Chapter 5
The summer I was twenty-one, I came home to play my namesake.
I think my parents had been waiting for the right timing: As long as they had a theater named Tempest and a daughter named Miranda, I had to play the role eventually.
It was between my third and fourth years at theater school, and it felt different going home to do a show: I was a trained actor now.
I was working with professionals and was well on my way to being one.
Our Romeo and Juliet three summers earlier was now the stuff of local legend: high school sweethearts playing star-crossed lovers.
It was too perfect. We were too perfect—young and open and ravenous for the roles.
We had gone on to the same theater school in Toronto, and that summer, Theo had a dinner theater gig in one of the lakeside tourist towns east of the city, so I went north alone.
I almost relished it: I was happy to have the hometown spotlight to myself.
I didn’t want to play Miranda, but I couldn’t pass up a lead role, not to mention a chance to show off: I was so much better now.
Miranda is the only female role in the show, and I found the character passive, diminutive.
I was too young to really recognize her fire.
The show was special because it was the last season with Bill Miller, famed Canadian stage actor and my dad’s best friend.
Bill was playing Prospero, the magician, my father in the play.
Bill was kind, a generous friend to the company, and a gifted actor, but that year he was in the early stages of dementia, and nobody, including him, knew it yet.
He dropped lines constantly but was such a natural at Shakespeare that he would riff in iambic pentameter, sometimes adding a little Richard II here, a little Pericles there.
To the naked ear, it sounded like Shakespeare, which it sometimes was.
I did my best to keep up, to know the beats of the play inside out.
I knew my lines and my cues perfectly. I studied them religiously and even memorized his lines too.
Backstage between scenes, he snapped at me: “Never interrupt me onstage again, you little bitch. I’m the professional here.”
I was stung, stunned, and totally thrown.
It happened again in our next scene: He lost his line and started his off-script ramblings.
Usually, I could tell when he was off track.
I could see his brain working and sense when he might circle back to our scene eventually, but this time he was gone.
He was on to Hamlet now, booming, “To be or not to be.” The audience, now totally aware that we were lost, sat in silence—no one dared smile at the scene before them.
Finally, Bill trailed off and stared at me.
I was so lost in his reverie that I forgot where we were in the scene, and I blanked.
I was so swept up in his nonsense that I lost my own lines.
We stared at each other in silence for a long time, and finally, without thinking, I did the worst thing an actor can do. I called, “Line.”
In rehearsal, when actors are still learning their scripts, it is common practice to call “line” so as to stay in the scene, and someone, usually the stage manager, feeds the line to the actor.
This is not done onstage.
Not during a show.
Never, ever.
Not even in an emergency. Even in an emergency, you are supposed to do something, make it up, improvise.
Any half-decent scene partner knows how to feed you the line, but in this case, I was supposed to be getting Bill on track.
My scene partner was long gone in a world of his own, and I was helpless.
As soon as the word slipped out of my mouth, I knew I was done. There was a small collective gasp from backstage, a long pause, and then Sally quietly called out, “Why speaks my father so urgently . . .”
I repeated the line, the rest of my speech flooding back into my brain. I got through the show.
Afterward, my parents cornered me. Bill was livid. He threatened to quit, even though there was only one show left. He blamed me for distracting him.
“What were you thinking?” my mother asked. “How on earth are you going to be an actor if you can’t even remember your lines!”
“It’s unfortunate,” my father said. “Most unfortunate.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but you saw—Bill was all over the place! He was doing Hamlet!”
“We, ah, know Bill has been a little . . . off,” said my father. “That’s why we brought you in. We thought you . . . with all of your training . . . Well, we assumed you would be able to keep him on track.”
“I’ve been keeping him on track all summer! He has made dozens of mistakes! I made one! Give me a break!”
“Oh, Miranda. Don’t you see that this is different? We really had to advocate to put you in the role, our own daughter, rather than giving a lead role to a guest artist. Having you play Miranda has, well, it’s long been a dream of ours.”
“Well, sorry for ruining your dream,” I snapped. This was so unfair.
“There’s one more show. We just need to get through it, and we can put this behind us,” my father said. He attempted to pat my arm, but I swatted him away and stormed off.
The local newspaper reviewed us that night. In an act of kindness, they didn’t mention my fumble. They didn’t mention me at all. But that didn’t matter, because the Tempest Facebook page was full of comments:
That’s what you get for casting your own daughter.
Looks like the fancy theater school really paid off.
Bill is a national treasure!
I knew Miranda in high school and she thought she was better than everyone.
There were kind comments too, Everyone makes mistakes and It’s just community theater, but it didn’t matter. We got through the last show without incident, but I felt full panic every time I was onstage.
I never acted in my hometown again.
Until now.
The next day is the read-through, when we will run through the script from start to finish, just so we can all hear it.
I’m oddly nervous; really, the only other professionals in the room, aside from my parents, are Theo, as Puck, and Arthur, playing Bottom.
The last anyone has actually heard from me is Listings, which some people seem to think is exciting, so the bar is low.
Still, I feel self-conscious. I haven’t felt like myself in weeks. Being here doesn’t help that.
I have a bath to calm myself before the read-through.
I stand naked in the bathroom, assessing myself again.
The first hints of aging are starting to reveal themselves.
I’m too thin. What used to be kind of perky and lithe now seems a little gaunt.
I don’t eat as much as I should—occupational hazard.
Years in television have cured me of carbs in general, the camera adding pounds that I imagine are there.
I drink too much coffee, too much wine, and really only supplement this with protein shakes and salad.
My body in real life is not my real body.
My real body is whatever I have to look at on-screen, and even she is a stranger.
I suppose my body is conventionally attractive, but looking at it dripping wet, it all seems a little limp.
Before leaving the city, I dyed my hair from the platinum blond I was known for on the show to my natural light brown and cut it a few inches below my chin.
I needed to return to myself before returning to everyone else.
I blow out my hair and straighten it with just a little wave.
I put on my new Reformation navy tank dress that swirls around my thighs, giving the impression of a more romantic figure than I have.
It’s a softer look than I usually do. In the city I wear black, gold hoops, red lips, but if I am to play Helena, I need to look softer, sweeter.
Plainer, really. Might as well get in the role from day one.
I let my parents go to the theater ahead of me; they have things to set up, and I don’t want to establish a pattern of arriving everywhere together this summer.
I need to be, in some capacity, an independent agent, and I think they’re relieved by that too.
Fact is, we haven’t been under the same roof in fifteen years, and none of us are super excited about it.
At the theater, people are buzzing. “First day!” a woman says to me. “So exciting!”
I smile too big at her because I don’t know what to say.
A few people come up to me to say hello, explaining who they are, what their roles are, how they know my parents, how they watch my show.
I hate small talk. I try to be gracious.
I glance around the room while people talk at me, looking for Theo.
He’s hard to miss—he’s the tallest person in every room. I spot him in the corner, chatting to some old ladies. It’s as if he can feel my eyes on him. He turns around, his smile breaking across his face like the goddamn sun. One long, perfect arm rises in greeting.
“Mirabel!” he cries with pure joy. He lunges toward me like the giant puppy he is. It hurts my heart. It’s been so long. It’s been too long. I’ve behaved so badly. No one else has ever called me Mirabel. Just my Theo.
We are interrupted immediately upon contact, Sally calling us to attention just as his arms wrap tightly around me.
“It’s so good to see you,” he whispers into my hair. “Talk after, yeah?”
I nod dumbly, my mouth dry, my heart racing. I don’t know where to begin with him.
“Okay!” Sally, the stage manager, claps her hands. “Let’s go, everybody. This is going to take a while.”