“I hope we don’t get stopped by the police,” said Brian Prentice.
As the members of the theater company riding in the small yellow school bus on the way to the Van Dusen estate howled with laughter, Ray Nicholson, who was driving, replied with a broad grin, “Well, if we do, better let me do the talking.”
Brian, dressed in costume as Theseus, Duke of Athens, sat directly behind Ray, with director Simon Dyer beside him and Charlotte across the aisle with Aaron beside her in the window seat. The male actors on board, a few in women’s costumes, were all in full stage makeup, with heavy foundation and dark slashes of eyeliner that gave a grossly exaggerated, sinister appearance up close but from a distance, under lights, looked natural and made their facial features easier for the audience to discern.
Aaron gazed out the window, watching the lush, dark-green trees that flanked the two-lane highway flash by. As an orange blur came alongside the bus, he called out, “Ray, watch it! Car passing and it’s really moving.”
Ray braked hard as the bus approached a sharp turn, and the orange car veered sharply in front of his vehicle, narrowly avoiding an oncoming truck.
“Christ!” exclaimed Ray, squinting into the late-afternoon sun. “Not that jackass Adrian Archer again! What I wouldn’t give right now for a siren and flashing lights.” But with the orange vehicle now in front of him, Ray could see that Adrian Archer wasn’t in the driver’s seat. The car was being driven by a blonde woman, her hair pulled back in a ponytail blowing in the breeze from the open windows. Archer was in the passenger seat turned toward her.
Keeping his eyes on the vehicle in front of him, Ray called out its license number to Charlotte, who wrote it down in the notebook she kept with her at all times. She also jotted down the details of the woman in the driver’s seat. Probably nothing, she thought. All kinds of legitimate reasons why Adrian would be out with Sophie. They could be running an errand for Belinda, say.
Ray slowed as they approached the Van Dusen estate, and when the gates swung open, he drove up the drive and around the back of the house. The graveled parking area would eventually fill up with the cars of theatergoers, but for now, just a few cars were parked there, including the orange Lamborghini that had passed them a few minutes ago.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its elements of the natural and the supernatural, and much of it set in “a wood near Athens” and “another part of the wood,” lends itself perfectly to an outdoor performance in a beautifully maintained garden with a wide expanse of lawn and beds filled with fragrant herbs and flowers.
The company responsible for the wedding’s floral displays had agreed to Simon’s request to install the white wooden arch a day early so the theater company could use it as Titania’s bower. The head florist had donated baskets of red roses, pink carnations, white gerbera daisies, yellow lilies, and ferns that had reached their best-before date but had one more night left in them, and her enthusiastic staff had wired them to the arch. In the morning, those flowers would be removed and replaced with fresh, expensive white roses and orchids.
The theater company’s carpenter and sound and lighting technicians had spent the afternoon preparing the stage for the evening performance, installing lighting and planting speakers around the stage, carefully hidden behind tubs of potted plants.
There was no real backstage area, just a painted curtain at the rear of the stage behind which actors would wait until they were needed onstage and Charlotte and Aaron could help them with quick costume changes. The props table had been set up to one side, along with another table filled with chilled water bottles for the cast during intermission.
When she had ticked the last of the costume items off her master list, satisfied that everything was in place for the performance, Charlotte wandered around to the front of the stage to watch the theatergoers arrive. She was always amazed by how quickly the audience for this production materialized; one moment, just a few early arrivals keen to get a good spot were staking out their places, and the next moment, there wasn’t a spare inch left on which to unfold a lawn chair.
As the crowd unpacked their picnics, poured glasses of wine, and chatted with friends, Charlotte returned backstage, picked up a water bottle, and joined Ray at the prompt desk to one side of the stage. She set the bottle down near his copy of the script.
“Ready?”
“Ready. And so’s he, by the looks of him.” A man wearing a beige raincoat and fedora, with a camera slung around his neck and a notebook in his hand, beetled toward them.
“Oh, no,” groaned Charlotte. “Not that awful Fletcher Macmillan. I wonder what he wants this time.”
“Hello, Charlotte. Ray,” said Fletcher Macmillan. “You’ve got a lovely evening for it.” Macmillan, a dedicated anglophile, had perfected a pretentious, old-fashioned mid-Atlantic accent and manner of speech that reminded Charlotte of a character from a late-night black-and-white film.
“Still on the arts beat, are you Fletcher?” Ray asked.
“Well, that and other things. You know how it is when you work for a small newspaper like the Hudson Valley Echo. Bit of this, bit of that. I’m not here tonight for the play, though. I’ve already given that a glowing review. I’m covering Mrs. Van Dusen’s annual fundraiser and hoping for an interview with the bride and groom. Have you seen them, by any chance?”
“No, sorry, I haven’t,” said Charlotte.
“Oh, well,” said Macmillan. “The night is young. Lots of time. Must dash. Want to get some photographs of the crowd. See you at the after party.”
As he wandered away, Charlotte remarked that she too must dash, as it was time for her to be getting backstage. Ray squeezed her hand in a parting gesture of encouragement and said, “See you at the intermission.”
As the seconds ticked by until curtain up, the tension backstage rose. Simon gave the actors a few last-minute words of encouragement, and they stood in little groups, doing whatever they needed to do to reduce performance anxiety. One or two dangled their arms loosely at their sides while they shook out their hands. A couple exchanged quiet words, while others remained apart from the main group, eyes closed, taking deep breaths, focusing on whatever quiet ritual prepared them for the performance they were about to give. Charlotte had seen this many times and knew that their anxiety would evaporate the moment they stepped onstage.
The audience chatted quietly and then, although no announcement had been made, seemed to sense a change in atmosphere, a surge of creative energy. At a signal from Simon, Aaron told the actors to stand by and sent a message to the audio technician, and a moment later, Purcell’s light, sprightly baroque music signaled the play was about to begin.
The audience hastily packed away the remains of their picnics, switched off their mobile phones, and settled back in their lawn chairs. Twenty seconds later, just after Aaron announced “Curtain up!,” Brian Prentice reached out for the hand of the young actor playing Hippolyta, and with a swish of his skirts, the two swept onstage.
“Now fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour
Draws on apace; four happy days bring in
Another moon; but oh, methinks, how slow
This old moon wanes!”
Brian intoned in his deep, mellow voice.
“And we’re off!” Charlotte whispered to Aaron. The tenseness that had enveloped the players just before curtain up dissipated like morning fog and was replaced by a smooth confidence as the production got under way. Charlotte thought of it as an aircraft taking off through a tense climb until it reached cruising altitude, when passengers breathed a silent sigh of relief and relaxed back into their seats. The actors would soon hit their stride, as well as their marks. The novelty of male actors playing female characters wore off quickly as the audience not only got used to it and accepted it but began to enjoy it.
Behind the stage, Aaron rechecked a metal rack of costumes, arranging them in the order they’d be needed against a script with exit lines of dialogue highlighted to show which actors would need a costume change when they came offstage. A quick turnaround was needed in a couple of instances, as the actor returned almost immediately to the stage as another character. After satisfying himself that the costumes were in order for Charlotte and him to make the quick changes, he turned his attention to the props table. He touched each item as he checked it off against his list: donkey head, purple flower, scroll, lantern . . . Everything he’d unloaded from the bus was there, and as the deep shadows of the night began to gather along the edges of the garden and the players got the play up on its legs, he sat on a metal folding chair, unscrewed the cap of a water bottle, and relaxed, just a little, with one ear cocked to the action onstage. As the first scene ended, the actors dashed into the changing area, and Aaron and Charlotte removed the skirt of the actor playing Hermia and prepared him to appear onstage in the next scene as one of the tradesmen discussing the logistics of their play Pyramus and Thisbe, which they planned to perform at the wedding of the Duke of Athens.
The audience’s laughter at the banter of the characters known as the “rude mechanicals”—Bottom, Quince, Starveling, Snout, Flute, and Snug—drifted up into a sky filling with the last pink blush of daylight. Slowly and almost imperceptibly, as the play unfolded, the warmth of a late-June evening gave way to the cool air of night. Sweaters and jackets were pulled out of bags and travel rugs draped over knees. The subtle fragrance of flowers that release their perfume at night crept over the scene. As the pale gray of twilight descended, floodlights suspended from trees came on, illuminating the stage and contrasting with the dimming light around it.
Aaron glanced up at the lights.
“If you think it looks good now,” said Charlotte, “just wait a bit. It’ll be completely dark soon, and when the moon starts to rise, everything will look absolutely magical. There’s something about this play . . . is it a dream? Is it real? Perhaps the moon has something to do with that.”
“Is it a full moon tonight?”
“Yes. This performance is always scheduled for the Friday night nearest the full moon. And we’ve certainly got a beautiful night for it tonight.” She checked her watch, then tipped her head toward the stage, and they listened.
“What thou seest when thou dost wake,
Do it for thy true love take . . .”
“Okay. Oberon’s just sprinkled the magic juice on Titania’s eyelids, so the intermission’s coming up in about ten minutes.” She glanced at the clothes rack and Aaron’s prop table. “Have you got everything ready to go for the third and fourth acts? Simon will be here in a few minutes to talk to the actors.”
Aaron nodded. “Yeah, it’s all good. I checked it.”
“Right, we’ll use the intermission to see the actors have everything they need, so I’m going to the loo now. Keep an eye on things here. I won’t be long.”
When she had disappeared into the house, Aaron waited a moment longer, then slipped away himself. A few moments later, puffs of marijuana smoke drifted down the garden, away from the audience, adding its distinctive odor to the fragrance permeating the night air.