by Gary Amdahl
“I would rather you tried, all of you, really tried to hurt each other. This waggling of fingers and chasing someone whom you clearly do not want to catch—it’s appalling! Don’t you think so, Charles? I mean, really. It’s insulting unless your audience are children eating birthday cake. You know how to use a sword.” It was true that he was able to fence dramatically well; and while fencers perforce show each other the slenderest profile, Charles often found it possible to drop the point of his foil to the floor and advance, spine straight and shoulders square, one, two, even three long arrogant strides directly into his opponent’s range. “Go down there,” commanded Sir Edwin, “and shove it up someone’s arse, why don’t you.”
“My position, Sir Edwin, is that somersaults and comic faces are delightful.”
“They make me want to vomit.”
“The thought of attempting to wound someone—”
“Yes, but that’s just it! The thought of the attempt—precisely!”
“—to wound a brother or a sister is abominable, maestro.”
“Stop and think a moment while your fluttering little heart becomes a piece of pumping meat again.”
“I find it directly opposed to the nature of the theatrical enterprise.”
“That is not only sentimental horseshit but the foundation of everything that is infantile in the arts.”
“Maestro, this may in fact not be a heaven fit for heroes, but I find I do not much care. I wish only to examine the nature of the real via actions of obscure delight.” Charles had done a great deal of debating in the course of his superb education—and was uncomfortably aware that he did not actually know how he felt. He was uncomfortable as well with his facility in the face of such an absence or ignorance.
“You’re simply naïve,” said Sir Edwin, apparently able to read minds.
“Maybe I am,” Charles admitted.
“You are wrong.”
“Maybe I am.”
“You could not be more wrong. That actors should feel delight at behavior so remote from actuality, from consequentiality, from truth, is almost unforgivably wrong. The urge to wound, to really and truly wound, is the only force that can actually animate lifeless words and weary gestures—the only force, at least, that an audience will sit still for.”
“They seem to be willing to sit through just about anything.” Charles surprised himself with this remark: Was it a truer self at last beginning to emerge?
“Do not confuse desire with pleasure.” Edwin spoke with muted passion.
“I must beg your pardon, maestro. Your meaning is obscure.”
Both of them were acting, not altogether happily, but evidently unwilling or unable to leave off, to break into sincerity and earnestness.
“Do not confuse desire, I tell you, with pleasure.” It was possible Sir Edwin was frustrated, annoyed. His vehemence was pitched uncertainly. He was either in the grip of something, or pretending to be. As he was a drunkard, it would never be certain.
“Having still no actionable clue as to what you are talking about, I will nevertheless promise you that if it is ever within the scope of my immature intellect to distinguish the two, I will do so. I will attempt to do so, at any rate—for no other reason than that you have said so with such clear strength of feeling.”
“Goddamn you.” Suddenly Sir Edwin was no longer acting. It was a gift.
“Goddamn me.”
“Goddamn you.”
“All right then,” Charles said, still game, but inwardly beginning to shy. “Goddamn me.”
Sir Edwin turned away in disgust and Charles saw that though he had not exactly missed the man’s inscrutable and alcoholic signs and crucial but murky inflections, he had, once again, ignored them, and was now, consequently, imperiled. Sir Edwin was panting with stifled rage.
“I tell you to go down there and act like a man, to grab those infants by the scruffs of their necks and shake them until it’s clear they are no longer in their playpens—and you simper like the rich parlor fucking smart ass that you incontrovertibly are and will always be. I tell you it’s nauseating and you become a pale imitation of Oscar Wilde. I CAN’T STAND IT ANYMORE!” The last was a shriek and he was now very nearly in tears. “Over and over and over again—do you not, do you really not, are you incapable, completely FUCKING INCAPABLE of understanding what we are struggling against? Conformation to the etiquette of the stage, to its infantile rules and bourgeois complacencies—it’s like fucking a corpse. It’s loathsome. Or it would be if it were real. It is merely ridiculous, merely embarrassing.”
Sir Edwin sat down and pulled his cloak around him so that not even his eyes could be seen. He hunched forward and appeared to be weeping, but made no sound. After a short while, he seemed to relax. He sat back and the cloak fell away from his face. He breathed deeply and evenly.
“And so,” Charles said, “just to make sure I understand you, I am to not confuse desire with pleasure. Was that it?”
Sir Edwin refused to look at him.
“Was that fucking it?” Charles demanded.
Sir Edwin was weary now, and wise. “I meant only to suggest that there are layers and layers of desire for pleasure. We actors revel quite rightly in these superficial desires, in the gratification of these superficial desires—that is what we are paid to do. Still, the corpse is a corpse and her cunt is full of maggots. I’m not trying to be outrageous—you know this as well as I do. We all know. What you may not know is that beneath all those layers of pleasures is a primary desire. We may think of it as an original desire. We may think of it as a primal desire. You must show us, if you can, what it is to want food, to want sex, to want to brain another man so you can have his food and his women—but you are exhibiting the superfice. You may bring something to life if you are successful. And that is the great desire you must not confuse with pleasure: simply to be alive.”
He began weeping again, loudly, with a kind of abandoned happiness, and Charles descended to the stage.
The stage was high enough so that when Charles came to the leading edge of it he was looking at his actors’ shoes as they shuffled and swept left and right, forward and back. He tipped his head back and called out for everyone to mark out a playing space and begin to go through the motions and whisper the lines of whatever scene marked their entrance into The American. After they’d done so for a few minutes, over the gentle, strange murmuring punctuated by the creak and clap of the boards, he told them to speak up and to slow down.
From the balcony Sir Edwin shouted. “NOTICE HOW THE NATURE—”
And Charles took it up, almost as if he were echoing Sir Edwin: “Notice how the nature of what you are doing changes along with the speed, your apprehension and judgment of what you are doing.”
A few more minutes passed and he climbed up on the stage, moving around an imaginary painting on an easel, speaking Christopher Newman’s first lines of the play—“That’s just what I wanted to see!”—while the young woman who was the imaginary painting’s painter, Noémie, fell in with him.
“Now half again as slow and notice—”
“NOTICE HOW YOUR THOUGHTS STILL LAG BEHIND YOUR ACTIONS, EVEN WHEN YOU HAVE COME NEARLY TO A STANDSTILL!”
“Move as slowly as you can move and still maintain a sense of one single continuous movement and notice how your thoughts still lag behind your actions, which indeed are reactions themselves to something we cannot see, name, understand.”
“ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU DO NOT FEEL WHOLE WHEN YOU ARE A CHARACTER!” shouted Sir Edwin, who then began again to sob, loudly—and, it had to be said, histrionically.
“Pick a new scene,” said Charles. “Move normally, speak softly.”
Vera—Claire de Cintré—joined him for their first scene together. Charles spoke his lines with her for a while—“It’s as if there had been a conspiracy to baffle me tonight: we have been kept asunder from the moment I arrived”—then said, “Indeed, as Sir Edwin suggests, you know who you are at the expense of being
happy. Ask yourself why that is. Know that you will never be happy until there is no division between you and the other characters. Know that you are sinning when you are isolated and alone on the stage. Know that sin means only that you have missed the point and that repentance means only to change your perspective. You in your isolation have created the other characters and now you are afraid of them, of what they will do, of how you will act in consequence. You created them but you are afraid of being dragged into their lives. Do not be afraid, my actors. You are living in a constant state of anxiety and anticipation. Change your sinning way: everything is waiting for you, here on the stage, in the character of the other.”
Again he gave them just a few minutes, two or three, then asked them to slowly and gently cease to speak and move. He asked them to savor the silence and stillness and yet remember where they were and what they were doing. When they were ready, calm and alert, they were to return to the scenes they had just been acting but include the other characters in the scene, two or three others, reform, as it were, and choose a property that was important to the scene, a chair or an easel.
“You will never be convincing on a stage, my friends, if you cannot treat your props properly. You must see and use them—and allow them to use you—in exactly the same way you see and use and are used by the other human beings onstage with you. A chair is every bit as miraculous as a human being is. Look at the chair, feel it. It is floating there in space just as you are. Just as the planet does. Its constituent parts are your constituent parts. You may wish to think of yourself as related to your property interdependently. This in truth is how we live. Distinctions between consciousness and self-consciousness, between organic and inorganic are only superficially true and useful. Consider the story the chair will tell: as we are flesh, it is wood, fashioned by a maker in a shop, who got the wood from a timber merchant, who got the wood, with subtle but overwhelming violence, from a tree in the forest. Of course you tell yourself you know where the tree came from: it grew from a seed. Break open the seed: Is it empty or merely invisible? Without water, and soil, and sunlight, what will come of it? What is water? The wave recognizes itself only when it is washed upon a shore. Instantly it vanishes, is withdrawn from the shore into the singularity of the ocean. What is soil? Light? Where does light come from and where does it go to? Does it come from darkness and go to darkness? Does it need darkness in order to claim its singularity? Does darkness need light to claim its singularity? Does darkness come from light and go to light? ‘Brief as the lightning in the collied night that, in a spleen unfolds both heaven and earth, and ere a man hath power to say, behold, the jaws of darkness do devour it up. So quick bright things come to confusion.’ All this coming and going implies time and space, a clock and a grid. Who built this clock? Who drew and laid down the grid? Who declared five senses and no more? What is a senseless man? What is a dreaming man? What is man dreamlessly sleeping? What is prior to logic, to reason? Is character, your own and your character’s character, a matter of outward performance and social polish, as La Rochefoucauld would have it, or of inward essence? Where is the Christ who promised to show us what could not be seen? Why was this gnosis banned from our Bible? Where is the Christ of the Upanishads? Why must we hear only Jeremiah when our cities are destroyed? ‘Behold, that which I have built up, will I break down. That which I have planted will I pluck up.’ The worker is hidden in his shop. The work has drawn a veil over the worker. Only on the stage of simultaneous being and not being can we see the work and the worker together.”
Charles ceases to speak. Slowly the ensemble follows him into silence—and it is only then that they realize the cellist of the continuo group Charles has engaged has slipped in sometime during the weaving and fallen immediately under the spell, providing a single unceasing ground note, moving imperceptibly up to the sharp, then back down to natural, further still to the flat, then up again. No one moves, everyone listens. There are more persons in the theater than he had thought. Children, mostly. Children of the crew, he supposes.
Vera tries to catch Charles’s eye, but he refuses—or is intent on something else. She wants to see how seriously he has taken himself—taken himself as opposed to what he has spoken of with such bafflingly strange eloquence. She wants him to remember that it is a game. Rather: she wants that belief confirmed in herself. He has either over-rehearsed or, how shall she put it . . . lost his balance. He is, she thinks, using one of his pet phrases, “out of joint,” and she wants to know which of these metaphors he prefers. She sees how liable he is to become an icy clown or an ironic lout if he is not understood and applauded. That a spell was woven she cannot deny, but now wants out.
A little boy, no more than five, who has been standing very near them, only half-there, like a sprite, or a cupid, he is so chubby and pretty, like a cupid carved in the corner of a great ceiling now mysteriously between herself and Charles, says—no, sings, chants—very clearly and sweetly in the silence, “When I put a chair in my head, it’s so I can sit in my head. I take my body apart and put the pieces in my head. And then I sit in my head.”
He is the plumber’s son. Again and again and again, he is the plumber’s son.
Cheerful laughter chitters and laps around them.
Charles claps his hands. She sees he is not laughing, but, to her great relief, would like to.
“And what’s yer name, young feller?” Charles asks him.
Suddenly shy, he looks down, then, spinning, runs stage left and disappears in the shadows of the wing, shouting for his father, who is standing and chuckling in the middle aisle of the steeply raked orchestra seats, under the chandelier, where Vera had been sitting in her winding sheet. Laughing loudly, father calls out to son.
Allowing himself to smile, Charles addresses his actors. “I know you don’t all have all of your lines yet, but find a script and, quick as you can, let’s run through the whole play, shouting your lines as fast as you can say them and running around the theater until you run out of breath! That includes the balcony, the wings, the stairways! Run until your heart is pounding! Noémie! Lord Deepmere! Start us off, please!”
Thus was the story told of the wealthy Californian who goes to Europe in search of art, of beauty, who falls in love with the widow of an impoverished aristocrat, and who encounters simultaneously a deep disdain for his lack of family and a deep lust for his surplus of money—in about a quarter of an hour of helter-skelter hilarity . . . while outside, a tiny, celebratory, nominally pro-war rocket rose up on a thin line of fizzing and sparking red flame, broke the window next to the one Charles had left open (there was, in the immediate aftermath and first stages of investigation, some suspicion, for a moment or two, that someone had secretly entered the theater and opened a window on purpose). It exploded loudly but without much force, and began to burn itself out smokily in the carpeting. Which in turn caught fire, spreading quickly over the floor and consuming the false dome, under which hung the chandelier that was the main source of general lighting in the theater. When they smelled smoke and looked up and saw the paint begin to bubble, the ensemble, already darting and jogging, moved in confused anticipation toward the center of the theater, their lines trailing off and the speed of their movements slowing. When it became clear that the ceiling was burning, they scrambled left and right past the velvet seats, then up or down the aisles toward the stage or the exits, from which vantage points they watched the chandelier go dark. Shouting run run run, they all ran. Some of the last, Charles included, heard the heavy, slow crash in the darkness.
He held a novelty handkerchief—red, white, and blue, stars and stripes, mandated by his board for publicity purposes—to his nose and mouth, and bent low as he could, bringing his knees nearly to his still falsely bearded chin, and walked up the front stairway to the second-floor lobby. The haze either stung and filmed his eyes and distorted his perception of the red-carpeted, red-wallpapered stairway, making it look narrower and steeper and higher than it was; or was he perhaps
simply light-headed from the smoke . . .? This may be the beginning of my death, he thought. Will I know? Each second growing more and more certain until the final moment when the smoke is gone and my head is cool and there is a flash of clear light and I know that the sham is over and that I am, how do we say, dead? The lobby was like a mountaintop cave, a small dark mouth opening in the swirling mist. There was no trace of a wise man—he was all alone and could hear the building whispering, moaning, shouting restlessly to itself. It did not wish to die, and yet was willing to burn. Sir Edwin’s aesthetic love of destruction, of collapse and immolation, did not extend, it appeared, to those things of his own which he wished to preserve. He had begun to ask Charles in a normal tone of voice, manly but urgent, one understood, one knew, brooking no bullshit, straight to the point, if Charles might consider dashing in and retrieving a few valuable bits and pieces of theatrical memorabilia—but he hadn’t been able to maintain the tone. He lost control of his voice and his face and his hands at the same moment: he squeaked and shrieked and shook like a leaf. Charles couldn’t look at him and turned away in disgust. His prize possessions amounted to museum pieces indicating the aesthetic ancestors of what Sir Edwin called “The Free Theater” but which everyone else referred to now as “the Minot”: a portrait in oil of the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen; a spotted and torn photograph of the Meininger Players assembled on a tiny picture-frame stage somewhere in the heart of Thuringia or Saxony; another, blurry and desiccated, of those same players either lying facedown on a mattress or huddled over it as if about to pounce on it, grinning melodramatically (the use of the mattress to muffle offstage “crowd noise” was legendary in the birth of “stage realism”); more photographs of Andre Antoine and his Théâtre Libre, and the famous “missing fourth wall” stage set put together with junk lumber and cast-off furniture; wood-cut prints of Sir Edwin’s fantastic, eerie set design for the Moscow Art Theater’s Hamlet. Charles yanked paintings and photographs down from the walls, wrapped them in a tablecloth, then smartly rapped a display case, breaking its glass. He thought he could stay in the burning room forever: this was how things were. Nothing could have made him happier, more deeply content. But he balanced two miniature stage sets on top of the bundle of pictures and autograph letters, stuffed two small sculptures under his arms, and made his way back down the stairs. They had become something like the face of a cliff, and he walked perpendicularly to it, defying gravity. Then he was in the main lobby and he could hear crackling and crashing and the firemen shouting inside the theater. Then different shouts and cannonading bursts of water. Outside on the street, Sir Edwin had gotten hold of himself and lit a cigar. Drawing voluptuously on it, he stared at Charles with a strange, almost mocking, superior gratitude. Both men were slick with soot-black sweat, sticky with blood from small wounds. Edwin seemed satisfied with the show of destruction and manly staving off of destruction, now that it was all over—even pleased. He spoke with fatuously coy irony of a dream to use the sounds of the firefight, from gush of water to shriek of fear, from splatter of horse dung to clatter of shoes on cobblestones, in place of the small orchestra: “That,” he insisted, “was the music of the future.” Firemen trudged past alternately muttering and braying with victorious exhaustion. Charles and Sir Edwin could hear hot wood sizzling and steaming above them in the black building, and smell the wet ash, the burnt spores and flowers of mold. Charles was nauseated by the ridiculously sweet smoke of Sir Edwin’s cigar, and disgusted with his reinvigorated incoherence and perversity, but they were walking now and had passed into a livelier block, full of restaurants and saloons, people with stuffed bellies and laughing mouths, and Charles surrendered to a fleeting vision of his master’s alcoholically perceived but immutable truth. Something “great” might be revealed if he did something “real” on the stage. Let it happen to me, he thought, seeing in his mind the crackling flames in the lobby, as you say it will. Then someone came running after them to tell them that a little boy, one of the plumber’s sons, no doubt, had been found under the chandelier.
