“I think the way to do this is that The Trojan Women will be in English and Phedre will be in French,” Toca Sacar said. “In that way the students that speak English can have a few lines here and there in this production and the French students can have the same opportunity in the next play.”
We were sitting in the front rows of the riding arena theater. We being the teaching staff of the festival. Toca was wandering around in front of us. He was wearing shorts, sandals, and black ankle socks with a T-shirt that read “One of the Few People Who Never Slept with Shelley Winters.” His legs are not his best feature. I made a mental note to talk to him about black socks with sandals. Maybe the note should be about any socks with sandals, unless you want to be mistaken for a German tourist.
“And,” he said. Oh, oh, I thought, what’s coming next? “I think we will perform in various places about the Abbey and have the audience come with us. We have no sets. The lighting here is very rudimentary. We can make the Abbey serve as Ancient Greece. The costumes are just going to be sheets and things anyway so the worse lighting the better.”
Estelle Anderson raised her hand. “You know, Toca, I can’t see a damned thing. I’ll probably break my neck wandering around in the dark.”
Toca said, “I’ll give you a handmaiden, Estelle. One of the students with particularly keen eyesight. And a flashlight. I think we’ll start out on the terrace in front of the Abbey. There’s plenty of light there. Then we can have the scene with Hugo and you by the great cedar of Lebanon out by the gate. That can be the welcoming home scene. You,” he gestured toward me, “can enter by the gate with your retinue.”
“My retinue being?” I said.
“Him,” Toca said, pointing to Steve. He added, “Maybe some students. We’re going to need most of them as the Trojan women. I don’t think we have enough big ones as it is. We’re probably going to have to use some of the bigger boys, too. As women, I mean.”
“Perhaps they can double up. Put short tunics under their long robes, and they can enter with Steve and me,” I said.
“They’ll have to run like hell,” Toca said.
“Just a little faster than the audience,” I said.
“And that’s what they’re here for,” Estelle said. “To run like hell. God knows I’ve run like hell many a time. I had to strip naked in the wings for The House of Garcia Lorca.”
“I’ll bet you loved it,” Toca said.
“I think the stagehands loved it more than I did,” Estelle said.
“I could stage a little Greek dance that the students could do to lead the audience from one stage to another,” Nadia Barkley said. “You know my first teacher in London was a student of Isadora Duncan. She was one of the Isadorables.”
There was a long silence. I actually loved the idea. This was going to be one of the worst productions of The Trojan Women anyway. Let’s go for it.
“Great,” I said. “This is going to be the most original production this play has ever had.”
“Hugo and Steve are going to play their roles as though they are gay,” Toca said.
“As though they’re gay?” I said. “Hello.”
I looked at Steve. He looked uncomfortable. And to think he had been sucking my cock just a few hours before. “Sorry,” I said.
“Every actor’s private life should be private,” Toca said. I looked around. Estelle and Nadia seemed extremely bored with the direction the conversation was going. It wasn’t about them.
Toca changed the subject. “Okay, I have to figure out where the scenes will take place. You folks have to learn your lines. Maybe I can get some of the local people to fill in some of the nonspeaking walk-ons. The problem with the students is that most of them are too small.”
“I’d sprinkle them in with the women as their children,” I said. “They are living proof that these women have had sex with the Trojan warriors at one time or another. I know, I know. Actor’s ideas are always fatal, Toca, so you can ignore that one.”
“It’s not bad, as a matter of fact. Most directing is just trying to be practical about what your actors can do. Or have to do. We have to use those kids somehow. That’s not bad. We don’t have any fairies or sprites in this, so they can be children, which they are. Maybe we’ll give them a Greek song. Is there any such thing?”
He looked at Nadia. She said, “My thing is dance.”
“Maybe they could sing ‘The Party’s Over,’” I said.
“Smart-ass,” Toca said. “I’ll think of something.”
So we went our ways. I didn’t have many lines with Steve so that was relatively easy. Steve wasn’t really an actor, but he could play himself. And we figured out some things to do. We thought of putting our arms around each other, even some ways of looking at each other that could be interpreted as having a relationship somewhere beyond friendly. Neither of us thought acting swishy was a way to interpret the roles. We probably didn’t have to do anything. Our own body language would do it. But were Steve and I lovers? I don’t think he would have said so.
Rehearsing with Estelle Anderson was quite another thing. She knew her role very well. She told me that she was not a Method actress, although she had worked with Actor’s Studio in the early days. “I was too old for them, even then. My training had been memorization and characterization through movement and delivering the role exactly the same every night. I never felt comfortable acting against somebody who might suddenly be a quite different person than they had been the night before. It’s just work, you know. I myself don’t particularly want to have a cathartic experience every night. It’s too hard being charming at dinner afterward.”
To me she said, “I can play down to somewhere in my fifties. You have to play up to somewhere in your thirties. I know the idea of my refusing to sleep with you is patently ridiculous on the face of it, but the audience here probably isn’t going to realize what it is all about anyway. I just plan to be terribly dramatic. So if you’re not going to be swamped by me you are going to have to be terribly dramatic, too. You’re big enough. You just have to deepen your voice more.”
She gave me some exercises to get down in my speaking range, and I wandered around the lawns of the Abbey doing my “Me, me, me, me, me. My, my, my, my, my. Mo, mo, mo, mo, mo.” I learned a lot from Estelle. For her, acting training was a lot like dance training. It was very physical, and you had to do it repetitively until you could deliver it without having to get in the mood. Then sometimes the mood got into you.
She also gave me a very good piece of advice. “Don’t ever play a role that is not suitable for you. You are too beautiful to play tortured geniuses. Leave that for the ugly ones. And don’t ever do operetta. It’s the kiss of death.”
“We’re doing The Red Mill,” I said.
“Well, let it be a lesson to you. No one is going to see you here, and you’ll see the reaction. When you do a serious role they’ll be out there oohing and aahing.”
“I’m doing Tea and Sympathy at the end of the season,” I said.
She looked at me critically. “You can handle that. Boarding school student? Yes, but just. If you’re going to do it, now’s the time. How old are you?”
“Twenty-five,” I said.
“You’ll change a lot in the next five years. Not for the worse. But you’ll get more serious looking. Don’t try to do Shakespeare before you’re thirty.”
“Romeo?” I said.
“Don’t ever do Romeo and Juliet. The public is sick of it. So am I. Besides, everyone knows the plot. Who cares about doomed young love anymore? Nobody’s doomed anymore. They just take pills and go to the analyst.”
“How astute you are, Estelle,” I said.
“Are you making fun of me?” She fixed me with that gimlet eye of hers.
“I am, sort of. But also I hoped that we know each other well enough now I could get away with it,” I said.
“So what gives with that boyfriend of yours? How’s that going? You’re a great-looking couple. Although you’re going to have to lie about this later and pretend that you’re straight. Unless the two of you quit this gig altogether and go into nursing.”
I decide to put a hold on the nursing concept and concentrated on my long speeches.
Toca finally decided on six different places around the Abbey. He added one scene in the Abbey courtyard, another by the stream that ran at the edge of the lawn in front of the Abbey terrace, one with Estelle and I leaning out of a window on the second floor. “It suggests a bedroom,” he said. And one final scene with the entire cast leading the audience for a grand finale onto the stage of the stable/theater.
It seemed very ambitious to me. We were not going to wear microphones, and someone was going to have to carry the lights here and there. “We’ll carry torches,” Toca said. I prayed that togas would not be flying up or flaring up in the night.
Toca was successful in enlisting townspeople as extras. Most of them were from the foreign community, but Madame Cerise, the baker’s wife, started appearing at rehearsals, as did the wife of the butcher, two elderly ladies who lived on the corner beside the café who turned out to be mother and daughter, and the hotel keeper’s wife, a strident blonde who perhaps hoped Estelle would drop dead at the last minute.
The lady who ran the electric products store also appeared at the final rehearsals. She was the other major blonde in town and, despite her hearing aid, brought a bit of flash to the doings around Cornichons.
Graham was called upon to be part of the Greek warrior contingent, and so was Cass the Heartbreaker. The dentist, Monsieur Fusil, decided to show off his tennis legs in a tunic, and Toca thought a party of five would be quite adequate to represent the warriors. He ordered tunics, with metal breastplates, and helmets and boots that laced up our calves, all from Paris. We were quite a sight. My outfit was scarlet, and I mean scarlet. Steve had to work to keep up with me in his sky-blue costume. Graham put us all in the shade in his silver and white. Cass got black and silver, and the leggy dentist got navy blue, which suited him quite well. He had a good profile under his helmet. We made quite a dashing suite, to tell the truth.
Nina had been enlisted to be Estelle’s handmaiden, and she added some beauty to the front ranks of the Trojan ladies. It was actually quite a good-looking company, which was fortunate for all of us as opening night was a disaster. We were only planning five performances of each play, and rehearsal times were, of necessity, brief.
The semiprofessional company held themselves together rather well, although there were little screams from the French ladies as they tried to cross the wet lawns in their spike-heeled shoes. No Greek sandals for them. Cass fell into the creek and lost his helmet. Steve said he was quite sure M. Fusil pushed him in. He had heard that Cass had been seen talking at length with Madame Fusil at the bank.
Estelle’s coronet came off and fell out the window and hit Monsieur Ramponneau, the roofer, in the head. He put it on and wore it the rest of the evening, which made it difficult to convince our rambling viewers that this was a serious drama.
The audience was the real problem, as they had trouble finding us as we drifted like will-o’-the-wisps about the Abbey grounds. The little Greek dance was rather successful, and the kids capered about nicely as the portable CD player floated the music of shepherd’s pipes into the night air. Little Henrietta was particularly good miming that she was playing a flute. There is something a bit possessed about Henrietta. She will go far in the theater.
However, the kids weren’t sure where the next scene was so they led the audience around the back of the Abbey and into the parking lot before Toca could chase them down and lead them back to the main entrance. The ladies of the court were assembled under the cedar of Lebanon, and my party looked completely ridiculous standing in front of the café ready to stride through the Abbey gates as we waited.
It was a long evening and the audience began slipping off to the café every time we shifted from one venue to another. By the time we finally got them into the theater, only a handful of them were left and the cast itself was footsore and careworn. It was also almost midnight.
At the end there was a weary little round of applause and the few stalwarts who had managed to see the whole thing through staggered into the night. Estelle turned to Toca and said, “That was a nightmare.”
Toca said, “It will be much better tomorrow night.”
It rained the next night, and we performed the entire thing under umbrellas, cast and audience. At least it wasn’t very cold. Nina seemed to be enjoying it very much. I didn’t get to talk to her because I was changing my costume in Steve’s room and then spending the night there, because when we got done doing the big ugly I didn’t want to wake them up climbing the stairs to my tower room and risk waking up Theo.
The photographs of the production looked splendid. You would never have guessed that much of the lighting came from car headlights and that everyone was wearing rubber boots under their togas because of the rain, dew, fog, and other moist activities prevalent in the Loire Valley in midsummer. Estelle said later that it was “outlandish.” I guess that pretty well wraps it up. Listen, it was one more thing for my résumé.