After that, we sat for a time. The atmosphere became pleasantly uncomfortable. This sensation of a pervasive, shared emotional discomfort may have been helped along by the presence nearby of the foul-smelling oil furnace, hissing and burning, making the air in our little corner feel sickeningly, suffocatingly warm. Finally Billy broke the tension with a homophobic joke. “Reg, will I have to make out with you?”
“In a manner of speaking, Billy. Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena will trade back and forth in a kind of blind, revolving embrace. Erotic possibility, signifying not immorality but immortality, is the real pleasure for unmarried lovers. So we’re going to get it on.”
“Like in my dormitory,” laughed Valentine.
Later, we all stretched out on the floor and began mapping positions. It was clear that the kids were — how shall I put this? — experienced in some ways and inexperienced in others. Sheila Tannenbaum chuckled when touched; there was little that was pretty about this rangy girl, yet she was coy and therefore sexy. Billy Valentine was not sexy. It annoyed me to watch him grope Mary Victoria Frost. He had no moves, and she, as far as I could tell, didn’t care. I signaled everyone to switch partners, and Mary wrapped her legs around me. I read this as permission to cradle her in my lap. She weighed practically nothing. Was she one of those girls who exist on breakfast cereal and amphetamines? I stuck my face in her hair and breathed in her smells of bath oil and nicotine. Oh, my heart. I laid my head on Mary’s shoulder and watched Billy Valentine straddle Sheila. He appeared to be mauling the girl’s throat — what was he doing, administering a “sleeper” hold? — until Sheila made an athletic move with her legs, scissoring Billy and bringing him hard to the floor. Thump. Quickly, I leaned over and tugged Sheila toward me, in this way getting two girls and scoring a sexual victory over a boy young enough to be my son.
Billy Valentine sat to the side with his legs crossed and his head down. I had the feeling, watching him, that I was seeing him in an unguarded moment, and in a posture and attitude that expressed an essential state of his being. I was witnessing, it occurred to me, something like pure sadness; and I would’ve bet money that Billy was the child of divorced, probably alcoholic parents. I cuddled the girls and, in a moment of, I suppose, empathy, told him, “You know, Billy, my mother and father got drunk and argued all the time. The truth is, they were terrible to each other. I thought I’d never get over all that, and I guess maybe I never have.”
For an instant, Billy looked as if he might laugh. But he didn’t laugh. He gazed at me with these big, round eyes that seemed to grow larger and more rounded; and his whole countenance changed, which is to say that, in some way that had more to do with a feeling than an actual look, his expression softened, and he lowered his head.
“Places for act two, scene one!” I called out to Danielle and the cast. “We’re going to run the play from Puck’s line to the faerie, ‘Thou speak’st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night.’ Puck, you’re downstage left, crawling out of your hole.”
“Thou speak’st aright. I am that merry. Wanderer of the night,” intoned my sightless Puck.
“Wait a minute, Martin. Do the line again, this time as if you hate life. Say this line as if you’re alone in the world and you despise yourself.”
“Thou speak’st aright; I am that”—here he paused for an especially long time, as if thinking about a hard problem—“merry wanderer of the night.”
“Listen to me. Puck is not some frolicking clown. He’s Hobgoblin! Beelzebub! Lucifer! Satan, the enemy of love! Puck is a wretched, willfully destructive creature. Let’s do a quick exercise. Repeat after me: I am a wretched, willfully destructive creature.”
“I am a wretched, willfully destructive. Creature.”
“Everything I do creates pain.”
“Everything I. Do creates pain.”
“No one loves me.”
“No. One loves me.”
“I’m fucked up.”
“I’m fucked…”
He was sniffling. His voice cracked. Were there tears? I could not see the young actor’s eyes because they were hidden behind dark lenses. I leaned close to my Puck, in order to growl in his ear, “I wear the number of the beast.”
“Huh?” he whimpered.
I smacked the blind kid on the shoulder. “Let’s run this play, Martin, I mean Puck. When we get to the section where you chase the young lovers through the forest, go ahead and swat our legs with your cane.”
And to the cast, the Royals and rude Mechanicals, the devils and imps and lost children, I proclaimed, “This show needs to move, people. It’s a comedy!”
Or is it? Students of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will undoubtedly be familiar with the trend, in recent years, to emphasize horror in the drama: faeries played as ghouls, Oberon as a molester; Bottom’s transformation depicted as a grotesque, literally asinine mutilation. There is a reactionary aspect to this movement away from traditional fun and games; construing the Dream as a hellish sexual nightmare rather than as an innocuous garden party is a way of making the play interestingly “modern” in the post — world war, post-Holocaust, thermonuclear and psychoanalytic era.
“Make it ugly,” I instructed my cast in the final week before the show. It was a Sunday afternoon, our first — and only, thanks to storms blowing in — outdoor run-through. The day was overcast and unseasonably chilly, with winds from the north smelling like rain. Crows perched on tree branches and the faeries’ wooden platforms, three plywood decks connected by swaying footbridges, everything balanced precariously in the high, heavy oak limbs that reached out to shade Puck’s deep hole, dug “center stage” at the southernmost edge of the Barry College green, our theater.
“Up in the trees, faeries, let’s go,” I called. Girls took turns climbing. A few had trouble getting up. Sarah Goldwasser, the regal Titania, marched over and said, “Reg, will you tell Oberon to stop grabbing my nipples in our fight scene?”
“I think it’s kind of good for the scene, Sarah.”
“He does it too hard. My nipples don’t like it that hard,” she said, and huffed off toward her bower.
“Here comes the rain,” a boy’s voice beside me exclaimed.
“I’d appreciate it if you would concentrate on your acting and not worry about the weather, Billy.”
“How are we supposed to do any acting when the entire stage is nothing but a hole in the ground?”
The boy had a point. And I had an answer. “The circular patterns sketched by our movements around the pit will illustrate mankind’s proximity to the abyss, and this in turn will be a dramaturgical reminder of the themes of revolution and renewal in English morris dancing, which, you’ll recall from the first week of rehearsal, Billy, is an acknowledged folk source for Shakespeare’s May Day comedies.”
I wish I could say I was pleased with this impromptu oration. Purely technical observations concerning the larger implications of stagecraft are best left in the classroom, having, out here in the field, as it were, more of a confusing than a clarifying effect. Billy looked despairing. Clearly I had been right, during that sex-scene rehearsal the week before, in supposing him to be the child of an unhappy home. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, in as fatherly a voice as I could concoct on short notice, “I know it’s a mighty big hole, Billy. We’ll all have to be careful not to fall in and break our legs. Sometimes in the theater, as in life, we do our best work when mainly concerned with not making fools of ourselves.”
“That’s typical for a man to say, isn’t it?” declared a woman’s voice. I became immediately tense. The speaker was Carol, who had snuck up from behind and was standing with her arms crossed before her chest, the posture expressing her confrontational mode, surely an indication that she had been drinking.