Bullets for Macbeth

by Marvin Kaye

  Godwin began to despair of being ready by opening night. “Look,” he told the decimated company one evening, “we’ll work around the holes in the cast as best we can. Mel will throw cues from the promptbook. Meanwhile, I’ll find out whether opening night can be shoved back any. The rest of you that still have your health, for God’s sake, hold on to it! And learn your lines!”

  Rehearsals continued, though the director often had to walk through parts with promptbook in hand. Godwin valiantly tried to keep things moving on schedule, and Melanie did everything she could do to assist, no matter how much her husband tried to get her to take it easy.

  But then, one Monday night, Godwin showed up at rehearsal alone. The stage manager was out sick, so Dana Wynn held the prompt script and tossed cues when the actors requested them. The director sat off to one side and hardly spoke all night. The cast, sensing something was the matter, behaved; no one squabbled about bits of business, and not even the most cantankerous performers disturbed Godwin with petty problems.

  During the fifteen-minute break, the whispering set in. I walked up to a small knot of actors listening to Caren Wykoffe-Davis mouthing off. She was the Welsh grande dame du théâtre Godwin had imported to play Lady Macbeth. In her late forties, she was a tall woman with a dignified bearing offset by an occasional earthiness of speech. Her career, she’d told me, spanned the gamut, from music hall to the Old Vic. She was quite as at home caroling smutty ditties about Lola’s broken dustpan as she was washing her hands of Duncan’s imagined blood.

  “Well, what did the bugger expect?” I heard her say as I approached the clique over which she presided. “Making her work her arse off like that! I blame him entirely!”

  It didn’t take long to find out she was talking about the Godwins. Melanie had lost the baby over the weekend.

  After the run-through, Harry was supposed to meet Hilary at Shakespeare’s Pub. I went with him, and we ran into her just as she was getting ready to enter. When she saw me, she cocked an eyebrow, so I wasted no time telling her the bad news.

  The color drained from her cheeks. She said something I couldn’t hear, then grasped my arm. “Where’s Michael?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. He left as soon as they were done.”

  “Gene, what should I do? Go to the hospital? Or try to find him? Who needs—”

  “They both need a shoulder, I’m sure,” I told her. “Take it easy. It’s probably too soon for him to want to talk, anyway.”

  She nodded, tried to speak, then turned away. Her hand rose to her face.

  I looked at Harry and he gestured that he would wait inside. After he left, I stepped behind Hilary and put my hands gently on her shoulders.

  There were no words possible, but she took the handkerchief I handed her. A few seconds later, she turned and her face was calm, though grave.

  “Let’s go inside,” she said, “he might be there.”

  He was. Mills stood next to him at the bar, trying to cheer him up, but Godwin stared straight ahead, speechless. There were two glasses in front of him, an old-fashioned tumbler and a beer mug. Both were almost empty.

  Hilary went over to him. I don’t know if she spoke, or if he just sensed her presence, but he looked up. They retired to a corner table, where he sat holding her hand, staring at her in mute grief.

  Several of the cast members were at one of the largest tables in the place, and I saw that Dana Wynn had joined them. I steered clear of it and sat down with Harry, Charles Stockton, and Olin Oakes, the old actor who’d come out of retirement at Godwin’s behest

  “Not much we can do for him now, is there?” Harry asked as I pulled my chair in and put my elbows on the wooden edge of the table. I shook my head.

  “It’s a bad business,” Oakes rumbled, staring into the snifter of amber liquid which he rolled between his hands. “The Scottish play is a plague on actors. A plague.”

  Stockton, who still was racked with fits of coughing from time to time, nodded glumly. He was a thin man with sandy hair and reddish tufts of eyebrow and mustache. He wore shell-frame spectacles, which slipped down the bridge of his nose every few moments and had to be righted with a peculiar upthrust of his thumb. “A few years ago,” he mumbled, so low I had to strain to hear, “I took the grand tour of Scotland. Saw Edina, as they used to say, Loch Ness, made a pilgrimage to Stornoway on the Minch, where my family came from originally. But the most awful place I ever set foot in was during that trip.”

  Oakes inclined his massive head knowingly. “Glamis Castle,” he said.

  “Indeed. Glamis Castle,” Stockton replied. “These chaps probably never heard of it.”

  “I imagine,” said Whelan, “it has something to do with Macbeth, since—”

  Oakes’ sharply indrawn breath stopped him.

  “It is a custom,” Stockton explained, “in Britain, among classical actors, never even to refer to the play by name.”

  Harry nodded. “Right enough. We Americans don’t like to quote it, but I never heard anything about not saying the title. How do you—?”

  “The Scottish play,” Oakes anticipated the question. “Call it the Scottish play.” The elderly thespian finished his brandy and held the glass up so the waiter would bring a refill. The gesture was commanding, which was understandable since he’d been making it again and again as one monarch or another for upward of fifty years.

  “Glamis Castle,” said Stockton, “has a chamber known as Duncan Hall. Tradition has it that much of the action of the Scottish play supposedly takes place in this room. I found the place a psychic nightmare. Chills, presentiments, what have you—I wouldn’t go there again if you paid me.”

  “Everything about the Scottish play is bad,” Oakes agreed. “The history of Glamis Castle, I remember reading years ago, is as grim as the building itself. A witch was burned there, children died, young wives became widows. The worst thing I remember hearing was of a monstrous child so hideously deformed that its parents entered it in the official records as born dead. They kept the poor creature in a cell for years and finally walled it up. They say its ghost still wanders there. ...”

  “I can believe it,” said Stockton, with a shudder. “It was a hideous place, Glamis.”

  “And when we first meet—uh—the Scottish person with a play named after him,” said Whelan, “he is the Lord of Glamis.”

  Oakes nodded, his full mane of silvery hair tossing in unruly fashion.

  I saw the stuff of a news release in the conversation. Macbeth, the unlucky play: history and tradition. It would need more anecdotes. I asked Oakes for some, and he provided them. In fifty years of classical acting, he’d played in Macbeth more times than he could recall. Each time was attended by some misfortune, great or small.

  “It’s an incubus,” Stockton remarked. “You can’t wallow in horror, filter such emotions through yourself without being eventually crushed.”

  “Then you don’t believe it’s unlucky, per se?” I asked. “You’d say it was more a matter of—”

  “Bad vibes,” Harry put in.

  Stockton shook his head. “How can you ask that, Gene? It’s all that, plus bad luck. Haunted, it is.”

  “Good quote,” I said, “but do you really believe it?”

  Oakes gestured in the direction of Hilary and Godwin, neither of whom had moved.

  “How can anyone not believe it?” he challenged.

  None of us said anything for a long while.

  “Well,” Harry remarked at last, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire production is scrapped now.”

  Stockton laughed sardonically. “Why? Because of the death of a foetus? Bloody unlikely!”

  “Godwin is destroyed!”

  “Perhaps.” It was Oakes. “But I have a feeling he’s made of sterner stuff.” He said it sonorously, as if quoting something.

  “That’s academic,” Stockton argued. “The fact is that Grilis won’t write this all off, Godwin or no.”

  “Terrific,” said
Whelan, “but what the hell does he do without a director and half the cast sick or—”

  “Without a director?” asked Oakes. “What makes you think Michael’s going to chuck it all?”

  Harry made an I-don’t-know gesture with palms up. “He just doesn’t look as if he’s going to pull out of it. Do you realize he didn’t give a single direction tonight? Not one comment.”

  “Give him time,” the old man said reassuringly.

  “Time? There’s hardly enough—”

  “Please!” said Stockton. “It’s not even worth discussing. If Godwin crumbles, do you really think there won’t be someone to step in?”

  “Such as who?”

  Stockton pointed across the way to Dana Wynn, whose back was to us.

  “Dana?” Harry started. “You’ve got to be kidding?”

  Stockton’s lips twisted in a humorless smile. “Am I? Don’t think she isn’t delighted by this whole lousy business with Melanie. If it makes Godwin break, tant pis. She’s been pitching herself at Grilis as a budding director for some time.”

  As if in punctuation to Stockton’s assertion, Dana suddenly laughed. It wasn’t loud, merely a brief burst of merriment, quickly subdued, but it was horribly out of place that night.

  I noticed it was echoed by laughter from Mills, who had recently joined the other party. With him, as usual, was Bill Evans, who’d exchanged his crutch for a cane loaned to him by Mills: an ebony stick with ornate silver head that looked ludicrous in the youth’s possession.

  They invited us to join them, and Stockton did, but Harry and I stayed put. As for Oakes, he was becoming increasingly intoxicated and preferred keeping his seat.

  Before long, Harry and I had to carry him home. Hilary and Godwin were still together when we left. We loaded Oakes in the Opel and drove him to a quaint street in the nineties, just off Broadway. Harry had to get him beneath his armpits and I took his feet.

  When we’d deposited him on his bed and got his shoes off, Harry sat down with a sigh.

  “Mike is an old friend of his, so I never say anything, but Christ! I must’ve put him to bed a dozen times since we went into rehearsal.”

  I stared about the apartment. Posters and photos, all of younger incarnations of Olin Olvis Oakes, hung everywhere, thick with dust. Loose playbills, brittle with age, were piled inches deep on the surface of every table, abutment, and bookshelf. The latter were stuffed full of playscripts and books on acting theory—Stanislavski, Boleslavski, Viola Spolin, Michael Chekhov, Grotowski, Yeaton, etc., etc.—as well as an odd miscellany of poetry and philosophy, in no discernible system of thought or logical order. Gibran vied for quarters with Nietzsche, Shaw jostled Moss Hart. I withdrew a copy of Kaufmann’s translation of The Birth of Tragedy and read the penned inscription on the flyleaf: “Herein the finest theory on the Melancholy Dane. To Olin from a compere and confrere. Was I too late or were you too early?” It was signed “Mike Godwin.” The pages were uncut.

  “Does he live alone?” I asked Harry.

  He nodded. “Don’t we all?”

  NEWS FROM

  Hilary Ultd.

  FOR: Immediate release.

  ATTN: Hilary Quayle.

  15520 West End Ave., NYC 326-0871

  DARKNESS IN THE DARKEST PLAY

  Is it right to snuff the lights in Macbeth? Michael Godwin thinks so, and will try to prove it in the spectacular G&G production of Shakespeare’s great Scottish horror play, scheduled to premiere Friday, January 13, at Felt Forum.

  The G&G Macbeth will feature a set modeled on Shakespeare’s own theatre, The Globe, yet modern stage effects will also be employed—such as during the murder scenes.

  Director Godwin explains: “The Globe was an open-air playhouse. Performances took place in full daylight. But when we murder Banquo, only one torch will be burning, soon to be extinguished.

  “Scholars may argue, but I don’t feel this violates the style of our production. There is reason to believe that Macbeth did not play at The Globe until autumn, 1607, but the original performance took place indoors on August 7 of the preceding year for King James I at Hampton Court.

  “If this is true, then darkness as an atmospheric effect is perfectly permissible, since the initial production doubtless was given at night. Surely Shakespeare was too good a theater person not to douse the lights at the exact same places as we do!”

  Godwin’s quarter-million-dollar extravaganza stars Armand Mills, Caren Wykoffe-Davis, Harry Whelan, and—in a special return from retirement—Olin Olvis Oakes. G&G is a partnership of two producers: Godwin and Fred Grilis.

  As I was reading over the above press release, Hilary struggled into snow boots. She asked me to accompany her to rehearsal and help her shake Mike Godwin out of his lethargy. He’d been moping around for three days, and the cast was growing desperate ... partly because Dana Wynn stepped in and assumed the directorial reins which Godwin let slip.

  “He doesn’t object,” Hilary said, shaking her head. “He just sits back and doesn’t say a word.”

  I didn’t know what we could do to snap him out of it, but I agreed to come along. Putting the press release on my clipboard, since I meant to show it to Hilary later, I grabbed my coat and went to get the car.

  When we arrived, they were halfway through Scene 31. Mills was onstage with Blake Peters (whose real name was Peter Kotzwinkle) and E. K. Chambers, the two actors playing the First and Second Murderers of Banquo. Bill Evans was off in a corner near the entrance to the “town house,” that is, the central scenic unit around which Godwin’s stage pictures revolved.

  Macbeth was giving instructions to the assassins on how the slaughter of Banquo and Fleance was to be effected.

  Within this houre, at most,

  I will advise you where to plant yourselves,

  Acquaint you with the perfect Spy o’th’time,

  The moment on’t, for’t must be done tonight,

  And something from the Pallace: alwayes with a thought

  That I require a clearnesse; and with him,

  To leave no Rubs nor Botches in the Worke:

  Fleance, his Sonne, that keepes him companie,

  Whose absence is no lesse materiall to me,

  Than is his Fathers, must embrace the fate

  Of that darke houre: resolve yourselves apart,

  I’ll come to you anon.

  It was a passage I was familiar with, because Hilary had pointed it out to me while we were discussing Godwin’s mysterious Third Murderer. The phrase “the perfect Spy o’th’time,” Hilary explained, was variously interpreted as meaning many things, depending on the scholar. Basically, it boiled down to (a) Macbeth telling the murderers he would advise them exactly at what time Banquo and Fleance would come by, ripe for murder, or (b) Macbeth implying that a mysterious spy would join the pair of villains. If the latter were true, it would indicate that Macbeth always intended to send a third killer to work with the first two—perhaps someone more intimately associated with the fortunes of the court than they.

  On the other hand, some commentators emphasize the final line, “I’ll come to you anon,” as textual evidence that Macbeth is himself the Third Murderer. (Of course he’ll come anon! That’s just what he does, at the beginning of Act Three, Scene Three!”—D. L. Oubralz, Anti-Heroes and Their Opposites.)

  At the rehearsal break, Hilary tried to engage Godwin in conversation, but he didn’t respond. Dana called places, and Caren Wykoffe-Davis, about to make an entrance, stopped to ask Hilary how Melanie felt. Everyone knew Hilary spent a good deal of time visiting her.

  “She came home from the hospital today,” Hilary replied. “She’s all right physically, but as for her mental health—” She nodded toward Godwin. “She’s as depressed as he.”

  Lady Macbeth shot a cold look at them. “It’s bloody well his fault! Men! They—”

  She was interrupted by Dana Wynn’s sharp voice.

  “When Miss Quayle is finished chatting, perhaps Miss Davis w
ill be able to begin the scene. ...”

  Hilary said nothing. She had, indeed, inadvertently helped delay Lady Macbeth’s entrance, so she had no defense—but she still didn’t care to be put down by Dana, Grilis’ fully briefed emissary.

  Lady Macbeth did not reply, either. She swept onstage and began her dialogue with Macbeth’s servant (Evans).

  Is Banquo gone from Court?

  Aye, Madame, but returnes again tonight.

  The scene ran its course, then Peters and Chambers appeared, huddled closely together.

  But who did bid thee join with us?

  It was the Third Murderer scene, but there was no actor standing with them to play the role. Dana read the appropriate lines from the prompt script without walking through the blocking. I wondered whether the distraught director had ever gotten around to informing the cast member he’d chosen to play the mysterious killer.

  The scene ended, and they went into the banquet, after which Dana called a fifteen-minute break. I approached Godwin and, on an impulse, handed him the press release I’d written earlier, thinking it might get some reaction out of him. But, without a word, he passed it to Dana, who was standing nearby.

  “What’s this garbage?” she asked.

  “One of our press releases.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  Before I could answer, my employer walked over and asked what was wrong.

  Dana stuck out the press release so it was a few inches below Hilary’s eyes. “Did you write this?”

  She gave me a vote of confidence by not taking time to read it. “I may have written it,” Hilary replied. “What business is it of yours?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Godwin straighten in his seat.

  “In case you’ve forgotten,” Dana stated shrilly, “I represent Fred Grilis, your employer. He was worried from the first about your aptitude for theatrical PR, Miss Quayle, and now I see he may have been right.”

  Hilary took the release, casually letting her eye fall on it—but I saw she was doing her best to speed-read it. After a few seconds, she stared straight at Dana, raising her voice to match the associate producer’s.