“Number 33, you’re up,” came the call.
When they all had first arrived, the Head of Acting swept in, distracted and tilting his face oddly as if he was used to wearing bifocals.
“One of the questions we are going to ask you today,” he said briskly, “is why you want to attend this Institute, and why you want to become an actor. I am telling you this in advance so you can think hard about your answer. Let me say that all I am looking for is a truthful answer to this question. I do not want you to tell me that the theater fills you with a noble and holy passion just because you think that is the answer with which you can win. I want you to tell me the truth.
“Let me explain what I mean,” said the Head of Acting, still looking at them down the length of his long nose. “I auditioned for a place at this Institute nearly forty years ago. When I arrived for my audition and waited in this Green Room like you are all waiting here now, I was not filled with a noble and holy passion for the theater. I only knew that drama school sounded like more fun than university, and I thought it would probably mean less work. I was wrong about the work,” he added, and smiled faintly.
“The real reason I enrolled in any tertiary education at all was that I knew that teenage girls always like university boys better. I had been a scrawny and awkward and unsuccessful teenager and I wanted a second chance. I thought I would enroll in some college, buy a car and try for a girlfriend.
“I am telling you this about myself,” the Head of Acting said in his calm distracted way, “because I don’t want you to stand in front of the panel and lie. I want you to tell the truth, even if the truth is boring or embarrassing or contemptible. I don’t care what you say, as long as it’s you and as long as it’s real.” He swept a look over them all, smiled a tiny smile and said, “Good luck.”
Stanley moved from the Class of ’61 photograph to the Class of ’62 photograph and suddenly saw the Head of Acting. He was young and a little thinner but wore the same unfocused expression, as if he was watching something over the photographer’s shoulder that none of the others could see. They were all dressed in military uniforms, and the Head of Acting was kneeling at the front with a rifle in his lap, his peaked cap pushed back on his head, showing a darkly oiled curl of hair. Stanley leaned in for a closer look, and wondered if this square-jawed soldier ever found a girl.
From the damp-smelling foam-lined pit underneath the trapdoor ran a low reinforced passage left and right, and beyond the orchestra pit was another passage that ran underneath the first rows of the stalls in the audience. These passages invisibly framed the orchestra pit, forming a kind of underground moat that offered two quick and unseen paths between the wings on either side of the stage. The outer passage crawled between the ancient foundations of the auditorium, lit along the floor by a dusty string of fairy lights that sometimes winked on and off if the control box was accidentally knocked. The tunnel was narrow and low, the mortar bleeding thickly from between the cement bricks and brushing rough on either shoulder as you passed, the dry itch candyfloss of under-floor insulation wisping out between the joists. The inner passage was lined with gib-board, and narrower stilclass="underline" if two actors met in the middle they had to perform a quick shuffling rotating embrace, like an animate turnstile revolving in the dark.
The secrets of the auditorium were revealed to the first-years in the second week of the school year. They filed silently through the passages, inspected and tested the trap, hoisted themselves up into the flies, and dropped, awkward and untrusting, both hands clutching at the flying harness and craning nervously to check the winch. They walked across the stippled bridge that connected the fly-floors, looking down at the stage far below and reaching out to touch the thick braided cables that ran back and forth. The flies were at least twice the height of the proscenium arch, and the Head of Acting showed them how an entire panel of scenery could be flown up into the space above the stage to hang there, ready and waiting for the cue to drop. He activated the lift in the orchestra pit and they watched the floor of the pit rise up to meet the level of the stage. He showed them the heavy motorized chain underneath the false stage floor that activated the revolve, and then he switched the revolve on and they let themselves be carried around in silent powerful orbit, standing braced like stiff-legged pawns as the red mouth of the auditorium flashed by again and again.
The Head of Lighting came forward and showed them the templates that could turn light into dappled water and wind, the gauzes that gave the illusion of distance, the lights that could make you beautiful or villainous or old, and the followspot with its thick steel handle that could track an actor around the stage. He showed them how to make sunlight and moonlight and counterfeit flames. He showed them how to turn indoors into outdoors and back again.
They stood underneath the steel lighting rig and looked up at the heavy black instruments hanging like a cloud of bats from the pipes, the black barn-doors that shuttered and blinkered the bulbs all folded and unfolded like countless bat-wing membranes settling in sleep. The instruments were each clamped to the rig with a steel yoke which allowed the shuttered beam to be directed anywhere over the stage: the Head of Lighting demonstrated, slipping colored gels expertly in and out of the gel frame holder and pulling the yokes to and fro. He straddled the top of his dented ladder with his ankles hooked around the topmost steps to hold him steady, squinting down at them and plucking at his brown beard with his free hand as he spoke.
The first-years were then shown the lesser secrets: the door-slam, a little wooden box with a heavy sliding bolt that could simulate door-slamming sounds from backstage, and the rain box, a little box filled with dried peas for simulating rain-sounds—“Before everything was digitalized,” the Head of Acting said with a nostalgic gravity, as he shook the box and filled the air with the sound of gentle drumming rain. He showed them up close how the false perspective of the painted flats contrived to make the stage area bigger than it actually was. He showed them the grooves and runnels into which the flats could slip, the ancient pulley that hauled at the red curtain, and the curved cyclorama at the back of the stage that gave the space a never-ending vastness, as if it went back and back forever.
“The auditorium is a sacred space,” the Head of Acting said at last, looking gravely at them as they stood in the middle of the flooded stage and breathed in the sweet dusty smell of hot lights and generated fog. “We do not hold classes in here. It is only when we come to dress rehearsal that you are allowed to use this space. You may not come in here alone.”
The first-years all nodded. Stanley was standing at the back of the group, still craning upward into the vast blackness of the flies and trying to remember everything they had been shown. He was a little in awe of the Head of Acting, but underneath it all he wasn’t sure he liked the man very much. There was something cold and pulsing about his manner that reminded Stanley of a lizard or a frog. He had never touched the Head of Acting’s ropy liver-spotted hands, but in his mind he imagined them to be cold and moist and snatching.
They all waited for the Head of Acting to say more, but he just drew his heels together and spread his arm to gesture them off the stage, signaling that the tour had come to a close.
The first-years filed quietly past him and he watched them go, down the wheeled aluminum steps into the stalls, up the aisle past the rows and rows, and finally out into the marble light of the foyer. When they were gone he moved to the stage manager’s cubicle to kill the lights. He stood with his hand on the cool gray lever, and out of habit cleared his throat and called out a warning up into the flies: “Going dark.”