The Rebirth of Wonder

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  The Rebirth of Wonder

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  The Rebirth of Wonder

  by

  Lawrence Watt-Evans

  Copyright Lawrence Watt Evans 1992

  Smashwords Edition 2012

  All rights reserved

  Cover art by Ruth Evans

  In memory of Jack Wells

  Chapter One

  Cue 84: Grandmaster slow fade, count of ten, to black. Count five, and wait for the curtains to close completely; then bring up the curtain-warmer on Dimmer #3 for curtain calls.

  No problem. Art Dunham took a final glance at the cue sheet clipped to the cord of his work light, just to be sure he wasn't missing anything. Reassured, he turned his attention back to the stage, keeping his right hand closed firmly on the black knob of the largest lever.

  Jamie was alone on the stage, giving the closing speech, and he'd gotten himself off-center, off his mark, so the pink light was all on the near side, and his other side was washed in blue. That was something to mention, last performance or not; Jamie meant well, and he could act, but he was so damn sloppy about the details sometimes!

  “...If we be friends...”

  That was the cue. Still watching the stage, Art gripped the big lever more tightly and began pulling it down, slowly and steadily. It took some muscle; the controls were old and stiff, and there were half a dozen dimmers mastered on – not with electronics, like some modern boards, but with old-fashioned mechanical linkages.

  “...and Robin,” Jamie said with an appropriate bow and flourish, “shall restore amends.”

  That was the last line; Art continued the fade. Either his count was off tonight or Jamie, eager to be done with the show, had rushed his delivery; there was an awkward half-second before the lights were completely down when Jamie was standing alone on the stage, silent and motionless. That hadn't happened in any of the previous performances or rehearsals.

  Please, Art thought, don't move, Jamie. Don't look over here to see what's taking so long. Don't run offstage. It would ruin the effect.

  Then the lights were out, and as he reached up with his left hand for the #3 dimmer he heard Jamie scampering off the far side of the stage.

  The curtains were closing, which was good; Marilyn was slow getting started, sometimes. She wasn't really big and strong enough to be working the ropes alone, but the actors had never settled on who should help her when, so Marilyn had to make do. Typical of actors, Art thought.

  Applause was welling up from the audience, the first tentative patter turning into a spilling roar, like a summer thunderstorm breaking.

  The curtain was completely closed, so far as Art could see from his place at the board, and he'd counted his five; he unceremoniously shoved the #3 dimmer to the top. With rustles and whispers and uneven footsteps the players slipped through the curtains at stage right and walked out to take their bows.

  For perhaps the hundredth time, Art wished that the theater had proper footlights and overhead strips. The curtain-warmer he'd rigged, despite his best efforts, still left shadows where no shadows should be. He couldn't see them from backstage, of course, but he knew they were there. With the curtains closed and no strip lighting out front, just a couple of Fresnels, there wasn't a thing he could do about it – but he still resented it. It was his job not just to do the best he could with what was available, but to do the lighting right.

  He promised himself, as he had a dozen times before, that somehow, somewhere, he would scrounge up the materials and build himself some new strips, first chance he had.

  Which might be fairly soon, he thought with a rather grim satisfaction – this was the last show of the summer, and it was only the second of August.

  The applause faded away, and the actors came running off the stage, smiling broadly. Art could hear the more impatient members of the audience getting up to go, their voices and the rustle of their clothing increasingly audible over the diminished clapping.

  The actors, too, were talking as he pulled the #3 dimmer back down on a count of five. As it passed the halfway mark in its slot he reached up above the lighting board to the dimmer knob at the end of the bank of switches on the wall, and turned it, bringing up the houselights. He heard Anne and Susan giggling, and Jamie babbling happily about something.

  When he had the houselights all the way up he slid his hand over an inch or two and flicked the ordinary toggle switch that turned on the backstage work lights, then reached up and tugged the chain that turned off his own little work light.

  He left the stage unlit, though of course the backstage lights kept it merely dim instead of dark; any brighter light there might show through the curtain.

  Besides, the onstage work lights had been gelled over as rudimentary strips, as usual, and they were patched through a dimmer at the moment, which was another reason to leave them off. It was time to shut down the board.

  Somebody on the other side of the stage was opening a bottle of champagne; Art wished that whoever it was had waited until the last of the audience was out of the theater. That was sloppy showmanship; the popping cork must have been audible clear out to the lobby. That violated what Art considered a basic theatrical principle: that the audience out there should never be reminded that there is a backstage.

  The pop was followed by laughter and high-pitched voices – released tension at work, now that the show was over, not just for tonight, but for good.

  “Hey, Art!” someone called. “Come and get it!”

  “Just a minute,” Art answered. “I've got to reset the board!”

  “You can do that later!”

  “I'll do it now,” Art replied. “I don't want to forget.”

  He wasn't likely to forget, really; he just hated leaving anything hanging.

  He began systematically turning the knobs that uncoupled the individual dimmers from the masters, and the masters from the grandmaster, checking to be sure that each lever was pushed all the way down to zero. When he had checked everything to his satisfaction he reached up and ripped the cue sheets from the clamp that held them, then dropped them neatly into the wastebasket beside the lighting board.

  Then he reached over and threw the master switch, cutting all power to and from the main board.

  After a final glance around the curtain, out at the empty house, he crossed the stage toward the clustered actors and crew.

  As he drew near someone patted him on the back; when he turned around to see who it was a plastic cup of champagne was thrust into his hand. He caught it awkwardly, slopping a little onto his fingers.

  “It went just fine tonight, didn't it?” someone asked.

  “Pretty well, I guess,” Art answered absentmindedly. He caught sight of Jamie, still in costume but with his makeup smeared and half gone, and called, “You were off-center for your final speech, kid, halfway out of the light!”

  “I was?” Jamie laughed. “Oh, well, maybe next year I'll get it right!”

  “What about next month?” an unidentified female voice asked. “Has anyone heard anything?”

  “No one's booked the theater,” Art answered. “No one's even
asked Dad about it, so far as I know.”

  “I didn't want to do a second show this year anyway,” Jamie said. “I'm going out to California for a couple of weeks.”

  “Yeah, that's fine for you,” Susan said. She had removed most of her costume and was wearing only a black leotard, without any of Titania's fairy splendor. “Some of us aren't going anywhere.”

  “I'd love to do another show, if anyone's planning one,” someone said.

  “So would I.”

  There was a general chorus of agreement, followed by a few dissenting voices.

  “I guess,” Art said, “that if anyone were planning one, he'd have no trouble finding a cast.”

  “And no trouble getting a tech crew, either – you come with the theater, don't you, Art?” It was Marilyn's voice; Art looked for her, and spotted her off to one side, near the ropes.

  “When I get paid, I do,” Art agreed. “Not that I'm an entire crew.”

  “Oh, don't talk about money!” Susan protested.

  “Why not? Just because you don't have any?” Jamie joked back.

  “That's one good reason,” Marilyn said.

  “Well, hey, Marilyn, you could probably talk your way into a share of the profits if you wanted to get paid to work here,” someone answered.

  “What profits?” half a dozen voices asked simultaneously.

  Anne's voice overrode the laughter, demanding, “Has anyone counted tonight's take yet?”

  George's voice called from the men's dressing room, “I'm counting it now!”

  “If there's any left, I vote we give it to Marilyn,” someone said.

  “No, it's gonna pay for the cast party!”

  “I mean if there's any left after the party.”

  “There never is!”

  “We'll make sure of that!”

  More laughter ensued, continuing until George appeared in the dressing room door, cashbox in hand.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” he shouted above the hubbub. “I have an announcement!”

  The cheerful babble faded momentarily into relative quiet.

  “Our proceeds tonight have exceeded my expectations, and we will not have to take up a collection! In fact, after setting aside the balance of what we owe Art and his father, and covering all other necessary expenses, I find we have a surplus totaling seventeen dollars and fifty cents with which we are free to party!”

  The babbling surged anew, and someone proposed a toast.

  “To George,” he called, “our director and producer, who kept the lot of us safely off the streets for the past six weeks!”

  “To George!”

  Two dozen plastic glasses were raised in salute, and cheap champagne was drunk or spilled. Art sipped his carefully, avoiding outthrust elbows, listening to the shouted comments.

  “Hey, if we didn't have to pay Art, we'd have lots of money left!”

  “Yeah, but we wouldn't have a theater or anyone to run lights.”

  “But maybe we could hire a new director.”

  “Ha!” Art said. “You'll never find a director who works as cheap as I do!”

  “You love it, Art, and you know it.”

  “You don't care about the money!”

  “Yes, I love it,” Art agreed, “but yes, I care about the money, too!”

  “George, do you really have to go?” Marilyn asked.

  “Yes, I really do,” George replied. “You know I do. My folks have been planning this for years.”

  “Yeah, poor George! He has to go to Europe while all the rest of us get to sit around and do nothing for a month!”

  “I don't see why someone else can't direct,” said a peevish voice.

  “D'you want to try it?”

  “What about producer?”

  “Oh, that's easy!”

  “Producer is nothing. We've got the theater right here, and it hardly takes any money...”

  “That's what you think!”

  “If anyone wants to volunteer to direct and produce another show this summer,” Art said, “it's fine with me.”

  “More money, huh, Art?”

  “I thought you said you wanted a vacation, Art!”

  “And it looks like I'm going to get one,” he retorted. “I don't hear anyone volunteering!”

  There was no answer to that. The conversation broke up gradually into several smaller conversations, none of which included Art. Two of the women were badgering George, one on either side of him, asking him to take them along to Paris. Anne and Susan and Jamie were in a corner together, laughing at each other's jokes. The other actors, and the guests they had let in, gathered in clumps of three or four, talking and laughing, while Art found a gap between ropes where he could lean back against the wall and sip his champagne.

  It was very cheap champagne, that was obvious, but what else, he asked himself, could he expect from a bunch of amateurs like this? Half the cast wasn't even out of high school yet; the girls who had played Titania's attendants might still be in junior high. This might be the first champagne some of them had ever tasted – it could give them entirely the wrong idea of what the stuff was supposed to taste like.

  But it was no business of his; he was part of the theater, not part of the company. It was entirely possible that he would never see any of these people again after the party broke up – and that might happen despite several sincere promises of help in striking the set and cleaning up the entire building. Somehow, such promises tended to be forgotten once the final performance was over.

  For the past three years George had always made a point of helping, and he had always dragged along whomever else he could find – but he wouldn't be around this time. His flight left Sunday morning, a detail that had canceled the final matinee that had originally been planned – even if they could have managed without a director, George also played the Duke of Athens, and they'd run out of male understudies.

  The early departure meant George would be unable to stay late at the cast party. The women who had been trying to get into his bed – there was always at least one, every show, attracted either by the director's aura of power, or simply by George's natural charm – would be disappointed.

  If he had been in George's position, Art thought, he wouldn't have been so reluctant a conquest. He wasn't the director, though; he was just the lighting director, a fixture of no particular interest.

  “Hello, Art,” someone said.

  He turned, and found Marilyn peering at him around a cluster of ropes.

  “Hi,” he replied.

  “How's the champagne?”

  “Awful.”

  “I know.” She stared at him for a moment; he let his gaze wander out past her to the mob of teenaged actors and actresses, and the friends and family members who had drifted backstage to join them. They looked younger every year – not because they were younger, but because they stayed the same, on average, while he grew older.

  The individual actors changed, and went off to other places or found other interests, but there were always new ones, always the same – and he was always here, helping out, and growing older, the gap between himself and the actors steadily widening.

  “There really won't be another show this summer?” Marilyn asked. “The theater will just be empty?”

  He could hear her dismay. He shrugged and sipped his champagne.

  “I don't know,” he said. “Something might turn up. No one's talked to my father, though.”

  “Why don't you talk to him?”

  Startled, Art stared at her. “About what?”

  “About renting the theater, of course!”

  Puzzled, he looked closely at her, noticing that she had a black smear of something on one cheek. “About who renting the theater?” he asked. “Nobody wants it for the rest of August. I suppose we'll have all the usual meetings and concerts come fall, but nobody's asked for it for August. Not even hinted.”

  “Couldn't you rent it?”

  Art studied her, baffled. “I could get it free,
if no paying customers show up,” he said. “I mean, my dad knows I have to come in here to clean and check the place over whether it's rented or not, so why not? But what would I do with it?”

  “You could put on another play,” Marilyn insisted. “You'd have no trouble finding a cast, you said so yourself, and I'd be glad to stage-manage and do sets and crew again.”

  “Oh, right,” Art said. “Who's going to direct? George is going to Europe, Jack Gunderson is in Oregon, Fred Sohl is working for IBM somewhere, and Jenny Dawson's got kids to take care of. Who else in Bampton knows anything about directing?”

  “You could do it. Or we could do it together.”

  Art shook his head. “I don't know anything about directing, and I don't want to.”

  Hesitantly, Marilyn ventured, “Then I could direct, maybe.”

  “If you want to try doing it yourself, go ahead; I'm sure my father will be easy to persuade. He hates to have property standing empty. Don't expect anything from me, though, beyond what I always do – I'll hang and run your lights, and I'll handle building maintenance, and that's it. That's my job.”

  “You won't help me direct?”

  “Nope. Get someone else.” He waved his almost-empty cup at the crowd of half- costumed, smiling people.

  “They're just kids,” she said.

  “So?”

  “You've been here for years, Art. You probably know more about putting on a play than anyone else here, even George.”

  “I just run lights,” Art insisted.

  “But you've been here for every show I remember! You've watched how everything is done, you must want to try something besides lighting!”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Not really. I've been here running lights for the last ten years because it's something to do in the summer, a way to pick up a few bucks and help out my dad, but that's about it. I never wanted to act or direct any more than most of those kids wanted to run lights. I've stayed on here because my father doesn't trust anyone else not to burn the place down, that's all.”

  “But then what will you do all summer?” she asked, her tone almost desperate.