“I shall unseam you from the navel to the chops,” shouted Edward Behrens. “I’ll fix your head upon my battlements.”
He stood in the first row of the theater and glared up at his Macbeth, an imposing figure, kilted and cloaked in dark plaids but wearing the petulant expression of an exhausted child.
The rehearsal had begun well, with the three stunningly repulsive witches chanting, “When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?” It had foundered eleven lines later as the king, a sturdy scholarship student from the Bronx, entered with his soldiers and demanded, “What bloody man is that?” Not everyone in the company had heard this treacherous line before, and those who had not infected those who had with their unseemly mirth. Once order had been restored, Behrens’s patience was tried again as Bren and the sound man struggled to produce a gradually increasing thunderstorm during the second appearance of the witches. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled, but never at appropriate times, and often the thunder came before the lightning, as if Bren had to be reminded to flash the floodlights. The blackout had to be done a dozen times before the girls managed to vanish without a trace. Would it work on opening night? Probably not, the director thought, but technical problems were the reason for having technical rehearsals. Ego tantrums were not.
“Please tell me, Brian,” he continued in a dangerously calm voice, “why, when we have spent endless weeks blocking this misbegotten play, you insist upon delivering every line downstage center with your back to the other characters.”
“It doesn’t feel right to go upstage on that line,” the actor said.
“It doesn’t feel right?” Behrens repeated. “Now he says it doesn’t feel right. In the first place, you have done it properly a hundred times before. In the second place, this is a tech rehearsal, Brian. This is not a feeling rehearsal, except for my feelings, which are at the moment just short of savage.”
Brian smirked and seized his advantage. “All right, then, it’s dark up there,” he said, pointing at the spot some six feet behind him where his Lady stood, tapping her foot.
With a sigh of resignation, Behrens turned toward the light booth. “Eli, just a shade brighter upstage right for Laurence Olivier here, and then maybe we can get on with it before we all die of old age.”
At the switchboard Eli groaned, turned a dial, and scribbled furiously on his clipboard.
“That’s thrown everything else out of balance,” Bren observed, peering down at the stage.
“Please,” Eli said. “Do me a favor, Bren.”
“What?”
“Two favors. One, don’t make any remarks. Two, get me another Coke.”
“Yes, master,” Bren said, and headed for the Coke machine while the play lurched forward a few more lines and stopped again.
The second and third witches were also buying Cokes. He supposed the first was avoiding him, but from the prison of the light booth it had been hard to tell.
The second witch was a tall, bony girl whose blond hair, powdered gray, hung in lank strands against her ravaged cheeks. Polly, the third witch, was normally plump and cheerful. She had never seemed really fat, but for Macbeth she had contrived the look of a monstrous, nocturnal toad—bloated, pale, and evil-looking. They were dressed in scanty rags over leotards the same color as their pale gray skins. They had black lips and wispy beards and were gossiping about a party.
“Hail, lovely ladies,” Bren said, feeding his coins into the Coke machine. “When, think you, comes an end to this ghastly day?”
“Hail, good McBren,” said Polly, and then they chanted together, “‘When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.’ But,” finished the tall witch, “that won’t be ere the set of sun, unless the Bear murders the Rushmore and plays Macbeth himself.”
“I think the sun set hours ago,” Bren said, “but you can’t tell in this tomb.”
The rehearsal had started at two o’clock and had so far progressed to Act Two, Scene One. Soon sandwiches would be brought in, after which cast and crew would struggle on into the night. With weekday curfews and schoolwork in mind, Mr. Behrens had decided to hold the first technical on Saturday and the second technical and the dress rehearsal the Wednesday and Thursday nights before the Friday opening. He knew that the interval might prove disastrous, but he had been even more reluctant to keep everyone up all night during the week.
“How do we look?” Polly asked, doing an exaggerated model’s turn, her fat jiggling, her bearded chin tipped up at a provocative angle. “I wish we could see ourselves from out front. Someone simply has to take pictures.”
“Utterly ravishing,” Bren said, then added casually, “but where’s the third weird sister?”
“She’s in a sulk tonight,” Polly confided. “Sits in a corner with a book except when Jeremy wants her for something.”
Bren felt a thud in the pit of his stomach. Why had he asked? Even though he felt terrible, and his lighting earlier in the play had been a disaster, some of the despair of the night before had lifted. Now it settled again like a black mist.
“When Jeremy wants her for something,” he repeated dully.
“You know, to hand him props or whatever,” Polly amplified.
But Bren refused to be reassured. He pictured Erika and Jeremy backstage. They would be joking in whispers, chuckling and nudging each other. In the dark alleys between the masking curtains, they would wait for their cues and kiss. He had seen her only from afar as she played the first witch scenes at the beginning of the play, noting that her costume and makeup, enhanced by sharp spikes of shocking pink hair, were even more gruesomely effective than those of the other two.
“I’d better take Eli his Coke,” he said, “before he collapses on the switchboard and electrocutes himself.”
“I’ll tell Erika you asked about her,” Polly said with a knowing smile.
“Thanks, Pol. I’m sure that will be riveting news,” Bren said, and retreated toward the sanctuary of the light booth. As he crossed the back of the house, he was appalled to see that the rehearsal had taken a leap forward and almost reached another of his scenes.
“Great timing,” Eli said, sliding out of his seat as Bren charged into the light booth. “Don’t get rattled. You’ve got at least thirty seconds to find your place.”
Thirty seconds was not enough. The coming scene, in which Macduff discovers the body of the murdered king, was Bren’s pride and joy. Its effects were subtle, complex, and terrifyingly beautiful. The cue arrived, and he was still frantically searching the lighting script.
When the sequence failed to begin, Behrens stopped the rehearsal. “Are you geniuses asleep up there?” he shouted.
“I’ve got it now,” Bren called. “Sorry.” But he was still fumbling.
Eli leaned over his shoulder and started the cue. “Pull yourself together,” he hissed. “This thing has to be done right. If you can’t do it, I will.”
“I can do it. I just got lost. Why am I the only one who’s not allowed to screw up?” Bren asked.
“You’ve been screwing up all day,” Eli said, and continued to work the lights.
Bren scrunched miserably in his seat as Eli took over his cues, not only from the murder, but all the way through the dispatching of Banquo on the heath. He had not only missed his favorite scene, he missed his last scene before the final appearance of the witches.
Soon they would break for sandwiches. I’ll go out to a deli, Bren thought, and wander around on Broadway. Even this seemed better than a convivial gathering of actors and technicians, during which he would surely have to watch Jeremy and Erika flirting while they ate. He had not spoken to her since the horrible telephone conversation of the night before, but it seemed pointless even to try. When the break came, he went straight out to the street without going down into the theater, thus avoiding Behrens as well as Erika.
After a lonely sandwich on Broadway, the evening still stretched interminably ahead. “I could have gone home and had a nap,” Bren grumbled to himself as he waited in the light booth while the play crawled forward. But Eli might need him to refocus a light or change a gel. A technical rehearsal involves not only major crises, but innumerable small changes in costumes, makeup, props, and lights.
The final witch scene with its projected apparitions called for the efforts of both light men, and technically it went quite well. Eli appeared to have forgotten his earlier impatience, and in any case he could not have managed alone. Bren was determined not to disgrace himself again. He watched the witches almost without interest except for the lines and movements that were cues to change the lights. Even so, he could hardly fail to notice that their performance was very poor. Erika in particular had lost her edge. She seemed dispirited, and her timing was off. Several times she stumbled, and her awkwardness confused the other two, who had come to depend upon her leadership.
Down in the house, Edward Behrens sighed, took notes, and let it pass. He still had the fight and the coming of Birnam Wood to Dunsinane ahead of him; a little lousy dancing could be overlooked. But during the following scene he felt a small thump in the next seat and turned to see Erika beside him. Even in the dim light that spilled from the stage, he could see streaks of tears in her horrible gray makeup. She gave her beard a vicious yank, and most of it came off in her hand.
“It’ll come right,” Behrens whispered to his favorite witch.
She shook her head. “I blew it, and I’m going to blow it again,” she muttered.
“You won’t, you know. This is just tech rehearsal blues.”
“I wish it were,” Erika said. “I’m afraid it’s something much, much worse.”
Behrens reached out to give her spiky head a reassuring pat, then leapt to his feet as he saw the scene onstage end in unparalleled confusion. The wife of Ross, hotly pursued by a murderer, had caught her foot on a strut projecting from the tower of her castle. This began slowly to revolve and then to break apart as Jeremy plunged onto the stage, both hands outstretched in a futile effort to hold it up.
“The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!” the director cried, and from their various stations around the theater, the entire cast and crew broke into gales of wild hilarity.
The remainder of the rehearsal was an anticlimax. The burst of laughter seemed to have done everyone good, and the company slogged through the rest of the play, changed into street clothes, and went gratefully home.
Only Eli remained to fiddle with a single spotlight on the edge of the balcony. Behrens watched him for a moment before turning wearily to climb the stairs. He would have to say something about the lights, for which he had felt such confident expectations. He knew that Eli had replaced Bren in the scenes before the intermission, and it now seemed to him that he had been a fool to entrust such a vital task to anyone so inexperienced.
“I feel mean as a dog,” he said to Eli when he had joined him at the balcony rail, “but I think you’re going to have to take over the things Bren was doing by himself. We can run them through one extra time to give you the practice.”
Surprisingly, Eli shook his head. “He’ll be all right,” he said. “Leave him alone, if you can stand it.”
“I don’t know how much more I can stand,” Behrens said. “His work was an almost total disaster tonight, and it’s not as if it weren’t really crucial stuff. I’m sure you thought you knew what you were doing, but he’d never even seen a light board before this play, right?”
“That’s right,” Eli said, “but he’s really good. He’s got a fantastic touch for it. Just something was wrong tonight. He was sick or something. Trust me, Bear. We’ve got almost a week for him to get over whatever it is, and two more rehearsals.”
The director was silent, studying the skinny, tireless boy bent over the spotlight. Then he shrugged. “Well, I guess you’re right, however it turns out,” he said. “After all, this is supposed to be an educational institution, not the Royal Shakespeare Company. Give him some aspirin and a kick in the ass, and we’ll hope for the best.”
“And the best is what you’ll get,” Eli said with a grin, and went back to the light booth to turn off the spot and put the board to bed for the night. Soon he too was gone, and Edward Behrens was left alone in his dimly lit theater.
At least he should have been alone, since all the cast and crew had departed, but as soon as he reached the back of the house, he had a strong sensation that he was being watched. This part of the theater, which had been dark during the rehearsal, was now faintly illuminated by wall sconces turned low. He was being watched, and now he was being addressed from the shadowy corner under the balcony to his left.
“Hello, poor, tired Bear,” said the voice, which was female and quite beautiful. “I wish I had some honey to give you, but sympathy is all I have to offer.”
Behrens whirled and saw the tall woman who sat, relaxed and smiling, at the far end of the back row. She had a black scarf over her head which now she pulled off, releasing a cloud of bright hair. “Miranda West,” she said, holding out a slim hand. “Come sit by my side and tell me all your woes.”
Behrens’s first reaction had been one of outrage that some stranger had sat there for God only knew how long watching the horrible floundering of his rehearsal. Now, as he leaned over the row of seats and took the proffered hand, he was not sure it was such a bad thing after all. Bren’s mother was certainly an astonishingly attractive woman, and he found himself thinking that he had spent not only the past weeks but several centuries in the exclusive company of high school students.
Miranda moved over and pointed invitingly to the place at the end of the row. Behrens sat down. He found himself wondering whether Bren had a father and inhaling a faint, unfamiliar, but curiously intoxicating perfume. Even in the gloom at the back of the theater, the woman’s eyes were disturbingly blue. Her smile was at once mischievous and friendly. The impulse to tell her everything about himself was almost irresistible, but not quite. Sophisticated and laconic, he said to himself. That’s what you want to be at a time like this.
“All my woes,” he asked, “or only those occasioned by this wretched play?”
“We could start with the play,” Miranda suggested, “and work backward.”
“Do you have all night, then?”
“I don’t see why not,” she said, and settled back in her chair.
Behrens laughed. “No, really. You don’t want to hear it. The feelings one has after a technical rehearsal are better left unexpressed, since they are bound to be greatly exaggerated and mostly suicidal. It will all look better in the morning.”
His companion seemed genuinely surprised. “I thought it went remarkably well,” she said. “What’s a little falling scenery and a missed light cue or two? They won’t happen again.”
“You’re probably right that the same things won’t happen again,” he said. “It’s the things just like them that are waiting to happen. It’s the disease, not the symptoms. The damn play is just not ready, and I have no one to blame but myself.”
“Nonsense,” Miranda said briskly. “Anyone can see that you have done a marvelous job against frightful odds. Macbeth is not the easiest play in the world, you know.”
“I don’t know what possessed me to choose it.”
“You can’t be the first person to ask himself that question,” she said, “but it has a fatal fascination. Even the fact that it carries a curse doesn’t seem to discourage people from producing it. Rather the contrary, I suspect.”
“A curse?” Behrens said. “That’s all I need.”
Miranda’s eyes widened, and she leaned toward him, studying his face intently. “I can’t believe you didn’t know about the curse of Macbeth. If I’d had any idea, I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but maybe it’s just as well I did. You’ve still got almost a week to straighten things out with the dark powers.”
“Lovely lady,” Behrens said. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but I do know that if this play is cursed, it’s cursed by incompetence and nothing more mysterious than that.”
“I suppose you’ve been going around saying ‘Macbeth’ all the time,” Miranda continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “I suppose you say things like, ‘Now we’ll take Scene One of Macbeth,’ or ‘Macbeth is a difficult play for young people,’ or ‘The lighting for Macbeth is a challenge,’ don’t you?”
“It seems more than likely that I do,” Behrens said dryly. “What am I supposed to say?”
“People call it ‘the Scottish play,”’ Miranda explained, “or, I suppose, just ‘the play,’ if they are actually in it, but never ‘Macbeth.’”
“Does this curious proscription apply to mentions of Macbeth in the script?” the director asked.
“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”
“Silly! Who’s being silly?”
“Not I, I promise you,” Miranda said with a satisfied little smile. “You see, I know about these things. But maybe it’s not too late. If you will just watch your tongue for the next few days, all may yet be well.”
“I’d rather watch my kids,” Behrens said. “I’m trying to figure out why the lousy ones are improving and the terrific ones are going all to pot. The first witch, for example, a fantastically talented girl who was lifting those scenes right up into the realm of art, and now she’s tripping over her own feet. And your son, not to mince words. I thought I had found a new genius in stage lighting, and tonight he couldn’t even find his place in the script.”
Miranda looked thoughtful. “Of course, it’s complicated,” she said after a pause. “It might be the curse, and then again, it might be love. I’m not sure which is worse. Probably it’s both, and if it is, you’re going to need a lot of help, Edward Bear.”
“Love!” he said. “Curses. What I need is more rehearsal time.”
“Time may do wonders for the torments of the heart,” Miranda said, “or make them worse. Only an expert can lift a curse.”
Behrens was beginning to feel that enchanting though his new friend might be, she was surely a little mad. It was not a quality he felt prepared to cope with at the moment. He rose from his seat. “Well, lacking an expert,” he said, “and since I can’t possibly remember not to say the name of my play for a week, perhaps you’ll pray for me.”
“Would you really like me to?” There was no mistaking the eagerness in her voice.
“It can’t do any harm,” said Behrens, extending his hand.
She pressed his fingers lightly, and he felt a tingling wave pass up his arm, through the base of his neck, and into his brain.
“I’ll give it my most serious attention,” said Miranda West, and, following him up the stairs and out into the street, she turned toward the river and vanished into the night without another word.