THEY WERE RUNNING through the opening number when Jonathan entered the theater. He slid in by the front door past the empty ticket windows and made his way into the audience where a few assistant producers and investors sat toward the back behind various crew people, stage managers, and assistants who flanked Ian at the fifth row center. The houselights were on and the velvet seats spread out smooth but naked looking in the daytime and the dancers and actors in their rehearsal clothes stood onstage in a silvery-gray void like beings on another planet.
An old college friend of Ian’s, who was a British theater critic, and his wife, a playwright, sat in the last row and gazed upon the proceedings among the other scattered audience members. Their faces registered nothing outwardly but Jonathan could read the billions of impressions of rivalry, condescension, misunderstanding, projection, false enthusiasm, shallow judgment, and studied criticism in their posture, blinks, and subtle movements.
The exuberance of the American musical, said the critic.
The hysteria, said the playwright.
Suddenly the young woman playing Jane Eyre and one of the other players spun around and kicked and sang something and the company all turned and shifted and began to move in a line down the stage toward marks drawn in chalk on the floor that denoted a destination. Men in tight sweatpants were leaping onto one another and looping their arms around necks and shoulders. By the time the men had jumped down and thrown themselves onto the floor under the lifted feet of some of the women and with their arms outstretched along the stage, more dancers were beginning to appear from the wings, a moving frieze of arching and bending bodies that trembled and swayed to the rising music. They crossed the stage and vanished back into the wings and reappeared again one by one and by now the lighting designer was at work and so they were silhouetted phantoms with kicking legs that seemed to stir up an unreal shimmering smoke as they wove together and separated and divided into angles and rows and then coalesced and in the lightening aura around them there began to appear what seemed to be a second company of dancers behind them but which were their shadows cast elongated and precise, lurid and howling against a scrim at the back of the stage. Their immense voices and wild screams filled up the theater like a ghostly orchestra heard through some faulty transmission from the underworld normally unheard.
Okay, now let’s have you murmuring, engaging the audience as you crisscross downstage, called Ian, and as he spoke they did what he described, extending their faces and arms out to the phantom audience. The footlights came on and colored rays glazed their skin and made them into garish psycho killers who called out to the empty seats from the distant decade of the 1980s. The first chorus began.
The Jane Eyre character was standing in one corner of the stage on her own holding a giant torch which would be lit during production and which she used to fend off the oncoming killers as if in a dream. The dancers passed close by her, one by one, turning, twisting, spinning, and drew close to her and then crumbled away as she defended herself with the invisible flame.
The company now lay on the ground as the number ended. Some of the dancers breathed more heavily than the rest and others sat up impatient for the notes and next routine. Jane Eyre stood at ease now, adjusting her cropped dance sweater. Others chatted quietly to one another.
They walked up onstage, Ian, the stage manager, and the choreographer. They each picked different people to talk to and began gesturing and enacting various movements. Ian looked for a moment offstage to where the killer dancers had fled. He instructed Jane Eyre not to look at them as they danced off and to concentrate on the forces propelling toward her. He conferred with the stage manager and jumped off the stage.
The theater critic and the playwright sat in a stupor. They were nakedly uncomfortable and they looked around the bustling theater as if in a nudist colony or a strip club. Jonathan moved elegantly out of his seat along his row, approaching some investors and producers and making conversation. Then he reached the seats of the critic and the writer.
He stood over them—they were still conferring in their seats—like a nightclub owner stopping at a table of tourists. The lighting designer was playing around and now a golden light suffused the theater while the stage sat in a reddish darkness. Jonathan was standing by their seats, looking down at them before they noticed him. They were discussing commedia dell’arte and its influence on musical theater. Jonathan placed a hand on the critic’s shoulder.
Angus, long time no see, he said.
What? Angus turned, startled.
Jonathan smiled.
Oh, hello, said the playwright, named Kai. Angus, she said to her husband as if translating, it’s Jonathan, Ian’s friend, Alix’s brother.
What do you think of the show? Jonathan asked.
They critiqued, politely, emphasizing that musical theater was not really their thing. Jonathan towered over them, casual, comfortable, listening with a bemused expression to their hesitations and exaggerated admiration. Jonathan let them know that he was thinking of investing in the production.
From a huddle with his associates and assistants Ian emerged and strolled up the aisle. A few of the performers were left onstage, some had headed backstage and several roamed the aisles collecting bags and heading out for a break. Ian patted them and squeezed their shoulders as he passed them. They accepted his attentions hungrily, happily, some childishly. They stepped aside as he opened his arms to embrace Jonathan.
Entertaining? Ian said to Angus and Kai.
They were nodding enthusiastically with their heads, all the while withholding any real praise with their bodies and tone of voice. They had just come from Warsaw where they’d seen an incredible experimental production of Ibsen, very political, they explained. A Doll’s Horse? said Ian. Hedda Hair? said Jonathan. The playwright looked at them.
What do you make of the concept? said Ian. The Jane Eyre meets Talking Heads idea?
Nothing yet, said Angus. I’d need to see the whole thing first.
What do you think of the staging?
It’s hard to tell, said Kai. Without the set, or costumes.
That’s good, said Ian, who didn’t really care what they thought. Because it’s all going to change anyway. This is a work in progress. Early days still.
He gazed down at them and thought about how many years he had known them. At one time, he had considered them friends. But ever since his early success they had treated him resentfully, dismissively. Now he saw them as pompous and pretentious and deeply vain in spite of their bland academic outfits and aggressively aging hair. They’d followed his successful career as if they were bird-watchers and he some common pigeon who had inexplicably been accepted by a flock of rare eagles. They no more believed in his talent than they believed that they themselves might be untalented. Over the years they had won prizes and fellowships and commissions and professorships. They had been invited to lecture and appeared in numerous footnotes. These achievements had been like snakebites on their egos, swelling them out of proportion to the rest of their beings so that their sense of importance bulged and tottered on top of them like extra heads, as if they were monsters in a fable, muzzled, drooling, snouted, skin split to reveal pink bone and yellow ooze. There was a flurry of conversation as Ian tried to swat away their lumbering passive-aggressive attacks and Jonathan enjoyed the performance like a stallion watching smaller animals argue over a rodent.
After Angus and Kai left the theater Jonathan told Ian he’d like to invest in the show. Then he said: So Alix tells me Poppy is starting an internship with you. Interesting.