific productions they’d be forced to see. I imagined the stacks of unpaid bills sitting on the producers’ desks, the invoices from the ironworkers, and the supertitle company, and everyone else who had been dragged into our little corner of artistic hell.

  “I can’t believe he’s pulling the plug,” I said. “I can’t believe it’s over.” And then, the full import of John’s news hit me.

  I was done.

  No one else was ever going to see Romeo and Juliet. No one else was ever going to offer me the chance to stage manage another play. I really was going to have to take the LSAT.

  I started to cry.

  “Aw, Franklin,” John said. His arms were strong around me. He pulled me close to his chest, made all of the appropriate shushing noises as my silent tears grew to sobs, expanded into great, gasping torrents of loss. I choked on my own hysterics, ashamed of myself, unable to stop. He smoothed my hair, ran his hands down my back, told me it was all going to be all right.

  But he was wrong. It was never going to be right again. My life in the theater—the only life I’d ever wanted—was over.

  At
last, I managed to catch my breath. He pulled away enough to fish a handkerchief out of his pocket, and I ducked my head, imagining the mess of my swollen eyes and smeared makeup and slimy nose. He let me avoid his gaze, but he settled a steady hand on my arm, led me toward a handful of chairs that were scattered against the wall.

  “I might as well tell you the rest of it,” he said.

  I could tell from his tone that whatever he had to say, it was going to be worse than the failure of our show. It was going to be worse than my wasting my wishes on a career that I was never going to have.

  He was going to tell me that he was gay. (Read: That he was a greater actor than everyone in our entire professional cast, combined.) He was going to say that he was married, that he had a perfect wife and two point four kids and a dog, all waiting for him back in Texas. He was going to announce a religious epiphany, a decision to move to an ashram half the world away.

  He chewed on his lower lip for a minute, and then he said, “I’m heading to New York.”

  “New York?” I croaked. My voice didn’t belong to me; it sounded like a cross between a frog and a dying goat. I sniffed and cleared my throat. “What’s in New York?” Of course, I knew what was in New York. Broadway. More theaters per block than anywhere else in the world. The “A” train. I swallowed hard and said, “What show?”

  “A revival of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Big-name cast. Traditional staging.”

  Even as my heart was breaking, I said, “No manhole covers?”

  He grimaced. “Not one in sight.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I thought we’d have more time here. Another couple of weeks at least. Working until the scheduled opening.”

  I couldn’t blame him. A lot could happen in a couple of weeks. A lot had happened in a couple of days. “Break a leg,” I said bravely, when the silence grew too loud.