by David Gates
Kenny Donnelly was at Circle in the Square at the same time as me, and he always tried to throw work my way. You might have called him a friend too. Last spring I was picking up extra money doing radio commercials while he was finishing a five-month run at Cherry Lane with his adaptation of The London Merchant; or, the History of George Barnwell: sort of a Sweeney Todd meets Rocky Horror, with Rick Calloway—who’d been his partner, off and on, for years—as Sarah Millwood. Kenny had invited me to audition for the murdered uncle, but I’d assumed the show would close in two days.
—
He comped me for one of the final performances—he’d been right, the uncle was a great part—and took me out for drinks after. Would I be interested in coming up to Vermont in July? The community theater he’d organized was doing Twelfth Night this year, and he needed a couple of professionals to glue it together. Two months in Arcadia: he’d put me up, feed me, and I could have my choice of Orsino or Feste; he’d take whichever I didn’t want, and we’d let the amateurs have fun with Malvolio and Sir Andrew and Sir Toby. Barbara Antonelli—I’d worked with Barbara, yes?—was coming up to do Maria, and a Shakespeare professor from the University of Vermont wanted to try Malvolio. For Viola he planned to cast a drama teacher from the local high school; she had a vaguely look-alike brother who was willing to give Sebastian a whirl, although he’d never acted before. And he knew a college girl, a drama major whose father was a lawyer in town, who might be right for Olivia. A good little actress, he thought, quite apart from the fact that the father was on his board.
“I might be getting a little old for Orsino,” I said.
“And I’m not?” Kenny said. “Aren’t you sweet. Actually, I sort of like the idea of an Orsino who’s past his sell-by date. But listen, what you will. As the man says.”
I’d booked my trip to Germany for mid-June, but if I made all my connections I could get to Vermont the day before rehearsals started. Pathetic as it seems, I took it all seriously and quit getting high in the evenings. I watched Ben Kingsley in the Trevor Nunn film, and listened to the old Caedmon recording. We all know Shakespeare criticism is a rabbit hole, but I bought Marjorie Garber’s book and found her Twelfth Night chapter helpful, if less so than A. C. Bradley’s “Feste the Jester,” written back in 1929. And I came upon this, from good old Granville-Barker in 1912: “Feste, I feel, is not a young man…There runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures. We gather that in those days, for a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense, there was a kindly refuge from the world’s struggle as an allowed fool. Nowadays we no longer put them in livery.”
My only hope of memorizing anymore was to read my scenes aloud, over and over, and I recorded myself so I could listen when I was running or doing errands. The day before I left for Europe, I was jogging through Central Park, yelling along with myself, when I came upon the statue of Hans Christian Andersen, that kindly giant pedophile in bronze, with his open storybook on one knee and a real live little girl on the other, being photographed by her parents: “Fie, thou dishonest Satan!” The daddy picked his daughter up, as I might have picked up a daughter of mine. Even on the plane back from Frankfurt, and then on the train up to Vermont, I kept force-feeding myself Feste, moving my lips as I read and listened. My part of death, no one so true did share it!
—
I stepped out onto the platform in Montpelier as the sun was going down on what must have been a hot day; the last time I’d felt the open air I’d been in Europe. Kenny lifted my suitcases into the trunk of his Saab and drove me through countryside that looked like Germany without the castles. (My little German adventure is a whole other story; but you’ve seen The Blue Angel.) At one point we passed an Adopt-a-Highway sign with the name of his theater. Kenny told me he’d bought up here when it was still affordable; David Mamet had a house a couple of towns away. “Let it be recorded,” he said, “that I loathed the man before he turned Republican. You hungry? I’m a little peckish. Let’s go drop in on the folklife.”
We stopped at a bar in his town; the kitchen was closed, but the owner, whom Kenny introduced as Mike, went back and started the fryolator to cook us his special wings, while we drank Bud and watched the last innings of a ball game. Kenny got into a discussion with Mike about the Red Sox pitcher (“They’re sitting fastball, for Christ’s sake—why is he not going to his changeup?”) and bought a round for everybody when the Sox won in the bottom of the ninth.
His house, a big old Vermont cape framed by maple trees, sat on a knoll, up a winding dirt drive. “Hell in the wintertime,” he said. He helped me carry my bags to his guest cottage, which had once been the henhouse and still had a wooden cutout of a rooster on the door, with a hand-lettered sign that read NO TEASING. “Aren’t you flagrant,” I said.
“This is only for my very special out-of-town guests,” he said. “The iron law of country life—don’t shit where you sleep.”
After he’d made sure the bathroom had soap and sniffed the towels for freshness, we walked up to the top of his hill and looked down at the lights in his six-over-six windows. You could smell the hay that had just been cut in his fields. He pointed up, and what do you know: the Milky Way, with its million million stars. “They used to call that the Pathway of the Secret People,” Kenny said.
“Who called it that?” I said.
“I don’t know, the ancients? I read it somewhere. Anyhow, that always stuck with me. Yes, hmm, I wonder why. You know, I love this fucking place. I never had a home before. Do I swear like this when I’m sober?”
“It’s amazing,” I said.
“Yes, well, those near and dear to us have a different view. You can take the boy out of the city…”
“How is Rick? Is he coming up for this?”
“Oh. You haven’t been getting around much. Rick. No, Rick is currently receding at the speed of light. The Big Bang. Followed by red-shift. We are no longer receiving signals from that quadrant. Should I put this in layman’s terms?”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“He always did say this was the ass end of the universe—which one would’ve thought was high praise, coming from Rick. But I’m not going to start singing that old sweet song. In every other respect, life is very, very good. Life is adverbially good. I own a fucking hill, can you believe that? Your life is going to be adverbially good, I can tell. We’re both going through some shit, okay? The key is—Jesus, am I babbling? Come along quietly now, Kenny. Look, I’m a sad old queen and you’re a sad old whatever the hell you are. But is life not adverbially good? What say we go down and look at that scene where Malvolio comes in with his yellow stockings—I’m not sure how that’s going to play. Given the talent involved. You’re not tired, are you? Shit, of course you are. We can do this in the morning.”
—
The next day, Kenny drove me to a first read-through at the theater, a converted barn with seats salvaged from an old movie house. I kissed cheeks with Barbara Antonelli—I hadn’t seen her since we’d done The Crucible in Williamstown, what, twenty years ago?—and took a seat in the front row. I was waiting for Kenny to get up onstage and do his ladies-and-gentlemen-we’re-going-to-have-a-show speech when a young woman in loose cotton pants came in and sat down, leaving a seat between us, slipped off her sandals and perched yoga style, the soles of her feet turned up. The light from the open door caught the side of her face, and you could see the faintest blond down: Was she beautiful, or only young? She caught me looking and said, “I’m Julia. I know who you are.”
“That makes you special right there,” I said. “You’re our Olivia, yes? I’m your corrupter of words.”
“I know, I’ve been so looking forward to working with you. I don’t really know this play, though.”
“I’m just trusting Kenny,” I said.
“Me too, but—Can I say something? I don’t think he really gets women.”
“Well, I could ref
er you to any number of women who might call my own understanding into question.”
“Oh yes, he told me you had a history.”
“Bless his heart,” I said. “And he said you have a future. Then again, he used to say that about me.”
“So is this how you charm them all? Pretending like you’re old?”
“It’s called getting into character.”
“I can’t decide if I like you or not,” she said.
“And does that work for you?” I said. “Frankness, straight up?”
“If I might interrupt?” Kenny called from the stage. I realized we’d been the only people talking. “We need to get things rolling here. Where’s our Viola?”
“In the ladies’,” Barbara said.
“Mother of Mercy,” Kenny said. “Does anybody else have to go?”
I thought Kenny was a little hard on the schoolteacher who played Viola, a not especially boyish looking lady named Louise. He corrected her lines—“Not ‘for what you are.’ ‘I see you what you are’ ”—and shot down her idea of giving a sickly smile after her line about patience on a monument smiling at grief. Bad idea, granted, but of course her real offense was not being Rick Calloway. It seemed to me that Julia would probably be okay. At least somebody had taught her to project, and looking at how she carried herself you could see she must have done some dance as well. She played Olivia as bored, spoiled and flirty—enough like Helena Bonham Carter to make me think she’d rented the video, too. In our first scene, where Feste says, “The lady bade take away the fool; therefore, I say again, take her away,” and Olivia says, “Sir, I bade them take away you,” she poked my nose, and Kenny yelled out, “No, no, no—you’re still pissed at him. Again, please?” She looked at me and mouthed, You see? But then she did it over, with just the right pout.
Back at the house, Kenny brought gin, tonic, limes and a sweating ice bucket out to the screened porch. “A word in your ear?” he said. “I have to live in this town. Not that she’s not a lovely girl, but surely you can find other amusements.” He dropped a wedge of lime on top of the ice cubes in my glass. “Her parents are good friends.”
“I should certainly hope so.”
“Please,” he said, “leave the badinage to those of us who know how to do it.” He picked up the gin. “I would warn you that she drugs a bit, but I know that wouldn’t discourage you.”
“You’re thinking of me back in my glory days.” He began pouring. “Whoa, easy—when. Exactly what did you tell this young lady about me?”
“Only that you had an eye for the young ladies. And that she might consider resisting your autumnal charms.” He topped off my glass with tonic. “Just between you and me and the wall, there’s been a little trouble in that quarter.”
“Then she needs to rein in her…What’s the opposite of autumnal? Vernal?”
“Oh, you’re good. She is very gifted.”
“So what’s this trouble?”
“Well, since you insist on dragging it out of me. One of her professors—I believe he lost his job over it. And her father got all involved. Not a chappie I’d want to cross. In fact, I think he ended up here because of some—well, there I go. He’s a friend, what can I say?”
“Just so we’re clear,” I said, “are you forbidding this or promoting it? Sounds like you’ve gone out of your way to plant the seed. On both sides.”
“Am I that much of a devil?” He began putting ice in his glass. “Not that I mind watching a good train wreck now and again. Just not here.” He poured gin, no tonic, and clinked his glass against mine. “Pretty please?”
—
The next day, I turned down Julia’s invitation to go swimming after rehearsal, at some locally legendary swimming hole, but that night most of the cast ended up at the bar in the town’s Mexican restaurant, owned by the guy Kenny chose to play Sir Toby, who’d had some stage experience, God help us, in a road-company Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. On Fridays he provided the entertainment, with mic, stool and plug-in acoustic guitar, singing what he called “sixties and seventies”—blessedly, this was a Wednesday. I saw our Sir Andrew, a slender college boy with black-framed glasses, sitting at the end of the bar and beset by Julia, who was touching his upper arm with her fingertips, then her palm, then running the back of her hand down his cheek, then twirling his long hair around her index finger. She saw me watching and gave me her Olivia pout. I took a seat at a table, between Barbara Antonelli and the Viola woman—I’ve lost her name again—with her supposedly look-alike brother. Louise.
Barbara looked over at the bar. “I’d fight you for her,” she said, “but she’ll be forty before she knows she’s gay. By which time I’ll be dead.” I looked to see if Louise had heard, but she was talking with the brother. “How did he drag you up here?”
“I wasn’t doing much else,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Don’t waste it on me,” she said. “He put me up in this dreadful bed-and-breakfast. Who are these people? Could you get me another one? No salt this time. Will we even get through this?”
“One way or another.” I looked around for a waitress.
“Aren’t you the trouper. Oh, well. A year from now, we’ll all be even older. How are you doing? You don’t look that much the worse for wear.”
“All on the inside,” I said.
“And do you hear from that lovely ex-wife of yours?”
“Good Christ,” I said. “Why don’t you just reach over and slap me like a human being?”
Louise turned away from talking with her brother. “How do you think I’m doing so far?” she said to Barbara. “Honestly. I’m afraid I’m in over my head.”
“Shakespeare,” she said. “We’re all in over our heads, dear.”
“Not you,” Louise said. “Or you.”
The waitress was standing over us. “You’re going to be fine,” I said. “Another one of these? No salt? And I’ll have a Bud. What can I get you guys?”
“We’re good,” Louise said. “Have you met Billy?”
“Not officially,” Billy said. “You were great this afternoon.”
“We’ll see when I start having to remember my lines,” I said.
“And what is it that you do in real life?” Barbara said to him.
“I was managing a Curves, in St. Johnsbury. We had to close a couple months ago.”
“Curves. Now, is that a bar?”
“No, you know—Curves. It’s like a women’s fitness?”
“Oh. Of course. We have those. I was thinking it was one of those gentlemen’s clubs.” She turned to me. “When we get back to civilization, let’s you and me make an expedition to this place in Midtown—aspiring actresses out the wazoo.” She looked over at the bar again; Julia and her young man were gone.
The waitress set down my Bud and Barbara’s margarita. “Can I get you folks anything to eat? Marty told me half price on everything.”
“Isn’t he a dear,” Barbara said. “Can we drink now, think later?”
“Perfect. Kitchen doesn’t close till ten.”
“And on a weekday night,” Barbara said. “I think we should all move up here.”
“It’s really not such a bad place,” Louise said. “The winters can be a challenge. But I spent a winter in New York once, and that was a challenge.”
“Did you,” Barbara said. “Well, then, you know. What about we all settle in Vermont and help Kenny revive the drama.”
“Did I hear my name?” Kenny sat down next to me. “They treating you right here?”
“Half price, can you imagine?” Barbara said. “Anything on the whole menu, from what I could gather. They didn’t say about the drinks, though.”
“Mother of Mercy,” he said. “Okay, I’ll take care of this.”
“Kenny’s a big man in this town,” I said.
“I was. You degenerates are ruining my good name.” He leaned closer to me and said, “Playing a little rough, aren’t we?” He stood up. �
�Let me see if I can awaken our host’s bounty.”
We dropped Barbara at Blue Jay Way, a Victorian house painted San Francisco style, with a wooden sign out front that showed an officious-looking bird chirping on a twig. I got into the front seat, and Kenny said, “I expect Barbara to be snotty. Believe me, I know how pathetic this must seem to you.”
“Come on, you know what my life is,” I said. “And everybody here seems to like you.”
“Well, yes, of course, hello, this is the new NPR Vermont—it’s now a hate crime not to have David Sedaris on your iPod.” There were no other cars out, but he put on his blinker to turn onto the street that led toward his house; only then did I spot a police cruiser with its lights off parked next to the drive-in bank. “Those fuckers,” he said. “Pull you over for not having your hands at ten and two. When Rick and I started coming up here, somebody left a dead dog in the mailbox, little miniature poodle or something. Dressed it up in a baby’s pink T-shirt. I’ll never get over it. You know what they said? ‘Call animal control.’ And then Rick would piss and moan because I kept a shotgun under the bed.”
“Jesus. Well, so things are better, no?”
“Any sane person would think so. Even I think so. But I have to tell you, back then they really got who you were. Like: a man who did dirty things to men. So now I’m our oh-so-charming gay theater guy. I mean, who wrote this shit? Why am I doing fucking Shakespeare? Why am I not doing Genet?”
“Because Genet’s terrible?” I said.
“Well, if you’re going to be rational about it.” He put on his blinker again and took the road that went past a pine-smelling sawmill, lit by a couple of bluish floodlights, then up a steep grade along a rocky stream. “I don’t know, I just want to have my nice house on the hill, put on a nice little show for the nice people. This is what it’s gotten down to.”
