“I am not,” Raul said, “averse to masturbation.”
They entered the backstage of the theater. Davis passed by in a rage, yelling, “That idiot Bobby ruined my costume.”
“As others,” Raul said, rounding on Alec, “are not averse to emotional masturbation.”
Judy, who played Ophelia, came into their range of vision. She glared at Alec. Alec began to move toward her, saying absently to Raul, “Don’t run the thought into the ground.”
“Go to your whore, see if I care,” Raul said.
“What’s Alec doing?” John Henderson asked Raul with a wink.
“Guildenstern aspires to the bed of nobility.”
John didn’t seem to quite understand.
Raul looked at him. “It’s a round-trip ticket he’s cashing in.”
The cast was peeking through the curtain to catch a glimpse of the audience, although they had been warned it was unprofessional and undignified behavior. “Ah,” Raul said to no one, “look at the rabble beg.” He paused, then peeked himself, turning quickly on his heels. “Oh, my God. I shouldn’t have done that. I saw my parents.”
He walked rapidly, to work off his tension, to one of the wings. The clock there read eight twenty-five. Raul slumped into a chair. “Five minutes,” he gasped. Four or five people wished him luck. He saw Alec and walked rapidly toward him. Alec was as pale as Raul. The stage was cleared of people, the audience hushed as the lights dimmed. Raul and Alec clasped hands. For a moment the two black figures were ghosts — solitary and foreboding — to be called to life by the lights of the stage.
The level of mental tension that an actor on stage must maintain is phenomenal. Raul, in addition to the normal rigors, to move gracefully with his ungainly body was drugged heavily by fullness of mind. What to an audience are natural moves and speech, to an actor are ghostly echoes, fixed moments viewed peripherally, reverberating among the lights of the bare stage.
Speech, which you know is arranged in a text, becomes a natural extension of this self you have gained by denying your own. It is a time without memory or place for an actor; a birth, or death, a moment of the eternal graced by some omnipotent hand.
This fluid quality, the simple transition of personalities, gives an actor a superhuman energy and power. Raul knew that if at any time during the play this energy, this personal world dissipated, if a line was delivered badly, the momentum would be lost. Only twice did that happen, both times due to other members of the cast. Their clumsiness, their lack of a world, depressed Raul’s and Alec’s.
The poetry of their movements was outlined clearly against the harsh lighting and bare stage. The invisible tide that carried them, the rhythm of their moods, flowed impossibly on. The performance had an unbearable vitality for Raul. The contact with the audience was, at times, so thorough as to move him, emotionally, more than he had ever been.
Alec and he were on the high surge of this tide. They sculptured the tension of the play to greater and greater points of tolerance, until it seemed miraculous that it had not climaxed. And gleefully, marvelously playing the trick on the audience, it did not climax, but vanished. Like the withdrawing tide.
The curtain fell. Alec and Raul embraced, laughing, running to separate wings for the curtain call. They laughed and smiled to each other as the cast went out, individually, for their reward. As more and more of the principles went out, the applause rose higher, sometimes lower, slightly, for a specific actor. Alec and Raul grinned maliciously at this. Al Hinton walked out, the applause plateauing on the level for Davis. And Raul began to move, oceans with him. As he stepped out onto the stage, the audience broke out louder. It was as if hundreds were calling his name, and he felt complete.
Alec walked out, the audience maintaining, incredibly, its hysteria. He and Raul clasped hands mid-stage, stepping out of the line for their individual bows. The curtain came down, both of them cackling and stopping abruptly as it went up again. Down, and up again, until finally it ended.
With the curtain down, the stage lights were on full. Raul and Alec swung about, leaping into each other’s arms, shaking hands, laughing, screaming with joy. The cast milled about, Alec standing as if in a trance, Raul running about the stage, trying to rid himself of the unbearable energy and joy that possessed him.
In minutes people were coming backstage and soon it was crowded. Miller came over to Raul and Alec, putting a hand behind Raul’s head, giving it a good shake, saying it was great. “Even Fred liked it,” Raul yelled.
One after another people came to Raul and Alec, congratulating them. The sense of ego was overpowering. Some said it was better than the Broadway production. “Surely an exaggeration,” Alec said, smiling.
“Not at all,” a man replied. “The production as a whole certainly wasn’t. However, the two of you, I think, were more effective than Broadway.”
“Thank you in any case,” Raul said.
Bowden and Henderson came by, obviously very pleased with Raul. “You see how well it has turned out,” Henderson said.
“Yes,” Raul said, beaming.
“Have patience in the future. Good luck.” He shook Raul’s hand. There was little joy in this. But parents kept coming, countless hands were taken and compliments given.
Raul and Alec stood together regally receiving the line of well-wishers. The students’ admiring eyes were the most satisfactory, but to see adults so respectful was joyous. They laughed within at their modestly gracious thank yous.
As the crowd thinned, they ran to the dressing rooms, taking off their make-up. Because of Raul’s pleading, Miller allowed them to keep their costumes on. “You’ll have to pay for them if you ruin them.”
“Fred,” Raul said, a leg thrust forward arrogantly, “I would no more tear these than I would my soul.”
They were boisterous in the dressing room, arranging with the self-important, obese Black to be driven to the cast party. Raul was pleased that Black, usually so arrogant, became servile with them. He turned away others, saving room for Alec and Raul in his car.
Capes billowing, boots resounding on the pavement, they went out into the black clear night. They lit cigarettes, Raul’s parched, hungering throat mad for the taste. They rolled all the windows down to be in contact with the wild air, yelling at the top of their lungs.
Driving with blind reckless force, they tried to drown their energy in suicidal haste. Arriving at a fashionable East Side apartment house, they strutted in, full-blown from the vital air.
The noise of the party stopped, startled by their presence. They were surrounded, in moments, by people. Sandwiches and drinks paraded before them. Within ten minutes they were up in the emergency staircase smoking grass.
Soon they returned, delivering their obscure epigrammatic lines. Their parts were more than second natures now: they had replaced real life. No joy was insupportable or lasting, no sorrow withstood the degenerating process of dramatic self-pity. Only the exuberance and vitality of performance controlled them. Emotion became a ghost, called to life briefly, intensely, disappearing again to phantasm.
They exhausted themselves as degenerate artists, at once cruel, mocking, and whimsical of human convention. Proudly arrogant, they flaunted their talents before the audience of this world. Nothing could weaken their strength of unity in acting. They slept badly, ate worse, abusing and exploiting their bodies, but this seemed to add to their energy.
This climaxed their relationship, their superb coordination. Their arrogance and power did not arise from charlatanism, but from a firm belief in their own worth. Their lives, for them, were not mere lives, but history.