The funeral music was not helping my mood. Jim Ferguson, our sexually aggressive Oberon and a zoology major, pointed out, “That’s a female mallard. She’s injured. Look at her — she’s all crooked.”
It was true. The duck listed in the water. Jim explained, “Ducks are vicious when they’re hurt. They host human influenza and other dangerous viruses.”
“Duck?” asked Martin Epps, waving his cane, straying precariously near the water’s edge.
I told him, “Don’t worry about the duck, okay?” To the cast in general, I said, “I’ll need a couple of volunteers to lower Martin into the water when the time comes.”
“Water?” said Martin, splashing with his cane, poking to find the hole’s bottom.
The duck paddled weakly. All around me, kids in little groups stared down at it and smoked in that self-consciously erotic way — the dramatic puffs and the stagy, side-of-the-mouth exhalations blown upward into the air like steam escaping so many hot engines — that seems to be an advertisement for the carefree life. I couldn’t take it. “Do you kids think you’re going to live forever?” I shouted at these innocents. “Do you think life is some kind of holiday? You think that one day you’ll stop being depressed! You won’t ever stop being depressed! No matter how much sex you have!”
As if on cue, bells rang out from the chapel spire. Big wooden doors were flung open, and the first few mourners emerged from the church.
“Places!” cried Danielle.
Faeries tossed away cigarette butts and Royals crouched behind bushes while Mechanicals popped open their first-act beers. Billy Valentine passed Mary Victoria Frost an enormous joint. Martin Epps alone remained before his watery lair. “Billy, Mary, give me a hand with Martin,” I said. “One, two, three.” Up went the blind boy. He was light for a fat kid. He entered the water and said, “Ahhh.”
“Stay put and don’t piss off the duck,” I directed him.
Billy and Mary and I crawled beneath the stage-left shrubs. Billy was about to stash the joint when I stopped him. “Hey, don’t put that away. I need a hit.” Fireflies blinked on, off, on. The audience settled into seats. Sounds of weeping rose from the house. I peeked up and could see, above me, faeries’ legs dangling from platforms in trees, pair after pair of young legs.
“Good dope,” I whispered to Billy.
Then Danielle gave the signal, and Greg Lippincott walked onstage and exclaimed, “Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour draws on apace; four happy days bring in another moon.” Who can listen to that kind of stuff? A moment later came the cue for the young lovers to stumble out and stand before their elders. There was not much ground to stand on, only slippery grass beside the hole, where Martin was sunk in black water to his chin. The crooked duck regarded Martin with crazed eyes. “Full of vexation come I, with complaint against my child, my daughter Hermia,” growled Egeus, as faculty, alumni, and a few undergraduates and parents wept tears for Harrison Mackay. Understandably, I felt the need to get a laugh. “The course of true love never did run smooth,” I proclaimed morosely, and at that instant the duck began flapping its maimed wings, and Martin waved his cane wildly, and a gust of wind blew in like a sneeze from God, shaking the trees and blowing hats off heads in the audience. I looked for Carol among the mourners. Where was she? Did she truly love me enough to have a child with me?
“It’s going pretty well, don’t you think?” I asked Billy when we came offstage at the middle of act one. We listened respectfully as Helena rattled off her famous speech about being sexually unattractive; and then Bottom and his men took over, rushing out and tackling one another and flubbing their lines — but it didn’t matter what they did, because these characters are probably the most indestructible comic team in all of English literature, and, sure enough, when Bottom crunched Lion in the windpipe with his weight belt the audience let out its first decent belly laugh of the night. Billy and I hid behind the backstage trees and waited to run out, lie down to sleep on the cold ground, get drugged by Puck, wake up with our hard-ons, and begin chasing each other and/or Mary Victoria Frost and/or Sheila Tannenbaum through the haunted woods. Billy whispered, “Can I talk to you, Reg?”
“Call me Lysander during the show.”
“I didn’t want you to think, after the other day, you know, that I don’t love my father.”
He seemed maudlin, not at all like a happy comedian eager to chew the scenery. “I didn’t think that. I’m sure you love your father very much,” I assured him.
Saying this made me sad. Billy told me, “My father is not a bad man, no matter what people say.”
Night was falling; the air had grown cold. Puck on his stomach crawled up the bank of his pond, then splashed back down into the water. Faeries on platforms jumped up and down noisily. Mary and Sheila, one tree over from me and Billy, adjusted costumes and each other’s hair. Up Puck came again, covered in mud. His glasses had slipped from his head, and now his sightless eyes stared wildly; he could not have realized how afraid he looked. “I’ll put a girdle. Round about. Earth—” he sputtered as, suddenly, the duck attacked. Martin howled and grasped at the mud and the grass, reaching for a handhold on dry land. It was too late. The duck blasted off the pond and came down hard in a spray of foam on Martin’s pudgy, naked back. Webbed feet slapped the boy’s white skin as the duck gave the coup de grâce with a thrust of her bill into Martin’s neck.
“Thanks for talking, Lysander,” Billy exclaimed. He bolted from behind our oak tree. Sheila Tannenbaum leaped out of hiding and ran after him. “I love thee not, therefore pursue me not,” the boy yelled at the girl.
What is more exciting than kinetic, technical theater, the impeccable orchestrations of pratfall farce? I say this in consideration of the fact that audience members were leaving their seats and sneaking close, the better to gawk at Puck in his hole. As is always the case during productions of the Bard, a few carried paperback copies of the script. Sticklers. I watched them thumb pages back and forth, no doubt searching for references to a vengeful mallard. I have no objection to the public encroaching on the players — during Shakespeare’s time, spectators sat on the stage and became, to a limited degree, implicated in the theater experience — but in this instance a participatory audience was a safety hazard. Billy, Mary, Sheila, and I had to dodge and weave throughout the better part of acts two and three. Darting barefoot and more or less naked around people wearing formal clothes had, as an activity, a distinctly anarchic, rebellious aspect — rebellious in the sense that it created, for me at least, the kind of sweaty excitement that comes with dangerous play. I felt free and young. I should say that I felt myself backsliding to a younger state of mind. It’s hard to say what this feeling consisted in — panic and hope, disappointment, shame. I was wearing torn Barry Bears gym shorts and feeling like a teenager and running fast, and my feet sank into the earth, and mud splashed my legs. What is more awful and disorienting than adolescence? How had I become so lost and alone? What had persuaded me that I could play a young man’s part? Was Billy pursuing me? Was I pursuing Billy? The bereaved came forward into the fray with heads bowed, and I stumbled through a puddle and narrowly missed crashing into President Farnham. “Reginald! This is criminal! Criminal!” the man shouted after me. Then: “Up and down, up and down, I will lead them up and down; I am fear’d in field and town: Goblin, lead them up and down,” Martin Epps sang out magnificently, beautifully, before, at long last, he slid through ooze and disappeared, cane and all, beneath the water.