Alec opened the door onto the main floor, his eyes going directly to the sheet of paper. Raul cleared his throat. They both looked up and down the hallway, slowly strolling over to the bulletin board. The parts were listed in order of importance. The sheet read: 1. Paul — Alec Shaw; 2. The Peasant — Raul Sabas; 3. Grigory — Al Hinton; and so on.
They stared at the mimeographed sheet for a while, vague smiles crossing their faces. Then, abruptly, they turned on their heels, facing each other, extended their hands, shook hands, said together: “Congratulations.”
“It was no more than we deserved,” Raul said.
“No. No more than we deserved. We shouldn’t lose control like that again.”
Raul looked at the clock. “I have a class.”
“I’ll see you in the theater after school.”
“Do we have rehearsals today?”
“They begin immediately.”
Seeing a group of hopefuls approaching, they left hastily, to avoid giving the impression they were gloating. Raul, since he had to go up four flights of stairs to reach his class, couldn’t avoid being overtaken. John Henderson, as embarrassed as Raul, mumbled his congratulations.
“You’re not happy about your part, are you?”
“No,” Henderson said, without hiding his bitterness.
“What part did you want?”
“The Peasant,” he said, smiling strangely.
Raul laughed. “Oh my God, we’re on dangerous ground.”
“Well, that’s show biz,” John said, hurrying up the stairs.
Raul listened to Henderson’s steps echoing. To no one, he said, “It certainly is. You bet your goddamn asshole.” He started up the stairs, thought briefly, and then said, “That lacked poetry.”
Raul and Alec were exhilarated all day, and what puzzled them most they resolved quickly. When they asked Mr. Miller why he had given them such small parts to read, he looked surprised and said, “I just worked with the two of you in the fall production. I knew your capabilities, there was no reason to test you.”
From this point on, both Raul’s and Alec’s manner became cocky and businesslike toward the other actors. One asked either Raul or Alec what was being rehearsed that day, whether one was playing one’s part well, or what was going on in Miller’s mind. Indeed, once Alec and Raul had achieved their positions of distinction, and with Miller as Raul’s faculty adviser, they were completely in his confidence.
Miller felt fatherly toward Raul. He had ambitions for the boy. He would retire in three years, and he cherished the idea of turning out an actor who would make his mark. He had abandoned his rule that only seniors or juniors could get leads to keep Raul in the school. And he hoped by making an example of his life he could make Raul face facts and compromise with reality.
Raul went to school, beginning with the day casting was posted, faithfully. But in the afternoon, from one to three- thirty, when he was supposed to be in gym, he went, instead, to the theater. Miller knew this but said nothing, using the time to indoctrinate him. The two chatted as if they were friends; Miller’s informality was pleasing — and if Raul had no respect for him as a director or as an adviser, he respected him for this. In a few weeks they were on a first-name basis. It was not rare to ask Raul a question about Paul I and be told, “I don’t know. Ask Fred.” And he would laugh uproariously at his pretentious informality.
Alec was more often than not in on these talks, and before long they became aware of Miller’s dissatisfaction with both the playwright and his play.
Miller had asked Goldby to alter a few things in the script. In all cases, he had refused even to rewrite slightly. Goldby’s insistence on a pageant became an insurmountable difficulty. Miller was not a forceful man, but Goldby’s youthful arrogance caused him to write an ominous letter, and Goldby, for a time, seemed to be giving in. He wrote Miller he would try to rewrite one of the scenes. A week later he wrote again, “I cannot alter the play in any way. Each scene complements the other — it is a delicate balance. Should I change this scene or the other, it would throw the whole thing out of whack. I simply cannot do it.”
Miller hesitated. He spoke to both Raul and Alec about it, and they were for throwing the play out altogether. Miller hadn’t expected this from the two leads. When they went on to discuss the whole cast’s apathy toward the play, he was almost decided. A day or two later he pointed out to Raul and Alec that he needed another play: one that could hold a cast of more than thirty and that had leads suitable for Raul, Alec, and Hinton.
Neither Alec nor Raul hesitated. They named Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. “That doesn’t have a cast of more than thirty people,” Miller said.
“The first productions didn’t,” Alec said. “But do you remember the New York production?”
Raul took out a copy of the play — either one or the other of them always carried one; it had become a Bible to them. He turned to the pages listing the cast of the New York production and gave it to Alec. Alec counted the number of people and said, “Thirty, not counting the musicians.”
Miller was dismayed. He hadn’t expected, or wished, for a feasible alternative.
Raul said, “Alec and I would take either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, Hinton would be the Player.”
Alec laughed. “Thank you for casting the play, Raul.”
Raul hurried to explain. “No, I mean, he just said that he didn’t know, that he needed…”
Alec laughed again. “It’s okay, Raul, you can calm down.”
Miller came out of his reverie. “I would probably cast Raul as Rosencrantz, and you as Guildenstern. Hinton could be the Player.” He paused. “It’s a good idea, I may do it.”
That night Miller wrote to Goldby, “The difficulties being so great, I have decided, at least for this term, not to do Paul I.”
Miller’s decision threw the theater into panic. With a month of rehearsal time lost already, Miller seized upon it and worked to increase it. Within a week Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had progressed, proportionately, to where Paul I was after a month.
He had an advantage in doing this play — Raul and Alec had most, if not all, of their lines already memorized and mildly interpreted. There were disadvantages in that, however — the rest of the cast was behind them; and Raul and Alec had a habit of reinterpreting parts over and over, which added to the chaos.
Miller found unusual problems working with the three leads. It was impossible to block moves for Raul. He refused to stay in the same place, and Miller didn’t realize that he looked so natural on the stage because of it. Alec followed blocking perfectly, but he blocked his own moves. He also had a tendency to be stylized, and Miller’s solution for this was to block more moves for him. With Hinton there was the old difficulty of his Harlem accent.
Miller would remind him that Othello was coming up next year, and the cast would regularly pronounce “I,” for his benefit. Hinton tried, he tried hard, producing, eventually, a dead middle ground. Raul smoldered inwardly with political objections. When Alec once complained of Hinton’s inability to be Shakespearian, Raul, with all the force of a dormant volcano erupting, said, “What crap! What bullshit! You’re not only trying to make a white man out of him, you don’t realize that, theatrically, Al’s accent is beautiful on stage, however incongruous.”
After Raul had calmed Alec out of his resentment at being so viciously attacked, Alec realized something about Al Hinton that he had never realized before.